Harvard Joins The Club

Golf was introduced to New England in 1892 by a young woman named Florence Boit. Until 1948 she remained anonymous and was referred to only as "the young lady from Pau." It seems that Florence arrived in Wellesley, Mass. for a summer sojourn at the home of Arthur Hunnewell with her golf clubs in tow, having brought them over from Pau, France, where she had been wintering. She was soon informed to her great chagrin that the game of golf had never been played in New England before, much less even heard of.

She set out to rectify the situation by supervising the construction of an embryonic seven-hole course using flower pots as cups on the Hunnewell lawn.

One of the Hunnewell neighbors, Laurence Curtis, became enraptured with the game and decided to petition The Country Club in Brookline to lay out a course.

Curtis, who was a member of the club, wrote in an article which appeared in Golfing Magazine in the 1890s: "After seeing and playing the game, and witnessing the enthusiasm of all who participated in it, I wrote to the executive committee of The Country Club, setting forth that there was a new game called golf, stating that it had been played in Scotland for three hundred years, and that it might readily be introduced at the club; and that the cost of an experimental course need not exceed fifty dollars."

The Country Club had been in existence since 1882, when it was founded by J. Murray Forbes. Since it was the first of the genus of country clubs which are now a staple of American culture, the club's founding fathers had not thought it necessary to specify when picking a name. As a contemporary wrote--"so unique is its fame, that all up and down the Atlantic seaboard no reference to locality is needed in speaking to good sportsmen of "The Country Club."

Originally The Country Club had been founded as a place where Boston gentlemen could congregate for recreation "free from the annoyance of horse railroads." One Boston Brahmin had stated, "The purpose of the Club was that it should be a place for the men of Massachusetts to get away from their women folk."

The club, of course, had no golf course, as members spent their time hunting and shooting. The focus of the club was a now-defunct race track and the old polo field which runs alongside the first fairway of the present course. The members regularly engaged in fox hunts, and one member enthusiastically wrote at the time: "The hounds only arrived last week from England, and came on the steamship 'Glamorgan,' and they were landed in fine condition, showing that they were well cared for on the steamer, not one indicating the least sign of mange, which dogs are apt to contract at sea. The hounds are of the bluest of 'blue blood,' and were personally selected by Lord Willhoughby de Broke, master of the South Warwickshire (England) Pack."

Thanks to Curtis and Florence Boit, a six-hole course was duly laid out in March of 1893, and ever since The Country Club has been one of the nation's premiere tests of golf. These first holes were "placed on a lawn in front of the clubhouse, in dangerous proximity, as after experience showed, to the front piazza."

The pristine course opened with Hunnewell hitting the first shot off the tee. Miraculously, he sunk a hole-in-one, but the assembled spectators, who had never witnessed golf, remained totally impassive, merely assuming that this was the goal of the game.

The Country Club would have remained an innocuous watering ground for the rich if not for one cataclysmic event. In 1913, a 21-year-old former caddie at The Country Club, Francis Ouimet, who lived in Brookline, won the U.S. Open there. Ouimet's victory was a watershed in the history of American golf, because he beat the two leading British professionals of the era, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray.

Vardon and Ray, who were considered invincible, had been touring the States proselytizing the game, sponsored by The Times of London. Ouimet, who had caddied at TCC since he was 11, forced a playoff, hitting a jigger onto number 17 and making a must birdie putt.

The next morning Ouimet, accompanied by his ten-year-old urchin of a caddie, Eddie Lowery, astounded the golf world by matching the best ball of Vardon and Ray. Ouimet shot a 72, birdieing the 17th once again to take a three-stroke lead over Vardon. Vardon finished with a 77 and Ray shot a 79. After the monumental victory, which has since been christened "the shot heard round the world," Ouimet went out and celebrated by downing a drink called a "horse's neck," a concoction of lemon juice and ginger ale.

As for Ouimet's doughty caddie Lowery, he went on to make millions as a San Francisco auto dealer and sponsored young golfers like Ken Venturi, the 1964 Open winner.

Yesterday another thrilling match took place over the hallowed fairways of The Country Club. Harvard walloped Yale and Princeton in the Big Three match, and the Crimson has Florence Boit to thank.