Fondly called Tillie by his friends, A.W. Tillinghast liked to call himself the ‘dean of American-born golf architects’—a dubious title at best, as most of the golf course designers of Tillie’s time were from Scotland or England.
Born in 1874, he took up the game with a passion early in life and, to put it simply, became a fixture on the golf scene. He seemed to be on hand for every major event, and simply knew everyone who mattered. He was friend to Old Tom Morris and many of the other old timers of golf such as Andra Kirkaldy and Ben Sayers.
Indeed, there was hardly any facet of the game that Tillinghast did not explore. Any full account of his life would have to include a multitude of scenes in which Tillie appeared in different roles. Tillie the photographer carried the best camera equipment on his pilgrimages to Scotland capturing superb golf scenes and celebrities. Tillie the author wrote humorous, fictional pieces about golf, which his daughter, Elsie, later described as ‘immense, gushing sentimentalism.’ Tillie the advocate was forever promoting the virtues of public golf, and Tillie the entrepreneur owned a combination miniature golf course/driving range with lights, covered booths, and long-hitting contests. Tillie the phrasemaker is said to have coined the word ‘birdie,’ though by his own account, the term came into more or less spontaneous use among a group of Philadelphia golfers of which he was a member.
Tillie the tournament organiser ran the Shawnee Open, and Tillie the statesman was one of the founders of the Professional Golf Association of America (PGA). Tillie the reporter wrote a syndicated column and published annual, highly subjective, and eagerly awaited rankings of the top twelve American golfers in three categories: professional; male amateur; and female amateur. Tillie obviously had an eye for golf talent: in 1916 after his first sight of Bobby Jones, he was sufficiently impressed to name the fourteen year old as the number twelve amateur.
Tillie the player had enough of a game to make a respectable match against the top amateurs of the day, though never quite enough to beat them on the big occasions. Tillie the green-keeper was the champion of the fledgling USGA Green Section and its agronomic research.
The mere listing of his activities suggests correctly that he was a man of enormous energy and gusto. He also had a volatile and flamboyant personality. The spoiled son of a wealthy Philadelphian, Tillinghast grew up doing exactly as he pleased, and never lasted long at a single school he attended. Like many other men of his class and time, he was a prodigiously heavy drinker, and the Tillinghast legend contains accounts of long binges, epic parties, lavish spending, and pistol-flourishing rages. He was a spellbinding talker, a flashy dresser, and a good hand at the piano. His trademark was a magnificent waxed moustache. With his wife and two daughters, he lived in a splendid columned house in Harrington Park, New Jersey. In totality, Tillinghast was the embodiment of the sporting gentleman of the Roaring Twenties.
Even so, had Tillinghast not become a golf course architect, it’s quite likely he’d merit little more than an honourable footnote in golf history. His first commission came in the form of an invitation from a wealthy friend to lay out Shawnee-on-the-Delaware in 1909. At the time Tillinghast was thirty-four years old, and hardly seemed to have the temperament or discipline for any sustained enterprise. But he threw himself into the task and produced a course that was instantly hailed a success. Tillinghast was on his way. For the next three decades he lived and breathed golf architecture.
From 1910 through 1940, Tillie designed around seventy golf courses and re-designed around twice that number. His courses are found throughout the United States, primarily in the Northeast, with a few in Canada. The courses are synonymous with golf—Baltusrol, Bethpage, Brackenridge, Brook Hollow, Five Farms, Newport, Quaker Ridge, Ridgewood, San Francisco, Somerset Hills, Winged Foot, and many more. Many of these continue to host the big national championships.
After his death in 1942, he was soon forgotten by the golf world. However his golf courses continued to give pleasure and to serve as tournament sites. In recent years, the extent of his legacy to American golf has come to be better understood and appreciated, for it is abundantly clear that Tillinghast had a genius for building golf courses that endure. And today, anyone with any knowledge of golf architecture can tell you that A.W. Tillinghast was surely one of the very best.
Beyond the golf courses he left behind, we have the treasure trove of his writings. Tillie was a prolific and talented writer. He wrote extensively for Golf Illustrated and was its editor for many years. He also wrote columns for The American Golfer, The Professional Golfer of America, and many other leading golf journals of the time. Tillie’s writings are essential to our understanding of the game of golf as it evolved in North America, and the principles he espoused are the foundations of contemporary golf course design. His overriding design principle was: original creation. He wrote, ‘produce something which will provide a true test of the game, and then consider every conceivable way to make it as beautiful as possible’ (13).
Simply put, this is the Tillinghast legacy that lives in the golf courses we play today. And we can continue to build his heritage through the writings he left for us to study and enjoy. In retrospect, it seems that he deserved all along the title he gave himself— the ‘dean’ of golf course design.
(13) A.W.Tillinghast, The Course Beautiful (Lynchburg: TreeWolf Productions, 1995)