Golf Grand Designs for establishing New Courses
The game of Golf has a lasting hold on mankind. In the United States it has become a pastime involving millions of people and billions of dollars; in Japan, a fanatical cult. Wherever the quest for sunshine has been exploited, golf has become the centerpiece of development. Less than a century ago it was almost unknown anywhere outside Scotland. In India, Scottish merchants had started clubs in Calcutta and Bombay, and there were only two courses in England when the club at Pau, in Southern France, was formed in 1856.
The Scots were the great prophets of golf, spreading its gospel from Perth, St. Andrews, Prestwick and Dornoch to every corner of the earth where Empire held sway- and beyond. England was the first conquest; Black heath, Old Manchester and Westward Ho! The earliest outposts. By the turn of the century the tide had swept across Britain, on to the Continent of Europe and even to Japan, where an ardent pioneer designed four holes on a mountain. In 1888 John Reid inspired the first permanent club in the United States, St. Andrews GC at Yonkers, NY.
The appeal of golf is infinite; it tempts and destroys, seduces and rejects. It is a game of eternal hope; beyond every horizon is a promised land, even though it proves to be elusive. The golfer is blessed like no other player of games, in the settings for his pleasure. The quality of golf designs marks them apart from all other countries. The foundations of their greatness were laid in one of the four eras into which the development of golf architecture can be naturally divided. Some of them later underwent significant change. Whether much or little altered, the dates of their emergence closely parallel the growth of the game around the world.
Almost all the great championship courses of Britain in Ireland evolved on links land, significantly helped along in a later era by the hand man. All the early designers remain anonymous; not so those who, along with H.S. Colt; creator of Sunning dale, took the drastic step of moving golf inland and in so doing established golf architecture as an art.
Chicago Golf Club was the first American club to build an eighteen-hole course, right; 5,877 yards long, it was designed by Charles Blair Macdonald and opened in 1894. That same year the club became one of the five founding members of the United States Golf Association. In 1911 the course was the site where Johnny McDermott, the first native-born American won the tournament. The building of North America’s finest courses follows very closely the pattern of settlement on the mainland. They appeared first on the East Coast, Charles Blair Macdonald being responsible for two most influential early courses, Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links on Land Island.
During the Golden Age, nowhere more glitters than in United States, the marvelous West Coast courses were created, together with those of the South and Mid-West. Bermudda apart, courses of quality came to the offshore islands much later. Despite arriving on the Southern half of the European mainland, at Pau, it was in the North that golf became firmly established, most of the first great being built, much later, close to-if not actually on the coast.
In the period following World War II the leisure boom led to the construction of championship courses in the warmer resort areas of the South. The areas of South America and Africa where golf took root were those where the British influence was strongest, in the Southern half of both Continents. There the game blossomed in the period between the wars, when so many good courses were built around the world. In the years following World War II new and challenging courses were constructed along the Northern coasts of the both Continents, primarily as tourist attractions and, in South America where there was an economic boom, for the new rich.
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