No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1109: C.B. Macdonald Deep Dive - Part 1

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

In this two-part biographical deep dive, Professor DJ takes Neil and Randy through the life and times of Charles Blair Macdonald, the father of American golf course architecture. Part one focuses on Macdonald’s introduction to golf from his time in Scotland, the design of America’s first eighteen hole course, the social circles who funded his early projects, the complicated history of what became the first official US Amateur championship,, and a ton more. We’ll have part two of this deep dive out next week! Join us in our support of the Evans Scholars Foundation: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nolayingup.com/esf⁠ Support our Sponsors: Titleist East Sands Golf Co. If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Nest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠nolayingup.com/join⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Newsletter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://newsletter.nolayingup.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Podcast channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@NoLayingUpPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

be the right club today that's better than most that is better than most better than most ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the no laying up podcast presented by our friends at

title list my name is DJ listening as the first tour event of the season always an interesting interesting spot for gear we always see who's changing things who's changing clubs let's talk about who's changing golf shoes and why and specifically why people are changing into new shoes from our friends at footjoy, including specifically the new pro SL and the new premiere series. Think about how much

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I can tell you they're lighter. I felt like I had more traction than I had in the previous premieres, which were already great. So that's exciting from our friends at Footjoy. A golf shoe is not just a golf shoe. It's an important part of your equipment. and only Footjoy thinks of them that way. It's why they're the number one shoe in golf and have been for 100 years to learn more about the process. To bring Premier and ProSL to life and to the tour, visit the Footjoy Tour Hub on Footjoy.

Dot com slash Tour Hub. Let's get to the show. Today is going to be a deep, deep, deep dive. Deep dive. And I got a couple of miners with me today. M-I-N-E-R-S, not that sounded like I was, you know, introducing some young people. The first one's going to be Neil.

Neil, I know you love these deep dives. We're off to a great start already. How are you, my man? Feeling like Jacques Cousteau, baby. I'm ready to go deep. I know that Randy's really into the crypto mining, so you called the right guy. And of course, that is going to be top 100, Randy,

considering the topic that we're discussing today. We're recorded this a couple weeks early. I don't know if the top 100 Randy bid has run its course, but I hope not. Randy, how are you? Oh, I'm great. maybe a patron saint of top 100 golf courses excited to be here excited to get down into the mines god if i was going to be trapped in a mine could not think of uh better companionship than the two of you i just think of that the lord of the rain go through the mines yeah go through the minds well uh yeah

we'll see pack the lunch i'm i'm ready got your pickax randy hates building furniture he hates manual labor so we brought him down in the mines to do his favorite thing i love it well Randy, you mentioned it. You mentioned it. I don't think any of these top 100 golf courses that you're, you know, so beloved by you would have existed without the guy that we're talking about today. Today we're going to be talking about Charles Blair, CB McDonald, the father of American golf. Do you guys know a lot about CB McDonald's? Because I have kind of a theory.

And the point of this episode, I think, is like, I certainly have a tendency to overestimate, overproject my knowledge about. about a lot of these like great characters, great places, great stories in the game. And it's kind of, you know, it takes doing a very deep dive like this until you really feel like you can actually get your arms around what's going on. I'm curious where you guys are coming to this conversation from. Yeah, I'll go first here. I think CB McDonald is somebody that is very surface. I mean, extremely surface level knowledge for me.

I know the name. You hear the name a bunch. You know, I associate national. golf links is kind of where my mind immediately goes and then like templates and Seth Rainer but truly truly I don't really know anything about the guy so looking forward to learning more yeah I hear he was a heavyweight up here in the northeast you played a few of his courses like a few of his courses like what I've seen uh always liked his name you know it's an interesting actor DJ a fellow acronym guy or CB don't hear those two letters together

Well, actually, you hear him kind of in a different order, BC a lot, but not CB. Right. So that's cool. There's a club. There's the Lynx Club in Manhattan. Oh, maybe. CB had something to do with. Just the links.

Just the links. You're not going to get invited. The Links Club is a golf court. We're going to get to all that in part two. But yeah, I'm glad you're familiar. And I'll say this. So it sounds like he fucked. Okay.

So that's, he's a heavyweight. Like you know that. Not as much as some of the other people were going to talk about. But I don't know. people know that's a cue yeah if he was a like i don't you think you're you're right did you think you know a lot about him but like i don't really know where he was from i know he's kind of the father of american golf uh so yeah this is sometimes this architecture stuff it's like you don't want to get sniffed out as a pretender you're like oh yeah i love you know cb like whole guy celebrate the guy's

entire catalog it's like cool man and let me let me let me maybe start there and just put my both hands up, I come in peace. To all the GCA people, to all the golf history people. I come, as our guy Drew Pond would say, I come with the posture of a learner here. I am, I'm not trying to invent this. This is lifelong learner.

This is a story that is so familiar. If you are very, very, very familiar with CB McDonald, you might not learn all that much in this. You're probably reading the same books I am, but I hadn't read those books. You guys hadn't read those books. I'm guessing a lot of other people listening to this episode, hadn't read those books. A lot of this started

when a buddy of mine recently big time golfer, all he does is think about golf. All he does is play golf is like he comes up to me in a moment of vulnerability. I'm like this I remember we were at like the fifth fairway at my course. And he goes, hey man, like

I gotta be honest like what's up with all these templates? Like what are templates? Like I have no idea. And I'm like, oh man, you know what? I appreciate you. You saying that? I felt that way before too. It probably just made me realize We're probably overdue for just a 101 deep dive. We want to start doing more of these types of, like, extremely deep dives.

And I'm like, if we're going to do one, let's kick it off with the father of American golf, C.B. McDonald, and let's start there. So there's a lot of stuff in here that I didn't know. A necessary preface, though, Dege, because we all know that the GCA community is really welcoming. For sure. And we're going to talk kind of newcomers. We're going to talk a lot about that. We're going to source and cite a lot of work throughout this.

And I want to say this up front too. Man, I developed a ton of respect and just interest and appreciation for a lot of those people. Because the skill that it takes to put together books and articles and reviews and like histories on these types of people is a fascinating process that I think both of you would actually enjoy. very much. I mean, you start to, you start to get into it. It's like watching people work together on golf club Atlas and these posts from like 25 years ago where they're all sharing, you know, like, oh, I found this diary entry and this corresponds with this and this well, but this guy said the opposite and this book over here. And like watching it all just like play out on a, you know, a message board thread or something. I'm like, man, this is like legitimately, uh, very impressive

that people are able to do this. And granted, all of those threads then usually devolve into like, well, you don't fucking know what you're talking about. And this guy's a total fraud. And of course, you would think that. And like, that's very funny too. And so throughout this whole process, like, I have these very static, you know, just books that I'm reading. And, you know, the big one is going to be CB McDonald's book himself, his book of reminisces.

It's called Scotland's gift, golf. Randy, I think you need to start writing down your, your reminisces, perhaps, just thoughts of, you know, what you felt like back in the day. That's going to be a big source. And the other one is going to be. a book called The Evangelist of Golf, which is written by George Botto, published by Renaissance Golf Design, Tom Doakes, uh, golf golf company. Uh, unbelievably awesome, gorgeous, like genuinely thrilling book to read.

Uh, it's a, it's a biography. It seems like it's very dry. There's a lot of charts and graphs and diagrams and, you know, routing plans and that kind of stuff, but George writes it in like a very human, funny way. He kind of takes the piss out of McDonald. He injects his own kind of like winks and his own sort of eye rolls at times. It's just an awesome book. Looks gorgeous on a shelf.

I'm pulling so much for this podcast from that book. It would look great on your shelf as well. If you are interested in this stuff at all, you absolutely should buy it because it's very, very, very cool. And George Bato, I just, I'll start a little bit, you know, just some biography to level set on him. I didn't know anything about his story. It was a name that I had kind of sort of heard but didn't know a lot about. Obviously, never got to meet him. He passed away in 2014.

But Neil, I think you'll like this big second career guy. He was a, he was an operator of a dry cleaning business in New Jersey. Good business. For like, good business. For his whole career. Steady, steady dry cleaning business that he owned. It was always a like recreational golfer. But it wasn't until like really he's in like his late 50s, 60s that he got super into this golden age.

golf stuff and he did this just because he realized like man all these golf courses in new york new jersey that i really like it seems like this guy seth reiner he's got his paws all over like i don't know anything about this place there's no like about this guy there's nobody hell of an engineer yeah there's nobody really writing books about this guy and so he just like dedicated the last 20 years of his life to becoming the reiner macdonald expert the big output from that is this book the evangelist of golf but then he also became you know in the golden age restoration trend kicked off he became kind of like a consultant as well he worked with gill hans on a bunch of projects in the northeast as they're trying to restore some stuff to golden age uh he worked

with tom doke and jim rbina on old mac he was out there like you know what would mcdonald have done here well he probably would have thought this randy i thought you'd like this when they got to the 12th hole uh the radan they actually had george drive the pvc pipe into the ground where the uh where the the green was going to be just as kind of a culmination from you know his his his his decades of studying these guys i i enjoyed that detail which came from a uh an obituary written by bradley klein uh and then actually like the you know of course everybody knows like the the leo recreated in wisconsin a couple years ago at sand valley uh but way back in the day mike keiser actually had george out to banden to say like hey can we put the lito here like can we

can we start here which is kind of fascinating to think about uh if if that would have come to fruition So a lot of what we're going to be talking about is from George's book, The Evangelist of Golf, which again, you should go check out. And then like I said, a bunch of just newspapers, old obituaries, old kind of like write-ups and then a lot of golf course like Golf Club Atlas posts from like 20, 25 years ago. Can I ask, did you find any plans or old journal entries in the ceiling tiles of an abandoned building or aerials buried in some archive at the. local chamber of commerce. No, but that's what a lot of these guys are doing. I know. If you didn't do that, then we should just turn the podcast off now because then you are not a true

architecture buff. No, what I'm trying to say is I see that all of these people are digging into those ceiling tiles and I have so much more respect for the fact that they're doing it. It's legitimately very cool to. That is sincerely my favorite thing about that community is like the detective work of like, yes, we just pulled these, we're trying to redo, you know, the creek and we just pulled these plans. they were just like up in the chimney.

Yeah. Somebody stuffed them in there 50 years ago. And so the edges are charred, but like they're still like pretty. They're definitely, they're definitely originals. They're his handwriting for sure. We could say that. We know that. God, he wanted this bunker on the seventh.

Yeah, I think. Yeah. We don't move this bunker. This entire place is just, you know, invalid, basically. Yeah, I love that stuff. And like, listen, anybody getting passionate about anything. I think we need to support that. It is great.

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, guys, the guy that we're talking about, CB McDonald, Charles Blair, McDonald, we're going to start with this quote, to call him a golf course architect, would be like calling Thomas Edison an electrician. Love that line from Jim Noyes, which is in golf course architecture website magazine, both, I don't know. CB McDonald clearly far more than that.

He's the biggest reason that, you know, golf in America took hold in the way that it did. He was a Randy like you. He's a fierce protector of the rules of the game. the customs and the traditions of the way golf was played in Scotland. He's responsible for creating some of the first golf courses in the country, started in people's backyards, eventually turned into the first proper 18-hole course that we had here in our fine country. He protected golf for as long as he could from what he called the inevitable Americanization of golf, which he knew had a chance to dumb it down, just get it off on the wrong foot,

turning into it, turn it into kind of like a passing fad here in the States. If it did not get off to the right start, he knew the boat needed to be pointed in the right direction. He was a great golfer, even if he was not always a great loser, which we will certainly get into. Oversaw some daring engineering feats, ultimately became an expert in agronomy and irrigation. A lot of Renaissance men in this period that we're going to learn about, just guys become an expert at kind of everything.

He certainly fit the bill there. And I think most importantly, infuse the American game with some strategy, finally. Holes needed to have a purpose. There needed to be a point to playing holes in certain ways. And he pushed everyone who designs golf courses both then and now to not just put a ditch in the landing area and call it a day, which is kind of what everybody was doing at that time. Yes, Randy. Maybe we'll get here.

So forgive me if we do. But you mentioned he was part. of laying out building the first 18-hole golf course in the in the u.s. dumb question what course is that is that national that is not national we will get there uh absolutely uh this actually just outside chicago which i know you guys will love is this a safe space i'm going to ask probably a lot of dumb questions you know what if you have the question someone else in the class probably has the same question and niels type in we're back channel and he's feeding me he's like randy ask this I'm too embarrassed.

So just keep that in mind too. Everybody already thinks I'm a moron, so I can ask whatever I want. The other thing, he pissed a lot of people off, I think is kind of the fun part of doing this, this type of deep dive. You know, if there was no controversy, no friction, it'd be like, yeah, you know, he did a bunch of great stuff. Like, what a great guy. But it wasn't always seamless. I mean, he had a lot of friction and a lot of ruffled feathers along the way. This is a quote from Ben Crenshaw that I think.

sums them up pretty well. To his detractors, McDonald was an opinionated autocrat, a stubborn and bullheaded dictator who felt appointed by Providence to defend his romanticized vision of golf from contamination in America. But to his many friends and admirers, he was merely a traditionalist, a man who wished to bring the game he learned as a young student at St. Andrews University back to share with able sportsmen in this country.

