Olivet Nazarene University Digital Commons @ Olivet Faculty Scholarship – History History Fall 1999 Change, Continuity, and Golf 's Battle of the Century Stephen Lowe Olivet Nazarene University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.olivet.edu/hist_facp Part of the American Popular Culture Commons Recommended Citation Lowe, Stephen. "Change, Continuity, and Golf's Battle of the eC ntury." Journal of Sport History 26 (1999): 521-543. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Digital Commons @ Olivet. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship – History by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Olivet. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Change, Continuity, and Golf's Battle of the Century By Stephen R. Lowe, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History 1 One field of sports history that has yet to be cultivated is that of American golf. Remarkably, historians have even neglected golf in America's so-called Golden Age of Sports, the decade of the 1920s. These years witnessed the transformation of golf from an esoteric, aristocratic pastime to a popular participatory and spectator sport. In fact, the country's golfing population was approximately 250,000 in 1916, but by 1925 it had climbed to 4.5 million as private and municipal courses increasingly dotted the landscape. With the emergence of the sport came two of the most colorful, popular, even adored athletes of the decade, Walter C. Hagen and Robert "Bobby" Tyre Jones, Jr. Hagen and Jones competed against each other in a number of medal tournaments (mostly U.S.