BEATRIX HOYT: AMERICA’S FIRST WOMAN USGA CHAMPION 1896 1897 1898 Kindle Edition

In 1893, Willie Dunn Jr., a thirty-two-year-old Scot, set foot on the shores of Long Island and began re-shaping the game of golf in America at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. The son of the famous Old Willie Dunn of England, Dunn Jr. brought with him a family tradition of teaching, club making, course design, and a deadly competitive spirit in tournament play. Newspapers quickly hailed him as America’s first golf professional. Among his earliest students at Shinnecock Hills was a cottager, Beatrix Hoyt, a young schoolgirl, who first picked up a golf club at the age of fourteen. Under Dunn’s initial tutelage, she grew into a bold, tournament-hardened golfer.In its beginnings in America, as the game of golf washed ashore from the Old World, Amzi Lorenzo Barber—financier and visionary, known as the Asphalt King—had a scheme to forge a residential exurb by carving emerald fairways out of Westchester’s forest primeval, far removed from golf’s traditional seaside links setting. His sagacity saw the routing the first ever parkland golf course along the sloped topography of the Hudson River Valley environs. Backed by his fellow robber barons of the Gilded Age, the Ardsley Casino’s golfing links transformed the quiet village of Dobbs Ferry.The turn of the 19th century was a time of advancement for women’s suffrage, and three-time USGA National Open Champion Beatrix Hoyt represented something entirely new in American society: women were now determined to seize the mantle of physical competence and elbow the stagnant corset-caged Victorian matron from her pedestal. Winner of the first three USGA National Open Championships in 1896, 1897 & 1898, it was Beatrix Hoyt who demonstrated what could be achieved by women willing to seize the mantel of realized physical competence, challenging her entrenched partner, and charging into the lead at the start of the modern century! Read more