I think that's a vision, a mission we can all kind of get behind. guys. I mean, there's a lot. I think there's a lot in there. Dude, I think you're going to love this guy, Randy. I think you guys are birds of a feather. Well, I was going to say, the dictatorial stuff definitely sounds like Randy. And I, but I will say, I'm really digging his stash, the stash you got up here on the screen. I'm kind of growing one in his honor right now. Not even the best mustache we're going to, we're going to see in these slides. But isn't that a life lesson, you know, if, if you really want to do something,

and you want to do it in your mind as well as it can be, you're going to piss some people off. You got to break some eggs and make an omelet. Unless you're probably not doing it right. Yeah. No, I agree. So like we kind of said, I think there's a very quick version of this story.

You can read all this on Wikipedia. Rich kid goes to St. Andrews. He falls in love with golf. He comes back. He creates a bunch of golf courses. America, you know, embraces golf. And here we are all today. That to me, and Neil, I know you agree with this.

This is not nearly as fun as like really getting into the nitty gritty and the details. And the reason this looks this way is because of this guy who own this company, yada, yada, yada. And so I'm going to, I'm going to do it that way because I think it's a much more interesting way to kind of dive into this. And reading about CB McDonald's life, this is a weird comp and I'm not comparing these two people necessarily. Maybe there is more comparison than you think. It's a bit like reading the Dick Cheney obituary that, that Tron and I, we're talking about on the trap drawer where it's like, you can look at it as just like, yeah, here's the story of this guy's life and man, he did a bunch of stuff.

But in reality, it's like, well, that's kind of like just the story of America over the last like 50 years. Like this guy's kind of involved in everything. And that's a little bit how CB McDonald is too. It's like, yes, this is going to be his life and the things he built and the people he knew and interacted with. But it's really, it's like the story of golf in America. Really, like honestly, in a lot of the spots, you can convince me like you can take the golf part out and it's kind of just the story of America. So guys, with that, should we get into it in earnest here?

Can't wait. Charles, Blair, McDonald's, born in Niagara Falls, Canada on November 14th, 1855, father of American golf, technically born in Canada. Randy, there you go. There's your first little fun fact. You can keep under your hat for cocktail parties at some of these great clubs that you're hanging out at. His parents were American citizens, Godfrey and Mary Blackwell.

well, McDonald, and not long after CB was born, the family moved back to Chicago, Illinois, where life was, was fairly posh for them. I wrote, I had to, I mean, this original script was like way too long. So I had to cut some of this stuff out. I did all this stuff about like his lineage and what it traces back to. And Neil, there's all this stuff in the Mohawk Valley, upstate New York. His lineage traces back to this guy, Sir William Johnson, who owned like a half a million acres of the Mohawk Valley.

of a sudden, like immediately out of the gate, two pitches into the game here, Randy. Like I'm, I'm researching like, you know, King George's war and like recruiting, you know, Native Americans to fight for the British. I'm like, okay, this is not. I don't think this is super relevant to what we're talking about if we're trying to thin it out. Well, it is timely with with Ken Burns's work that I've, I've been enjoying. I mean, the Mohawk Valley got, you know, Washington, not a friend of the Native Americans, you know, so big, the big homie that owned half, half a, have a gabillion acres.

probably got that. Somebody else had it first. Let me put it that way. And that's exactly right. And I guess I would point people maybe to Ken Burns for a deeper exploration. Ken does great work. I was highly work. Big fan. The point of all of that, even kind of a brief drive-by is like this family has some dough, right? And he comes from, he comes from means. He's, his ancestors is kind of like, what would it would be like his great, great, great-grandfather or something like that like puts the family in kind of the upper crust and they they kind of hang out there for quite a while and the point of saying that just right off the jump here is we're going to hear a lot of pretty hard line positions for instance he he never took a fee for designing a golf course sure

he was very very dug in about this idea of what makes an amateur and how no self-respecting person should ever profit off of the game in any way which i think there's probably ups and downs to that, certainly. But I think all that. There, Neil, talking directly to you. I think, yeah, I don't know what he would have thought of kind of the influencer industrial complex that's been created. But I think all of that is to say, like, you know, just a little bit of a caveat, easy

to have those positions when you kind of have a bunch of dough already. Sure. So it just doesn't go without saying. So when he... You think you would have been a limousine lib? No, I don't. Okay. I think he would have been quite far. You know, it's a projection.

Sure, he's more pulling the ladder up behind him. For me, but yeah, I think it might have been maybe some of the people he hug out with. I think they were on the other side. But, you know, stick to sports here, Neil. We're just stick to the golf. You said I could ask any questions. You're right. You're right.

I just might not have the answers or want to get canceled. But so when he's 16 years old, he's sent by his father to go live with his grandfather, who lives in Scotland, where he was to study at the University of St. Andrews. I think a dream all of us have had since going to visit St. Andrews, like, man, wouldn't it be cool to just go on a steamer over and study over there? Like, man, that sounds great. Neil, I threw this one in there for you. Totally unnecessary detail, but I think it's interesting. The ship that he crossed the Atlantic on was a ship called the Scotia.

Okay. Which was a side wheeled steamer. There's a diagram that I'm putting up on the, you can watch all this on YouTube, by the way. there's a side wheel steamer's kind of like part steamship part um you know like paddle paddle boat uh and this was the last of its its character that actually crossed the atlantic like this this was like a very who's who ship this is the ship that carried teddy roosevelt his family across the atlantic it gets a name check in 20 000 leagues under the sea uh it's like the boat that gets run into by uh captain nemo and the boys uh and the nautilus it's like the boat that sherlock holmes travels on

when he's going across the Atlantic. It's very like, it's like 270. It's like the Queen Mary before the Queen Mary. Yeah, 270 first class passengers and like 50 second class passengers. It's like it's one of the airplanes T.C. flies on, basically. And so again, all that to say, kind of like this is, this is the guy we're dealing with. And so CB gets to Edinburgh and eventually Musselboro where he spends the night with his family friend. And this is the first place that he hears about golf.

He sees these paintings, all these old guys with their bright red coats. you know, scuffling around in the dust and hitting this little white ball. Not impressed. Thinks it's very, very stupid, to be honest. He writes in his memoir, it seemed to me a form of tiddly winks, stupid and silly. Never in my life had I known a sport that was not strenuous or violent. Just I love that line. So confirm me, he did not play until college.

Did not play until he got over there. Hadn't even heard of it. All right. So that's impressive already if he becomes a high level player number one. Well, and think about it. would probably be down with my take that, you know, low stakes, but meaningful competition. It's kind of meaningless competition, baby.

Very into that. He's very into that. We're going to hear about that in a minute here. But, uh, I mean, just to put like a very specific point on it, like, of course he hadn't heard about it.

It was until he got over there because it wasn't there, right? I mean, there was like nothing going on in the States. Randy. I was going to ask and apologies if we're getting there, but, uh, I mean,

what a, what a, what a fortunate thing that his grandfather happened to be in Scotland. Do we know why his grandfather was in Scotland? I couldn't figure that out. I don't know what brought him there, but he was very deep into the golf scene, which was another fortunate part of kind of the way all this broke,

which we will get to just momentarily. But after his quick stay in Musselboro, he takes the train up to, you know, from Edinburgh up to St. Andrews. He's got this golf idea rattling around in his head that he's just heard about. And he gets there and it's, you know, it's golf everywhere. And this is the centerpiece of the town and, you know,

yada, yada. And I think a quick pause, quick like digression is as insulated from like some of this as he might have been with his family's wealth and whatever. I think it's very interesting to think about like the city that he had just come from because Chicago's massive. Even at this time, it's like this, it's 300,000 people. St. Andrews, by comparison, is small and tiny and charming and quaint and look at these cool buildings in the university and isn't this slow pace of life so delightful. but there's also like the time period that he had just come from and again i'm telling on myself here but i think i have a tendency especially when looking at history to just like flatten somebody's life into one year right where it's like oh c b mcdonald it's like you know i don't know 1910 like he was

he was born in 1910 and he lived in 1910 and he died in 1910 right like i don't know that's kind of like where he was and in reality like when he leaves and he gets on this boat there's like seven years after the civil war ends i mean it's like it's place were very different and Chicago was, you know, still putting its pieces back together and people returning back from the war and putting their life back together and trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do and just like think about how different, you know, that place is compared to where he's about to get off the train in St. Andrews. And not only that, uh, for, for the history buffs out there, Chicago 1872, anything rattling around on like what might

be going on around that? Big ass fire. Big ass fire, Neil. Massive fire. A cow kicked a freaking and lay a turnover. Burn the city down. That's right. Miss Leary, Ms. O'Leary? Yeah. And so this is like nine months after the fire.

So like a third of the city is homeless. And so I'm going to kind of like, all of this is trying to paint this picture of like, man, why did this guy get so hooked on golf in St. Andrews and the traditions of the game? I think, think about that,

like where he came from and what he stepped into. Because when he got off the train, I think it was probably something pretty similar, like a very souped up visceral version of like probably what a lot of us have all felt when we get to St. Andrews, right? Like, man, this is, this is it, you know, charming town. Do I just move here? You know, like this is, this is what I've been looking for and I didn't even know it. You know, Randy, I'm sure you can, you can relate to that. Oh, I, that was my experience exactly. I mean, honestly, almost step for step

so far. Landed in Edinburgh, went out to Musselboro the first day and then up to St. Andrews. People don't realize this, but Toras, Randy took the Scotia over. He did. That was the last. A month and a half early. Yeah, it was the last voyage it made. It was one of his clubs. They had a replica of it.

Yeah, it was very cool. It would be fun. And Tran's always threatening to do it. Ocean crossing via slow boat. Yeah. Yeah, maybe one day. So he writes about this feeling of kind of like landing in St. Andrews getting off the train. He says, quote, here everyone seemed to move along.

absorbed in the past while in America everyone was absorbed in the future the contrast reminded me of Handel's funeral march compared with marching through Georgia look up those songs if you're not a music person funny comparison it was not long before I came became acclimated and soon I fell in step with this leisurely delightful life and this is going to be like the whole deal for me is this idea of like we must hold the past with reverential vision, right? Like we, in order to go forward,

we have to go backwards. That kind of becomes like the thing that just comes up again and again and again is like this push and pull between how do we, when he gets back to America, how do we start from scratch and how do we like build this a future for this thing? And the only way we can do that is by like clinging to what they did in the past, which I just, again, I think is like a pretty interesting push and pull.

God, my guy, you know, my guy gets a little fresh sea breeze. He sees people just leisurely going about it. And he just starts getting some big ideas. Yes. And this is before school starts. You know, he's just out there like just running amok. So I mentioned his grandfather who lived in Scotland, as you said, Randy. That would be Colonel William McDonald, who was not just like a golfer.

He was an RNA member as well. So again, it's not like he's like sneaking out, you know, under the pitching put and like, wow, what are these golf clubs? Like he's got, you know, he's kind of skipping the line. And he's jumping right to the front. And so the day after CB arrives, his grandfather, William, takes him into town to meet with the pro. I'm sure you guys know the pro is the great man, Tom Morris. Yeah, old, old Tom, kind of middle-aged Tom at this point.

That's why I was making sure it wasn't young Tom. No, but we are going to get to young Tom as well, who was only like four years older than C.B. at this time. So, yeah, old Tom Morris, like 51. at the time he's he's he's the pro and uh cb's too young to be allowed into the RNA so instead he gets a locker inside uh the golf shop of old tom morris and i there's gonna be a lot of stuff in here while i got to kind of like catch myself on like i know golf can get way too saccharin and way to like wow think about the history of the game and oh but like cb mcdonald having a locker inside of old tom morris's golf shop like that's it's very cool uh i like that so it's sick he

old time Morris gives him his first set of golf clubs it was a set that had seven woods and four irons kind of a kj choy or maybe like a l pGA a lot of you know a lot of head covers in that bag for for young cb randy i think you're gonna you're gonna like this too because i think it speaks to kind of like his view on the rules uh the 14 club rule was not yet in effect at this point and as he got older he got so he like incensed like he hated this idea of of people just carrying 20 clubs, 25 clubs, just basically having a club for literally every situation that popped up. And he zagged the other way. He thought this was massively cheapening the game. So eventually he would go on to play with only six clubs. He only had one wooden club.

It was just the driver. So what a dog. Respect for that. And I would support some of that kind of feeling coming back, half sets, make it work culture. Sure. I think is a good thing. So yeah, yeah.

So he meets old Tom, gets his clubs, him and his grandfather grew out and they play. The old course, of course, he's hooked. The old course is all the romantic stuff that, you know, everybody knows that it is. Real quick, sorry, real quick. I think this is where I have a tendency to just kind of breeze through and not appreciate is, like, imagine how bad he was that first round, right? Like, like this guy, just the struggles of trying to pick up this new foreign. game. I feel like we glaze right past that. But

my guy had to have been frustrated for a while with golf. For sure. And he gets obsessive. And I think he tries to work through that very quickly because he's just playing like nonstop, sunup to sundown. So he gets the bug. He's good. Absolutely gets the bug.

And so like I said, he loves the exes and knows. He loves like hitting the ball with a stick. Like that's great. But he loves like two other things. He loves kind of the culture. the spirit of the game, this idea that there's a set of rules, there's law and order that everyone has to follow. Everyone's on equal ground.

