Golf History – Old Magazine Articles

Golf Goes Yankee
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

The attached golf article first appeared in a 1922 Vanity Fair titled The Royal and Ancient Game. Penned by golf legend Charles Chick Evans, Jr. (1890 – 1979) it traces the birth of the game and its migration across the sea where the game was heartily welcomed:

Golf seemed a gift from an high. Across the water it came and our best people took it up. They had discovered it in their travels abroad. It is true that poor people played it in Britain, but it seemed very sure that they would not do so in America…

Click here to read about the American cars of 1922.

The Swing of Cecil Leitch
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Attached herein is a photographic study of the British golf champion Cecil Leitch (1891 – 1977) snapped with a high-speed, stop-motion camera. In nine black and white images depicting her drive from start to finish, we are able to gain an understand as to how she was able to win three British driving championships up until that time. She left the game after having won a total of twelve national titles; at the time of this printing, she was writing her first book: Golf (1922).

Top-Drawer Golf Accessories
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1916)

A quick look at some of the golf shoe offerings from the spring of 1916. Ties for the sport are also pictured, as is a portable ash-tray for use on the links.

The Evolution of Golf Clothes
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

Oddly, this essay has more to do with the evolution of golf from a shepherd’s pastime to the sport of kings, however there are some references made to the evolution of golf clothing:

Royalty did, however, dress up the game. It gave us the brilliant garments that golf captains wear in Britain. When I first went abroad I thought that I had never seen more splendid creatures. And the modern golf costume is a thing of mode and cut…

Ladies’ Golf Attire by Burberrys
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

A Burberry’s tweed, self-belted golf suit for the fashionable woman of 1922.

Essential Elements in Golf
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1918)

Throughout the fall of 1918, American golf enthusiast H.B. Martin (Harry Brownlow Martin, 1873 – 1965), who was not one to dally on the links when there are hard questions to be asked, approached the champions of the game with one query in mind:

What is the ONE essential thing in golf?

As you will read for yourself, he came away with many different responses.

Tailored Golf Fashions
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1922)

With the 1922 American economy as strong as it was, questions regarding what to wear on the links were seen as important queries and were not easily tossed aside. The following article illustrate the best golf jackets offered by the master-tailors at Cohen-Rissman, Fashion Park and The House of Kuppenheimer.

George Duncan and Abe Mitchell at the Columbia Country Club
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Now our golfing cousins from the land of the Thistle and Rose are sending another pair, who might well be christened the New Mandarins of Golf. One is is George Duncan of Scotland. The other is Abe Mitchell of England. And in addition to giving battle in our in our Open Championship at Columbia, Washington, D.C., they will display their wares in exhibition matches before 250,000 of our golfing citizens in another one of those extended tours that bring in a lot of kale and almost as many blisters.

An Assortment of Golf Shoes
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1915)

Golf shoes were the topic of this segment from a VANITY FAIR fashion review for men, as it appeared in the June issue of 1915.

Golf Gets Easier…
(People Today, 1954)

The Golfmobile provides an ideal solution for two new golfing problems: a growing shortage of caddies and a crop of time-pressed golf lovers, headed by President Eisenhower, who frequently uses a Golfmobile to cut playing time in half.

The Tamarisk Country Club in Palm Springs, California was one of the first to employ a fleet of the ‘bugs’ and now many courses throughout the country are doing the same.

1930s Golf Attire
(Photoplay Magazine, 1934)

The attached 1933 and 1934 photos will give some indication as to what golf clothes looked like during the early Thirties. Depicted in the first image are four actors of the Hollywood tribe: Adolphe Menjou (clad in plus-fours), a slovenly Johnny Weismuller, Bruce Cabot and Richard Arlen.

Full-cut trousers were the rule of the day, as can clearly be seen in the second photo that was indifferently ripped from the browning pages of Delineator Magazine, which also shows a smashing linen shirtwaist dress that was worn on the Bermuda links.

Is Bobby Jones Losing Interest in Golf?
(Literary Digest, 1929)

The two page article attached herein addresses the meteoric rise of the American golf legend Bobby Jones (1902 – 1971). Said to have been a child prodigy in the game, he made his mark early, winning the 1923 U.S. Open against Bobby Cruickshank (1894 – 1975) at the age of 19. Trophies came to him effortlessly during the course of the following six years and, judging from the question posed above, the golf journalists were right: Bobby Jones was losing interest in the game – he would leave competitive golf the following year.

John Byron Nelson: One Heck Of A Golfer
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

This short profile of Byron Nelson (1912 – 2006) was written when the golf champion was at the top of his game. Nelson was indeed one of the grand old masters of golf with many victories to his name (twelve PGA Tour wins). This article serves to illustrate how admired he was by his fellow players as well as his contemporaries who watched the game closely.

Click here to read about the first steel tennis racket.

Sporty Golfing Pants: Pleated Knickers
(Magazine Ad, 1922)

These pleated golf knickers anticipated the full-cut trouser craze of the thirties, however, soon many golfers (both on and off the field) would be wearing the very full-cut pleated knickers known in the day as plus-fours. Plus-fours were one of any number of men’s fashion trends which originated with the masculine fashion-muse the Edward VIII (1894 – 1972).