The Scots did a good job with inventing golf and spreading it around the world. Pity they and their successors didn’t try harder with the names of clubs.
Blairgowrie Golf Club in Scotland, Wales’ Betws-y-coed Golf Club, Welwyn Garden City Golf Club in England, and Kilkenny Golf Club in Ireland. These names inform you where they are geographically but they are pedestrian and unimaginative when compared with some clubs in the U.S. whose names are so mellifluous as to be lyrical. For example Red Sky Ranch & Golf Club in Wolcott, Colorado, Wild Horse Golf Club in Gothenberg, Nebraska, Wolf Creek Golf Club in Mesquite, Nevada and Wee Burn Country Club in Darien, Connecticut.
William Shakespeare was born in England and Dylan Thomas in Wales. Robert Burns, whose “Auld Lang Syne” song is sung lustily each New Year’s Eve, was born in Scotland and Seamus Heaney, the poet and 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, in Ireland. How can countries with men of such literary heritage as these settle for such numbing nomenclature?
Consider some names from across the Atlantic such as the Myopia Hunt Club in Massachusetts founded by students at Harvard who were all nearsighted and wore glasses. That’s interesting isn’t it? Furthermore, it is not in a place called Myopia. It is in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. It is made even more interesting by the way the hounds bay and bark at you from their kennels as you arrive.
How about Purgatory Golf Club in Indiana or Dancing Rabbit Golf Club in Mississippi? Dancing Rabbit Golf Club. Now there’s a magnificent moniker.
I give you the Philadelphia Cricket Club, a country club where the Truist Championship was played over the Wissahickon Course last month. A golf club within a cricket club puts you in mind not of birdies and eagles but of arcane cricketing terms such as “silly-mid-on” and “silly mid-off,” of “fine leg” and “third slip” and “square leg” and “gully.”
How about Roaring Gap in North Carolina or Shooting Star in Wyoming or Winged Foot and Sleepy Hollow in New York? Here are three that are really top of the class for romance and imagination: Bald Peak Colony Club in New Hampshire, LuLu Country Club in Pennsylvania and Contraband Bayou in Louisiana.
There are 66 royal golf clubs, so named because they have had that title bestowed on them by a reigning monarch.
Some U.S. golf clubs have taken their names from Native American tribes or lands. Seminole for example, or Wannamoisett Country Club and the Misquamicut Club in Rhode Island, or Sankaty Head on Nantucket island. Don’t they sound magnificent?
Eastward Ho! on Cape Cod has a geographical ring to it. So does Westward Ho! in North Devon, England, properly known as Royal North Devon, where J.H. Taylor, who with Harry Vardon and James Braid made up the game’s Great Triumvirate, started as a caddie.
I suppose we unimaginative souls in the U.K. can console ourselves with one prefix that adds a little mystery and glamour to the otherwise blunt. There are 66 royal golf clubs, so named because they have had that title bestowed on them by a reigning monarch. That is something to be thankful for, I suppose. Wimbledon Golf Club? Ummm. That’s matter of fact isn’t it? But Royal Wimbledon Golf Club? Now you’re talking.
John Hopkins
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