Everyone's playing the same game. There's another quote from Ben Crenshaw here. McDonald observed that the links were an extension of the very being of St. Andrews with churchmen, parishioners, scholars, tradesmen, ladies and students, everyone playing on equal footing with honor and strictly by the rules adopted by the RNA more than 100 years before. lovely thought. I obviously love that thought as well. Again, just doing my due diligence runs a little counter to just like coming back

and building the most exclusive places in like the history of the game. But I think that kind of resist the Americanization though. I think that's truly right. I think that's truly right. And I think that the egalitarianism, you know, this like every man's sport. I think that was one of the things that he found when he came back. Like it's going to be a little harder to replicate than I originally thought it was going be so but on the on the topic of the rules everyone being on equal footing he dove in headfirst

on this became a lifelong staunch defender of the 13 original rules he was convinced these rules were enough to cover any situation that someone was going to run into that would be put to the test later we'll talk about that in a bit uh and above all randy again i'm not trying to lead you to water here but like he was so passionately in favor of playing the ball down playing the ball as it lies. Get your fucking hands off that thing. Do not touch it. He wrote that touching a ball without penalty was quote,

anathema to me, a kind of sacrilegious profanity. Again, I mean, that's it right there. That's it, dude. That's it. And I think like that's where some of this, like going back and reading all this stuff, I think that's where I've found like,

I started like soaring. reading some of this stuff where I'm just like man how like did I just become like the frog in boiling water on a lot of this stuff where it's just like ah you know well we added these grand stands and then you know well sometimes it's muddy and then well they're they're doing this with the watering and so that we got to do it's just like imagine if he you drop it into the 3M open god I wonder how you feel about TIO right oh truly and it's just like again it's kind of like you can you can kind of rationalize yourself into anything and i'm more guilty of this than anybody but it's like

no at what are we actually talking about here like the game is like no get your fucking hands off it man play it down that's a skill yeah okay you might not have the answer this but maybe in one of these books was he like was he like was he the kid did people like this american like did did did old tom like him or he's like who the fuck is this guy yes getting obsessed with with our game no they they did very much like him and the other thing you got got to think about too is like he's over there with a bunch of schoolmates so he's got that kind of baked in right like there's a bunch of university kids that he becomes friends with but he does become like boys with a lot of the other the other scots as well like we mentioned that uh

you know of course old tom morris has a son young tom morris uh who's four years older than cb and they got introduced and like started playing matches together and so you know they'd go out and and play and cb could pick his brain and ask him all sorts of things like ask him all sorts of questions and Randy again like this idea of like yeah he probably really sucked at the time but he's like he's hanging out with literally the best golfers in the world at the time and so again not to put like too fine a point on it but think about like what he gets dropped into here it's 1872 which is the year that young tom morris would win his fourth open championship in a row unless i know like a thousand people aren't trying to qualify for this but like still he's he's the guy old tom morris would win his fourth open championship in a row unless i know like a thousand people aren't trying to qualify for this but like still he's he's the guy old tom morris Morris had already won four opens by then. And CB walks into this world and it's like, hey, man, here's this new sport you've never heard of. And by the way, here's the guy that's the best in the world at it right here.

And all of his friends that he plays with, they're all right here too. And his dad used to be the best in the world at it. So, like, he's right here too. So like, if you have any questions, here's just kind of all the best people at your disposal is, is, again, just like very heady territory. Yeah, well, that's kind of what's getting at my point is, like,

he was able to just assimilate into this, you know, cabal very quickly. So he must have been the kid. I think so. He writes about this later. He says, one can see by all this. What a remarkable galaxy of golfers there was in St. Andrews in the early 70s.

I doubt if in any one country they have ever been matched in brilliance of play, devotion to the principles of the game and personal integrity. Because, of course, Randy, we're not just playing the game. All these guys are playing the game in the right way as well. So, yeah, we work hard and we play hard. But to be clear, Randy, we separate that work in that play. That's right. They're not playing money matches out there.

They're just playing for, you know, for glory. There's playoffs. There was something kind of fun. Like he did, like I said, he gets obsessed, especially before school starts, like before the semester starts or whatever. He's just out there playing all the time during the summer in Scotland, you know, can be light out for 20 hours a day or whatever. He's just out there constantly.

Of course, the one bugaboo in this was the old course being closed on Sundays. So him and his friends used to actually hide clubs in the gorse out like on the far corner of the old course. You know, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, like that whole, that whole corner. And like they would just run out there and play golf on Sundays where like the very religious townsfolk couldn't see them and scold them. It's interesting. It's interesting where he's okay not adhering to, you know, know the rules, right? Like that's always interesting too. Hold on to my boys. We're going to go play on Sunday. I know the course is close. Well, yeah, that's a double. Hold on. Hold on to that idea as well.

They're ready. So yeah, so he's he's got all these people, you know, all in the same place at the same time, which by the way, I love like, I feel like this stuff happens outside of golf, like probably more than it happens in golf. Like it happens in music all the time, right? Where you had like, you know, Laurel Canyon and you had like the grunge movement in the Northwest or hip hop and you. New York or whatever. And like all these people you kind of realize after the fact are all like in the same place at the same time. And then you start all those boats going in different directions. And it's like, oh man, all this stuff wouldn't happen without this convergence. So just kind of a cool thing. Because it wasn't just old Tom and young Tom and CB McDonald's like Davey Strath,

who did North Barrett, famous for, you know, having his name on the Strath bunker. Willie and Jamie Dunn. But then he also writes like at length about, you know, other press. and caddies, professors, students, like, everybody's kind of like on the same page. And who knows? What about the other architects? Like is, is, you know, Harry Colt hanging out is like McKenzie's probably at war somewhere, right?

McKenzie's South Africa. Much younger. He's younger. Yeah, so he's much younger at this point. Colt, I think, was more London than Scotland. I don't know the age difference there. That's a good question. But I think a lot of-

Architects, because you've just talking about architects, because you hear this golden age, right? And they all kind of at different ages, but in the tens and 1910s, 1920s, that's when you start, all their work starts getting celebrated. I'm wondering if they. Well, a lot of those guys were Scottish,

and it's a lot of like guys you don't know the names. I mean, Davey Strath and Willie Dunn and Jamie Dunn. And like a lot of the first courses that we're going to talk about, like when he comes back, he ends up like redoing kind of, you know, all the original routing was done by this Scotsman that came over and laid out. six crude holes or seven really or nine really crude holes or whatever so there are a lot of

those people that are probably there they're just not like donald ross and yeah lang hast and like those guys who are who are quite a bit younger so all good things must come to an end here unfortunately guys and uh in the fall of 1874 after two very crucial years uh it's time for young charley macdonald to go back to america back to real life uh he had essentially like gotten you know it's like a master's degree now in the game of golf, which I think just made it worse when he did come back home, just to kind of look up and realize, like, man, we got a long, long ways to go. Like, none of this stuff exists, which is kind of what he's, what he's greeted with when he

goes back to America. Or we got a lot of land. That's right. We got a lot of land in America. You can do something with it. Sounds like opportunity, not, you know. So just like it was worth, you know, considering the Chicago. that he left, probably worth considering the Chicago that he comes back to.

Of course, we mentioned the Great Fire, which was 1871. But while he was over there, while he was abroad, there was also the great panic of 1873, wasn't super familiar with the Great Panic. This was an economic crisis that was so bad that they actually called it the Great Depression until 1929. And it was kind of like, oh, games kind of changed. This is, you know, kind of a World War I, World War II. You don't call it World War I until the Great Depression. I believe it was it over over speculation on railroads.

Exactly what it is. Yes. Yeah. And so again, that was another one where I was like, you know, spent two hours just like, I'm like, I don't need to get, I don't need to get super deep into that. Real quick, I feel like the, there have been more and more references to the panic of 1873 lately than. Well, because it's in the same thing as the, uh, the cable, the fiber, you know, dot com stuff in the early 2000s and now the AI stuff. It's just it, it rhymes, baby.

Yeah. So he comes back to like a tough economic situation and joins the workforce. And like anybody, anybody who does have a job is basically expected to work like 12 or 16 hours a day. And so in other words, like even if there was golf, the idea of playing golf like would have been so inconceivable and like out of fashion that it was pretty much unthinkable. I don't have a great sense like to what level he was kind of insulated from this. I mean, obviously he had. some means to come back to, but it seems like at this time, I mean, he definitely built like his own fortune. It became like a very successful stockbroker. And so I think a lot of that is like built during this period where he comes back. I think he's working his ass off trying to, trying to kind of, it's probably good timing. Yeah. Market crashes. Not let me get in, buy some stuff on the cheap. The other thing worth noting about the railroad stuff, Randy, is like, that track did get laid. You know what I mean? Like a lot of People lost their money and, you know, lost their shirts on it.

But like, it's in the ground. So that's that it kind of similar to when people say like, you want to be like the third owner of a golf course. Yes. Then someone comes in and scoops up somebody else's hard work. That's kind of what happened with when they laid out of that fiber too in the early 2000s. It's like, well, it's in the ground now. So somebody else, everybody went belly up so people can buy it cheap. That's right.

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Let's get back to the deep dive. So anyways, he adds kind of his family wealth to this new wealth that he's accruing. And he finds himself in a pretty comfortable position financially, especially relative to kind of those around him. However, this does not really solve the golf problem, right? Because there's still no golf to play.

And this is all he can kind of think about. But he's got nowhere to play. He's got no one to play with. There's no, like, equipment, even like little things like that is like, even if he wanted to play, even if he built a bunch of holes, it's like, yeah, where are you going to get golf balls? You got to, like, send for that stuff from overseas.

And it's just kind of a funny, like, thinking about all the infrastructure and everything is, it's kind of funny. So apart from, like, the rare times where he was able to go overseas, he just didn't play at all. It's kind of like TC in that, in that way, you know? I don't even play. One of my home around in the southern hemisphere than my home goal. a lot at home this year. That's true.

But this this becomes this 17-year period that is famously referred to as the dark ages for him. He does not basically play any golf for 17 years. There's one attempt that he makes in 1875, a friend of his from University of St. Andrews comes to visit him when he's like 20. And they figure they'll, you know, they got nothing to do. So they're going to go out to build a couple golf holes and they go to again just like checking this time in history this old civil war camp camp douglas which on the south side of uh chicago and they find like literal tin cans that are left behind by the union soldiers they bury those in the ground as their cups he's still got these golf clubs from old tom morris uh and so they they say how about the holes over here and how about the t's here

and they start hitting balls all over the place and watching fly you want to talk about my nightmare oh my god so glad i wasn't part of that group I don't know what happened here, but the way he describes it is, is quote, the hoodlums in the vicinity tormented us to death. Evidently, they thought we were demented. My golf clubs were stowed away until such a time as I could go abroad. So I don't know if it's just some real like get a look, like get a load of these fucking guys over here. Just a very funny scene.

And that's, and that's why his courses became private. Yeah, probably didn't help. That's for sure. No, there is like, I kind of spiked this, but there's like all this stuff, like even after golf does kind of get going. Like you do see like him constantly being like, you know, people still do not get it. There was a whole like thing published. I think it was the Philly, like the Philadelphia Times in like late 1880s that summed up. It was like this write up of like golf is sweeping the nation.

Here's what it is. And the long description of like what it is was like you hit your first ball. you take off running your servant tries to keep up with you so that they can find the ball as well and then you just play as fast as you can and whoever holds out on 18 is deemed the winner and it's just like this is like 10 years a little more of that yeah this is like 10 years after you know like he actually like gets things going and so i imagine there was probably a little bit of just like all right man i'm just going to stick to the people who like who get it and kind of know what's what's going on but so the dark ages last up until

1892. Neil, another history lesson for you. The following year, 1893, something is happening. What's going on in Chicago? It's about to take place in Chicago in 1893. Oh. I have a guess.

Please, I shouldn't have just limited that to Neil. That's open to the whole class. I know there's a World's Fair coming. Exactly. Exactly. Well, 1896, I thought the World's Fair was. I think it was 1893. But I, maybe that's when they kicked off the work.

But I, well, I mean, they definitely kicked off the work much earlier than 18. And I only shout out my guy Eric Larson for that. Of course. Devil in the White City. Unbelievable. World's fairs. World's fairs might have been on the list of things that are sick. Just really cool, you know, coming together of a bunch of different tech and industry and people from all over the world.

Just very cool, very cool things. So the World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition is coming to Chicago. It's only the second time it's going to be held in the United States. and so CB McDonald and a lot of the upper crust people who have vacationed over in the UK and in Europe know there's going to be a lot of Europeans coming to Chicago. What do these Europeans like to do for recreation? Of course, they like to play golf. We've got to get some golf for these guys to play when they're over here. You'll play some G.

Civic duty. Yeah, man, the boys want to play some G when they get over here. And so CB McDonald, this is a fun note from George Bato's book. had been talking about golf so much up to this point over the last 17 years that even his close friends. But not playing it. But not playing, which is kind of relatable to me.

Even his close friends, like, started just straight up avoiding him because I do we just don't want to talk about golf anymore. But when this idea starts getting kicked around about like, all right, we're going to have to build a golf course in Chicago. Everybody's like, oh, like this guy,

Steve McDonald's probably going to be, probably going to be involved. I know a guy. Yeah, you got to talk to Steve. Yeah, even shut up about it. Even if it's not, I know a guy, it's going to be like, well, there's no way. Like, we're keeping him from being involved.

Like, of course he's going to be involved, right? And so the canvas that he's given to work with was a sprawling estate in Lake Forest, Illinois. It was owned by Senator Charles B. Farwell. Randy, I can't tell you a lot about his platform. I didn't get super, super deep into it. I don't know that well. Okay. But he had this very spacious retreat up on the bluff in Lake Forest.

forest kind of overlooking Lake Michigan. It was called Fairlawn. I believe we might be looking at a photo of Fairlawn, too, because the original Fairlawn burned down. And then I think his daughter kind of maybe put, you know, a new house up. Anyways, the point is like this is what the land sort of looked like. Very estate-e, right? I mean, a lot of trees, a lot of gardens, a lot of landscaping.

