My favorite stories are the ones that start simple, but the more I dig, the treasure trove is endless. This is one of those. It started with a simple cartoon.

Robert Ripley — yes, of Ripley’s believe it or not — drew a portrait of a man called Walter Travis for the sports page of the Washington Evening Star on May 25th, 1926. Travis is shown in profile, cigar clamped in his teeth, the famous “Schenectady Putter” sketched beside him. The caption identifies him as "the only American to win the British Amateur Golf Championship."

The question above: "Can we win this year?"

It had been twenty-two years since Travis won. By 1926, the papers were openly calling it a jinx. Some called it a curse. Whatever it was, I went looking for the full story. And what I found spread across a dozen newspapers from 1904 to 1926 is one of the better sports stories I've come across in all these old papers.

Walter Travis was born in Australia in 1862. He moved to the United States as a young man, became a citizen, settled in New York, and by all accounts showed no interest in golf until his mid-thirties.

He was 35, the Springfield Daily Republican noted in April 1926, "before he ever swung at a ball." Grantland Rice was clearly fascinated by Travis. He called him "The Lone Watcher."

What Rice understood — and what makes Travis genuinely remarkable — is the trajectory. Within two years of picking up a club, Travis was in the semifinals of the US Amateur. Within four, he had won it. He would win it three times: 1900, 1901, and 1903. By the standards of the game's great practitioners, he was a late-blooming anomaly who shouldn't have been able to do what he did.

He was also, by every account, a genuinely difficult person to be around. Gruff. Unsociable. Perpetually smoking a large cigar. He didn't seek instruction, didn't cultivate relationships, didn't charm the rooms he walked into. What he could do, better than almost anyone alive, was putt.

The Evening World covered it on June 3rd, 1904. The headline: "Travis Wins Golf Title in England — American Beats E.D. Blackwell To-Day for English Amateur Championship in Final Round of Britain's Big Tournament."

The subhead noted a "Remarkable Display of Putting by the Yankee Creates Sensation on Sandwich Links."

The British golfing establishment was not accustomed to Americans winning their championship. No American ever had. The atmosphere around Travis that week was, by various accounts, cold. One reporter noted that "although they could not refrain from applauding the American's superiority over the Scotchman, it was admitted the gallery manifested more cordiality toward the loser than the winner."

Travis won anyway. He beat Edward Blackwell 4 and 3 in the final. The first American citizen to win the British Amateur.

He smoked his cigar the whole time.

The club that had made Travis almost unbeatable on the greens at Sandwich was not a conventional British blade putter. It was the Schenectady — a center-shafted mallet head invented by an engineer named Arthur F. Knight at Mohawk Golf Club in Schenectady, New York.

Knight, a General Electric engineer, had spent the summer of 1902 in his workshop trying to solve his own putting inconsistencies. His solution was radical: move the shaft to the center of the mallet head rather than the heel, redistributing weight and balance in a way that many golfers — Travis chief among them — found immediately superior.

The Hartford Courant broke the ban news in May 1910 with blunt efficiency:

"The Schenectady putter has been banned in all Great Britain. Official confirmation of the reported decision against it by the rules committee of the Ancient and Honorable Golf Club of St. Andrews was received here today."

The USGA's secretary responded the same day: "Although this action has been taken abroad, I wish to state that no action has been taken by the United States Golf Association as yet, and I have reason to believe that the use of this putter will not be barred over here."

It wasn't. The USGA never banned it. But the R&A ban held.

By 1911 the Los Angeles Times was running the headline: "The Club That Caused a Golf War."

The accompanying illustration showed a California golfer named William Frederickson "defiantly practicing with a Schenectady." The paper described the controversy as having "hit Los Angeles with unabated fury."

Travis never went back to defend his title. The ban stood in Britain until 1952.

By 1926 the papers were running team portraits of every American amateur hoping to break the drought: Bobby Jones, Francis Ouimet, Chick Evans, George Von Elm. With Travis's photograph looming over the group like a ghost.

The Capital Times asked in its headline: "Will U.S. Golfers Halt European Advance? America's Foremost Amateurs Hope to Smash Old Jinx in British Classic, And Repeat The Victory Won By Walter Travis Back In 1904."

The St. Joseph News-Press was more pointed: "Can American Golfers End Old Jinx?" The caption under the team photo read:

Grantland Rice, in his Springfield column, was characteristically direct about the weight of it all:

Bobby Jones was the favorite. He always was.

Bobby Jones didn't make the final. He was beaten in the quarterfinals by a local Edinburgh youngster named Andrew Jamieson (described by the Daily News as "unknown") 4 and 3. The paper called it "the greatest tragedy in American sports."

The man who made the final was Jess Sweetser. A 24-year-old Yale graduate from New York, a stockbroker by profession, who four years earlier had beaten Bobby Jones by one of the most lopsided margins in US Amateur history. He had crossed the Atlantic with the Walker Cup team, caught a cold on the boat, and arrived in Scotland in what he and everyone around him believed was a severe case of flu.

What it actually was, doctors would later confirm, was incipient tuberculosis.

He nearly withdrew before the first round. A walkover gave him an extra day of rest. He stayed.

Round by round he ground through the bracket — beating Francis Ouimet along the way — while fighting nausea, a lame knee, and a wrist that stiffened badly as the tournament progressed. The night before the final he was so ill he again considered withdrawing.

He didn't.

The Call-Bulletin's correspondent filed from Muirfield on May 29th: "

That last sentence is the one worth noting. An American born citizen. For the first time.

Walter Travis, who won it in 1904, was Australian-born, making him a naturalized American. Every paper covering Sweetser's win noted the distinction. Travis had broken the door open. Sweetser was the first to walk through it as someone born on American soil.

The final itself was one of the stranger matches in the championship's history. Simpson, an Edinburgh engineer described by multiple papers as "unheralded", missed his tee time when his car broke down on the way to Muirfield.

Sweetser refused the forfeit. He insisted they wait.

Simpson arrived an hour late. By bicycle.

The Atlanta Constitution's H.C. Hamilton was there: "

The Aftermath

Sweetser sailed home under quarantine. He spent much of the following year recovering from what the tuberculosis had done to him. He never won the British Amateur again — but he never needed to.

The Brooklyn Eagle's post-win analysis called him "short of the pin one of the finest golfers we have ever seen" and noted that his approach play, specifically aiming past the flag rather than at it, trusting his control, had been the real key. The writer concluded: "There is no middle ground — Sweetser either wins or goes down in a blaze."

That time he won.

Walter Travis was 64 years old when Sweetser won at Muirfield. He had spent 22 years watching American after American attempt what he had done in 1904 and fall short. He died on July 31st, 1927 — fourteen months after Sweetser's victory.

The putter ban wasn't lifted until 1952.

Today the center-shafted mallet putter is one of the most popular designs in the game. You probably own one.

See you tomorrow.

— Chris

Sources

Newspapers:

Patents:

Photographs: