Copake Country Club in the
Hudson Valley is now
suspected to be the work of
Emmet.
Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet; the
Emmet family was listed in Ward McAllister’s
First Forty Families in America. He graduated
from the Arts school of Columbia College in
1883 and from Columbia Law School in
1885, yet spent the next four years farming
in Otsego County, N.Y. “If I did not learn
anything else at the Law School, I learned to
avoid litigation,” he once wrote. He married
Ella Batavia Smith, niece of the pioneering
retailer and developer A. T. Stewart. The New
York Times wedding announcement noted that
about 500 guests attended the afternoon
reception, and that the couple was planning
a three-week honeymoon.
They would return to Emmet’s 17th-
century Long Island estate, Sherrewogue.
Emmet’s new brother-in-law was Stanford
White— White had married Ella’s sister
Bessie—and in 1895 the famous (and later
infamous) architect remodeled and enlarged
the Emmets’ sprawling farmhouse overlooking
Stony Brook Harbor. Emmet’s golfing circle
was equally rarified: His friendship with C.B.
Macdonald would play a key role in Macdonald’s seminal National Golf Links of America,
where Emmet was a founding member.
Emmet led a privileged Gilded Age life,
filled with golf, fox hunting, training hounds,
overseas travel, farming and gardening. Still,
he was disinclined to take the easy road in all
things golf. A November 30, 1897, Times
sports brief, “Keene Beats Emmet,” is the
first of many such examples. The tournament
A sampling of the outspoken designer’s most quotable
comments:
On Wide-Open Courses: “Too much has been done for the
swiper. He has far too much latitude at present.”
On Easy Courses: “I know of courses about New York where the
greens are so unprotected that they can be approached with an
umbrella handle as a weapon, with entire impunity.”
On Difficult Courses: “Shall it be said of us American golfers that we cannot
stomach the rigors of the ancient game, and are so careful about losing a ball
that we take all the sting out of our links? Let us be careful that in doing so we do
not take all of the sting out of our game.”
On Bunkering: “Every ball that enters a bunker should stop there, and it should
only require one good stroke to get it out.”
On Rough: “The rough ground bordering the fair green should be of such a
nature that a player can get out of it but a short distance with a niblick.”
On Short-Sighted Green Maintenance: “A clamor arises for the motor mower to
iron it out as smooth as a billiard table.”
On Modern Architecture: “Nowadays a golf architect is expected to create a
miniature Switzerland on a piece of real estate as flat as Sheepshead Bay Race
Course—with the finance committee hailing from Missouri. Nothing is
considered impossible anymore on a golf course.”
Emmet Unfiltered
committee of the Red Spring Cup declared
Emmet the champion after a scheduling conflict kept his finals opponent, Foxhall Keene,
from making their previously arranged match;
“[Emmet] refused to accept it on those conditions,” and lost on the first playoff hole of
the rescheduled match two weeks later.
Emmet’s earliest documented foray into
design was the Island Golf Links in 1897. He
laid out the course in conjunction with George
L. Hubbell, president of the Garden City
Company, the organization from which
Emmet ultimately retired as vice president.
According to H.B. Martin’s 50 Years of American Golf, Hubbell was “obsessed with the idea
that golf would help build the community.”
Island’s nine holes, set on ideal golfing turf,
cost only $1,750 to build. In 1899, Emmet
completed another nine holes and the course,
now the Garden City Golf Club, was selected
to host the first MGA championship—the Met
Amateur—that same year. The U.S. Amateur
followed in 1900 and the U.S. Open in 1902.
Despite this championship pedigree, founding Garden City member Walter Travis later
revised the layout in the wake of his pointed
critique in The American Golfer. Perhaps
harder to fathom in our glad-handing times
is that Emmet, ever outspoken, had himself
already criticized Garden City in print.
“It is my opinion that most of our courses
are too wide. I am sure that the Garden City
course is,” Emmet wrote in the February
1902 issue of Golf. “The Garden City course
is fairly ruined every year by the mowing of
the rough side hazard.” He was an equal-opportunity offender, publicly taking to task
the maintenance practices of other courses he
hadn’t designed, including Nassau Country
Club (which he was later hired to re-work)
and Shinnecock Hills (deemed “very foolish
to go to the expense of sodding”).
