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The
Founding of the WWGA (Tim
Cronin, the golf writer for The Daily Southtown, is the author of three books,
including the newly-issued “The Spirit of Medinah,” the story of the
club’s first 75 years, and “A Century of Golf,” an in-depth history of the
Western Golf Association.) The Women’s Western Amateur Championship, the oldest annually-played
championship in golf, is two years older than the sponsor, the Women’s Western
Golf Association.
How can this be? Shouldn’t the mother precede the daughter?
Normally, yes, but the early years of golf in this country were chaotic
in every category. Innovation was well ahead of organization on the leaderboard.
Ideas outran formality time and again. The usual order hadn’t been put in
order yet.
In this case, the daughter was adopted. A century ago, the Women’s
Western Am was started not by the WWGA, but by the WGA, the Western Golf
Association.
Today, the WGA’s best known for sponsoring the Western Open and guiding
the Evans Scholars. But in 1901, when it wasn’t unusual to see someone riding
a horse through the Loop, the scholars were decades away and the Western Open
was not much more than an afterthought. It hadn’t even been held in 1900, the
WGA’s second year.
The focus of the WGA’s activities was on amateur golf, and that, at the
suggestion of W.A. Alexander on the summery Friday, would soon include women’s
golf.
It was Alexander, a notable at Exmoor Country Club, who stood up and put
forward the idea of a Western Women’s Amateur Championship at a WGA meeting on
August 16, 1901. His idea, coupled with the offer to give a championship cup for
the winner, wasn’t exactly greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm. The WGA board
members could barely suppress a yawn.
“No official action was taken on the offer,” the Chicago Tribune
reported the following morning, “the matter being left for discussion at a
later meeting. It was, however, the consensus of opinion among the directors
present that if the Onwentsia club would allow the competition for the
Governor’s Cup to be designated as the official Western women’s championship
it would satisfactorily settle the matter.”
In other words, a women’s championship would be fine, if someone else
would run it.
Alexander was hoping for something more than that, but Onwentsia was
game, and the WGA’s all-male board was grudgingly accepting of the idea. They
also finally accepted Alexander’s trophy.
Thus, the first Western Women’s Amateur Championship, played for the
W.A. Alexander Cup, was also the sixth Governor’s Cup. Actually, it was vice
versa. The Governor’s Cup, which dated to 1896, was already considered not
only the unofficial championship of women’s golf in the west – that area
west of the Allegheny Mountains – but also second only to the USGA Women’s
Amateur, a year older than the Governor’s Cup, in prestige.
That history and the addition of the WGA’s title meant a large turnout,
and 66 players out of an entry list of 77 teed it up on Wednesday, September 25,
1901.
Among those in the field was Maude Alexander, W.A. Alexander’s wife.
One of the finer female players in the area, she trailed the 96 posted by
medalist J. Anna “Johnnie” Carpenter of Westward Ho by five strokes in the
18-hole qualifying round, but was easily among the eight ladies making the elite
match play field.
It was truly an elite eight. Bessie Anthony, the defending Governor’s
Cup winner, was in it, along with the wife of Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor, the
WGA’s first president. Both were rated as scratch players, and likely were the
only women in the Chicago area with that distinction in 1901. It was Anthony who
defeated Alexander in the semifinals, her 7 and 6 rout, coming on the heels of a
19 hole first-round win over Elizabeth Congdon, presaging the following day’s
outcome.
In clobbering Alexander, Anthony lowered the women’s course record to
91, an amazing figure considering that, first, the equipment of the time was
barely less primitive than what had been used in Scotland 100 years before, and
second, that playing in a long skirt and a corset limited the potential
athleticism of the players immeasurably.
Anthony scored a 3 and 1 championship round win over Chatfield-Taylor on
September 28, 1901, the final closer than her win in the semis, but never really
in doubt. She won the first and fourth holes, and Chatfield-Taylor was never
able to square the match.
The event was judged to be “a thorough success,” the Tribune opined
the next morning, though it didn’t go off without incident. The quartet which
advanced to Friday’s semifinals had originally been paired incorrectly, the
result of the club’s Solomon Sturges going back to the qualifying scores,
rather than using a standard match-play bracket.
There were no WGA officials on hand, but Dr. J.E. Nyman of Westward Ho,
on hand to cheer on Carpenter, caught the error before the first match, and the
correction was made. Chatfield-Taylor scored a 6 and 4 win over Carpenter
anyway.
