The first U.S. Open winner's brush with death | Frank's Place
Horace Rawlins (who?) was shot at in 1903.
No matter how far back you look or how gentlemanly the game, you'll find that sports has never been a perfect sanctuary.
That was no less true last week at a blood-stained ballfield in suburban Washington than it was more than a century ago near the course-side home of a New Jersey golf professional.
On June 25, 1903, the night before the first round of golf's U.S. Open, the young man who had won that tournament eight years earlier lay sprawled in a gutter, trying to escape incongruous gunfire.
"I felt the passage of a bullet close to my face," Horace Rawlins later told a New York World reporter.
Rawlins, who a year later would be hired as the first professional at Delaware County's Springhaven Club, survived to tee it up the following day.
But while his victory in the inaugural U.S. Open at the Newport Country Club in 1895 earned him a measure of immortality, Rawlins' story would soon be forgotten, even within his own family.
It wouldn't be resurrected until the 1970s, when grandson Michael Rawlins opened a safe-deposit box at an English bank and found a gold medal.
Today, when the 117th U.S. Open winner will be crowned in Wisconsin, seems an apt time to retell the story of the first.
Born in 1874, Rawlins was among the initial wave of British and Scottish professionals imported to golf-crazed America in the 1890s.
He'd learned the game caddying for his father at Royal Isle of Wight Club. He'd honed his skills as a teenaged employee at various British courses. So did his older brother, Harry, who later became Atlantic City Golf Club's pro.
Horace Rawlins and Willie Anderson, the Scotsman who would win four U.S. Opens, wound up at Newport CC where, according to one account, their job was to "teach golf, tend greens, and stay out of the way."
In 1895, Newport, a 2,755-yard, nine-hole course, hosted the first U.S. Amateur. As a sop to the ineligible professionals, the sponsoring U.S. Golf Association scheduled an Open event to follow.
The 36-hole tournament attracted only 11 entrants. Only eight, all of them Scots or Brits, would finish.
Rawlins stood fourth after the first two loops around the oceanside course, his 91 two shots behind a trio of leaders. But he scored a 41 on each of the last two nines and his 173 total was good enough to beat runner-up Willie Dunn by two strokes.
Organizers deducted $50 from Rawlins' $200 prize to offset the cost of the gold medal they'd awarded him.
In its account of the historic event, the New York Times was less than laudatory in describing its 21-year-old winner:
"well-balanced, strong in all it elements, yet brilliant in none. He is a good heady player with a happy faculty of not getting discouraged when in difficulties."
Still, the publicity made him a prized commodity. Over the next decade, several new courses in Upstate New York and New England would employ Rawlins as their pro.
The night before that 1903 Open at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J., Rawlins visited the home of the host club's pro, George Low.
As he departed, just before 11 p.m., he noticed a man walking behind him. Suddenly, as Rawlins passed beneath a street lamp, the stranger fired a revolver.
"I gave a yell," Rawlins told the World, "and jumped out of the light and into the gutter."
The shooter, who fled, was never captured. Police theorized the incident might have been a case of mistaken identity involving two local burglars.
Understandably shaken, Rawlins finished far back at Baltusrol. A year later, Springhaven, founded in Wallingford in 1903, hired him as its first pro.
Rawlins was second in the 1904 U.S. Open at Shinnecock but never again seriously contended. He would eventually return to work in his native England, where he died in 1935.
Decades later, Rawlins' descendents knew nothing of his Open victory. And when a sportswriter phoned Springhaven in the 1970s to ask about him, the response was "Horace who?"
That began to change in 1974, when his grandson opened a long-neglected safe-deposit box. There he found photographs, golf memorabilia, and, most intriguing, a beribboned gold medal.
Unsure of its origins, he contacted a local collector.
"[He] came by to see the medal . . . told me it was perhaps the first official award ever made to a professional in the United States," Michael Rawlins told the Inquirer in 1995.
Eventually, the family presented the historic award to the USGA, where it's now displayed in that organization's Far Hills, N.J., museum.
By then, Jim Brennan, a Springhaven member who had stumbled upon Rawlins' Open victory and connections to the club, had helped start an annual tournament there. The Horace Rawlins Invitational has been played at Springhaven each summer since 1973.
Next month, the Mid-Herts Club in suburban London, where Rawlins once worked, will dedicate a statue in the golfer's honor.
Among the other items in the safe-deposit box was a 1900 article Rawlins had written for an American golf magazine.
In that yellowed clipping was advice that's just as meaningful now:
"A man may overdrive you every time but he will not get the hole if he is weak on the approach and you are strong."
This weekend the golfer who wins the 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills will be the one best able to deal with fate, unpredictable winds, and tall fescue.
And maybe having dodged those bullets, he'll be reminded of the long-ago Open champion who on a dark New Jersey night literally did just that.