Shinnecock: A Crucial Link

When Corey Pavin won the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 1995 it was just another chapter in Shinnecock's long and glorious history as the heart of Long Island golf. (Newsday Photo/J. Michael Dombrowski)

By Jeff Williams | Staff Writer

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THOSE WHO TRACE the history of golf in America must always come to Long Island. Those who seek the soul of the game must come here, too, and they have been doing so for more than 100 years. While the game, imported from the British Isles, had modest beginnings in several parts of the country as early as the 1870s, it was Long Island where its most fertile seeds were sown, where it grew robustly, where it set the standard for all golf across the country.

William Vanderbilt, Duncan Cryder and Edward Mead, wealthy New Yorkers on vacation, discovered golf in Biarritz, France, in the winter of 1890. A lesson from a Scottish professional at the Biarritz course, founded in 1888, planted in them a passion for the game that ultimately gave rise to the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. Those men and several of their cronies founded Shinncecock Hills in the summer of 1891.

Shinnecock Hills wasn't the first golf course in America. The ``Apple Tree'' gang was playing a pasture layout in Yonkers in the late 1880s, and several other small, crude courses were in use. The Chicago Golf Club got the first holes of its course playable before Shinnecock. But Shinnecock was first in so many different and important areas.

The Shinnecock Hills Golf Club was the first incorporated golf club in America when it was founded in 1891. It was the first to have a clubhouse. It was the first allow women full membership, which it did from the beginning. It was one of the founding members of the United States Golf Association in 1894.

It also hosted the second U.S. Open golf tournament, where the first stand was made for civil rights in the sport. White professionals threatened to boycott because the club entered two of its caddies, John Shippen and Oscar Bunn. Shippen was black and Shinnecock Indian. Bunn was a Shinnecock, part of the all-Shinnecock work crew that built the course to the design of Scottish pro Willie Davis. USGA president Theodore Havermayer advised the pros that if they objected, then don't play. The pros played and Shippen finished second.

Shinnecock also had the first teenage phenom in the game, Beatrix Hoyt, who won the U.S. Women's Amateur Championship three straight times and then gave up playing competitively at age 20.

Shinnecock gave rise to a number of courses on the Island built before 1900. Among them are Maidstone in East Hampton, the Nassau Country Club in Glen Cove, the Meadow Brook Club (on its old site near Mitchel Field) and the Garden City Golf Club, which began as a public course.

The National Golf Links of America, which lies immediately north of Shinnecock Hills, was the first course calculatingly designed to be a championship layout. Founded by Charles Blair Macdonald, it opened in 1911. Macdonald, having spent four years at St. Andrews University, imported the designs of several classic Scottish holes, among them Road Hole of St. Andrews, the Redan Hole of North Berwick and the Alps Hole of Prestwick.

Long Island golf clubs played key roles in hosting the early major championships of the game, and many of the game's immortals played here and won here. In all, five U.S. Opens have been contested on the Island, with three at Shinnecock Hills and one each at Garden City Golf Club and the Fresh Meadows Country Club when it was still in Flushing. Seven U.S. Amateurs have been played here with Garden City hosting four of them. Four U.S. Women's Amateurs and three PGA Championships have also been contested.

Bobby Jones won the 1923 U.S. Open at the Inwood Country Club. He did it with a putter he had picked up at the Nassau Country Club while playing a practice round there. The putter, nicknamed Calamity Jane, is one of the most famous clubs in the history of the sport. It is on display at the Augusta National Golf Club while a replica commissioned by Jones is displayed in the Calamity Jane Halfway House at Nassau.

Greats of golf course designed have left their marks on Long Island. A.W. Tillinghast designed four of the five courses at Bethpage State Park, including the Black Course. The Black will host the U.S. Open in 2002, the first truly public course ever to do so. Bethpage wasn't the beginning of grand public golf on the Island. The courses at Salisbury Park, now Eisenhower Park, were the first major public venues on the Island. Walter Hagen won the 1926 PGA Championship on Salisbury No. 4, which now is the Red Course at Eisenhower and the only surviving original course.

Long Island contributed one of golf history's most influential administrators, the late Joe C. Dey Jr. of Locust Valley. Dey was executive secretary of the USGA for more than 30 years and became what was in effect the first commissioner of the PGA Tour in the late 1960s. In 1975 he became only the second American to be elected captain of the Royal & Ancient Golfing Society of St. Andrews, which along with the USGA makes the rules for the game worldwide.

It's estimated that a quarter of a million Long Islanders play golf, even if it's simply to whack balls at one of the many elaborate driving ranges that have sprung up in the last decade. There are 56 private courses on the Island, 53 public ones. Two more public courses will open this year, and other courses are in the planning stages.

Long Island has always, and will always, continue to be at the heart and soul of the game.