We might say Garden City Golf Club has aged gracefully, except it
hasn’t aged at all. It is a small, private club frozen in time, in the heart of
a prosperous Long Island town just east of New York City. It is a place where
golf simply feels more like golf, where your second step inside the clubhouse
confirms your arrival at one of golf’s most sacred cathedrals and your third
transforms you to another time and place.
In the latter part of the 1890s, Devereaux Emmet was part of a
“small but enthusiastic” committee assembled to investigate building of a
nine-hole course primarily for guests of the Garden City Hotel. The Island Golf
Links opened in May 1897. Within four years it expanded to 18 holes, went
private, changed its name and became the premier golf club in America.
Other than some work by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and later by Tom
Doak, the course has hardly changed since a 1902 renovation by Garden City’s
leading man, Walter J. Travis, one of the club’s earliest members who won the
1900 U.S. Amateur there—quite an accomplishment for a 39-year-old who had been
playing the game four years. Two years later the “Old Man” placed second to
Laurie Auchterlonie when the club hosted the U.S. Open. At the time that was the
highest finish ever by an amateur in the Open.
Travis’ local knowledge made him the go-to guy when it came time
to offset the impact of the latest technological revolution, the rubber-cored
ball. Travis added and deepened fairway and greenside bunkers and backed up some
of the tees to add length.
What Emmet and Travis combined to deliver is something out of the
best of the British Isles. Replete with small, deep pot bunkers and waist-high
fescue, Garden City plays as hard and as fast as the links courses found along
the oceans in Ireland and Scotland. Lies are tight and the wind sees to it that
the 6,900-yard, par-73 design never plays the same.
