A great new book about a great old club and its historic course

Always seek the best writer for the job

Three days ago I was mulling what to write about this week when my lunch guest arrived. I won’t say where we were because it’s somewhere that’s had more than enough media profile this year because of a trivial change to its rules. My guest was the versatile American writer Fred Waterman, journalist, historian, master short story teller, screenplay creator and much else besides, who I first met one May morning over a decade ago at The Kittansett Club.

He was to be my partner in a 36 hole alternate shot foursomes match. Regular readers will know I believe that meeting someone for the first time just before sharing a golf ball with them is akin to a couple preparing for bed on the first night of their arranged marriage. The parties to both these unusual experiences are on the brink of indulging in acts of intimacy with someone they’ve only just met.

The result can be agony or ecstasy. In the case of Fred and I, unsure of which it would be, we nervously eyed each other up as we stood on the first tee. In the event there were elements of both. We began by painstakingly building a useful lead in our match against two Kittansett members, mild ecstasy, before squandering it towards the end of the first 18 holes, rather less mild agony.

Then we enjoyed an unhurried lunch of over three hours, pure unbridled ecstasy, akin to the “endless pleasure/endless love” of which the eponymous heroine Semele sings in Handel’s beguiling opera, full of power struggles, passions, sex and violence which premiered in London in 1744. When play resumed, a couple of careless shots by me left us facing defeat, renewed and increasing agony, until a strong finish snatched a halved match from the jaws of defeat, great relief and mild ecstasy.

Returning to that May morning at Kittansett, my opening drive flew surprisingly far and straight. Fred’s second unluckily kicked into a greenside bunker. I thinned my bunker shot well past the pin, his putt for par came up short and I sank a four footer, enough for a scrambled half. Walking to the second tee Fred said “You can drive, you can play bunker shots and you can putt. It’s going to be all right today.”

This was more generous than my modest contribution to our opening bogey merited but I soon learned that it was characteristic. Earlier this year when we played together on this side of the pond I discovered his latest book The History of the Newport Country Club had just been published. Having been enchanted by this Club, its course and the clubhouse, which uniquely contains a ballroom but no dining room, I expressed interest in it. He immediately promised to give me a copy and five months later on his next visit to London, true to his word, he arrived with it.

That evening I read the Prologue, the most alluring three opening paragraphs of any golf club history I have ever read. I quote the first and last two sentences in full.

“The wind comes out of the southwest most days, lifting the cool ocean air and brushing it over the land. The ships of settlers, slavers, smugglers and the navies of three nations rode this breeze to the safety of the deep-water harbor and the gentle city that is like no other………At first it was a trading place, a rival to New York and Boston, then it became a refuge from Southern heat and Northern cities, and finally a resort where the industrialists came to enjoy the fortunes they had made elsewhere. And with them they brought the old Scottish game, which they made America’s own, out on Brenton Point, where it was meant to be, where the wind will blow for ever, over the land and the sea.”

If those words don’t produce a lump in your throat then you are a philistine, devoid of emotion and spirit. This exquisitely illustrated book also has an informative Foreword by the longstanding President, Barclay Douglas, Jr., who made the wise decision to hire Fred to write it. The first few chapters are devoted to placing the founding of The Newport Country Club [hereafter “the Club” or “the course”] in its historical context.

Some context it was, too, as America eventually began to emerge from what Charles Blair Macdonald called the Dark Ages (because of the absence of golf) after returning home from his life changing stay in mid-1870s Scotland. The Apple Tree Gang started meeting in 1888 and around this time Theodore Havemeyer began playing in summer with wealthy friends on land rented near Newport. By 1891 12 holes were being designed by expat professional Willie Dunn and America’s first golf clubhouse was built at Shinnecock Hills.

All this took place against the background of the Gilded Age, immortalised by Edith Wharton’s brilliant novels, including The House of Mirth which contains the most convincing fictional account of a suicide I’ve ever read. Wharton herself came from a comfortably off background and wrote perceptively about the lives of the very rich which were as different from the general population then as today’s multi-billionaires are now. Soon after her marriage she and her husband Edward, later a member of the Club, bought Land’s End, a Newport mansion with extensive oceanfront views, in 1885.

In January 1893 Havemeyer met four friends at his home in New York and he was elected as the first President of the Club. Its formal incorporation soon followed and the Club’s original subscribers included John Jacob Astor IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Perry Belmont (son of August) and James Stillman, worth $77 million at the time of his death in 1918. This provenance ensured that the development of the Club was not underfunded.

Fred Waterman describes the early years when the priorities were the course and the clubhouse. Expat Englishman Willie Davis, who learned his golf at Royal Liverpool, came to the Club after a year in Montreal and was responsible for the first nine hole layout. A second nine was built in 1897 but drainage problems led to these holes being abandoned.

There was keen competition for the role of designer of the clubhouse. A British writer is quoted as saying “In the spirit of a sumptuous and opulent people, Americans are spending money on building magnificent golf houses!” The clubhouse opened in 1895 and The New York Times declared that “It stood supreme for magnificence among golf clubs, not only in America, but in the world.”

A particularly entertaining chapter in the book deals with Charles Blair Macdonald’s outrage at not winning the first US “national Amateur championship” in 1894. Such was his annoyance that the organisers arranged a rerun at a different course where he again finished second. This debacle led to the formation of the USGA.

More than two decades after the Club had abandoned the second nine holes, land was purchased enabling the course to be extended to eighteen. AW Tillinghast designed these sympathetically with the original nine. The book mentions that claims that Donald Ross worked on the site are not supported by the Donald Ross Society. Suggestions of input from Seth Raynor are regarded as more credible.

After his abdication, King Edward VIII was a famous visitor and unpopular with the caddies because he was a “measly” tipper. President Eisenhower is outed as yet another occupant of the Oval Office to be both very competitive as well as partial to being given extremely generous putts and not afraid to improve his lie.

When running for President in 1960 JFK derided Ike for the amount of golf he played while in office. JFK was nervous that his own enjoyment of the game might hurt his chances of winning. Four months before election day he played Cypress Point with his close friend Red Fay who he’d met doing naval training in WW2 and who he later appointed Under Secretary for the Navy.

On the par three fifteenth, not to be confused with the famous sixteenth, JFK hit his tee shot straight at the pin. Red yelled “Go in! Go in!” JFK was horrified but the ball stopped six inches short. He said to Red “You’re yelling for that damn ball to go in the hole, and I’m watching a promising political career coming to an end. If that ball had gone into the hole in less than an hour the word would be out that that another golfer was trying to get into the White House.”

This story had a special resonance for me because I got to know Red Fay, an exceptionally charming man sadly no longer with us. We played together several times at the Vintage Club where he drove around in a stylish car still displaying the Kennedy/Johnson bumper sticker used in the 1960 campaign.

If you haven’t read Fred Waterman’s book, buy it now.

ENDS