Charles Blair Macdonald -- player, administrator and architect --had a powerful influence over the early days of American golf.

by Howard Rabinowitz

CHARLES Blair Macdonald was never accorded the title "Father of American Golf," which he thought he had earned. That sobriquet went instead to John Reid, the transplanted Scotsman who, together with the rest of the "Apple Tree Gang," formed the country's first permanent golf club, St. Andrew's, in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1888. But as a player, administrator and architect, Macdonald promoted golf in this country like no one else before or since, albeit within the confines of a small elite. By profession he was a stockbroker, and though he was described as a "daring speculator," his real passion was golf.

His lifelong love affair with the game began in his beloved St. Andrews. There he became an accomplished player under the tutelage of his grandfather, William Macdonald, and by watching and competing against some of the game's greatest figures, including Old and Young Tom Morris.

Macdonald himself described the years following his return to America as "the Dark Ages" because he was unable to play golf. He therefore had to meet his craving for the game during periodic business trips to Britain in the late 1870s and 1880s and by knocking balls around Camp Douglas, a deserted Civil War training camp.

The situation began to change in 1892 when Macdonald laid out seven short holes on the estate of U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell. At the request of the downtown Chicago Club, he then set up a nine-hole course in suburban Belmont. He added nine holes in the spring of 1893, making it the first 18-hole course in the country, but in 1895 the club moved to Wheaton, where Macdonald sculptured a more challenging 18 holes that ranked with the best inland courses abroad. He also became the new club's captain.

Thanks to the considerable headstart on his contemporaries, Macdonald became one of the better American amateur golfers of his era; indeed, he loudly claimed he was the best. When he finished second in a medal tournament at Newport Golf Club in September 1894, to determine America's best amateur player, Macdonald refused to recognize the tournament's legitimacy on the grounds that he was unfairly penalized on one hole and, in any event, only match play could determine the best player. But when he lost at the 18th hole of the final in the match-play tournament played for the same purpose the following month, he claimed it was just another tournament and that only an official association of clubs could host a true championship.

Partly to placate Macdonald and ease tensions between east and west, two delegates each from the nation's five most prestigious clubs met at the Calumet Club in New York on Dec. 22, 1894, to form a national governing body for American golf. Called at first The Amateur Golf Association of the United States, and then the American Golf Association, the organization officially became the United States Golf Association when its constitution was adopted in February 1895. As one of Chicago Golf's two delegates, Macdonald was chosen second vice president and was the driving force on the committees appointed to draw up the organization's constitution and by-laws and to decide on playing rules.

Macdonald made sure that the new organization's Amateur Championship was a match-play affair. At its first official championship, held in October 1895 at Newport, Macdonald defeated C.E. Sands, 12 and 11, in the 36-hole final. Macdonald did well in the Amateur until the turn of the century and was low amateur in the 1900 U.S. Open, although a distant 41 strokes behind winner Harry Vardon. But as the game attracted more skilled players and spread beyond the narrow circle of clubs, Macdonald became less of a threat in major competitions and, except for a few ceremonial attempts, effectively retired from championship golf after 1905.

Macdonald's fame was due less to his record as a player than to his role as a guiding force in the development of the game in the U.S. and as the nation's first great golf architect. Although Macdonald was a vice president of the USGA from 1894 to '98, he was never elected president and left the Executive Committee after 1898. Much of his authority within the game evidently derived from his service between 1908 and 1926 as the USGA's official or unofficial representative on the Royal and Ancient Golf Club's powerful Rules of Golf Committee.

The possessor of an ego that equalled his huge appetite, Macdonald thought he knew more about the game and was better steeped in its traditions than anyone else. Nor was he bashful about saying so. Irascible to the end and with a commanding presence that belied his nickname of Charlie, the physically and mentally intimidating Macdonald relished his reputation as "golf's autocrat." He was a fierce traditionalist who energetically and arrogantly sought to keep the game true to its Scottish roots.

Whether from within the USGA or as an influential gadfly, he resisted most efforts to "Americanize" the game. He opposed permitting the lifting and cleaning of muddy balls, was instrumental in helping to preserve the "stymie" and in making the definition of "amateur" more restrictive. He also defended the USGA against the younger Western Golf Association's challenges to its authority. No one was more steadfast in opposition to attempts to abolish the distinction between the elite and more ordinary clubs. His ties to the British game also led him to suggest what eventually became the Walker Cup matches between American and British male amateurs that debuted in 1922.

Macdonald was less successful at preventing a break between golf's two ruling bodies in 1911 when, despite his pleas for unification and further discussion, the USGA did not accept the R&A's ban on the Schenectady center-shafted mallet putter, a ban he himself thought unwise. Any prospects for a return to the days of R&A dominance ended in the 1920s when the two bodies failed to agree on a standard-sized ball.