And so when McDonald gets there, you know, he's thrilled, elated to be involved in this idea of building a golf course, not so stoked about the idea of where they're going to build this golf course. This is from Bato's book. He looked around the property with supreme contempt. He eyed at the trees and flower beds and said the grounds would never do. But eventually he recanted deciding that the venture was worthwhile, quote, if only to give the game a start.

And after a few glances about the place, he started to pace off holes. This is kind of like a more modern. There's like today's view of like sort of where this estate was. This, this house, I don't know if you can see kind of like that back, that big brick back patio. That's like the main house that we're looking at. So I think we're probably looking at this land over here between that house and the beach, right? So a lot of, a lot of trees, pretty skinny tract of land, but with a big, a big bluff on that kind of east side. And so the course itself that they built super basic, very rudimentary, seven holes.

None of them were longer than 250 yards. Four of them were shorter than 75 yards, just like, I mean, basically like a glorified pitch and put. But he did his best. He routed them as kind of artfully as he could around all the trees and in and out of these flower beds and even like incorporated the bluff so that any sliced shot, you know, could fall all the way down to the beach. I think that's very funny again when you think about like golf balls. It's like, well, shit, now I need golf. Like, where am I supposed to get more to golf balls? Yeah.

Also very funny because we're going to talk about this in a second, but he was a notorious slicer of the golf ball. So just keep in mind if maybe slicing a couple of these balls off the cliff informed some future design decisions. But so a couple things there, Dege. One, add the list of things that are sick, like naming. Instead of having an address, you just name your property. Couldn't agree with you more.

have you done that with your new your new new that's uh yeah the vibran i've named my office the library yeah um but you know there's some houses in the area that that have older houses that have some names stronghold yeah right and then two charles d uh what was his last name uh farwell farwell charles b farwell i think charles b excuse me charles b farwell uh served in the u s house representatives his five terms. Then he became a U.S. Senator. Notable achievements put forth the women's suffrage bill. Oh, that's no joke. One of the ladies vote, Randy. We can get down with that. We'll have his time. Yeah. And that is kind of, I mean, not to be flipping, but like, that's kind of what I mean about how like, yeah, we're kind of talking about like the history of America in the late

1800s and early 1900s years. Like all these people that he's building these courses for and around and who are funding this stuff is like those types of people. You know, it's like, it is the true, like who's who power brokers of the country yeah the only other thing that crept into my mind when you're and looking at the property here on uh on the youtube is just how fun is it that golf in america started with just some guys like building golf holes around where they lived and then thinking about our own guy hollywood hoteling for sure him and his buddies 150 years later you know just kind of doing the same thing for fun if you could dream it you could do it.

Yeah. It's just some guys backyard. Just if you, you know, just, you talk to the senator. He'll get you in. It's up there at Farlam. Times, times a flat circle, man. Yeah. Well said.

So, uh, eventually the World Fair comes and goes, you know, everybody has a great time out on Senator Farwell's lawn. But, uh, people are generally still very confused. Uh, the hoodlums are winning, Randy. Like what the hell are these people doing? But enough, you know, the light, enough light bulbs are going off with the, with the evolved, uh, to, to really see the ball go through the hoop here. And CB starts to attract, you know,

a couple more acolytes who like what they see. And so, of course, this seven hole pigeon putt is not good enough. We need to build a new course. He's done with this. He wants a hole that you can take a full swing without overdriving. He wants it's a little room to run, wide open spaces, right? And so in order to do this, though, you know, the age old developer, conundrum needs some dough.

He's convinced enough people now that, you know, this long game is fine, but it's no, trust me, like, this is not the real thing. This is nowhere close to where it's supposed to be. And so it gets like 20 or 30 people to kick in some money and, you know, buy some land where they can build a proper nine-hole golf course

in near my Belmont, Illinois. And so they buy a farm that's owned by this Englishman. A. Hado Smith is his name. So, you know, Englishman may be presumably a golfer, at least familiar with golf, could maybe see the vision of what they're trying to do. and McDonald's is like delighted with this opportunity.

He builds nine holes. Again, like I said earlier, along with some of the Scotsman that are friends of friends of his who had kind of like made their way over to Chicago. And since again, there weren't like a lot of, there weren't a lot of like golf clubs around. There's these great moments throughout this whole book where it's like he sends for sick.

He ordered six sets of clubs from Royal Liverpool. It's like the only place like people would order clubs from. And it's just very funny where it's like, Like, all right, we got 30 people ready to play. Like, we need to order six more sets of clubs. They'll be here in, you know, four months, uh, standby. And so, uh, eventually he's ready to give his friends like this big introduction.

They got this nine whole course. He's ready for this big grand opening day, organizes this tournament and this big lunch. And however, it just starts like pissing rain. And only two people show up to, uh, to this big unveiling. And, you know, which again, like anybody who's played golf in the UK, anybody who's played real golf is like that's kind of the perfect way to uh get introduced to the game just go out and and battle the elements and so that's what mcdonald did he passed out the clubs he's like we're we're we're going man like let's let's go get your shit and uh side note it's kind of funny actually like placed a bunch of bets like he placed like some some small wagers with these guys which is just a very funny detail of like all right i know you guys haven't played but like you know just like you know he is bet on the game uh this situation i think maybe like like like um you Like, yeah, like you can't, uh, that's a very interesting point, right?

Like, well, he's not up between you. He's very anti-professional, but not anti-gambling. Exactly. That's okay. And I'm not criticizing that. You know, I think that's a good, but I'm just a good distinction. Again, it's a little bit like he picks and chooses where, where, you know, he likes, he wants to have a little skin to the guy.

I'm sure he's made some money on the course. Uh, no, he's like putting like, actually ends up putting like money of his own into it. Whenever he runs out, he's like, well, the quote was what the quote was. So like I guess, I'm saying making money on the golf course, like, like prize money. You know,

like gamble, like I got the sense earlier on in this conversation that like he was anti like it's against the soul of the game to win prizes or to, in my head, it's like or gamble. But it sounds like he's playing. And also like I don't think he's operating these clubs as like a for profit.

I mean, these are like, you know, that I understand. I didn't think that was a, it's not a business venture for him. Right. Um,

so they make it through like five holes before. it's so rainy and so muddy that they have to stop. And there's no clubhouse, obviously. There's just like this barn. So they just go hide out in there and start playing cards. Sounds like sweetens. Yeah, a little bit. And that's going to be a theme too also, by the way,

these places like not having clubhouses and McDonald's thoughts on that. But apparently, according to him, five holes, that's all it took. He hooked these two. This was like his big moment of like watching people see the ball go through the hoop. I love this quote that's from his book. I'm happy to say that between each hand of cards, they ran to the door to see if the rain was over, each confident that he would win the next hole.

I think just a very relatable feeling for American golfers, right? Like everybody becomes an expert at looking at the Doppler radar, uh, during every delay, like now this is going to miss us. This is going to pass. You know, there's just like optimism of,

of golf that I think that's kind of the first, the first seeds of which, which made me chuckled. But so now we're off and running, right? We've got this nine hole course. CB is, is comfortable to start, recruiting more and more players. He even starts giving lessons at this time. But by the following

spring, he's got enough juice. He's got enough members. He's got enough in the kitty to add another nine holes. So Randy, to your question, that makes this the first 18 hole golf course in the United States, this place in Belmont. And we're going to talk about what happened to that golf course in a second. And so he takes his group of golfers. And in July of 1893, McDonald is 38 years old. they sign the official charter. They become the Chicago Golf Club. That's who these guys are. They are the Chicago Golf Club.

But of course, still not quite there. CB's not quite happy. Course can be better. This still isn't it. And if you know Chicago Golf Club, you know that it is not in Belmont, Illinois. And so in 1894, membership votes to buy a new piece of land.

They set their sights on this marvelous farm, the 200-acre plot in Wheaton, Illinois. It's called the Patrick Farm. It's like 25 miles from downtown. It's just off the northern rail line. So it's easy to get to you from the city. And they have enough members. And they make this purchase, pull the trigger.

And they start these plans for what is certain to become, you know, a golf course that's going to finally honor and equal the best inland courses of the British Isles. They're going to build it right here just outside of Chicago. Sure. Quick aside, this apparently, I didn't know this. Apparently did not go so well for Mr. Patrick, the guy who sold. uh the farm according to george botto's book uh mr patrick was unable to deal with his newfound wealth uh the 28 thousand dollar sale which was equivalent to well over a million dollars today apparently drove him insane and he died in an asylum so uh hate that hate that as well didn't

didn't know that one but was good land good land for like it did work it did work well and uh mcdonald along with with henry j wiggum another initials guy nil that we're going to hear from later on. And James Forgan, they begin to lay out the new 18-hole golf course and Chicago Golf Club becomes what it is in wheat. Shout out the OTPHJ Wiggum. Sorry I had to get that one. The H.J. Wickham thing is fun because he is,

God, that's tough. That's all that's going to be in my head for the rest of this. He's from Scotland. and his dad actually was one of C.B. McDonald's classmates when he was at St. Andrews University. And so he kept in touch with this guy. He knew that his son was like this really, really good golfer. And so when the plans kind of started taking shape for the world's fair, they knew they were going to need some people to come in with some gravitas and like show the locals what golf was. And so he writes to this guy.

And he's basically like, your son's not doing anything. Like send him over, right? Like what's he doing? Send him over. And he ended up staying in the U.S., like, I think for the rest of his life. And they clearly hit it off because they would become not only like very close collaborators on a bunch of stuff going forward, but also golf rivals. This guy, H. Shay Wiggum, ended up winning the second and third U.S. AM. Okay.

We're going to talk about the first U.S.am in a second. And furthermore, he would go on to marry C.B. McDonald's daughter. So I was going to ask if he was married. That was actually on my. He was married. I found very little information about. about his family. But it's, yeah, good, good questions.

This was, one of his daughters got married to, uh, to this guy, H.J. H.J. Wiggo. Uh, another, uh, another, like, example of a just total Renaissance man, by the way, because not only did he, was he like this expert golfer, great competitive golfer, uh, became kind of this like land developer, but he also, uh, became a drama critic for the Chicago Tribune. Uh, and eventually a war correspondent. So, again, just to, you know, you know, I don't know if, I don't know, I don't know.

if these guys were just like, I can't pin it down of whether it's like, well, they didn't have, it's not like they're clocking in like to marketing jobs. So maybe they just like became experts and very proficient at all these different things. Or if it was like maybe they weren't that good at everything, right? They just kind of did everything and nobody was really there to stop. I don't know. But I think it's kind of an interesting, interesting theory. Just takes too. Maybe they just had take. I think they definitely had takes. I know, I know that. I can't keep these takes in. So the original routing of the golf club is, is interesting because eventually it would be completely remodeled, completely redone, which we'll talk about in a second.

But a fun thing about the original routing, this is a picture from George Bato's book here. You can kind of see that like it's like these concentric circles, basically around the polo field where the front nine kind of goes clockwise around the outside and then you sort of flip it around. And then you kind of come, you know, counterclockwise again back towards the end. side and the theory behind this is that c b mcdonald had just like a debilitating slice and so the the thought was like yeah the left side of all of these holes is cornfields you know like plowed over land really thick gnarly rough forests like all of all of these different things uh but yeah if you hit a slice like you're probably just going to slice it into the other fairway uh which it's kind of funny obviously the routing would change dramatically when they redid it uh but just a great

little c b mcdonald uh flourish it was it was said that uh he never hit a ball out of bounds on this on this routing which is a great little uh feather in the cap but i was gonna ask you guys if you're designing a golf course what's your like what's your like you know mr nicholas hits fades so let's hit a lot of like par three's that you know i mean for me yeah we're worried about that big right miss baby so you would have maybe thrived on this original original uh chicago golf club routing yeah i the whole i hate is the kind of the big

I call it like a cape but like those holes that like just kind of keep bending around the water hate those holes so my my course would not have any of those I'm glad you call it a cape Rady because we're gonna we're gonna talk about that

hold on that thought for a second too so reviews of the original Chicago Golf Club even even kind of early original form are great Walter Travis sets a course record a great player in his own right only eventually gets broken by Chick Evans. Both of those guys said that those were among the only perfect rounds

that they ever played because that's what it took to score on this golf course. And realistically, again, like, we could have stopped there, right? Good reviews. People seem to like it. We got a good piece of land. McDonald, similar refrain. We're not quite there yet. Still not there.

He still knew that, like, he hadn't replicated anything matching, like, the great lynx golf courses of the British. Isles, which was going to become this pursuit that was basically just going to start to consume him for the rest of his life. And so 1897 just a few years after Chicago Golf Club opens, he writes this article that basically says this. He says, the ideal first class golf links has yet to be selected and the course laid out in America. And I think it's that word links that he's probably knows is missing. Wheaton, lovely, lovely place. The land is great. But it's still like the agronomy wasn't great at the time. The land was still like, it gets so baked out that it would like really crack instead of like playing firm and fast it

would just become hard like dead hard pan basically and he knew that wasn't right he knew like the strategy still kind of wasn't there it just was uh you know i think he still knew that like this is great i'm doing the best i can but like we're still not there we got to keep pushing forward which it's kind of something i admire about like just this whole story is like you're going to hear that pretty much every place he goes it's just like no it's not we're not there yet we got to keep going. Got to keep going. We've got to keep going. Question here, like with the Chicago Golf Club and the original members, are we thinking

these are all guys beginners, all new to golf? Yeah. So like Walter Travis, Chick Evans, or those guys are those guys, pets? No, those guys played professionally, I believe. Travis is like an interesting example. I think Chick Evans played professionally.

