New Jersey Golf’s Early Adopters

THE UNLIKELY INSPIRATION FOR THE TOUR

Lakewood, New Jersey—Home of the First “Tour” Event

PGA TOUR players today can pick and chose from among a schedule of about forty-five tournaments, some of them in countries outside the U.S., for a total (in 2021) of approximately $430 million in prize money and season-long bonuses.

As global as it is in its reach and financial influence today, the Tour’s origins are much more pedestrian. In his book The History of the PGA Tour, Al Barkow credits an event in Lakewood, New Jersey, with creating the template for what would become a typical tour event.

It happened on New Year’s Day 1898, in weather typical for a Jersey January: “Light snow in morning, followed by fair, cold wave, north to northwest gales.” Not the ideal forecast for a golf tournament, but good enough for seventeen, longjohns-clad golf professionals hailing from a region stretching from Long Island to upstate New York to Philadelphia to meet on the first tee at Lakewood’s Ocean County Hunt and Country Club. They went at it for two frigid, wind-blown days, all for a $150 purse.

Beyond the presence of frozen turf and the absence of GORE-TEX and handwarmers, this event was remarkable for several reasons. For one, by the late 1800s, Lakewood was developing a reputation—counterintuitive as it may seem today—as a winter tourist destination, one of golf’s first popular off-season gathering places. In those days, golfers visiting Lakewood had their choice of two resort courses whose prime season lasted from October to June.

This idea of a winter golf resort reflects the axis of America’s golf in 1898 relative to New York City and Philadelphia. Lakewood was not quite a day’s train ride away from these two golf centers, so golfers could hop on the train and get in some same-day play in slightly better weather than they were suffering through at home.

A better-known resort competitor for the winter golf crowd sixty miles to the south, Atlantic City, welcomed a train from Philadelphia every Saturday through the winter, laden with golfers to take on Atlantic City Country Club and Seaview Golf Club.

However, Lakewood had a differentiator—a Gilded Age social register, impressive and growing with Rockefellers, Goulds, Hamiltons, and others of that era’s wealthy elite. The social set loved spending time in Lakewood, filling the non-golf hours with polo, tennis, hunting, and just plain socializing. John D. Rockefeller Sr., considered by many the wealthiest American at that time, expressed a love for the pine scents that wafted through every breeze and spent months on end in the community. Clearly, money was flowing freely through Lakewood.

Ocean County Hunt and Country Club was one of the town’s first resorts. The club was organized in December 1895 and became

ABOVE: A postcard dated 1907 of the Lakewood Hotel OPPOSITE: The Golf Club of Lakewood was incorporated in 1898. FOLLOWING PAGES: Lakewood society at the polo grounds at Georgian Court, Lakewood, circa 1900

one of the first forty allied members of the USGA. By 1897, it sported a nine-hole course designed by Horace Rawlins, winner of the first U.S. Open in 1895.

However, the club didn’t last long. Its property was bought by Rockefeller in 1903. Presumably in honor of his property’s origin, Rockefeller named his manor “Golf House.”

The First Polar Bear Tournament?

In keeping with the hype leading up to the New Year’s Day tournament, the New York Times described the event as “one of golfing giants, to each of whom was granted an unknown degree of skill and each of whom had their partisans.” The partisans—today, we would call them gallery—were fired up by the pre-tournament publicity and estimated to number about one hundred; an impressive count considering the frigid temperatures that surely affected the quality of play.

With a century’s worth of hindsight, we would not describe any of the competitors as golfing “giants.” Among the ten pros who competed valiantly in harsh conditions over two days was the course’s designer and former U.S. Open champ Rawlins, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club’s John Shippen, and twentynine-year-old Val Fitzjohn, who was at the time the professional at Otsego Golf Club, near Cooperstown, New York.

Fitzjohn was a Scottish émigré who had learned the game caddying and helping his father tend to North Berwick Golf Club and to the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. Fitzjohn and his youngest brother Ed came to America in 1890, enticed by its almost faddish growth of golf. By 1898, Val was nearing the peak of what we would today call a journeyman pro’s career, highlighted by a T-2 in the 1899 U.S. Open at Baltimore Country Club.

Over those frigid two days in Ocean County, Val Fitzjohn shot 92-88, well enough ahead of most of the field, but only good enough for a tie with brother Ed. In what must have been a tough decision to go back out into the deep freeze, Val bested Ed on the first playoff hole and pocketed the seventy-five dollar first prize.

The Importance of This Competition

As prosperous as the PGA Tour is today, it’s hard to imagine a more modest origin story. Nonetheless, this event laid the foundation for the massive industry the various worldwide tours have become. Before Lakewood, the only American competition staged for golf professionals to vie for a purse was the USGA’s U.S. Open, which started in 1895. The Ocean County tournament predated the third such event—the Western Golf Association (WGA)’s Western Open—by a year. These three tournaments became the foundational competitions in what would be eventually become the professional golf tours we see today. Golf historian Barkow explained in his book, The Golden Era of Golf, that “The Lakewood tournament was staged by the hoteliers as a way to entertain their current patrons and, by word of mouth and newspaper reports, attract new customers.” The objective of the Ocean County event was not as straightforward as the USGA’s and WGA’s goal: to identify the best players. The reason for this event was to entertain guests, rent out Lakewood’s hotel rooms, and sell Ocean County real estate. As young as golf was in America, wily marketeers saw an opportunity to draw attention to Lakewood and its still-young tourist industry by putting on a professional golf tournament. In the process, they focused on cultivating what would become a central part of the tour: the resort business.

