When we speak of the godfathers of American golf architecture, names that remain familiar even today come to the forefront of the conversation. They include men such as Donald Ross, C.B. MacDonald, A.W. Tillinghast and Alister Mackenzie. A name that should be mentioned in the same breath is Tom Bendelow. He doesn”t receive the same recognition as some of his storied contemporaries, but his impact upon golf in American may be more profound than even those aforementioned giants of the game.
Known in golfing circles as the “Johnny Appleseed of golf,” Bendelow was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1868. His parents were merchants who owned the town”s pie shop. Aberdeen has always been a hotbed of golfing activity since the birth of the game, and Bendelow started to play it at a very young age. He became an accomplished amateur golfer and used to make excursions to St. Andrews as a teenager to play in regional tournaments. He studied journalism and worked for the local newspaper, the Aberdeen Free Press.
Bendelow came to America in 1892 as a 24-year-old. He lived in New York City and took a job with one of the city”s handful of dailies, the New York Herald. In 1894 he saw an advertisement in the newspaper seeking a knowledgeable golfer to build a two-hole golf course at a Long Island estate. Bendelow got the job and built a mini-home course for the Platt Family, one of the co-founders of Standard Oil. He parlayed that job into his first full-time golf architecture position, designing a six-hole course on Long Island called Nassau Country Club. It was a six-hole course that the members would play three times to complete their 18-hole round of golf.
In 1895 Bendelow began work on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx. His 18-hole design would be the first municipal golf course in America. The Bronx also hired Bendelow to run its course as the manager. Golf was just starting to break out as an outdoor recreational activity in American and Van Cortlandt was a very busy place. Bendelow introduced the concept of the reserved tee time so that golfers could take to the links in an orderly fashion.
With his reputation in the game of golf booming, Bendelow took a position with the A.G. Spalding Sporting Goods Company as their resident golf expert. He sold equipment, gave seminars and presentations, and did lessons to introduce the game to America”s masses. He played in exhibitions with some of the top players of that era. In 1900 Bendelow played in an exhibition with three-time British Open champion Harry Vardon. Later that month, Vardon won his first United States Open title at the Chicago Golf Club.
While continuing to work for Spalding, Bendelow remained active in the world of golf course architecture. While others such as Ross and Mackenzie often worked for new private country clubs, Benedelow more often than not designed courses for municipalities, park districts and county governments. As well as being known as golf”s Johnny Appleseed, he was often referred to as “The King of the municipal golf courses.”
Bendelow”s personal design philosophy was to make golf courses that were “inexpensive to build, easy to maintain, and would provided the maximum in playable rounds of golf.”
Spalding transferred Bendelow to its Chicago office after the turn of the century. The company began promoting Bendelow”s design skills. Bendelow would build the golf course for a government entity and the pro shop would be stocked with Spalding golf balls and Spalding golf equipment. Bendelow was able to travel to all parts of the country, doing business for Spalding while enhancing his golf course architecture business.
Bendelow even made it out to California where he designed eight courses. His best-known West Coast course is Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a former site of the L.A. Open in the 1930s and the most heavily played public course in Southern California. He also built San Francisco”s Lincoln Park, a course noted for its beautiful vistas on the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge.
While Bendelow was very active building public courses, he did work for private groups and is responsible for some high-end gems that are familiar even today. He designed Olympia Fields just outside Chicago. It has hosted Western Opens and United States Opens and was the site of Jim Furyk”s Open win in 2003. He also did another exclusive Chicago area country club, namely Medinah, another former Western Open and U.S. Open site as well as the venue for Tiger Woods” PGA Championship victories in 1999 and 2005. Medinah is also the site of the 2012 Ryder Cup Matches. Bendelow also designed East Lake in Atlanta, the recent home of the Tour Championship and the home course of renowned amateur great Bobby Jones, as well as Royal Ottawa Country Club, an early host of the Canadian Open.
At the time of his death in 1936, it was estimated that Tom Bendelow either designed or was involved in the remodel of close to 1,000 golf courses in North America, making him the most prolific golf course architect of his time. He built courses that were generally playable for the average golfer, thereby making the game fun and popular during its formative stages when it was first gaining a foothold in America.
When all is said and done, Tom Bendelow was truly a Renaissance man. A journalist, a golfer of note, a promoter of sporting goods, a golf course architect, and toward the end of his life, a lecturer at the University of Illinois, Bendelow was the least known of the godfathers of American golf architecture. Nonetheless, as the Johnny Appleseed of golf, it is safe to say that more golfers have played Bendelow-designed courses than any other noted golf course architect of his time.