But they're both Americans. Actually, hold on to the Walter Travis thing, because we're going to get there. He was actually born in Australia, which I didn't realize, came over to America. but kind of de facto Americans. But a lot of the other members are Americans, yes. And like people. I'm just getting to thinking about like how imagine you start a golf club and everybody sucks.

Yeah. But you're trying to design a golf course like is, you know, strategic and, you know, stimulating for like a golf diehard. Well, that's going to become. It's just, it's a funny in my head. I'm picturing that. I'm like, oh my God. No, I think that's like very astute because that becomes like it's such a cliche and you hear it in every.

golf course architecture conversation now but like that becomes one of the big big big things of his like platform is like no it has to be challenging for really good players but it has to be playable for bad players right and like we'll hear about that more as he gets into like national and stuff but yeah there always should be kind of like an alternate like a safe route right if you're willing to give up a shot like you're not going to lose your golf ball over here and i think a lot of that probably came from exactly what you're talking about is like all these people are beginners like they can't just like they stink he hit them in the face with a shot shovel, right? And so, no, I think that's like, I think that's very astute. So in that same article

where he's talking about the great links hasn't been, hasn't been created yet. He goes on, like, even later in that same paragraph, says, Long Island is a natural links, referring to the sandy, sandy land there, and how similar it was to, you know, Scotland and Ireland and parts of England. And he says, a first class course can only be made in time. And it all must be evolved by a process of growth and it requires study and patience. Those two words, study and patience are going to become very literal over the next 10 or so years as he becomes obsessed with this idea of creating the country's first great links golf course. And he didn't know it at the time when he wrote that, but he was pretty much telegraphing that

within about three years, four years, he was going to be leaving Chicago, he was going to move to New York with his eyes fixed intently on building this dream ideal links. And by the way, like way after he moves to New York, we're going to jump around timelines a little bit here. But the original golf course at Chicago Golf Club stays like mostly the same for the next 20 years or so. Neil, to your to your point from earlier, Harry Colt comes in and makes some suggestions and they do a little bit of changes here and there.

But like largely it's it's pretty much the same. but the hard part is that like the rest of golf is just exploding and there's just like this creative explosion on all these other different golf courses and so it just makes this feel very old and very tired and very like outdated very very quickly uh just over this like next 20 years and so in in 1917 basically like 20 years after this uh he writes a letter presumably like to the membership or the head of the membership or something where he does not mince words about this idea and he he says he basically encourages them to, quote, scrap their golf course, which again is like his golf course that he spent all this time pushing to make,

which is kind of funny. But he says, quote, I've long wondered when the intelligence of the Chicago Golf Club would realize that theirs is one of the worst courses in the country as compared with its former position. Nearly every change that has been made at Chicago Golf Club has been made for the worse and not for the better. As a matter of fact, Chicago does not possess a golf course that compares with any one of a dozen I could mention around the city of New.

York. It's a bit like Neil moving from Atlanta to to New York, I'm sure, you know, talking all his friends from high school. It's like, yeah, you guys were probably hanging out and fucking Decatur, do it, you know, yeah, were you guys at some of that bar? Yeah, it's like, it's like close to the guy to the bars they have in New York. Come see me in the West Billy. Okay, Deage, real quick for my own benefit here. I'm a little unclear. I don't know if you can shed some light on as this original build was going on in Chicago, right? Maybe even going back to Belmont specifically. How what was how quickly did golf in America break contain in Chicago? Like when did it really hop out of Chicago and I guess it you know Philadelphia, New York? It went east.

Yeah. So there's a lot of it is happening simultaneously. And I like I don't have all the exact timelines like in front of me so you know a pre apology to to any of these clubs but like famously the uh the st andrews golf club kneel up yeah in yonkers yeah north of new york city and the apple tree gang and all of those guys were technically like before like their course was built i think before chicago golf club like the new course was built uh but that was a nine hole golf course shinikawk was built but that was a 12 hole golf course um what else newport um you know so like there's a bunch of these that are kind of popping up like around the same time the country club of course don't want to get any letters from from boston a lot of these are going up at the same time but they're still

like very basic and rudimentary and chicago golf club is like kind of the first club way back in the belmont days and the course at belmont is the first 18 hole golf course and chicago golf club like the new course in wheaton i think is the first like big 18 hole this is a real proper golf course. But at the same time, a lot of this other stuff is going on as well, which is going to become apparent kind of in the next section. But before we get there, very, very quickly, you know, after that just very mean letter that he wrote, they do, Chicago does commit to redesign in the golf course in 1921, just in case we don't come back to it later. With CB McDonald's Seth Rainer, we'll get to obviously all Seth Rainer and all that stuff. But there's a great

line in the letter that he writes, maybe a warning that he writes, like to the membership again. He says, there's one point I wish to impress upon your committee. Leave Mr. Rainer alone until he gets his plans out. Keep your committee and members from buzzing around him until he's through, exclamation point. You will only delay the game and will not get his clean a plan if you don't. I just, I love that. He was very much like, especially by 21, like Rainer had become such an expert in doing this stuff you just like get the fuck out of the way and just let him do what he does

let him cook man let set cook and so anyway it's just kind of funny to think about like that opinion like at the golf course that he had fought so hard to build in the first place but yeah let's change gears a bit again timeline we're kind of shifting around but i'm trying to follow some of this stuff to their uh conclusions rather than jumping around all over the place but let's go back to 1894 this is this is the good stuff here guys uh 1894 is a big year year, big year for CB McDonald. Because not only did Chicago Golf Club acquire the land for their new course out in Wheaton, but there was also an important idea, Neil or Rainey, I think this kind of speaks to what

you're asking, that it's like starting to take shape as more and more people start playing the game. Because the question was not only like how to measure one course against the other, which is like a natural comparison point, but also like how to measure the players at one course versus the players from another. And like more specifically, who's the best, right? Because there's a handful of other clubs that are starting to pop up. And, you know, we got to kind of unify this stuff and figure out like, well, who's, you know, who's the kid?

Who's the, who's the best, right? It's America. We got to compete. Exactly. There are winners and losers here. This is not a leisure activity. And so this idea of a national championship first officially proposed, apparently, I don't know how they know that, by Theodore Havemeyer. and the membership of Newport Country Club out in Rhode Island,

which Havamire had co-founded the previous year. Havamire, very, very popular guy socially and also in the world of business. He was a native New Yorker who got into the sugar industry, Neil. Are you familiar with this? Him and his brother ended up building the domino sugar refinery. I'm sure a building you looked at very frequently in Brooklyn. I did. They just revitalized it too, turned it in.

It's been re-gentrified, abandoned. sugar factory turned into a mixed use a mixed use complex right there on the water on the east river also a havermeyer hall at columbia university i didn't know that familiar with the habemires there you go havamire was a polo player originally a lot of polo going on at a lot of these these clubs that pop up but like many you know wealthy americans he discovered while he was on vacation in europe this game of golf and he came back to the u.s and he was like man this what did he say uh this was a much more appropriate game than polo for a man of his age. Which, you know, game for a lifetime.

I think we all, you know, one of the things we all love about golf. But his journey to building a golf course pretty similar to McDonald's. You know, he convinced a bunch of his, his wealthy friends that had also been on vacation, you know, like, hey, they knew what golf was and, hey, we all vacationed down in Breton's point in Rhode Island. What if we've got this 40 acres and we built a course? But, you know, quickly they outgrew that. And then, you know, he got 75 more people to join him.

And they bought this bigger piece of land known as Rocky Farm, which is where Newport Country Club would call its home. It's going to be an emphasis on the rocky part of Rocky Farm in a little bit here. And so this idea of hosting a national championship is one thing. Everybody's on board. But deciding where to host it kind of is the question because, you know, C.B. McDonald probably wants to do it in Chicago. The Shannoncock people want to do it at their place. And Havamire obviously wants to do it at Newport. I mentioned there's the St. Andrews Golf Club, the American.

in St. Andrews Golf Club, not the Scottish Gulf people, of course. And this had been organized by John Reed up in the apple orchards of yonkers. The apple tree gang is predating. A lot of these people, I mentioned in the country club and Brookline. They were in the process of building a nine-holler.

And there was the 12-holler in Southampton, the pride of William K. Vanderbilt and his friends called Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which dated all the way back to 1891, Randy, for your, if you're keeping a time. Okay, that's, yes, appreciate that. But the honor you know, everybody knew like hosting this first national championship was going to be an honor.

It was going to be great promotion for the club. It was going to be, you know, a lot of attention. And because he was like, you know, popular guy, they all deferred to Havemeyer and Newport. And it was decided that the nine-huler in Rhode Island was going to be the host for the first ever national championship, the national amateur championship. And so everyone's very excited to crown a national championship, you know, a national, champion perhaps no one more excited than our guy c b mcdonald who was was widely considered unofficially to be the best golfer in the country but now he was going to have a chance to prove it so

not only you know think about again not to be too on the nose but like think back to the college days all of these things that like he's trying to chase he's trying to build he's like he sees this infrastructure in scotland where they have these tournaments they have all great players they know who's who you know he spends the next whatever 20 some years trying to to do that he finally does it in america he builds a club he moves that club he builds another course he's got enough like it's starting to spread out and now like he's going to have his national championship and he's going to be able to prove to everybody you know not only all of that but like i'm the best at it too it's got to give us all some hope that if he went 17 years without playing yeah the best could be ahead he gets yeah the best could be out there

for us, Randy, you know, he just gave it up for 17 years. Came back and just like riding a bike for CB. That's what. Well said. So what happens next is maybe a part of this story that a lot of people know. But hopefully there's some specifics and details in here that that you don't. The tournament scheduled for September of 1894. I loved this, even though the USDA obviously does not exist yet.

The mentality is pretty much there. Newport Club decided that in order to show off the worthiness of their layout, they would need to make this course as hard as humanly possible. Sure. They grew the rough. They paste the, you know, the pins are in the hardest possible spots. Very quickly, there's a lot of complaining from the field. The Newport Brass, they're not having it.

They're convinced that this is going to produce a true champion. Just again, kind of the more. We're going to test these guys, Dej. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The format is going to be 36 holes of metal play. We're similar to the NLU Club Championship. Of course, it's going to be four times around the nine hole layout, metal play, count all your strokes, lowest number of strokes, wins. There's only 20 people in the field.

And either because the course is so hard, either because people aren't into it, whatever. By the end of the first round, almost half of them have dropped out. There's only 12 people left going into the final round, which is great. Giant babies, man. Hampered. Psychological evaluations from the start. That's right. And your first round leader is a, of course, you know,

course c b mcdonald of chicago illinois who opens with a sparkling 89 on the uh hell yeah that newport uh he's four shots clear of second place he's already prepared to take his seat you know on the throne of american golf what disaster strikes in the second round cb is like he's not himself he's hitting it all over the map the lead is shrinking uh but the real drama comes when his ball comes to rest against a stone wall that runs through the golf course shout out to Rocky Farm. And so, you know, I hate to say it, but like, what does Mr. Touching your golf goals?

Yes. Yeah. Mr. Touching your golf ball is a sack, an act of sacrilegious profanity. What does he do? Picks of his golf ball, assuming that he is entitled relief from this stone wall. The new. A movable obstruction, I guess. And there's a little bit of unclarity, like a lack of clarity in how this is written of whether

he thought that he was removing his ball from a hazard and taking a one-stroke penalty, or whether he thought he was entitled, free relief. I couldn't really get to the point of that. But the point is he moves his ball. The tournament officials from Newport obviously feel this, like, very differently than he does about this situation. And they inform him that the wall is a hazard. He just removed his ball from the hazard. He's going to be assessed a two-stroke penalty for picking up his ball.

And so this puts CB's calamitous second round score. and even 100 shot 100 in the second round. And that puts him one shot behind Newport's W.G. Lawrence, who seemingly has now claimed a one-shot victory. He has become the first national champion in the history of the United States. That's why we all know W.G. Lawrence's name. But no, that's not exactly what happens. Here's how George Bato, again, go by George Bato's book, describes what happens next.

All hell broke loose. McDonald in a childish fit of peak, be rated. the Newport Club's tournament committee for the manner in which the tournament was conducted. His complaints were many, but the issue was not, the issue was his contention that a stonewall did not constitute a hazard. Not only was the penalty unjustified, but he had also chastised them for using a stroke play format, insisting that it should have been match play. Anyone knew that. He issued a sweeping condemnation of the entire tournament, labeling it, quote, a fiasco. This is funny for a lot of reasons, I think. One, I think if you were to one by one, we're very

probably not hearing a lot about like any of this or the fiasco. And too, like he knew the rules before he got there. He's like probably is helping make the rules. Like he knew it was going to be a stroke play tournament. And he like, seeming that was totally following with it after round one. So just kind of kind of emerging respect right now for a guy. I know, man. It's tough.

It's tough. And it's going to kind of get worse before it gets better. Unfortunately. And so he was also steadfast. And again, I'll just issue legally. just a tiny sliver of plausible deniability here. Because I can't exactly figure out what the issue was. But he was steadfast in his assertation that the ruling was incorrect.

