(First published in 1928, Macdonald's Scotland's Gift is a...)
First published in 1928, Macdonald's Scotland's Gift is arguably the most important book ever written on American golf. Macdonald elegantly chronicles how golf grew from being a little-known Scottish oddity with a mere handful of American courses in 1890 and spread like wild fire to some 4,000 courses by 1927.
Charles B. Macdonald was an American golfer and golf-course designer.
Background
Charles Blair Macdonald was born on November 14, 1856, at his mother's childhood home in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He was the second in a family of four sons (the first to survive infancy) of Godfrey and Mary (Blakewell) Macdonald, both residents of Chicago and naturalized United States citizens.
His mother was a descendant of Sir William Johnson, whose children had emigrated as Loyalists from the Mohawk Valley to Canada. Macdonald's father was a Scot who had become a prosperous business man.
Education
After receiving his early schooling in Chicago, young Macdonald was sent in the summer of 1872 to live with his grandfather, William Macdonald, in St. Andrews, Scotland, while completing his education at the university there.
Career
Upon his arrival to Scotland, Macdonald was introduced to golf by his grandfather, a member of the famous Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. He took an immediate liking to the game, and by the time he left St. Andrews, in September 1874, he was an accomplished golfer, playing regularly with the best players of the day.
Back in Chicago Macdonald became associated with the Chicago Board of Trade. The city was at this time too busy recovering from the fire of 1871 and the panic of 1873 to be interested in the then unknown Scottish sport, and Macdonald was able to play golf only on business trips to England until, in 1892, he finally laid out a few holes for a group of friends on the estate of Senator Charles B. Farwell in Lake Forest, Illinois.
This soon led to some twenty or thirty of Macdonald's Chicago friends putting up ten dollars apiece, which he spent to lay out a nine-hole course on a stock farm at Belmont, Illinois. By the summer of 1893 the course had been increased to eighteen holes and the Chicago Golf Club formally organized.
The following year, Macdonald raised $28, 000 to lay out for the club an improved eighteen-hole course at Wheaton, Illinois. Meanwhile, golf was taking hold in the East, and clubs had been organized at Yonkers, New York, Southampton, New York, Brookline, Massachussets, and Newport, Rhode Island, among other places. In 1894, these and the Chicago club formed the United States Golf Association to conduct national championship matches, formulate rules of play, and act as a central authority.
Macdonald helped to draw up its constitution and by-laws and was subsequently its first vice-president and an active member of its rules committee. In 1895, at Newport he won the first United States amateur golf championship conducted by the association. In 1900 Macdonald moved to New York City, where he eventually became a partner in the stock-brokerage firm of C. D. Barney & Company.
By this time the number of golf courses in the United States had greatly increased, but Macdonald contended that no one course was really ideal. He resolved to build a links that would incorporate the features of heroic holes on famous courses abroad. The result, which included also many holes of his own design, was the National Golf Links on the shores of Peconic Bay, near Southampton, New York.
The success of the National soon led to other ventures, and with his engineer associate, Seth J. Raynor, Macdonald subsequently designed the Piping Rock and Creek Clubs, Sleepy Hollow, St. Louis Country Club, White Sulphur Springs, Lido, Mid-Ocean, Links, Deepdale, Gibson Island, and Yale University golf courses, as well as a number of small private courses, such as those on the estates of Harry Payne Whitney and Otto Kahn.
While he required only $70, 000 for the original construction of his masterpiece, the National, he usually pursued his hobby of promoting and building courses on a grander scale. The Lido and Mid-Ocean courses cost nearly $800, 000 each. Yale spent some $450, 000 in blasting out its classical course at New Haven to his specifications. As a refuge for his associates in Manhattan, Macdonald organized the Links Club, a town club as exclusive and correct as the country clubs he enjoyed.
Macdonald died on April 21, 1939 of a heart condition at his home in Southampton, New York, and was buried in the cemetery there.
Achievements
Macdonald built the first 18-hole course in the United States, was a driving force in the founding of the United States Golf Association, won the first U. S.
Amateur championship, and later built some of the most influential golf courses in the United States, to the extent that he is considered the father of American golf course architecture.
In 2007, Macdonald was elected as a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, in the Lifetime Achievement category.
(First published in 1928, Macdonald's Scotland's Gift is a...)
Views
Quotations:
"The object of a bunker or trap is not only to punish a physical mistake, to punish lack of control, but also to punish pride and egotism. "
Membership
a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame
Personality
A man of immense stature, strength, articulation, and assurance, Macdonald moved, often with hauteur, in the highest financial and social circles. People either respected his dogmatic views or disliked him intensely.
Connections
In 1884, Macdonald married Frances Porter of Chicago. They had two daughters, Janet and Frances, the latter the wife of Henry J. Whigham, a journalist, who had succeeded his father-in-law as amateur golf champion in 1896.
