It’s No Junior Achievement

In our contemporary golfing world, where such players as Greg Norman and Tiger Woods have become multinational corporations, it is easy to assume that large-scale commercialism began with those first great stars of the television era, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

More informed observers may point to Walter Hagen, while the truly knowledgeable will recall that Harry Vardon was heavily compensated for his many non-tournament endeavors. Yet when it comes to developing golf’s wide range of business opportunities to the fullest, any of these run a distant second to Scotsman Willie Park Jr., one of the game’s pioneers and the designer of this week’s U.S. Open course at Olympia Fields, outside Chicago.

Park was born in 1864 in the seaside town of Musselburgh, where the racecourse-encircled links have seen the royal and ancient game played virtually from its inception. Here Young Willie grew up in an environment uniquely conducive to golfing greatness. His father, Willie Sr., was a four-time winner of the British Open (including the first Open Championship in 1860), an occasional designer of area courses and a club- and ball-maker of genuine renown. His uncle, Mungo, had a similar resume, though he won only one Open Championship. In addition, brothers Frank, Jack and young Mungo were first-class players, as was Willie Jr.’s close boyhood friend, Willie Dunn Jr., who would eventually become one of America’s pioneer golf professionals and designer of the 2004 U.S. Open course, Shinnecock Hills, in Long Island.

As a player, Young Willie twice won the Open Championship, in 1887 at Prestwick and two years later on his home turf at Musselburgh, where he defeated Andrew Kirkaldy in a 36-hole playoff.

Though perhaps something of an erratic ball striker, Young Willie had a blue-chip short game, the foundation of which was his talent with the putter. In those days of unmanicured greens, he was known to practice his stroke for as long as 12 hours, believing that properly grooved, it could overcome even the wildest drives and approaches. Often it did, gaining Park a grand reputation and leading him to coin the phrase, “A man who can putt is a match for anyone.”

Curiously, despite so fine a playing record, Park is perhaps best remembered for an event he lost, a 72-hole challenge match played in 1899 against Vardon, who had just won the third of his six Open Championships. The challenge -- for a then-massive 100 pounds a side -- had been issued by Park in 1898, but it took the better part of a year, and considerable haggling, before the match was played. Anticipation of the event was perhaps unparalleled in the annals of British golf, but in the end the negotiations may have been more exciting than the game. For Vardon, 2-up after the first 36 holes at North Berwick, simply laid waste to Park upon returning to his home course, Ganton, defeating the Scotsman, 11 and 10.

Perhaps as a result of some prizefight-like pre-match posturing, Park is today occasionally recounted as being cocky and a braggart, yet ample evidence suggests the opposite. In 1891, for example, the British magazine Golf wrote, “Few professional golfers are so universally liked as Willie Park,” and historian Robert Harris noted that Park was “well mannered and reserved -- the ice once broken revealed a great kindly charm.” More recently, author John Adams, in his biographical volume “The Parks of Musselburgh,” describes Willie as “magnanimous” and “a mature, hard-working, enterprising and courageous man, with a distinctive magnetism.” He also points out that Park refused to join his fellow Scottish pros in boycotting the presence of the young Englishman J.H. Taylor at the 1893 Open, his offer to play with Taylor effectively leaving the embargo against English players dead in the water.

Young Willie, then, operated outside the professional herd, always running an independent business and never, during his adult life, seeking employment in service to a club. He was, from all accounts, reserved, perhaps even something of a loner. Yet he was obviously competitive and held immense confidence in his own game, going so far as to issue an open challenge to play anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any amount of money. And such an offer entailed more than a little risk, for in an era when high-stakes challenge matches stood among golf’s biggest events, Willie Park Jr. is believed to have been the only professional regularly to stake himself, as opposed to wagering money put up by wealthy backers.

Such confidence traveled nicely into the business world, where Park carved his niche as golf’s entrepreneurial pioneer. Taking over the family equipment manufacturing business from his father in the early 1890s, he expanded it within the United Kingdom and to the United States, using his name, a reputation for quality and countless design innovations to achieve widespread success. His first major innovation, the convex shaping of a driver’s clubface, remains a universal standard more than 100 years later, and his “lofter” was a clear forerunner of today’s lob wedge. Park also invented the concept of the offset putter as well as a diamond-mesh pattern for the cover of a golf ball, the latter placing him nearly a decade ahead of his time in grasping the aerodynamics of ball flight.

Young Willie also broke ground in the field of golf literature, becoming the first professional to author a book, “The Game of Golf” in 1896. Highly popular in its day, the 277-page volume offered a full primer on playing the game, plus one of the earliest chapters on the design and construction of courses. A second, smaller work, “The Art of Putting” in 1920, was similarly successful, though it is “The Game of Golf” -- which was reprinted as recently as 2002 -- that remains today among the game’s classics.

That Park was writing about course design so early is fitting, for in addition to his other accomplishments, he is generally accepted as having been the first golf architect, at least in the modern sense of the word. True, Old Tom Morris, Tom Dunn and Willie’s father had previously received fees to lay out modest regional courses, but Park was the first to organize his practice into a full-fledged business, codify his design beliefs in writing and, perhaps most important, set standards of strategy and sophistication soon to be followed by a generation of celebrated architects.

Two English courses, opened almost concurrently, jump-started Young Willie’s design career: the Old course at Sunningdale and Huntercombe, which still exist today. At Sunningdale, he transformed a hilly, heather-covered site into England’s first great heathland layout, proving such land ideally suited for golf and sparking the nearby development of such classics as Walton Heath, Swinley Forest, West Sussex and St. George’s Hill. At Huntercombe, Park once again started a trend, launching what is believed to have been the first real estate/golf venture, kicking in 5,000 pounds of his money and taking a position as the company’s managing director. Ultimately the venture failed, but not before Park’s golf course garnered almost unprecedented praise. Indeed, even Walter Travis, a star player known for his cantankerous nature, called it “easily the best laid-out course that I have ever played over anywhere.”

The first of the great British architects to venture abroad, Park made three trips to the United States, the last of which became an extended stay from 1916 to 1923. During these visits he built or rebuilt more than 50 stateside courses, the modern standard bearers of which are Long Island’s Maidstone Club and what was originally called the No. 4 course at golf-crazy Olympia Fields.

Of the latter, Park wrote: “I am satisfied that your number IV course is the equal of any golf course I have ever seen and I know of none that is superior, either in beauty or natural terrain.”

Whether Young Willie serenaded all of his clients this way we can only guess. But given his pioneering role in the lucrative business of golf, such a conclusion -- grounded as it is in splendid salesmanship -- certainly seems a strong possibility.