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Fore!
Yale's
golf course was one of the places where the sport got its American
start.
April
2001
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith Ann Schiff is Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library.
Pebble
Beach, Augusta National, Ballybunion, Saint Andrews—
there are many fabled golf courses around the globe, and ever since
its opening on April 21, 1926, the Yale course in western New Haven
has been ranked among them. Generations of faculty, alumni, and
students, to say nothing of golf aficionados in general, have walked
its rolling hills in an often- elusive search for par, and some
of them have played significant roles in popularizing the sport
in America.
Golf as an organized
game in the United States dates from its introduction in 1888 by a transplanted
Scotsman, John Reid. He laid out a course in an apple orchard in Westchester,
New York, in 1889 and formed a club that was known as the "Apple Tree Gang."
Five years later the U.S. Golf Association was born, and national championships
were inaugurated in 1895.
Reid, the "father
of American golf," had a son, and in 1895, John Reid Jr. enrolled in Yale College
as a member of the Class of 1899. The same year, law professor Theodore Salisbury
Woolsey, Class of 1872, and his friend, Justus S. Hotchkiss, who received his
law degree in 1877, saw the game played for the first time, and decided to bring
golf to New Haven.
Woolsey and Hotchkiss
rented a large piece of land between Prospect Street and Winchester Avenue,
presently partially occupied by Albertus Magnus College, and hired a local Scottish
immigrant to lay out a nine-hole course. It was ready for use by the time John
Reid Jr., who, according to his Class book, had "escaped a Lawrenceville bunker
by a long drive and landed well up on the Yale green," arrived in New Haven.
A golf craze soon
swept the campus and the city. In the fall of 1896, the Yale Golf Club was organized,
and in the spring matches were played with many prominent golf teams. The following
May Yale won the first intercollegiate championship in the sport, and the Elis
won again in 1898 when Reid was team captain.
By the early 1920s
about 40 undergraduates played under special arrangement at the Race Brook and
New Haven country clubs. It was inconvenient to play at the private clubs, but
Yale men managed to polish their games and lead in both the number of team and
individual wins in intercollegiate matches.
In 1923, the widow
of Ray Tompkins, Class of 1884, gave a large tract of about 750 acres of woodland
to Yale in his memory. Tompkins, the 1883 football captain, had earlier expressed
the wish that a gift be used for athletic facilities—particularly for the
construction of a fine University golf course. Other portions of the new "Yale
playground" were to be developed for "tramping, tobogganing, skiing, and so
forth."
The Corporation set
aside 200 acres of the Tompkins gift as a preserve for the region's native plants
that could be used for natural history field studies and instruction in botany,
zoology, and forestry. This tract, which was known as Griest Woods, had been
owned by prominent New Haven manufacturer John M. Griest, who had fenced it
in for a long time to confine deer and elk. The area's hills, woods, swampland,
and ponds were already a refuge for animals.
To carve a golf course
out of the rest of the land, Yale hired renowned architect Charles Blair Macdonald.
Working with a budget of $400,000, Macdonald, in collaboration with Seth Raynor
and Charles H. Banks, Class of 1906, selected a picturesque portion of the tract
that offered views of Long Island and the Sound. When the course was completed,
it featured greens nearly three times bigger than what was then the average
size in the U.S. and Europe, and Yale became one of only a few universities
that could offer its students and alumni the use of its own 18-hole links.
Golfers noted that
while the course had "a character distinctively its own," a few of the holes
were clearly inspired by their famous counterparts overseas. The 15th at Yale
resembled the "Eden" hole at the St. Andrews course in Scotland. The ninth hole,
which required a shot directly across Griest Pond, was copied from the Biarritz
course in France. (The Yale version, said players, "presents a water hazard
calculated to daunt any but steady golfing nerves.")
From
its makeshift beginnings on Prospect Street, Yale golf has come
a long way. And while there have been changes in both equipment
and clothing in the 75 years since the current course opened for
business, one thing remains the same. All 18 holes still require
"steady golfing nerves." A booming drive, crisp approach shots,
and accurate putting also help.  |
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