And what's really funny is that golf is like still so new that the tournament committee was honestly unsure of whether or not they had applied the rule correctly as well. And so a truth would say. Yeah. And so it's kind of like just sheer force. of confidence and bitchiness like i guess the lesson here is just like if you're confident about it like maybe you could shake them up and maybe you can like you know never back down and so that's what they do the tournament committee decides like we do have to throw this out we're not sure if this counts or not and so they decide that they're going to replay the tournament the following month and this

time it would be at john reeds uh st andrews golf club in new york and cb also got his way that the format was going to be changed. It was going to be match play going forward. God, they got back down so hard. It's George. George Bato continues, wraps this up. He says, McDonald, who felt not the slightest twinge of embarrassment was ecstatic at having a second chance. So, I mean, you know, it's a black eye on Habemeyer. Yeah. I mean, handle your business, sir. Like, this is your club. This is your turf. Yeah, you got to be about something. This Chicago, do we bowl come in and and tell you how to run things. That's,

that's unbelievable. So the, the powers that be, the kind of like unofficial, you know, consortium who's putting this tournament together, decides that they're going to do it again a month later. October 1894.

The field's gotten stronger. The word is out a little bit. There's players from eight different clubs that have entered the field. And we're at the nine hole course at St. Andrews. Very, very short, something like 2,300 yards or so.

But it's match play. Who cares? You know, it's just about beating your opponent. And that's what McDonald does on day one. He wins his first match, eight and six, ass kicking. He rolls again in the afternoon four and three. And so this is just really like a two-day thing. Like you play the first two matches on day one,

and then you play the semifinals and the finals on day two if you stay alive. So he was just going to need to win two more matches the following day if he was going to win the trophy. But after day one, he is ready to celebrate. And there's all kinds of times in this story where McDonald's life kind of like intersects and interweaves with some of the most interesting characters of this time period. And one of those people is Stanford White. Are you guys familiar with Stanford White? No, but I like this stash.

Randy, can you describe what we're seeing here? And just for the people at home, this is a black and white photo. But he did have bright red hair as well. Yeah. Just, I mean, your eye immediately goes to. the biggest most aggressive mustache, a bit unkempt even. Kind of a Yosemite Sam

sort of vibe. Yeah, big flowing, unkempt mustache. And then a weirdly, kind of tightly cropped head of hair with just, yeah. Kind of a sick vibe, honestly. Take that mustache off of him. He looks, he's, he's just another guy.

He's a jag. But yeah, that mustache, man. Well, now piercing eyes, too. I mean, he's got, He's got a bit of drifter in him. That's, yeah, that's drift is a good word. Very perceptible as well, Neil. Very interesting guy, Stanford White. Not, you know, interesting, not only is, uh, meaning great guy.

He was a very, very talented architect. Designed a ton of residences for the wealthy elite in, in Northeast, got quite wealthy himself in doing so. Uh, he designed the Washington Square arch in New York City. Okay. There go a ton of other famous New York buildings that Neil, I'm sure you would be much more familiar with than I am, but maybe worth a deep dive on your own time. And he also, relevant to our story, designed the clubhouse at Shinnecock Hills,

which is often said to be the first purpose-built clubhouse in the United States, first kind of like a clubhouse for the sake of being a clubhouse. So very interesting guy, very interesting body of work. Again, interesting, not always meaning good. Seems like maybe not a great guy. Maybe what the parlance of our times, maybe a sex pest, they would call him. potentially just sexually involved with everyone at all times. He would end up getting murdered in New York City at the original Madison Square Garden.

Apparently used to have like a rooftop theater. And I think it was like a, you know, lover's quarrel. Got got got up on top of Madison Square Garden. Lots and lots of scandalous rumors surrounded him. Mark Twain wrote about like what a bad guy he was. And his kill after his killing like in the court. case like all kinds of stuff about his wife and his like you know his partners and who was maybe not of age and who was of a just like you can you can research a lot of that uh on your own time

i don't know what's true and and what's not true but you know kind of a fun uh whenever they show those sweeping drone shots of the clubhouse at chinicock hills uh this year you can kind of remember uh the colorful characters that are involved i just want to throw this one out there Because I think this kind of like really sums it up. When he died, Vanity Fair wrote a piece about his death. And would you like to hear the headline of their story? Yes. Quote, Stanford White, voluptuary and pervert, dies the death of a dog.

Wow. That's a full dose right between the eyes there. Really dancing on the grave there of our guy, Stanford White. So this all, God, this just, this just, as I'm staring at a picture of it, it just, the two become, it makes sense, right? Like the guy looks like he had urges. Yeah, I would, I would, God, I'd encourage, I don't feel great about working it into the CB McDonald deep dive, but I would encourage people to take a deep dive into into his life and times. So, Randy, the question you're probably asking yourself, why is all of this relevant, right? Great question.

because after round one of, of, you know, the, I guess, second first U.S. amateur, Stanford White decides to throw a premature victory party for his

boy, CB McDonald. You're clearly going to cruise to victory. Let's just go celebrate a day early. And so they go and they absolutely tie one on and just pretty much blackout at, with all their other wealthy friends out at the Waldorf in, in New York. And they stay out to like,

literally like 5 o'clock in the morning before this 36 whole day that he's got coming up. And so by the time 5 a.m. hits, CB only has time for like an hour of sleep. And then he's supposed to go meet his semi-final opponent for breakfast, which is a nice little custom that's kind of gone away, you know, meeting your opponent for breakfast. And this opponent just happens to be W.G. Lawrence, the guy that beat him by one at Newport a month earlier.

And so he's groggy. He feels like death, you know, from the night before. Or he pops a couple strict nine pills on the advice of our guy, Stanford White. And strict nine, you might recognize as like the more common name for rat poison. But apparently at the turn of the century, it was also used in very small doses as pep pills. And so it works. He beats a hangover care. He beats Lawrence two and one, gets his revenge in the semifinals.

He moves on to the finals where he's going to face a guy named Lawrence Stoddert. And this was not going to be the push over. that some of those day one matches had been. Start's like a real golfer. He's an English transplant, a member of Royal Liverpool when he lived over there. And, you know, meanwhile, CB feels like shit. He's hung over.

Strict Nines wearing off. He's exhausted. The strict Nines wearing off. He's like not ready to go. But Stanford White, again, here's a photo of Stanford White, has another idea for him. He says, quote, this is kind of like from the column Montgomery Wentworth.

custard school of thinking. He insists that during the lunch break, CB McDonald needs to have a full bottle of champagne and a large steak and that that would make the hangover disappear. Truly a wonder that some of these guys like lived into their 80s. So that's what he does.

And he hangs in there. He's playing okay. He's two down at the turn. But by the 17th, Stoddard's ball comes to rest in a rubble of stone wall. Very funny. Leads to a one-stroke penalty for extrication as George Bato points out in his No one seemed to notice that the last time a stonewall was involved.

He had pretty strong feelings. There should be no penalty, but nevertheless. So they're tied by the time they get to 18. And that's where McDonald's famous slice surfaces again. He blows a ball right into the cornfield. Stoddard keeps the ball in front of him. He knocks it on the green, taps it in for the win. And so again, when you look up the history of the U.S. amateur, you know, this is your guy.

Lawrence Stoddard, the Englishman, right? What an unbelievable. start to this championship. But no, that's not the case either. Of course. Let's go to our guy. George Bato, again, quote, to the dismay of everyone, McDonald was often a tirade again,

ranting and raving, discrediting Stoddard just as he had WG. Lawrence, he bellowed illogically that Stoddard had not previously won anything. How could he possibly be the national champion? This guy's got no resume. Yeah, basically hits him with like this fucking. It's a galitarian game. We all play as equals. This guy's got no resume.

Who is he? He hits him with like this fuck, this fucking guy. You're going to give the trophy. This fucking guy? Well, I could have beat this guy my sleep if I wasn't on all this rap poison, you know? And so he just, yeah, he just won't let it go. Man, he digs in his heels. This is not not going to happen.

This is Bato continuing on kind of paraphrasing, Steve McDonald here. Who was the St. Andrews Club to speak for the golfing? community. One does not speak for all of golf. Only an association of clubs could bestow such an honor. And on and on, he went. Not even the tournament committee had the courage to put an end to this embarrassing diatribe. Now, two championships were in shambles from the bullish and domineering personality of this displaced Chicagoan. Something had to be done. Can you kind of see where this is going? Can you kind of see where I thought we were going to be just a celebration of, of, of,

C B. And then I can only just, I imagine Stanford whites over there pulling from the champagne bottle. They get him. Get a pro. Don't let him talk shit to you. You, you, you the champ, pro. Lawrence ain't done shit. He's like, everybody's got my guy Stanford all wrong, man. He's not that bad. It's not a sex pest. So, uh, because of this like now second embarrassing outbursts, there's still no trophy awarded. People still can't just like, you know. So he's, he's bullying people. He's getting his way, which I think is like, let's not lose fact of the force of personality. A hundred percent. But there's some cooler heads around the situation could kind of see how this was going to keep playing out.

And until there was a unified body, like a unified set of rules, a unified set of operating principles, a unified, you know, group to put on tournaments. There was going to be these types of like arbitrary complaints and this type of like bitching basically just like all the time. And worse than that, it was going to be that like people were going to keep. siding with, you know, the Chicago guys were going to be on the side of the Chicago guys. And the Newport guys, we're going to ride for the Newport guys. And, you know, you could just kind of start to see how all of this like fracturing, uh,

we need a governing body to happen. That's what CB was saying. That's what he was saying is like, you guys don't get it. It's not my fault. It's not me not getting it. It's you guys don't get it. We need to have a governing body. And so, you know, instead of like just continuing down this road, a group of guys reached out to the members of, you've probably heard this story.

the five most prominent clubs in the country. CB is part of the Chicago Golf Club contingent. There's Newport. There's Shinnock. There's St. Andrews. There's, who else am I missing? Brookline. Yeah.

And each is asked to send two deliates to New York for a December meeting. The hope was going to be established a governing body. It could be an American counterpart to the RNA in Scotland. And so this meeting took place at the Calumet Club in New York. I don't know if you've ever been there, Neil. December 22nd, 1894. And this is where the amateur golf association of the United States was born.

But because they realized quickly that they were also going to have to host open championships with professionals. Professionals very much an afterthought at this point, but they realize like, we probably need to keep ourselves open to that as well. They quickly changed their name to the United States Golf Association, the USGA.

And so one of their first moves was to elect a president. Do you know who the president was? Not C.B. McDonald. It was going to be our guy, Theodore Havamire of Newport Country Club. Oh, I almost, okay. He was the guy that everybody really liked. Everybody really respected, of course,

this is going to lead to the Havemeyer trophy, Neil, which costs like $1,000 at the time, a very, very expensive trophy that he bestowed to the USGA as an act of thanks for his election. But the first movie he had was really to like smooth things over with all the other clubs that weren't invited to the meeting, which is kind of funny. There's like Meadowbrook, your spot, I think, right now?

Sure. Tuxedo, Essex. There are all these other places that, like, didn't get invited to this meeting that, you know, have Meyer now had to be like, well, no, no, no, come on. Like, we still care what you guys think. Of course we do. Yeah. So that's kind of funny. But they thought he was the guy to smooth that over.

And also of note, the group decided that they would host tournaments. That would be part of the charter. And the first official tournament that they would host would take place the following year, that October, I should say. So like whatever, 10 months after this meeting, this would be the United States amateur, now being held for the third first time, essentially, that they were going to be going to be going to be Newport Country Club. The field was going to be invitation only. 32 players, format was going to be 18 holes of stroke play, followed by knockout match play. they were finally ready now to hand out a trophy no more excuses no more complaints like we've got our rules we've got our tournament we've got our organizing body we're ready to go uh there's a great hopefully have my i won't get run over this time fingers crossed we'll see what happens there's a great detail in george's book about how even in the practice rounds like everyone kind of got a little glum because they could see how much better cb mcdonald was playing than everyone else everyone's like oh great like he's this fuck guy's gonna like win again it just feels like It feels pretty inevitable that he's going to be the champion.

And it's real quick, was CB amongst the delegates that created the USGA? He was. He was one of the delegates from Chicago, along with, uh, I don't know if it was Oregon. I forget the other guy, but good question. So, you know, he gets through stroke play. He gets into match play. He starts absolutely rolling wins his first match seven and six, uh, wins his second match, eight and six. wins his next match five and four.

Semifinals, he beats the shit out of this guy from Philadelphia, a country club eight and seven. And finally, it's time for the finals, which is a 36 whole match, they decided, just like it is today.

And McDonald's opponent in the finals is this guy named Charles Sands, who's a member of St. Andrews, the St. Andrews Club, who I don't know how this happened, but he's only been playing golf for like three months, which is kind of sick at the time, too, where it's like,

you can pick it up three months later. and you know, you're competing for a national championship. So no surprise. CB McDonald beats the shit out of this guy, 12 and 11. And so how does the guy who, you know, raised such this colossal stink about his first two shortcomings, celebrate his long-awaited victory? God, I love this detail so much.

He was playing so good, he felt. He was playing so good in this round of golf that after the match got closed out, and he had 11 holes left. He continued playing to see if he could break the course record. It shook hands and kept going on his way. I think one of the most disrespectful things you could possibly do to your opponent. I'm going to keep going, big dog. Yeah, you guys go go off the champagne.

I'll be in shortly. Yeah, get that engraver out here. Are we good to go? I don't want to cool off. Yeah. Unfortunately, he did. He did fail to do so. He did not break the course record, which kind of makes it even worse.

