The Rio Olympics Golf Tournament for men is at its halfway point with 36 holes already on the scoreboard for the field of 60 golfers. There is no 36-hole cut. Come Sunday evening, there will be golfers receiving gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals for winning, placing, and showing at the Rio Olympics. I wouldn’t call it all that strong of a field as 11 of the 60 contestants have never played in one of golf’s four major championships.
The women tee it up next week to determine Olympic champions for the first time since the one and only Paris Olympics golf tournament for women in 1900. Individual stroke play golf was a part of the Olympics in 1900 in Paris and in 1904 at St. Louis for men. This is the first time for the women in 116 years and for the men in 112 years that golf has been part of the Olympic Games.
Not everyone has been as supportive of Olympic golf as the sporting world movers and shakers had hoped. A number of talented linksters, including Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlory, are not participating because of zika virus concerns. Some golfers who have qualified such as Camilo Villegas and Brendon de Jonge declined to play because they are having subpar years on the PGA Tour and need to do well in the final two events of the year to qualify for the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and retain membership on the PGA Tour for 2017.
Finally, there are some golfers who had better playing options. Vijay Singh could have played in the Rio Olympics, but he chose instead to compete in the U.S. Senior Open in Ohio. Obviously a senior major is still more important in the world of golf than an Olympic gold medal.
Other issues include the congestion of the schedule for globetrotting members of both the European and American tours such as Adam Scott, Graeme McDowell, Charl Schwartzel and Louis Oosthuizen. Finally, from my weak perspective, I wonder why a sport like golf that purports to be squeaky clean would want any part of that cesspool that is the Olympic movement?
Of some interest to me is that Canadian George Lyon has been the Olympic golf defending champion since he took home the gold at Glen Echo Country Club in St. Louis more than a century ago. Golf was at its very beginning stages in America in 1904 and Glen Echo was the golfing establishment of note in St. Louis. It was designed by James Foulis, the 1896 U.S. Open champion. By the way, the St. Louis Olympics also coincided with the World’s Fair in St. Louis that summer and fall.
Lyon was relatively new to the game, having picked it up as a 38-year-old. He was best known as a superb cricketer, but he gravitated to golf once he walked away from cricket and became quite successful during the course of the next two decades, winning eight Canadian Amateur titles between 1898 and 1914. He was 46 years old when he competed in the Olympics, and his match play opponent in the finals in 1904 was American Chandler Egan of Chicago. Egan was America’s best golfer in the years before amateur greats Francis Ouimet, Chick Evan and Bobby Jones. He was Harvard educated and won the NCAA golf championship as an individual in 1902. He led Harvard to NCAA golf titles in 1902, 1903 and 1904. He also won the Western Amateur in 1904 and took home the U.S. Amateur title at Baltusrol that same summer. Olympic gold for Egan would be his third big win of the summer of 1904.
Alas, Chandler came up short, losing to Lyon by a 3-and-2 margin (three holes up with two left) in a 34-hole match. It was considered a minor upset although everyone knew how good George Lyon was. There were 77 golfers in the field for Olympic golf, 72 of them coming from the United States. Three were from Canada and two were from England.
Prior to the 72-hole Olympic golf tournament in 1904, there was a team golf competition held at Glen Echo. Teams were made up of 10 golfers and there were three different American teams, each representing a different golf association. There was a team from the Trans-Mississippi Golf Association, the United States Golf Association, and the Western Golf Association. The Western Golf Association won the 36-hole aggregate tourney. Its 10-man team included Chandler Egan, his cousin, Walter Egan, the runner-up in the 1901 U.S. Amateur, a threesome of Midlothian Country Club members, Robert Hunter, Mason Phelps, and Kenneth Edwards, along with Edward Cummins, Nathaniel Moore, Daniel Sawyer, Clement Smoot and Warren Wood. All were members of the Chicago-area country club set.
Daniel Sawyer went on to win the 1906 Western Amateur. Warren Wood won the North and South Amateur at Pinehurst in 1906. He also won the 1913 Western Am and finished second in the 1910 U.S. Amateur. Nathaniel Moore was an heir to the Nabisco fortune. Unfortunately he died in a Chicago brothel six years after winning the team golf event in the ’04 Olympics.
Robert Hunter had a most interesting amateur golf career following his Olympic gold experience. He won the NCAA title while at Yale, he played in seven U.S. Amateurs, made the cut in a pair of U.S. Opens, and lost in the North and South finals to Evans in 1911. He relocated to the West Coast after World War I and finished as the runner-up in the California State Amateur in 1922. As a side note, the Robert Hunter who won Olympic gold in 1904 is not the Robert Hunter who worked on golf course projects in California with Alister Mackenzie at Sharp Park, Sequoyah and Green Hills.
Kenneth Edwards made the cut in two U.S. Opens, Mason Phelps captained the Yale golf team and won the Western Am in 1908 and 1910. Chandler Egan was the best of them all, winning a second U.S. Amateur in 1905 and going on to be low amateur at the 1906 U.S. Open. He also won four Pacific Amateur titles, and he took home the California State Amateur in 1926. He also was a two-time Walker Cupper.
It’s the weekend of Olympic golf in Rio. A champion will receive a gold medal this year, just like George Lyon did in 1904. The untold story of those 1904 Olympics was the team competition that was officially won by USA Team 1. A tip of the golfing cap goes to my research assistant for this column, namely Patrick McKenna. McKenna is a longtime friend, a former Beverly Country Club caddie, an Evans Scholar at Marquette University, and is a CPA and an attorney. He is the club historian at Midlothian Country Club and was a leading force when that club celebrated the 100th anniversary of Walter Hagen’s win at the 1914 U.S. Open at MCC.
