Brookline’s rich history — both bad and good
WHEN it comes to the best and worst of times, there might not be another golf club in America with a legacy quite like that of the Country Club at Brookline near Boston, the scene of the US Open this week. In this country it is best remembered as the venue for the 1999 Ryder Cup, the one where the American team, in thrall to an unlikely comeback in the singles, ran on to the 17th green en masse while Jose Maria Olazabal had still to putt, a fitting climax to an event where the game plumbed new depths. What a contrast to the other landmark in the club’s rich history and a truly epochal US Open in 1913 widely considered as the birthplace of the American game.
Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, two of the great British pros who dominated the early years of the sport, were the favourites, only to lose in a play-off to a local caddie called Francis Ouimet, in the game’s greatest upset.
The modest Ouimet put the sport on America’s front pages for the first time and led to the great awakening. ‘In terms of growing the game, three Americans stand out: Ouimet, Arnold Palmer and Tiger Woods,’ the USGA’s Mike Trostel told The Quadrilateral website. ‘He was America’s first golf hero. At the same time, his humility and working-class roots helped erode the perception that golf was only for the elite. The win jump-started a national interest in the game when public courses didn’t exist.’
There was no shortage of interest in America in 1999 when their team overcame a four-point deficit after two days to win back the Ryder Cup, after two successive defeats.
In the excitement, plenty of people lost sight of all that had gone before. Not one of the Ryder Cups that I have covered since has come close to those shameful scenes. I can still hear the banshee howl of one American wag screaming: ‘Get in the thick rough!’ as a drive from a European rookie went awry early in a singles match. She then jumped up and down like she had holed the winning putt herself when the ball did finish in the thick stuff. The crowd took their cue from her example. ‘The arrival of the golf hooligan,’ was how the peerless writer Alistair Cooke put it.
The man who bore the brunt of it was, naturally, Colin Montgomerie. It was so bad that his father James, a former secretary at Royal Troon, had to come off the course and stop watching. The late, great Payne Stewart was so embarrassed he conceded a 25ft putt on the 18th to Monty, confirming a brave singles victory for the Scot. In terms of the game’s values, therefore, Brookline has borne witness to the two extremes. After the appalling spectacle in St Albans last week, we can only hope this staging of America’s national championship leans more towards the example set by Ouimet, and perhaps the most evocative US Open of all.