But after a couple fakeouts now, guys, like for real this time, Charles Blair McDonald, becomes the first name etched on the Havemeyer Trophy, a trophy that would go on to include, you know, Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicholas, Tiger Woods, many, many, many, more. I didn't know this, but that original trophy was actually destroyed in a clubhouse fire. Yes. Did you know this? Well, that just came up.

It was the Oakmont, right? No, it was what would become Eastlake. Like, Yeah, was when Bobby Jones was holding it. And so the trophy was down at whatever was East Lake before East Lake.

And yeah, they had a big clubhouse fire and the original. Didn't it surface or no, no, so I'm thinking of something else. Didn't it get misplaced? I feel like I saw this during the Oakmont US Open. Like,

or where was the US AM this year? Oh my God. Where was the US AM this year? This year was at Olympic Club, That's right. Yes. So I don't know. I feel like the Havemeier trophy got found like in a basement like somebody stole it. I've been in the ceiling tile. Are you mixing the Habemeyer and the Wanamaker perhaps? That's what that's exactly what I'm doing. I think the Watermaker trophy. Well, I'll have to look it up. But there you have it. Sorry.

Who's in the ceiling tiles? It was all the time. So we put it there. Where do you guys stand? I mean, this whole story makes me want to, I maybe, maybe, listen, I might take my own personal stand and I might recognize Habemeyer, Lawrence. I don't think CB McDonald is my first United States amateur chain. I don't know if you can have more of a hipster take

than that, but I support you. I think it's awesome. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So it's kind of these are stolen lands. This doesn't confirm. We need to recognize this stuff. The Wanamaker trophy was, it went missing for several years after winning the 1925 PGA Championship, Walter Hagan

and put the trophy in the back of a taxi. That's right. Okay, that does really go out. I told the driver to deliver it to Hagen's hotel. Instead, the Wannermaker trophy disappeared. Yeah, it's putting a lot of trust in the taxi driver. Well, there you go. So the day after the U.S.

Amateur is almost like an afterthought, but the U.S.GA kicks off its Open Championship, which at that time was seen as far less prestigious. Again, like this attitude kind of permeates a lot of this stuff. It's not just like, it's just kind of like, proper gentlemen don't don't make money from the game uh yeah but this is all upper crust bullshit totally what we're talking about a hundred percent and uh your first winner of the u s open is englishman horace rawlins uh maybe a picture of horace rawlins in the basement at sweetens neil and the

birdhouse i can't one of your horse one of your famous horace is uh but he he becomes your first u s open champion he wins 150 bucks uh for the effort but it was of course c b mcdonald's week he's the he's the big news of the week he had his golf club he had his golf course he had his governing body now he finally had his trophy and he also i mean listen this story that that whole section i i feel you man it uh people are complicated though you know people are uh we got we got tell the whole thing we're not even close to the end of this story i mean this is like either we got we're so early in this and you know he uh He did a lot of writing later in his life, both like in his actual memoir, his reminiscences,

and also in like various magazines. And I will say referring to kind of this shit show of these first two tournaments, very clearly had had like no contrition for how he acted. In his book, he basically hit him with like the many people are saying those first two tournaments are not legitimate. Like a lot of people have said this. Hundreds of people have said this. And, you know, he falls back. He does keep falling back on this dubious idea that like, you know, any one, like you can't just your club championship.

That can't be a national championship. Like that's not, it's not fair. He doesn't qualify. He writes a couple little sub-tweets in here. The Chicago Golf Club having 18 holes held an invitation tournament, but we made no such claim. The Shinnecock Hills Club, which had the best nine golfing holes in the east made no such claim. Other clubs probably did the same. Obviously, an association had to be organized.

So like a bit of a, you know, we're all looking for the guy who did this sort of sort of situation here. This is like, again, kind of I mentioned George Bato's book and how it's got some personality in it. And he's definitely a biographer, but he's also not afraid to call some balls and strikes and kind of be like, we all see this, right? And so he concludes, you know, this chapter on the USAM shenanigans with this paragraph, which I absolutely love, starts with with CB McDonald's writing about like the true spirit. to the game. It's quote. In golf, the cardinal rules are arbitrary and not founded on eternal justice. Equity has nothing to do with the game itself. The essence of the game is inequity as it is in humanity. The conditions cannot be governed by a green committee with the flying divots of the players

or the footprints in the bunkers. Take your medicine where you find it and don't cry. And for good measure, George Botte just adds the sentiment no doubt was aimed at everyone except for himself, which I think I think sums it up. pretty well. So, you know, guys, the gross gross. I was going to say C.B. He's a bitch. Yeah. He's acting like a bitch right now. It's it's not good, man. It's not good. I think I agree with you. But I think we're going to see a little bit of introspection. If you can just stay with me a little bit here. Okay. Because I think he might not come out and say like, I was I was acting messed up there. But he does kind of start to take a look at the larger, the larger picture a little bit.

And so this was all 1895. And that would prove to be his only U.S. Amateur victory, despite what a great player he was. I think he was already 40 by the time he won that one. So he'd go in, you know, he'd play in a bunch more US AMs. He played the next four for sure. I had so. Oh, but all these beginners are getting better.

Exactly. You know, it's like, everybody's like, oh, no, I'm just going to play golf all the time. A hundred percent. And as the tournament just becomes more prestigious, like more people from overseas come over and play, too. And so it does get harder. He gets older and it gets harder to win. And also there's like some. technological changes that we'll get to as well.

But I did mention his son, your guy, Neil H.J. Wiggum, would go on to win the next two. He's not in law. Oh, sorry. Mr. OTPH. Yeah, he would go on and win the next two tournaments. CB would kind of play the AM on and off until he was like 56, but he never made it past the semi-finals again.

And it's kind of funny when you start looking at the venues, because you can already see like his fingerprints starting to show up and starting to reveal themselves. The next AM was at Shinnecock. The third one's at Chicago Golf Club Like his own course that he built The one in 1899 was at the On Wencia Club Which is what sprung up

Like eventually from the original golf holes That he laid out in Lake Forest As Senator Farwell's house Like they kept that course around for a little bit Those guys started a club They moved it somewhere else That became On Wincia Club So there's all these little like breadcrums

Or like little seeds that kind of go off to become All kinds of different Well and I got to think Especially in those early days like getting becoming a us g a u sGA member club i'm guessing it's like through the clubs you oh you know i got a line to cb he'll get me i'm sure there had yeah i mean nobody like writes about that stuff but there had that stuff had to be a thing so by the time 1900 rolls around i kind of alluded to this earlier but cb's packed up he moves to new york uh where he had a new

office new golf course he's going to hang with the masters of the universe uh in manhattan what was the new golf course uh he started playing out of garden city golf club uh uh which is, you know, one of the... Neil's quite familiar with them. I'm actually not. Never been, Randy. Never been to either. There's two of them.

There's Garden City Country Club and the Garden City Men's Club. The Men's Club's one I'm referring to. I haven't been to either of this. So one of the... Up 100, Randy, though. I'm surprised you have. So Neil at No Laying Up.com, if you have an invite. So one of the founding members of Garden City, it was a man named Walter Travis, who is going to be,

we're going to take some interesting Walter Travis detours. throughout the rest of this, this examination. Because he comes on, you know, he turns out to be like a pretty interesting character in the next 15 years of this story. Like I mentioned earlier, he was actually born in Malden, Australia. There's a town like 80 or so miles, northwest of Melbourne, came to the U.S. when he was 23, married a woman from Connecticut, became a U.S. citizen, and him and his wife moved to Garden City,

became a real, like, red-blooded American after that. Travis was exposed to golf like a few years earlier, 1896 when he was traveling in England like a lot of these people. And his friends convinced him to buy a set of clubs that he could take with him back to the States. He was already 35 at this time by the time he picked up the game. And so if you ever heard him referred to as the old man, that's what that means because he, you know, how late his start the game was. But he ended up becoming a golf natural because two years later, he's in the semifinals of the US AM where he lost to Finley Douglas. He actually, Finley Douglas became a president of the USGA. He's the guy that handed Bobby Jones two of his, his Grand Slam trophies, kind of a fun one.

The following year, he made the semis again. And the year after that, in 1900, he won the US Amateur. The first of what would be three titles. So obviously, this tournament's changed a lot over the years. He's gotten a lot more, maybe not more prestigious, but more depth, obviously, to it. I think there's only like four people that have won it three times. I mean, Jack and, or not Jack, Tiger. Bobby Jones and, you know, I forget who the other one is.

But, uh, so 1901 and Travis. Yeah. And one more. Uh, but in 1901, the second round of match play, Travis gets paired up against none other than his fellow Garden City member, CB McDonald. Uh, and he ends up beating the hell out of CB. CB is way, way past his prime. Uh, by this point, he beats him seven and six.

But the thing that's very notable about this 1901 amateur is that both McDonald and Travis are playing a new golf ball, new livelier golf ball, wound core golf ball called the Haskell ball. That's the Haskell ball on the left there. If you were looking at this, it was said that the Haskell ball flew like 20 or 30 yards farther off the tea, but it also rolled much better than the gut of Percha, which is what it replaced. You can probably see where this is going. Bobby Jones said this was the most important golf development of his lifetime. It was the switch to this golf ball very likely was and in the immediate term in this 1901 tournament we're still kind of at like a crossroads as far as like who's playing what and who's playing what ball and who's playing the old ball who's playing the new ball and so Travis wins over over finley douglas that we mentioned uh who was a scott that had beaten him a few years prior and there's a little like whispers of controversy that kind of break out right because Travis is playing the new ball finley douglas is playing the old ball and And, you know, this led to quite a few people kind of being like, well, is this like a proper win?

Is this a real win? Golf magazine at the time went so far as to say this was more a case of golf ball versus golf ball against golf ball than it was player against player. CB McDonald ended up, you know, despite that he was also playing the Haskell ball, wrote that he agreed as well with with this. And this was just kind of like a bumpy relationship between Travis, his equipment, the general public, and ultimately C.B. McDonald's, a lot of which we'll get into in part two. But in the meantime, the Haskell ball made C. So just so I get this right, CB was anti Haskell, but he was also playing it. Not necessarily anti, but he was, he basically, like, no, not anti. He knew it was kind of like an inevitable development.

But he thought that one tournament specifically was like, yeah, no, you are right. Like if you're playing different balls, like that's, you know, that was kind of, it's the golf ball that beat him. It wasn't really the player that beat him. But no, he was fine with like the equipment change. He knew that was kind of like progress for a lot of different reasons. I'm sure these were like they lasted longer and a lot of other, a lot of other things. But again, like you can, you can probably kind of realize like where this is going, right?

And so he's got these like two big realizations after this 1901 USAM that he, writes about. The first one is that his his best playing days are behind him. These guys are hitting it way too far now. He's just kind of like an also ran sort of golfer, ceremonial golfer, as our guy Tiger would say. And, you know, him not being competitive anymore made him basically realize and like get a little introspective about how the golf, like the world of golf probably needed him in other ways. And so who knows how much of this is like ego or God complex or, you know, whatever. There's something at least admirable about, like, rather than digging in his heels again and being like, this technology's horrible, you know, whatever, he was very much like,

okay, well, this is not for me anymore. Like, how else can I help out? Like, what else can I do? And he started, like, really taking on this role as kind of an elder statesman in the game. There's a good, good passage that he wrote later. He said, I determined that my solace lay in giving up the struggle to become the game's master, but should rather become its servant. I concluded that was far better than upbraiding myself at the waste of time trying to compete in a supremacy that my muscles would not respond to as a year slyly stole vigor from my limbs. This was my renunciation. People used to be great writers at this time as well. Again, just shout out to the Renaissance man of it all.

But also, just to go back, Jerome Travers won the US AM four times. There we go. The name was your more. Thank you. Fourth guy. It was not at the tip of my tongue. The second thing he realized in addition to the fact that his, his playing days were probably over, but kind of related to it, was that a lot of golf courses were about to change. A lot of golf courses were about to get a lot shorter.

And furthermore, like, there's going to have to be a lot more thoughtful golf courses built, right? Like, people are going to have to be a lot more strategic in how they're building things. It was just going to become a game of power, if not. Like, people were just going to bomb and gouge all over the place, right? And so, you know, think about like the numbers above about like how much farther this golf ball's going. If it's like 20 to 30 yards on a T shot, that meant that most of the two like two shot holes were essentially like 30 to 50 yards shorter basically overnight, right? Par fives suddenly got much easier to either hit in two or the three shot par fives were like much easier than they used to be. And crucially like the intent of a lot of these holes, like I said, just changed overnight.

