ON A BREEZY SPRING DAY IN 1896, Dallas discovered golf. The first golf course, at the comer of Lemmon and Oak Lawn, had no fairways or greens- just rough and cup; a good lie was a drive that didn’t land in an ant bed or a cow patty.
Henry Lee Edwards, a Welsh cotton merchant who lived in the Oriental Hotel on Commerce Street, was responsible for importing the game, which he had learned from his brother James, an English squire. Edwards and his co-conspirators laid out a six-hole course on 30 acres along Oak Lawn, using quart-size tin cans for holes and strands of barbed wire to encircle the cleared areas around each hole to keep out the cattle. The group ordered golf equipment from Boston and rented a three-room frame house as club headquarters.
The game proved so popular that in 1900 the players organized the Dallas Golf and Country Club, whose charter members included prominent bankers Ed Tenison and Royal Ferris and newspaper pioneers A.H. Belo, Jr. and George B. Dealey. The golfers added 25 acres to the course and built a $2,000 clubhouse with a main room big enough for fried chicken dinners. By the end of the first year, the membership sported a $35 surplus. By 1912, die course had been sold to developers, a new course laid out in Highland Park, and the name changed simply to Dallas Country Club.
That same year, a band of golfing fanatics led by merchants Herbert Marcus, Arthur Everts, Eli Sanger, and Edward Titche I founded the Lakewood Country Club, organized “to support and maintain the royal and ancient game of golf and other innocent games.” Brook Hollow, with its first pro shop built on the site of a hog pen, followed in 1920. A frame building used as an Offi-cer’s Club at Love Field during World War I was moved to the course to serve as a clubhouse.
In the 1920s, Ed Tenison opened the fairway to the masses when he donated the land for Tenison Park; there, hackers with rented wood-shaft clubs could enjoy 18 holes on a quality
course for a half-dollar. Big-time golf came to Dallas in 1927 when Walter Hagen outdu-eled Tim Turnesa to capture the National PGA at the Cedar Crest course in Oak Cliff. Twenty-five years later. Julius Boros edged Porky Oliver and Ben Hogan to win the National Open at the Northwood Club, which had been laid out in 1946 on the former estate of E.E. “Buddy” Fogel-son, actress Greer Garson’s spouse. The Dallas Open, now called the Byron Nelson, was inau-gurated in 1956at Preston Hollow Country Club.
That year, by the way, a longstanding Nelson tradition also began. It rained.
HIGHLIGHTS AND HUSTLES
King-sized Con
In the early 1960s, while killing time as an employee of Hardy’s Driving Range at Greenville and Lovers Lane, Lee Trevino developed remarkable accuracy in batting golf bails with a 32-ounce Dr Pepper bottle, then putting out on Hardy’s pitch-and-put course using the bottle as a croquet mallet. Taking on all comers, Trevino never lost a match against a golfer armed with traditional weapons.
The Missing Magic
After finishing second in the 1933 U.S. Open at the age of 21, Dallas-bom Ralph Guldahl lost his touch and gave up the game in 1935. Miraculously recovering, Guldahl won back-to-back National Open titles in 1937 and 1938, then lost it again, this time for good.
The Unsinkable Titanic
Infamous gambler and hustler Titanic Thompson, who was also an excellent golfer, scammed scores of innocents at the Tenison and Cedar Crest courses in Dallas, and once scored 29 on the back nine at Fort Worth’s Ridglea to beat Byron Nelson and win a $3,000 wager. Thompson, a natural southpaw, suckered marks at Cedar Crest by playing right-handed, thus setting up odds on left-handed matches.
Worse Than a Bogey Golfers at Tenison enjoy one of the finest municipal courses in the United States. A couple of times over the years, however, players have met hazards not laid out by the architect- robbers. According to legend, one fast-thinking victim, about to relinquish his wallet, turned to his playing partner and said “here’s the thousand I owe you.”
Helping Mother Nature
Bowing to the Texas summer heat Brook Hollow Golf Club boasted the nation’s first complete fairway watering system.
Whoever Said
Golf Is a Game?
In 1930, Brook Hollow regulars Wallace Baker and F.F. Kay teed off In the face of a -3 degree blizzard, taking along an extra caddie lugging a charcoal furnace. Years later, Tenison legend Dick Martin, whom lee Trevino says was the best golfer he ever saw until Jack Nicklaus, painted his ball with Mercurochrome so he could play in the snow.
A Little Fun for the Little People
After nearly 50 years in the business, the new owner of Wee St Andrews, a miniature golf landmark on North Beckley in Oak Cliff, decided to spice up his advertising. He ran a note in the newspaper personal column in 1977 promising “action for swingers at a dollar a ball.” One caller thought the ad referred to kinky sex for midgets.
Big Shots
In 1956, Don January won the Dallas Open at Preston Hollow with a 25-foot eagle from a sand trap to edge Dow Finsterwald and Doug Ford by a single stroke. In 1967, Miller Barber holed out from the seventh tee during the Dallas Open at the Oak Cliff Country Club.
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