Willie Park Jr.

Willie Park Jr. was a professional golfer and golf course architect, born on February 4, 1864 at Musselburgh in Scotland. His father Willie Park Sr. was a golfer who won the Open Championship four times, the first of them being the inaugural championship of 1860. The son was playing in the Open himself by the age of sixteen, and he won it twice: in 1887 at Prestwick, and in 1889 on his home links at Musselburgh, where he took the 36-hole play-off against Andrew Kirkaldy by five strokes. He was known as a fine putter, and The Game of Golf, which he brought out in 1896, is held to be the first book on golf written by a professional golfer. In 1920 he wrote The Art of Putting as well.

As an architect he is said to have laid out some 170 courses in Britain, in Europe, in the United States and in Canada. His best-known work is the Old Course at Sunningdale Golf Club in Berkshire, England, which opened in 1901. It is known as a successful example of a course built inland on heathland rather than by the sea, and together with Huntercombe Golf Club to the west of London, opened in that same year of 1901, it is held to have raised the standard of inland course design in Britain.

His work spread to continental Europe and to North America, and he designed courses in Austria, Belgium and France as well. In the United States he was responsible for the North Course at Olympia Fields Country Club near Chicago (opened 1923) and for Maidstone Club on Long Island in New York State, and in Canada for Weston Golf and Country Club in Toronto, among others. The North Course at Olympia Fields has staged the U.S. Open twice. He died at Edinburgh on May 22, 1925, and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2013.

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