After helping establish the U.S. Golf Association and winning the
first U.S. Amateur in 1895, Charles Blair Macdonald bemoaned the state of
American golf at the start of the 20th century: few players and even fewer
courses, of inferior quality than those in the British Isles. A man of big
ideas, Macdonald conceived a simple solution: Start building.
His resulting masterpiece, the National Golf Links of America, a
world-class links featuring adaptations of Britain’s greatest holes on the sandy
soil of eastern Long Island, opened in 1911 and ushered in the Golden Age of
golf course architecture, an era that would never be matched in the number and
quality of courses.
Francis Ouimet spurred the growth of the Golden Age with his
victory at the 1913 U.S. Open. Over the next 20-plus years, more than 5,000
courses opened in the U.S. Included were some of the game’s grandest
cathedrals—Pebble Beach Golf Links, Pine Valley Golf Club, Augusta National Golf
Club, Pinehurst No. 2 and Los Angeles Country Club still reign atop golf’s
A-List.
“The Golden Age was a rare and fortuitous coming together of
circumstances, talent and ideas,” says golf course architect and historian Bill
Coore. “These guys were brilliant engineers and designers, but they also
understood the psychological elements. They dared and tempted golfers.”
