"It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course."
—Hank Aaron, 1971
Baseball player Hank Aaron who in the Summer of 1974 broke Babe Ruth’s record of 714 career homeruns, expressed frustration (illustrated in the quote above) about the game of Golf. This deceivingly difficult game has mystified many and at the same time captured the attention of millions around the world in the modern era of sports.
American audiences’ widespread fascination with Golf began in 1913, when a twenty-year old American named Francis Ouimet ably assisted by his ten-year old caddie, Eddie Lowery, won the 1913 U.S. Open Golf Championship in Brookline, Massachusetts. Ouimet’s incredible victory came after beating legendary British golfer and five-time British Open Champion Harry Vardon and British golfer Ted Ray, winner of the 1912 British Open Championship, in a three-way playoff. Francis Ouimet’s lifelong role as a great player and ambassador for the game made him one of the most important American golfers of all time.
A few years after Ouimet’s U.S. Open victory another golfer, Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones, proved that America's presence in the game of golf was just beginning. Bobby Jones’s most important accomplishment to that end was his Grand Slam victory by winning all four major Golf Championships in the same year, including the 1930 U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur and the British Amateur.