Aside from that, the Western Women’s Amateur Championship was off and
running. It would be held at Onwentsia in association with the Governor’s Cup
again in 1902, with players entering both needing to send separate entry to the
WGA and Onwentsia.
The second time around, 16 ladies would qualify for match play, but the
result would be the same. Anthony scored a record 89 in the qualifying round and
never needed to tee it up on the 15th hole until the championship match, when
Maude Alexander threw a major scare at her.
Alexander, trying to win the trophy her husband donated, led 1 up at the
turn and was 2 up via a 6 at the 10th after her approach stopped four feet from
the cup. But Anthony, playing slightly more steady golf, won the 12th and 13th
holes to square the match, then played a 90-yard mashie to within eight feet of
the pin on the 17th. She missed the putt for a 4, but the 5 was good enough for
a 1-up lead going to the last. When Alexander could do no better than a 4 for a
halve of the hole, Anthony was the champion again.
As a three-time winner, she gained permanent possession of Onwentsia’s
Governor’s Cup. As the only Western Women’s champion in the first two years,
she earned plaudits as the “best in the west.”
But this would be the last women’s championship conducted by the WGA.
For one thing, the wrong match play pairings were made for the second
year running. This time, it was because WGA secretary Ed Martin left the club
early. Once again, they were corrected, but it was clear that the organization
of the championship left something to be desired.
For another, in Onwentsia, the WGA was losing its partner. The club
decided to run the Governor’s Cup as a solo operation for 1903. That meant the
WGA, an all-volunteer body, would have to run a fourth tournament during the
year, to go along with the Western Open, Western Amateur and Marshall Field
Trophy matches.
Martin, having ascended to the WGA’s presidency in 1903, might well
have taken the Western Women’s Amateur completely under the association’s
wing that year, but he wanted to do more. Martin made the advancement of
women’s golf his cause. In May, knowing that the U.S. Women’s Amateur would
be played at Chicago Golf Club in the fall, he proposed a series of inter-club
women’s matches played under the auspices of the WGA. That was met with wide
approval.
Next, he laid the groundwork for the formation of the Women’s Western
Golf Association. Martin huddled with Jessie Brower of the Edgewater Golf Club,
asking her to poll the players in the Midlothian women’s championship to see
if they thought a WWGA would be worthwhile. While who else but Bessie Anthony,
despite a turned ankle suffered earlier in June in Pittsburgh, was going about
winning the title, Brower was getting positive responses from all hands, and
Martin called a meeting of interested parties for 3 p.m. Tuesday, June 30, 1903,
at the Wellington Hotel.
Mrs. L.C. Wachsmuth of the Washington Park Golf Club, a leading club in
that era, moved for “an organization to be formed of western women golfers,”
verbally sticking the tee in the ground.
“Forty-one enthusiastic women,” crowed the Inter Ocean the next
morning, were on hand from 21 clubs to applaud Wachsmuth’s call to action.
“It is the intention of the new league to hold a championship each year, open
only to members. ... Team contests will be promoted and a series of matches will
be arranged.
“Crafts W. Higgins, publisher of the Golfers’ Magazine, offered a
cup, to be played for in a team competition against bogey on the same lines as
the play for the Marshall Field trophy. ... Mr. Higgins’ offer was
accepted.”
Martin, Higgins and WGA secretary C.A. Atkinson were the three men at the
meeting. Martin quickly formed a committee of five ladies to nominate officers
and scheduled the next meeting for 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 9.
It was on that rainy day, at 40 Randolph Street, that the Women’s
Western Golf Association came into being. With 31 representatives on hand from
21 clubs turning out despite the inclement weather, Maude Alexander was elected
the first president, with Mrs. Wallace L. DeWolf of Onwentsia the vice
president, Brower the secretary and Mrs. H.A. Beidler of Lake Geneva Country
Club the treasurer.
These are the WWGA’s founding 21 clubs, of which 13 still exist: Auburn
Park, Belmont, Calumet, Chicago Golf, Edgewater, Elmhurst, Evanston, Exmoor,
Glen View, Hinsdale, Indianapolis, La Grange, Lake Geneva, Midlothian, Onwentsia,
River Forest, Riverside, Skokie, Washington Park, Westward Ho and Windsor.
“There is every indication the new association will be successful from
the start,” said the Tribune, which called Alexander “one of the most
popular players in the West.”
