American golf owes much to the town’s immigrant pros
By John steinbredeR
CARNOUSTIE, SCOTLAND | Mention Carnoustie, and the first association most golfers have with this village at the mouth of the Barry Burn is as an Open Championship venue so tough it came to be called Car-nasty.
The Open is staged on the Championship Course, one of three 18-hole layouts on a desolate North Sea links that lies a mere 14 miles north of St. Andrews as the seagull flies and has hosted eight of those tournaments to date. Invariably, it produces great winners. Tommy Armour prevailed in the 1931 edition and Ben Hogan in 1953. Gary Player and Tom Watson were victors here as well, in 1968 and 1975, respectively. And Pádraig Harrington came out on top in 2007.
But Carnoustie is just as famous for derailing the quests of players to become the Champion Golfer of the Year, with no one ever crashing quite as spectacularly as Frenchman Jean van de Velde in 1999 when he lost a three-stroke lead on the final hole of regulation play – and then lost a playoff to Paul Lawrie.
What is much less known, however, is the outsized role this burg of 4,000 residents at the turn of the 20th century played in the development of golf in America. That’s when more than 200 of its native sons traveled to the States to work at the golf and country clubs that were opening throughout that land and teach Americans how to play and understand the royal and ancient game. Thanks in no small part to their enthusiastic and effective tutelage – and their willingness to endure long separations from their families and friends back home while moving frequently to different jobs throughout the U.S. – the sport came to prosper in the New World.
The legacy of the immigrant pros from Carnoustie is a remarkable one. And a single family, led by John Smith and including his three sons Alex, Willie and Macdonald, stands out for the considerable contributions it made to golf’s growth and development there.
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