Golf resorts already existed in the north: Poland Spring, Maine; New Hampshire’s White Mountains; Lake Placid, New York; and even Water Gap, Pennsylvania. But the concept was moving south. Within a few years, golf resorts in places like Pinehurst, North Carolina, and Florida were opening everywhere, and some properties picked up on Lakewood’s idea of using professional golf as a way to attract interest. As Barkow put it, “Eventually, chambers of commerce around the country began putting on tournaments for pros as a way to get publicity for their towns and cities and attract people to live, work and play there.”

This little tournament contested in the middle of a frigid New Jersey winter, said Barkow, “was, and remains, the foundation of professional golf tours.” In a lingo understood by pros like Fitzjohn back then and Phil Mickelson today, professional golf is, as Barkow observed, “a great way to drum up business, and not just golf business.”

OPPOSITE: Horace Rawlins designed the first nine holes at the Ocean County Hunt and Country Club course and tied for fourth in the first event at the club. ABOVE: The first U.S. Open medal was given to Rawlins for winning the championship in 1895. INSET: An advertisement for brothers Val and Ed Fitzjohn who finished first and second, respectively, in the New Year’s Day tournament playoff.

ESSEX COUNTY COUNTRY CLUB

WEST ORANGE • HOLE 9

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PART TWO THE GREATEST GENERATION 1925–1955

Sociologists refer to Americans born between 1901 and 1927

as members of the Greatest Generation. In his popular 1998 book of the same name, Tom Brokaw profiled American members of this generation who came of age during the Great Depression and went on to fight in World War II or otherwise contributed to the war effort.

The people, places, and events described in this chapter were shaped by the most difficult set of circumstances the United States had faced, certainly since the Civil War. Like the subjects of Brokaw’s book, these New Jerseyans were forged by year upon year of the hardships created by two world wars, the Great Depression, and two massive epidemics—but most by an ability to solve problems.

We’ll see how, when, and why New Jersey was invaded by some of the biggest names in golf; how some of the most unlikely winners in U.S. Open history finally had their day; what it takes to be considered the “Player of the Century;” how Baltusrol’s fourth U.S. Open may have been the tipping point that introduced the world to the future of big-time golf; and how one club just six miles down Route 22 from Baltusrol defied gravity to become a cultural icon, if only for a few years. Finally, we’ll see how four clubs insist, thankfully, on committing to 120 years of tradition.

A PORTRAIT OF THE PLAYER OF THE CENTURY

Maureen Orcutt (1907–2007)

WHAT KIND OF GOLFER would it take to be talented enough, durable enough, and respected enough to deserve the title, “Player of the Century?”

From great players starting with the nineteenth century’s Old Tom Morris through Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, not the USGA, not the R&A, not the PGA Tour—not any major golf association—has credibly placed such a title on the shoulders of one of their competitors.

It’s understandable why—few, if any, players would begin to qualify. For a golfer to be plausibly named “Player of the Century,” a few conditions should be satisfied. One, the organization issuing the moniker should have a history that spans that century. Two, the golfer should have exhibited exceptional feats of golfing prowess, feats that eclipse those of anyone else involved. Three, the player’s championship record should traverse several decades— no shooting stars need apply. And, four, the golfer should embody the ideals that the organization values. For your consideration, meet New Jersey’s Maureen Orcutt, named in 1998 by the Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association as its “Player of the Century.” The WMGA, formed in 1899, was impressed by Orcutt’s ten WMGA Championships (over a forty-two-year span); twenty-eight total WMGA titles; her sixty-five notable, national, and regional-level tournament championships; and her international tournament presence over nearly seven decades of a ninety-nine-year life. As important, Orcutt was a stellar WMGA ambassador—a quality individual, fierce competitor, and champion who inspired admiration and respect from generations of golfers around the world.

More than simply a fabulous golfer, Orcutt was, starting in 1937, just the second-ever female sports journalist at the New York Times, and over her career, covered women’s golf for the New York World and wrote a sports column for the New York Journal. In the USGA’s Golf Journal (January 2007), historian Rhonda Glenn observed that, “Orcutt was a working girl and her reporting career helped finance her amateur golf. Over the years she was part of a group of elite players, Glenna Collett Vare, Virginia Van Wie, Alexa Stirling, Pam Barton, and she beat most of them at one time or another. “Several times Orcutt’s excellent tournament play conflicted with her reporting duties. In 1968, she made the final of the WMGA championship. ‘When I got into the finals, I called the office and said, ‘I’m not covering the final, send somebody.’ ” They did, and her replacement was able to report on Orcutt’s latest championship.

Orcutt’s writing offered her readers uncommon insight into the sport she knew so thoroughly. In 1969, she received the first Tanqueray Award for contributions to amateur sports and was elected to the New York Sports Hall of Fame in 1991. A publication Orcutt worked for, the New York Evening Journal, wrote that “Miss Orcutt has the unique distinction of being able to write as well as she plays championship golf.”

As if golf and a pioneering journalism career were not enough,