The centerpiece of the Inverness Club is its golf course, and understandably so, for the layout that Donald Ross originally designed and Andrew Green recently reimagined is one of the finest in the land. The fact that the Toledo, Ohio, club has hosted eight USGA championships to date, including four U.S. Opens, as well as a pair of PGA Championships and a Solheim Cup, speaks to that. So does a calendar that has Inverness staging the 2027 U.S. Women’s Open and a U.S. Amateur two years later.
There is also the matter of it being a superb members’ course that tests the skills of the club’s best amateur players while also delighting its most devoted duffers.
But another important part of the association, which was founded in 1903, is the clubhouse. Made of brick and designed to resemble an English manor home, it opened in 1920, after two previous iterations had burned down. And in addition to being a comfortable place for members to gather for food and drink and also to change clothes and shoes before and after games, the structure is full of museum-like memorabilia that recount the tournaments that have taken place at Inverness and acknowledge as well other notable elements, such as the five-year stretch in the 1940s when Byron Nelson was the club’s head professional.
Those elements combine to make the building one of my favorites in golf. And during a recent visit, I was reminded of its most awesome artifact, an elegant cathedral clock, and the story of how it came to stand in the clubhouse foyer.
The players were staggered by such hospitality – and so grateful for the gesture that they took up a collection to buy the cathedral clock.
It goes back to 1920, when the club hosted its first U.S. Open. Prior to that, golf professionals had never been invited into the clubhouses and locker rooms of the host clubs, compelled to dress and shower instead in their hotel rooms and eat meals in restaurants. Inverness president S.P. (for Sylvanus Pierson) Jermain did not like that arrangement at all, especially given that amateur competitors had traditionally been let in the doors even as the pros were outcast. So, Jermain decreed that all players of that year’s national championship be given the same privileges that club members enjoyed. Which included using the locker room and eating meals in the dining room.
The players were staggered by such hospitality – and so grateful for the gesture that they took up a collection to buy the cathedral clock. Walter Hagen is said to have initiated that effort, and the gift arrived at the club a few weeks after Englishman Ted Ray prevailed in the 1920 Open.
With that timepiece came a plaque that was mounted on its base. And the words read:
God measures men by what they are
Not what they in wealth possess
That vibrant message chimes afar
The voice of Inverness
As play in another U.S. Open is about to begin more than a century later, those words continue to resonate as clearly as the bells in that clock.
John Steinbreder
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TOP: JOHN MUMMERT, USGA