“A.W. Tillinghast, A Golf Expert” was the headline on the New York Times obituary for Albert Warren Tillinghast in May 1942. He was a tremendously prolific golf architect, designer of hundreds of courses including such Met Area treasures as Winged Foot East and West, Baltusrol Upper and Lower, Quaker Ridge, Ridgewood, Somerset Hills, Bethpage Black, Fresh Meadow, Knollwood, and Essex County. He was also a prolific writer, responsible for more than 400 columns that ran in newspapers as well as several books, and editor of the influential magazine Golf Illustrated in the 1930s. As a photographer, he traveled with the most up-to-date camera equipment and took photos of the golf holes that he found of interest. As a tournament organizer, he hosted Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the Shawnee Open – played on Tillinghast’s first design — where the pair were defeated by two-time U.S. Open champion John J. McDermott less than a month before they fell to Francis Ouimet in the famous playoff for the 1913 Open. And he was a talented golfer, winner of local and regional events who played in seven U.S. Amateurs and one U.S. Open, finishing 25th in the latter in 1910.
Born in the Frankford section of Philadelphia in 1874, Tillinghast was the son of a prosperous businessman whose rubber factory made a wide variety of products. His first sporting interest was cricket, but after a trip to Scotland in 1898 that led to several visits with Old Tom Morris, he became more purely enamored with golf. He began writing about the game, covering events in a syndicated column and issuing closely-watched rankings of the top 12 American players in three categories (amateurs, professionals, and women amateurs). He first designed courses in near his native Philadelphia, but soon after designing Shackamaxon in Scotch Plains, N.J., he received a deluge of work from the Met Area: Mountain Ridge (original 18-hole course in West Orange), Essex County, Somerset Hills, Quaker Ridge, Upper Montclair, Suburban, Elmwood, Fenway, Paramount, Southward Ho, Scarsdale, Baltusrol and Winged Foot – all between 1917 and 1924. He eventually shifted his offices to 42nd Street in Manhattan.
Tillinghast’s designs vary significantly, depending on the features of the site he had to work with. “The one consistent aspect of his designs is that they lack consistency,” his biographer Philip Young told Golf Club Atlas. This is a strength, not a weakness: he did not believe in hammering golf holes into preconceived notions. Several excerpts from Tillinghast’s writing, cited by Frank Hannigan in a landmark Golf Journal profile in 1974, shed light on his beliefs:
“If a hole does not possess striking individuality through some gift of nature, it must be given as much as possible artificially and the artifice must be introduced in so subtle a manner as to make it seem natural.”
“A round of golf should present 18 inspirations – not necessarily thrills, because spectacular holes may be sadly overdone. Every hole may be constructed to provide charm without being obtrusive with it.”
“The 7 deadly sins of architecture: Greens that don’t drain; greens that drain too much; greens too large for small shots; greens too small for long shots; greens too freakish for any shot; holes playing directly into the slopes of hills; holes requiring climbs to higher levels too suddenly.”
About Winged Foot in 1929: “The contouring of the greens places great premium on the placement of the drives, but never is there he necessity of facing a prodigious carry of the sink-or-swim sort. It is only the knowledge that the next shot must be played with rifle accuracy that brings the realization that the drive must be placed. The holes are like men, all rather similar from foot to neck, but with the greens showing the same varying characters as human faces.”
In his later years, Tillinghast designed Bethpage Black, Red, and Blue (and modified the existing Green Course), and served as a design consultant to the PGA, a role in which he visited more than 700 courses and according to his obituary, “recommended removal of 7,247 unnecessary sand traps.” He suffered a heart attack in 1940 and went to live with his daughter in Toledo, Ohio, where he died in 1942. He left behind an enduring collection of great golf courses that are still challenging the greatest players a century after he designed them.