Yet too much can be made of Macdonald as the Neanderthal of golf. As he himself observed, "As we gaze back we will reverence the past, but it is to the future we must look." His personal views about the Schenectady putter and a new standardized ball reflected a broader opposition to the R&A's interpretation of the Rules. He thought it was the R&A, under English influence, rather than America, which had departed from the true "spirit of the game." People should be able to play with any kind of ball or club that conformed to the original very lax rules. Macdonald thus urged conformity with R&A decisions, not because he thought the R&A was automatically correct, but because, like his Tory ancestors who sided with King George in the 1770s against an earlier generation of colonial upstarts, Macdonald could not envision an America, in this case as regards golf, that was not part of a larger British entity.

That Macdonald was not irrevocably wedded to the past was especially evident in his support for the development of the rubber-cored Haskell ball that revolutionized the game. Macdonald also introduced at Chicago Golf, and helped to gain acceptance for, another American "invention" -- the out-of-bounds rule.

Although denied the title "Father of American Golf," Macdonald was unchallenged as the "Father of American Golf Architecture." In fact, he claimed to have coined the term "golf architect" in 1901. Golf design, however, remained an avocation for him. A fierce foe of "commercialism" in golf, he never accepted a fee for his services and was involved in the construction of fewer than 20 courses. He simply designed courses for his own enjoyment and that of his prosperous friends, some of whom came together in the burgeoning number of clubs, while others added courses to their own estates.

In 1902, Macdonald decided to build the nation's first world-class course, with each of the 18 holes a shrine in its own right. He began visiting the great courses of Scotland and England and, returning with surveyors' maps and sketches, searched for the proper sandy site for what became The National Golf Links on the eastern end of Long Island. Financed by a syndicate of 70 wealthy friends, including Henry Frick, H.P. Whitney, William K. Vanderbilt and Robert T. Lincoln, son of the former president, who each contributed $1,000 to the project, The National opened officially to immediate acclaim in 1911 and is still considered Macdonald's masterpiece.

Rather than copy the design of European originals, Macdonald's work was inspired by them. At times, his versions of such classic holes as Prestwick's "Alps," North Berwick's "Redan" and Royal St. George's "Sahara" actually improved on their counterparts. And other holes, like the widely copied, crescent-shaped "cape hole," which allowed the golfer to chance as large a carry over water as he thought able, were thoroughly original, owing more to the nature of the terrain than to any existing model. And as president of The National, he controlled everything that happened both on and off the course.

Although his most noteworthy engineering achievement, the $750,000 Lido Golf Club on Long Island, is no longer in existence, other venues, after lengthening and minor modifications, are still among the best in the world. In addition to Chicago Golf Club and The National, they include The Greenbrier's Old White, Mid-Ocean and Yale University. In much of this later work, Macdonald had help from Seth Raynor (who had also been indispensable at The National), Charles Banks and Ralph Barton, men skilled in construction techniques who soon became noted architects in their own right.

In addition to training other architects, Macdonald influenced course construction by the example of his own courses and through his extensive writings, most notably his memoir, Scotland's Gift -- Golf. He also sponsored a contest in Country Life magazine to choose the best design for a par-4 hole at the proposed Lido club. The winner, an English physician, Alister Mackenzie, was so encouraged by his triumph that he soon switched occupations and became one of the game's greatest architects.

Macdonald's courses exhibited a great variety in their holes, careful attention to the siting and design of "true," undulating greens, and "bold" bunkers. Though often visually intimidating, his holes were playable for golfers of all skill levels, providing the less able were willing to skirt hazards and thus add distance to their task. Greens, he thought, were to golf courses what "a face is to a portrait." That is no surprise; he was a superb putter. He also strived to avoid the look of artificiality even when nature had been improved upon; reflecting his love for the barren linksland of Great Britain, he disdained hills and trees. Yet in still another departure from Scottish tradition, he advocated the regular watering of fairways and greens.

Yale, a marvel of both design and engineering, was Macdonald's last course, and its opening in 1926 coincided with his retirement from the R&A Rules Committee. He spent the last decade of his life railing against the tendencies he thought were corrupting the game. Ironically, the man who had learned the game on the democratic links of St. Andrews came to personify, as player, administrator and architect, the elitist nature of early American golf. He died in April 1939, in Southampton, N.Y., where he is buried in Southampton Cemetery, directly across from Raynor's grave.

Macdonald thoughtfully left behind in the National's handsome clubhouse a life-sized statue of himself. Commissioned by him, but paid for by the assessed membership.