Given the option of playing golf or going to a golf museum, golfers will always choose playing golf. This is why the museums of baseball, football, basketball, hockey and NASCAR attract 200,000-350,000 visitors a year while the USGA golf museum in Far Hills, N.J., gets 5,000. Even the World Golf Hall of Fame Museum in Pinehurst, N.C., has only 25,000 in attendance. (It recently moved from St. Augustine, Fla., because nobody went there. When his close friend Fred Couples was inducted, even Davis Love III wouldn’t drive two hours from his home in Georgia for the ceremony.)
The most popular sports emporium in the world is the FC Barcelona Museum with upwards of 2 million visitors a year, which is understandable because soccer is the global sport. For perspective, I’m on the board of a state-of-the-art literacy museum in Washington, D.C., called Planet Word founded by two golf friends, Ann and Tom Friedman—a 20-minute walk from the White House—that attracts more than 165,000 a year.
The Louvre gets almost 9 million, but aside from “Nike of Samothrace,” or the sculpture better known as “Winged Victory,” you don’t go there for sport. Last October, I visited the Ferrari Museums in Italy, which get 600,000 visitors a year to stare at the crown jewels of car racing. I got to see Enzo Ferrari’s office, but it wasn’t nearly as emotional for me as standing in Arnold Palmer’s workshop in Latrobe, Pa., which remains untouched since the day he regripped his last shaft a decade ago. (Next year it’ll be moved by the Palmer Foundation into a renovated barn down the road as part of a learning center for kids.)
The Hall of Champions at the USGA museum in Far Hills, N.J.
The R&A World Golf Museum in St. Andrews (annual visitors undisclosed) oddly has the upturned roof of a Japanese pagoda that clashes with the majestic Royal & Ancient clubhouse across the street. You could say the architect, Richard Murphy of Edinburgh, didn’t like golf history and didn’t want anyone else to, either. You can give the museum a miss, but peek through the windows of the R&A clubhouse and you might see the Claret Jug, Young Tom Morris’ championship belt and the famed Captain’s balls. There’s no greater living museum than the town with its university, cemetery, monuments and pubs. We need more appreciation of history today, if only so Arnold Palmer isn’t remembered as a canned drink you buy at 7-Eleven.
In America, my favorite golf museum isn’t a museum at all; it’s the private Links Club in Manhattan, founded by Charles Blair Macdonald and housing golf’s most important painting, Sir Francis Grant’s “The First Meeting of the North Berwick Golf Club,” which is recognized as the oldest representation of golf as we know it played today (1832). The club has a library designed by the English architect Sir Christopher Wren, a “bowling alley bar” with secret wood-paneled lockers used during Prohibition and what’s been called “the most powerful membership in the world.” There’s a legendary story about the Links Club, owing to the brownstone next door that was once the home of a New York dentist going through a messy divorce and unable to bear the thought of losing it in a settlement. Press reports say he rigged a gas-line explosion in the basement and blew up the building and himself. The property turned out to be worth more demolished than standing, so you might say, uncharitably, he was screwed both in life and in death. On a positive note, the Links got a nice refurbishment paid for by an insurance company.
Less colorfully, the Augusta (Ga.) Museum of History deserves mention for its distinguished golf exhibits during Masters week; a recent show honored the artist Anthony Ravielli, who depicted the ideal swing plane with Ben Hogan’s pane-of-glass—the best golf instructional illustration of all time. There’s also the Jack Nicklaus Museum at The Ohio State University—where else would you find his “White Fang” putter and 2,000 other pieces of Nicklaus memorabilia? Some clubhouses are museums with artifacts on display, like Merion, Oakmont and Winged Foot. And don’t undersell the USGA museum, which has my favorite threesome: Bobby Jones’ Calamity Jane putter, Hogan’s “lost” 1-iron from the 1950 U.S. Open and Alan Shepard’s moon-shot 6-iron from Apollo 14.
Nevertheless, it has to be raining hard to choose any one of these museums over playing a round of golf anywhere. It’s the nature of golfers, even though we’re considered the most history-conscious sportsmen. The real museums of the game are the golf courses.
