Donald Ross (golfer)
Donald Ross ( born November 23, 1872 in Dornoch, † April 26, 1948 in Pinehurst ) was a major representative of the Golden Age of golf architecture and one of the most prolific golf architects of the time with at least 413 new golf courses.
Life and work
The Scotsman Donald James Ross grew up on the links of Royal Dornoch and began his career there as a greenkeeper. After a year of training at Old Tom Morris in St. Andrews, he returned in 1893, first back to Dornoch. 1899 convinced him of the Harvard professor Robert Wilson to emigrate to the United States. This got him his first job at the Oakley Golf Club near Boston. Ross redesigned the course and designed some more in the area. A year later, he met the businessman James Walker Tufts know who hired him for his new Resort Pinehurst in North Carolina.
There he built a total of four places in the course of his career. The most significant of these is Pinehurst # 2, which he refined further and further in the coming decades. 1935 Ross led there as a culmination of his design work from Bermuda grass greens a - previously oiled sand greens were in the American South due to the drought usual. As the first golf architect he hired assistants and built with their help be " architecture empire" throughout the U.S.. In the 1920s, some 3,000 employees were working on the construction of its golf courses. About a third of his designs got Ross therefore never see, another third he visited more than once or twice. He worked mainly on his cottage behind the third green in Pinehurst with the help of topographic maps and written instructions to his construction crews.
His trademark was curved plateau greens, although they were front usually open, but a less than perfect approach shot on all sides could roll because Ross was very short cut the grass at the edges. This concept of "short grass slope" is still used today in major tournaments since the modern professional player the typical obstacles on the Green - bunker or rough - can much better control than sloping embankments and difficult to gage the slope.
Particular attention put Ross on the routing so that only short distances between green and next tee were back down. His courses which are harmonious and often inconspicuous, partly because of economical, but targeted bunkering. Occasionally, he even made use of the cross bunker, actually a relic from the Victorian period, which could not hold on most Ross courses but with modern views.
Among his most famous courses include Pinehurst # 2 ( 1903), the Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts ( 1913), Wannamoisett (1914), East Lake in Atlanta (1915), Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey (1916 ), Scioto (1916 ), Essex County in Massachusetts ( 1917), Oakland Hills (1918 ), Inverness in Toledo ( 1919), Interlachen ( 1921), Salem, Massachusetts ( 1925), Oak Hill in Rochester (1926 ), Holston Hills in Knoxville (1928) and Seminole in Florida ( 1929).
A year before his death founded Donald Ross with 13 colleagues including Robert Trent Jones, William Langford, Perry Maxwell and Stanley Thompson, the American Society of Golf Course Architects and became its first president. In 1977, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.