Right. Like the big example that a lot of people give is the Redan, the 15th hole at North Barrack, which we'll talk a lot more about when we get to national. But that hole almost used to play more like a risk reward par four, depending on the wind. Like there was this idea of par, right? Like it's a par three because you should theoretically knock it on the green and have two putts. But like that didn't mean par was like guaranteed, right? Like it was it was a fluid situation. If the wind was hammering in, there was like, A lot of people who are like the only way to play the Redan is like knock it over there to the left, put one up on the green and, you know, make a three or a four and just don't make a six. It was basically the idea. And so like this thought with the Redan was like any given day based on conditions, based on wind, based on your game at the time, based on what your skill set was. Like you might, you know, you might need to play it a different way, you know, but you still had to like read the situation and try to make the best score, which is kind of what made it so great, right? It wasn't supposed to be, yeah, just like hoisted fucking seven iron up there and drop it next to the hole. Same with, you know, the road hole and the Alps and a lot of these other great holes that are sprinkled across the UK all kind of end up feeling pretty similar. And a lot of these holes are on McDonald's mind at this time because, A, he's like he's seen a lot of them based on his travels around the UK, both when he was at school and in other trips.

but also because of a very famous article that got posted in Great Britain's Golf Illustrated magazine. Anybody knows the CB McDonald's story, knows this part of the story. Hoylake's legendary amateur Horace Hutchinson used to write for Golf Illustrated as well. He ended up becoming a very close advisor and mentor to CB McDonald. And this article that people reference is more of a,

it's more like a prompt. It was like a call out for people to write in. And it was Hutchinson trying to basically solicit opinions from all kinds of different people, pros, amateurs, whoever, like the who's who of golf, about what the best golf holes in the world were, which I think at the time kind of specifically meant like what the most difficult holes in the world were, but also, you know, what were strategic and why and all these things. And so he wrote, for the purposes of this inquiry, the questions to which we would request the answers of golfers of standing, both amateur and professional are one,

what do you consider the best and most difficult one shot hole? What do you consider the best and most difficult two shot hole? And three, what do you consider the best and most difficult three shot hole? And so Hutchinson and the whole kind of editorial team encouraged respondents to write as much or as little as they wanted in the responses, but he was very specific about one thing. He encouraged people to make sure they knew the difference

between subjective and objective criticism. So in other words, don't like trash a hole because you play it you stink at playing it and don't praise a hole just because you made a birdie there uh one that's just that's just kind of randy's whole thing exactly it's just what he does on any of our review pods it's unbelievable i think that's stop i think that's right so you might not know a ton about horace hutchinson he's going to keep popping up throughout the story but a good illustration about how much reverence i think his fellow players had for him was that immediately this magazine article gets responses from like most of the world's best golfers.

There was like five British Open winners that responded to five or four or five British Amateur Champions. There's like 30 detailed responses in total. It's like people like Harry Varden, J.H. Taylor, James Braid, Willie Park Jr., Herbert Fowler, and many, many more. Yeah, I don't have to tell you about some of those names, right? And so the results of the voting is like not going to blow you away because it's all these holes that now have become. you know, more and more famous over the years and shorthand for like what the best holes in the world are. The best one-shotter was determined to either be the Redan or the 11th at St. Andrews, the Eden hole. The best par four was the Alps, number 17 at Prestwick.

And the best three-shotter was a toss-up between numbers 14 and number 17 at St. Andrews. The long and the road. Of course, you might be sitting there screaming the, you know, the road hole is a par four. back then that wasn't quite so black and white it was like had brutal hazards it was very long i was kind of considered like a three-shotter for pretty much everyone except for the longest hitting professional so like the results weren't going to blow you away but more importantly it was like this idea that people were now writing about like the specific differences between you know two different holes in st andrews two different part fives i like this part three

for this reason you know i like this part three for this reason i love this par four yada yada yada and you know this type of writing like really found an audience for golfers who were interested in not only debating like which holes were better than others but like why right it's kind of the the original golf club atlas like let's let's get into it man let's let's dive into it and so one of the readers for whom you know this lightball really went off on these articles was our guy c b mcdonald because like we know he's he's consumed at this point that despite the progress they've made in America they're still not even close to replicating what's great about golf in the british aisles and this list just like proved it right like this is here here's everybody

explaining in great detail not only like the the depth of great golf that all these great british writers and players were going on and on about but like what made these holes great right like the fact that there was a strategic way to play them that there was a different way to attack them because in in the states golf started like this very one dimensional game the greens were usually dead flat and boring uh the soil the agronomy wasn't always great like we said uh and even more so it was just like kind of dumb like a lot of the holes like before c b mcdonald like when holes would pop up you know three holes here or a hole in someone's backyard or whatever most of it was just like pick it pick out the green pick out the tea and just like dig a big ditch wherever the drive's going to land and like I don't know, see if they could hit it over it. Right?

And it was like exactly what you got to earlier, Neil, is like, man, you know who that like doesn't punish is the guy who hits it really far? You know who that does punish? The guy who doesn't hit it very far. And so, again, this light bulb, like, kind of starts to go off for CB that like not only are these great strategic holes for great players, but they're great strategic holes, you know, even more so maybe for not great players. And they allow choices and they allow strategy. and it becomes like a a core tenant to what he thinks, you know, golf is all about. And especially when, you know, golf is at its infancy in America, he knows that like, man, we've got to, we've got to, like, get this going now.

Like, this is the, these are the premises and the, the tenants that we need to instill in our golf course, right? So. The templates, baby. We're getting there. We're getting there, right? Neil, I was going to ask. Does this make you want to include, you know, we send out a census every year? Should we ask people for their best one shot, two shot, three shot?

It's a great idea. I think that's a great idea, Randy. It is a great idea. Yeah. Yeah, we could do that in 2026 for sure. So our guys, our guys pretty reflective at this point, right? And he's interested in leaving it better than he found it. You know, he's got his trade.

Easy for him to say, he's got a bunch of money. And he's got his trophy at this point. But he also, I think, likes the ego boost of being the guy who's like, No, we're bringing the Scottish game, the English game. We're bringing that to the States. I'm the guy to do that, right? And so they've been moving the ball forward on all these different fronts and like trying to build better courses,

trying to build better clubs. But these articles, you know, about how great all these these golf holes were across the Atlantic Ocean, made them realize like just how far they had to go. And furthermore, it made him realize that the blueprint for how to get there was kind of staring them right in the face, right? It was right in the pages of, of Golf Illustrated here. So, you know, if it's in theory, right, if these were all the greatest

holes in the world, all the best players had just said so, what if you took all of these holes, you know, because the thing was like all these courses only had like one or two of these holes. It wasn't like all 18 holes at Prestwick are unbelievable. All 18 holes at the old course are perfect. It was like, what if you took a little bit from here and a little bit from there and now you, you've replicated them. You got to play canvas over here. take the best of the best. Yeah, wouldn't that then be like the greatest golf course ever created, right? You just take 18 of these.

You find some dynamic land. And there you go. On your hands, you got the greatest course ever built. And this is the idea that he becomes obsessed with, this idea of building the course that's going to, going to just plant the flag for the USA, say, this is it. This is the best we got. The national golf links of America. And this is what he sets out to do.

So in 1902, he sets out for Europe again. This time he's not there just to play golf for fun. He's there to get some info. He's there to measure stuff. He wants to see all these holes up close and personal. He wants to get a better understanding of how they play, what makes them work, what doesn't make them work. And he also wants to discuss this idea with like many of his friends over there, which is

funny because this is kind of how like word starts to get out about what he's doing and this plan that like he's just going to come rip off all the best holes. in Europe starts to go around that doesn't go great right i mean that that's like not a great look uh which i i can understand uh you know pair that with like his reputation as the guy who wouldn't admit when he lost uh pair that with just like this kind of eye rolling typical like american bluster and like yeah people are are pretty pissed man it's like pretty tacky uh idea right i think that's kind of why people don't like uh replica golf courses right it's kind of just like well sure i shouldn't say that i shouldn't paint with a broad brush

trap boys like him uh great a lot of private bitching about this a lot like even some kind of public editorials people calling him out and he responded back he stayed very you know pretty calm definitely didn't care what anybody had to say he was going to keep going forward uh he hit him with this banger randy i thought this was great uh the flowers of transplanted plants in time shed a perfume comparable to that of their indigenous home in otherwise you know you plant the flower somewhere else it's still going to smell great right uh yeah In his memoir, he had another great one that kind of summed up his feelings. He was quoting the landscape architect Prince Puckler, not familiar with his game.

He said, like to become more familiar. He said time is not able to bring forth new truths, but only an unfolding of timeless truths. In other words, like, man, you guys have been playing the game for hundreds of years. Like, you guys, you guys figured it out, right? Like, I'm kind of just trying to admit that, like, there's nothing new under the sun here a little bit. Like, why don't we just take what you guys have and just. like keep making it better that's what they do in every other art right is like let's just keep iterating and keep iterating so he is totally unfazed by this criticism he continues to to push forward

and the next few years he just keeps going back and forth between new york and europe each time you know gathering a little bit more info he starts making these like detailed studies taking measurements like i said making blueprints even like topographic maps of all these and he starts sending out like even other like satellite uh researchers devro emmitt is a name you you might have heard is a an architect up in the up in the northeast garden city guy uh he starts sending him out you know hey i'm not going all the way out here but like you it sounds like you got to go check out this whole like go see this place so again all these little seeds and like you can see you know devro emit comes back and becomes an architect and like it all kind of traces back to this main guy devro emit

by the way uh you know prolific architect uh congressional did the first course of Beth Page. He was also the brother-in-law of our guy, Stanford White. So shout out to him. I was going to say, Stanford, get over there. You know, he's out there doing some research, but he might have been playing a little G. Have a little fun too, Randy. Well, he got, you know, he got, you got God at MSG. So, you know, he's not around for that. What year was that? I forget, like late 1890s, I think. Okay, so he's already gone. I think he is. I think he is.

Probably saves some reputational harm for CB. One thing that becomes clear is, you know, he's got. He's got this idea that, like, I want to, you know, I want to take all these these templates, so to speak, and put them on a piece of land. One thing that becomes very clear, like, these are not the days of, like, big bulldozers, earth moving, you know, types of projects. So all these measurements that he's doing are great. He understands, like, you know, yeah, it's great. If you have this awesome hill, you can build, you know, an Alps. But he starts to realize quickly that, like, ah, man, I'm probably not going to find a place where I can put a perfect to scale version of the Alps and the Redan.

the Eden and the beirits and all these things without moving like a shitload of earth right and so you know that was still like a very radical idea at the time and so what it forces him to do is kind of like evolve his thinking a little bit and look at like you know well maybe these don't have to be exact copies and going back to those golf illustrated essays that he loves so much this is how uh harold hilton from hoylake describes the alps he says although it might have been better in the case of this particular whole had the position of the bunker been reversed and had the green been a wee bit more spacious, but still nature had decreed that it is not so and we cannot quarrel with nature. CB McDonald would be happy to quarrel with nature. He's down for that, you know, no matter what. But what he took from this is just like, well, what you're saying is like the Alps is great. But if you're saying it'd be better if the bunker was over here, then like, let's put the bunker over here. Right.

And so he starts to look at all these like, you know, you can kind of see where I'm going, right? Like you don't you can make the road hole without a, you know, railway shed. You just need to figure out like what the thing is that makes it great, you know? And so he kind of gets off this idea of like, I need to have all of these like to the inch. And it gets much more on like, okay, these are just loose concepts that I that I need to follow. It's like first principle thinking. Exactly. It's like breaking it down to like what is the strategic brilliance of this specific hole.

Yes. We can still call it that, but it's not exactly the same. And furthermore, he kind of like takes a look at this and is like, well, not only that, but like if we do it that way, now we've got all kinds of stuff open to us where it's like, well, maybe we take a hole that has a great T shot and we use that. And we take another hole that has a great second shot and we pair those two together and like, oh my God, now it just became one plus one equals three.

Right. And so it gets very excited about this. And he keeps doing all of his studying. And he actually turns the, he turns a golf course into, based on all of his research, into an equation. And he says, here's how it breaks out. I've figured it all out. I've got the data. 23% of the quality depends on the soil.

22% is depend on the perfection of the undulation and the hillocks. 18% is the putting greens. 13% is bunkers. 13% is the length of the holes. He had a lot of opinions on length of the holes. He had to know a whole other formula about like these are the perfect lengths for golf holes, but not only the lengths, like also the variety of length. 6% is based on the quality of turf, 3% on the width of the fairways,

which must be between 45 and 60 yards. I've way with him on that. And 2% is based on how close the T's are to the greens. I love this line. This walking 50 to 100 yards to the next T, mars the course and delays the game. Between the hole and the teeing ground, people sometimes forget what they're doing

and commence playing some other game. I love that. I think that's great. God, it sounds like shout out to Lincoln. park. Shout out to Sali. It's good stuff. Yeah. Just a lot of a lot of data and all that again, like sounds silly until you start looking about like your favorite courses. You're like, yeah, that's yeah, no, that kind of, uh, that kind of makes sense. And, uh, he, he had a couple other months like just for fun. Uh, more, more than three blind holes are a defect. Uh,

hills are a detriment. A mountain climbing as a sport onto itself has no place on the golf course. Uh, trees, Randy, are a serious detriment. unfortunately. Out of bounds should be avoided, if possible. Cops are an abomination. Cops were these, like, it doesn't matter. You can look them up there, like these kind of like, bunker mounds, like big, stupid unnatural kind of things.

It doesn't matter. They are an abomination. And glaring artificiality of any kind detracts from the fascination of the game. He wraps all this up by saying the aggregate, no waterfalls. The aggregate, unless it was already there. the aggregate of all of the above marks 100, which from my point is the, which from my point of view is an ideal golf course, something yet to be attained. It was yet to be attained, but that was going to be his goal when he broke around on his new golf course in Long Island in the coming years. And guys, that's where we're going to pick up with part two.

Part two has a lot of other good stuff in it. We're going to talk about national. We're talking about the Lido. We're going to talk about all kinds of other, all kinds of other stuff. A lot more Walzer, Travis, a lot more feuds, a little bit more Stanford White. and I look forward to it. I love it. I learned a lot.

Yeah. God, hell of a spin. I eagerly anticipate part two, DJ. Thank you. Well, thank you for listening. Hopefully part two is out short order, maybe the next day even that you're listening to this. But thank you guys for listening.

I look forward to the next part. I can't wait to get back into it. And we will see everybody again soon. Cheers.