Man of mystery - Donald J. Ross

Harvie Ward is telling a story about a recent round he played at Pinehurst No. 2 with a young assistant pro, a good player who almost qualified for the tour. Harvie sounds as enthusiastic as the carefree college kid who upset Frank Stranahan to win the North & South Amateur on No. 2 in 1948. He and the young pro are on the fifth hole, the No. 1 handicap hole, a long par 4 that doglegs and slopes hard from right to left as it flows into the testiest green on the course, an inverted saucer with more undulations than the Rockettes.

The young pro has hit the green, and tries to putt up to a hole cut on a back-left knoll. Three times he putts. Three times the ball comes back to him. Finally he succeeds in rolling the ball to the hole-and off the other side of the green. Pinehurst regulars have a wry expression for such occurrences: "Donald got him."

The mysterious specter of Donald J. Ross will hover unmissably over the Open this year, if not downright haunt it. Ross once said famously in summing up his prolific career, "It has been my good fortune to bring happiness to many men and great trouble to many men."

He designed (a) 200; (b) 300; 400; (d) 500, or (e) 600 courses in the first half of the century, depending on which source you prefer. The solidest estimate is between 350 and 400, at least a third of which he never set foot on, laying them out on topographical maps (tales of sketches on cocktail napkins are exaggerative) and leaving the execution to his engineering lieutenants or local workers.

In that vast an output, you can expect some clunkers. A few critics accuse him of mass production, greed and worse. In the Roaring Twenties, he churned out golf courses the way Henry Ford churned out cars. Ross' motives seem to have been mixed, but they included a sincere desire to spread the faith in a toddling American sport and oblige his suppliants.

In any event, an artist-and Ross definitely qualifies-deserves to be judged by his finest work, and Ross' finest is transcendent. If he'd been a sculptor, he'd have been Henry Moore. He is the patron saint of American golf architecture, an ongoing example to his successors. His best courses, led by Pinehurst No. 2 on which he lavished special attention for nearly half a century, are notable for their enticing naturalism. They may not be spectacularly suited to television, but they are timelessly challenging.

They include Seminole, Oak Hill, Oakland Hills, Inverness, Interlachen, Aronimink and Plainfield. The U.S. Golf Association has played some 60 national championships on Ross courses, including 18 U.S. Opens now. This magazine ranks 11 of his courses among America's 100 Greatest, with No. 2 still holding a spot in the hallowed top 10.

He has become a cult figure. A Donald Ross Society is devoted to the faithful preservation of his courses. A first full-scale biography is due later this year. (Ross resisted interviews and writing about himself, in abrupt contrast to today's self-promoting practitioners of his trade.) The American Society of Golf Course Architects, which Ross founded, this year gave its prized Donald Ross Award to Arnold Palmer, who, in his acceptance speech, called for a return to the traditional values of Ross courses-"still the greatest in the world."

By any measure, Ross is more famous now than when he was alive. A self- contained Scotsman, economical of word and dollar, he would scarcely know what to make of the phenomenon.

Who was he? Something of a mystery figure, who ordered many of his papers burned upon his death. His is your typical Horatio Alger story but with a Scottish burr mellowed by a Southern drawl. He was born and raised in the highlands village of Dornoch in 1872, oldest child in the large family of a poor stonemason. Ross began caddieing at 10 and developed into a fine young golfer.

The details of his early life are somewhat cloudy, as are details of his later life, but it's generally agreed he became an apprentice carpenter when he was done with school in his early teens. The golf club decided it wanted to hire a professional/greenkeeper for the first time, and approached Ross, presumably because a large part of the job consisted of making wooden clubs and his skills were thought a good fit.

Over the heartfelt objections of his parents, who stopped speaking to the secretary of the club whose idea it was, Ross gave up his carpenter's job and went off to St. Andrews and then Carnoustie to learn clubmaking and greenkeeping. He was mentored by, among others, Old Tom Morris, winner of four of the first eight British Open titles and also an early equipment maker and architect.

At 20, Ross returned to Dornoch and his new duties, which he fulfilled for the next six years, until a visiting Harvard professor with a golf fixation convinced him that the sport was about to take off in America. Again against the better judgment of his parents, Ross left Dornoch, this time on a ship bound for a distant land where he knew exactly one person-who was unaware he was coming.