Athletes - Walter Travis

Home > Listing Index > Athletes > Walter Travis

	Athletes - Walter Travis

Walter J. Travis (January 10 1862 – July 31 1927) was a prominent early 20th century golfer, golf journalist, golf equipment innovator, and golf course architect. He did not take up the game until October, 1896 at the age of 34. Within a month of hitting his first golf ball, Travis won his first trophy for first place in the Oakland Golf Club handicap competition. As a member of the Oakland Golf Club, Travis won the club championship with a score of 82 in 1897. In his first United States Amateur Championship in 1898, Travis lost to Findlay S. Douglas in a semi-final match. With a fierce dedication to the game, Travis became the country's top amateur golfer, winning the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1900, 1901, and 1903. In 1904, he became the first American to win the British Amateur Championship, a feat that would not be duplicated for another 17 years. Because of his late start in the game, Travis was respectfully referred to as "The Old Man". In 1915, at age 53, he won his fourth Metropolitan Golf Association Championship with a victory over 28 year old Jerome Travers, the man who had eliminated him in a semi-final of the 1914 U.S. Amateur Championship.

An Australian emmigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1890, Travis contributed heavily to the United States Golf Association Rules of Golf, and wrote extensively on various golf topics for the leading sports magazines of the time. His first book, "Practical Golf", published in 1901, received rave reviews from The New York Times. In 1908, he founded and published The American Golfer magazine. He stayed at the helm of "The American Golfer" until he turned it over to Grantland Rice in 1920.

Walter Travis's first project as a golf course architect was his collaboration with John Duncan Dunn in the 1899 design of Ekwanok Country Club in Vermont. His remodelling of the Garden City Golf Club course with Devereux Emmet brought great acclaim and notoriety as a golf course designer. Nearly 40 golf courses bore his mark, either as an original design or through remodelling. Through consultations, innumerable other courses felt his influence, such as Pine Valley, National Golf Links and Pinehurst #2. Travis made his last visit to inspect the construction of one of his original courses at the Country Club of Troy just a month before his death. Travis was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1979. In 1999, Golf World magazine ranked Travis second in its Top Ten List of Underrated Golf Course Architects. Four Travis-designed or remodelled courses were included in Golfweek's 2001 list of America's top 100 "Classic" courses: Ekwanok Country Club, Westchester CC's West course, Hollywood Golf Club, and Garden City Golf Club.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Walter Travis ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Walter Travis; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay