United States Golf Association

Founded on one man’s fury

At the USGA’s 100th anniversary celebration — held in and around the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 8, 1994 — John Updike offered this verdict: “The organization was founded, essentially, by a champion golfer, Charlie Macdonald, who resented a ruling and rough conditions which cost him a victory in the first American golf championship, played in Newport in 1894. Once the USGA had been founded… Charlie Macdonald was able to win the first official Amateur Championship, again at Newport in 1895. Like the Church of England, then, the USGA [was] founded to ease one man’s dissatisfactions.”

The grievance was real. In the summer of 1894, with golf barely established in America, the Newport Golf Club and St. Andrews Golf Club each hosted amateur tournaments and each labeled theirs the national championship. Charles Blair Macdonald — the Chicago stockbroker who had learned golf from Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews, and who would lay out America’s first 18-hole course at the Chicago Golf Club in 1893 — denounced both, with the result that both tournaments were declared unofficial.

Before the final day of the St. Andrews event, it was announced that an association of five clubs would be formed to write a set of rules and oversee a universally recognized championship. On December 22, 1894, delegates from Newport, St. Andrews, Chicago Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills and The Country Club met in New York and formed the Amateur Golf Association of the United States — soon renamed the United States Golf Association.

The first championships

The following fall, the new body staged its first championships at Newport. Macdonald, the man whose fury had created it, defeated Charles E. Sand 12 and 11 to win the first U.S. Amateur — still one of the most lopsided finals on record. The next day, an unheralded 21-year-old Englishman named Horace Rawlings won the first U.S. Open, taking home a first prize of $150 — against $2,500,000 a century and a quarter later.

The association’s early rule-making kept shaping the game: in 1911 and 1912, executive committee member Leighton Calkins introduced handicapping and the objective of par — two concepts that remain golf’s foundation.

What this profile does not claim

• The wartime Hale America National Open of 1942 or any other championship history beyond what is stated here; those were not verified from fully-read sources.
• Current championship counts, membership figures or headquarters details.
• That Macdonald acted alone; five clubs’ delegates formally created the association at the December 1894 meeting.