Walter Travis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1904 Walter J. Travis became the first man to hold the British and American Amateur Championship at the same time.
In 1904 Walter J. Travis became the first man to hold the British and American Amateur Championship at the same time.

Walter J. Travis (January 10, 1862 – July 31, 1927) was the most successful amateur golfer in the U.S. during the early 1900s, a noted golf journalist and publisher, an innovator in all aspects of golf, a teacher, and a respected golf course architect.

Contents

[edit] Golfing career

Travis was born in Maldon, Australia. He arrived in the U.S. in 1884 and became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1890, while living in Garden City, on Long Island. He first picked up a golf club in October 1896, a few weeks before his 35th birthday. Within a month of hitting his first golf shot, Travis earned his first trophy by winning the Oakland Golf Club handicap competition. The following year, Travis won the Oakland Golf Club championship with a score of 82. In 1898, Travis entered his first United States Amateur Championship and lost to Findlay S. Douglas in the semi-final match. Because of his late start in the game, Travis was respectfully referred to as "The Old Man". Driven by an intense dedication to the game, Travis was soon the country's top amateur golfer, winning the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1900, 1901, and 1903. In 1904, he became the first non-Brit to win the British Amateur Championship, a feat that would not be duplicated for another 22 years even with "wholesale assaults and single attempts to duplicate"his feat by such men as Jerome Travers, Francis Ouimet, and Bobby Jones (The Southern Golfer, Dec. 1925). The news of Travis's British victory sparked a surge of interest in the game of golf throughout the United States.

Among his other significant accomplishments as an amateur golfer were the following: Three North and South Amateur Championships at Pinehurst, and four Metropolitan Golf Association Championships. When Travis won his fourth MGA Championship, in 1915, at the age of 53, he beat 28 year old Jerome Travers in the final match. Just the year before, Travers had eliminated Travis in the semi-finals of U.S. Amateur Championship. With declining health diminishing his skills, Travis announced his retirement from competitive golf in 1916.

[edit] Tournament wins

This list does not include Travis's countless victories in noted club invitationals or championships, such as his 9 wins in the Garden City Golf Club's Spring Invitational that is now known as the Travis Memorial.

[edit] Contributions to golf

Walter Travis was a prolific writer who wrote extensively on various golf topics and was published in the leading sports magazines of the time. His first book, Practical Golf, published in 1901, received rave reviews from The New York Times for its depth, thoroughness, and clarity as a reference book. Practical Golf dealt with a variety of topics, including golfing techniques, golf equipment, construction of golf courses, the design and placement of hazards, rules of golf, and conduct of golf competitions. His chapter on "Handicapping" was first published in the July 1901 issue of Golf, and described as "the authoritative treatise on handicapping" of the time in a 1993 issue of Golf Journal.(Knuth, 1993) A second book, "The Art of Putting" was released in 1904. In 1908, Travis founded and published The American Golfer magazine. He stayed at the helm of "The American Golfer" as Editor until he turned it over to Grantland Rice in the Spring of 1920.

Travis with 1901 trophy and rubber-cored ball
Travis with 1901 trophy and rubber-cored ball

Travis was not hesitant about trying new equipment in his efforts to improve his game. He was the first to win a major event using the Haskell rubber-cored golf ball--the 1901 U.S. Amateur. As reported in the Travis biography, "The Old Man", by Bob Labbance (Sleeping Bear Press, 2000), Travis had "dabbled with predecessors of the Haskell ball, but kept his involvement under wraps until shortly before the tournament" and he "had developed a feel for this type of ball with practice and was not afraid to debut it at the championship". As Labbance reports, "Travis's bold move had not only prompted a change in golf balls but a change in golf as well". His success with the Haskell sounded the death knell for the gutty ball.

Travis was innovative in his approach to golf course design. In a Practical Golf chapter on hazards, Travis was critical of the ubiquitous and, to him, unappealing cross-bunkers that stretched all the way across the fairway at predictable intervals. Rather, he argued for more strategically and visually-appealing bunkers placed along the edges of fairways, stating, "Hazards arranged somewhat upon the lines indicated, rather than slavishly following the system adopted on the great majority of our courses, would, I think, make the game vastly more interesting, and more provocative of better golf all around." (Travis, 1901)

Many other innovative steps were taken by Travis throughout his career. His use of the Schenectady center-shafted putter in his British Amateur victory attracted considerable comment and controversy. Some 6 years later, the Royal and Ancient would issue a ban on all mallet-headed putters, including the Schenectady. Travis conducted careful experiments with varying lengths of driver shafts, often using a driver with a shaft as long as 50 inches in his search for greater distance off the tee. At his home course, Garden City Golf Club, Travis installed smaller sized cups on the practice green in order to sharpen his putting.

Though he was innovative with his equipment, and practiced incessantly, Travis disdained the notion of physical training after his first trial of abstaining from smoking and drinking during an 1897 tournament. He reported that he "putted like a baby", and would never again depart from his usual habits.