Make no mistake, the WWGA was as Western in reality as in name. It was
organized along the geographic lines of the WGA, with membership drawn from
clubs within 500 miles of Chicago, plus all territory west of the Mississippi
River.
The Chicago Record-Herald reported that the WWGA was formed mainly to run
the team matches that Martin had proposed, and in fact, by late July, the first
WWGA result ran in the newspapers. On July 24, La Grange scored an 8-7 win over
Evanston in a Nassau-scored match involving five players on each side. Exmoor,
Edgewater and Washington Park also won their matches that day.
It would take another month, until a WGA meeting on Wednesday, August 26,
for the older body to transfer authority over the women’s championship to the
WWGA. Wrote the Tribune the following morning in the cryptic style of the day,
“Directors of the Western Golf Association met yesterday afternoon at the
Grand Pacific to arrange details for the women’s championship at the Exmoor
Country Club. It was practically decided to leave the management in the hands of
the Women’s Western Golf Association.”
Just like that, the Western Women’s Amateur Championship became the
Women’s Western Amateur Championship. In 1903, members of WGA or WWGA-affiliated
clubs would be allowed to play, but after that, only players from WWGA-connected
clubs could tee it up.
Even as the team matches continued, elaborate preparations were made for
the big show at Exmoor. The Alexander Cup would be complemented by the Exmoor,
Women’s and Consolation cups, plus the Higgins Trophy for a
concurrently-played team match separate from the weekly matches.
Fifty-five of the 59 registered players would start the five-day affair
on Tuesday, September 8, and the results were eerily reminiscent of the previous
two years. Johnnie Carpenter collected the qualifying medal, as she had in 1901,
by scoring a 93.
There was nothing new there, and even less new in the name of the
champion. Bessie Anthony won again, this time by a 3 and 2 margin over Mabel
Higgins of Midlothian. Anthony was 2 up at the turn, 3 up after 12 holes, and
coasted in to the acclaim of all on hand.
Anthony’s title overshadowed Westward Ho’s team championship for the
Higgins bauble. It overwhelmed everything else in Chicago golf to that point in
the year.
The gal from Glen View had won three straight Women’s Western Amateurs.
She’d won the Onwentsia title in 1900 as well. She’d been triumphant at
Midlothian and elsewhere. She’d won easy. She’d won close matches. She’d
won on dry turf and on mushy surfaces. Bessie Anthony was the undisputed queen
of golf in the American west.
By early October, Bessie Anthony was the queen of American golf, coast to
coast. She rolled to a 7 and 6 victory over Carpenter in the all-Chicago final
of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Chicago Golf in Wheaton. As it would be for so
many more players over the course of a century, a WWGA championship was
Anthony’s springboard to national acclaim.
There was one other matter to determine before closing the WWGA’s first
season. The final weeks of the team matches had to be played, and when they were
over Exmoor had emerged triumphant, winning seven of their eight matches and a
total of 88 points. Westward Ho was second with six wins, Edgewater third in the
competition with 5 1/2 victories. Thirteen of the WWGA’s original 21 clubs
entered the series, and nine played to the conclusion.
The WWGA was an instant success, a fledgling regional organization that
would grow into one which would play championships across the country, as far
east as Hilton Head Island and as far west as Pasadena, Calif.
Time and again, the WWGA would prove itself to be an innovator. The
Women’s Western Junior, added in 1920, was a national first for the gals,
started nearly 30 years before the USGA started a similar event.
The establishment in 1930 of the Women’s Western Open triggered the
formation of the WPGA and the successor LPGA, and thus the rise in women’s
professional golf. After the 1967 Open, the WWGA board, originally surprised by
the entrance of professionals – originally, “Open” to the association
meant players from non-WWGA-affiliated clubs – decided the professional seed
had taken root and closed the Open to concentrate on the amateur game.
In 1971, the WWGA established the Women’s Western Golf Foundation to
award college scholarships to worthy high school girls with high academic
skills. And eight years later, a third WWGA championship again was on course
with the start of the Women’s Western Senior.
It’s been 100 summers since Bessie Anthony won the Alexander Cup for
the first time, and nearly as many since the WWGA itself commenced operations.
Much in the world has changed since, but the Women’s Western Golf Association
continues in the forefront of women’s golf. And its adopted child, the
Women’s Western Amateur, hasn’t fared badly either. A look at the list of
past champions is all the testimony needed as to the excellence of the
championship and the worthiness of the association which conducts it. And the
next 100 years, which begin with this year’s playing at good old Exmoor,
should be even better.
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