Explosion of Golf Popularity

Golf also spread abroad as the Scots emigrated through out the British Empire. Unsurprisingly, the first overseas clubs were in India: the Royal Calcutta Club was founded in 1829 and the Royal Bombay Club in 1842. The Royal Christchurch Club in New Zealand was founded in 1867 and the Otago Club in 1871. Golf is thought to have been played in Australia by 1870 but, in fact, the first club, the Royal Melbourne, was not founded until 1891, with the Royal Adelaide and Royal Sydney Clubs following in 1892 and 1893 respectively. There was a golf club in Mauritius in 1844 and the Royal Hong Kong Club was founded in 1889. Inevitably, golf had started in Canada, a country with many connections with Scotland. The Royal Montreal Club was founded in 1873 and the Royal Quebec Club two years later. In South Africa, the Royal Cape Club was founded in 1885.

It is perhaps surprising that golf arrived rather late in the country that has since produced the finest players the world has ever seen, the USA. In fact, the first games of golf in the USA were played during the American War of Independence in the south, around Charleston in South Carolina. The South Carolina Golf Club was formed in 1786 and a Savannah Golf Club existed ten years later. However, this initial enthusiasm was short-lived and the game soon disappeared.

In 1887 Robert Lockhart, an expatriate Scot from Dunfermline, paid a visit to St Andrews. He ordered six golf clubs and two dozen gutta-percha balls, or gutties, from "Old" Tom Morris for his friend John Reid, who was an iron founder in Yonkers, New York, and is credited with being the father of modem American golf. The clubs and balls were forwarded and Lockhart, who had played golf as a boy in Scotland, tried them out on a meadow near the Hudson River in the autumn of 1887 before handing them over to Reid. He was the first person to hit a golf ball on American soil for nearly one hundred years. The following spring, Reid and five of his friends laid out the first three-hole course and later a six-hole course when they moved to a larger plot of land between North Broadway and Shonnard Place. On 14th November 1888, Reid proposed that they form a society to be called the St Andrews' Golf Club of Yonkers, in honour of St Andrews, the home of golf and the place where their first clubs had come from. In 1892 they moved to a 34-acre apple orchard in Weston and they have become known as "The Apple Tree Gang" from their habit of sitting under the apple trees when they had finished their game.

Reid's example spread rapidly through the USA and clubs were founded in Kentucky, Chicago, Shinnecock Hills, Brookline, Southampton and Newport, Rhode Island. In 1894 Theodore Havemeyer was elected the first president of the USGA. In 1895 two tournaments were held at Newport, the United States Amateur Championship and the United States Open Championship. By the turn of the century there were over 1,000 clubs in America. Golf in the USA was on its way and it did not take the first champions long to appear.