Golf History

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.