[edit] The Schenectady Putter

The infamous putter used by Walter Travis in the 1904 Amateur Championship was stolen from its resting place in 1952, and its whereabouts is still questioned today. The Schenectady Putter, a center-shafted mallet-style putter which was banned by Royal and Ancient following Travis' Amateur win, was a gift given to Travis by a friend, A.W. Knight,on the eve of The Amateur Championship. Walter Travis putted beautifully and won the tournament, and continued to use the Schenectady Putter in the United States despite the ban by Royal and Ancient for many years. Fourteen years after his Amateur Championship, the Schenectady Putter left Travis' hands and made its way in to a glass case at Travis' home club, Garden City Golf Club. According to an article found in the April 1954 edition of the USGA Journal and Turf Management, "Garden City acquired the famous putter in 1918 when Travis played an exhibition against Findlay S. Douglas at that Club for the Red Cross. The members were in a most generous mood. Howard Maxwell paid $500 to the Red Cross for the privilege of caddying for Travis, and Albert R. Fish gave an unspecified amount for the right to caddie for Douglas. Travis became imbued with the spirit of the occasion and, at the conclusion of the match, permitted the Red Cross to auction off his putter. Lewis H. Lapham won the putter for the Club with a bid of $1,500."
In September of 1952, the putter disappeared quietly in the night, and was never returned. Unfortunately, there is virtually no way of telling this putter apart from any of A.W. Knight's early Schenectady Putters, which makes the process of tracking down Walter Travis' Amateur-winning putter near impossible. [1].

[edit] Golf course design

Travis in 1901
Travis in 1901

Walter Travis became a student of the layout and design features of golf courses early in his career. In late 1901, Travis wrote an article, published in the Bulletin of the USGA, titled, "Impressions of British Golf". He observed that in "England and Scotland....you have golf--Golf in its best and highest form". He referred to the "radical difference in their physical configurations in relation to our courses." He was impressed with the lack of trees, the number and placement of bunkers, the natural undulations of the greens, and the quality of turf. In future articles, Travis presented his basic principles of golf course design. Some have classified Travis as a "penal designer". However, a careful study of his writings can lead only to the conclusion that he was a firm believer in "thinking" golf, offering the golfer an opportunity to avoid difficulty with well-considered and executed shots.

Walter Travis's first project as a golf course architect was his collaboration with John Duncan Dunn in the 1899 design of Ekwanok Country Club in Vermont. Much of Travis's early acclaim and notoriety as a golf course designer may be traced to his extensive remodelling of the Garden City Golf Club's Devereux Emmet course, that was unveiled when Garden City Golf Club hosted the 1908 U.S. Amateur Championship. In all, nearly 50 golf courses bear his mark, either as an original design, or as a remodelling project. Through consultations, innumerable other courses bear his influence, including Pine Valley, National Golf Links, and Pinehurst #2.

Travis could lay claim to being the first "U.S. Open Doctor" with his remodelling of the CC of Buffalo and Columbia Country Club courses just prior to their hosting the U.S. Open in 1912 and 1920 respectively. Travis made his last visit to inspect the construction of one of his original courses at the Country Club of Troy just a month before his death on July 31, 1927.

[edit] Legacy

The induction of Walter J. Travis into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1979 was in recognition of his legacy as the first three-time champion in the U.S. Amateur Championship and the first non-Brit to win the British Amateur Championship. His willingness to experiment led to landmark changes in the landscape of golf equipment, e.g. his use of the Haskell golf ball to win the 1901 U.S. Amateur Championship. His most enduring legacy may be the many premier golf courses he designed or remodelled throughout his career. Four Travis-designed or remodelled courses are regularly included in Golfweek's rankings of America's top 100 "Classic" courses: Ekwanok Country Club, Westchester CC's West course, Hollywood Golf Club, and Garden City Golf Club.

Other highly regarded Travis courses include: Country Club of Scranton, Country Club of Troy, Cape Arundel Golf Club, Cherry Hill Club, Garden City Country Club, Camden Country Club, The Gleneagles Golf course at The Equinox Resort, Yahnundasis Golf Club, North Jersey Country Club, Lookout Point Country Club, Onondaga Golf and Country Club, Orchard Park Country Club, Pennhills Club, Stafford Country Club, Round Hill Club, Columbia Country Club, and Youngstown Country Club. In 1999, Golf World magazine ranked Travis second in its Top Ten List of Underrated Golf Course Architects.

[edit] References

  1. Labbance, Bob The Old Man: The Biography of Walter J. Travis, Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, 2000
  2. Travis, Walter J. Impressions of British Golf, GOLF, Vol. IX, 6, 1901
  3. Travis, Walter J. Practical Golf, New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1900, 1902, 1909 editions
  4. Travis, Walter J. "Changes in the Game of Golf", Country Life in America, June 1905, p 182-184
  5. Knuth, Dean "This One's a Par 4 1/2", Golf Journal, January/February 1993, p37-39.
  6. The Southern Golfer, December 1925.

[edit] External links