In the fall of 1912, several avid golfers, including Crump, met to discuss building a course in nearby New Jersey-perhaps in the Pine Barrens-where the soil and weather conditions might be a little more favorable for winter golf than they were on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware. When severe winter weather rendered Philadelphia courses unplayable, Crump and a few of his chums often took the Reading Railroad to Atlantic City, where they could count on the course at least being open. The union lasted less than a year his wife, Isabelle, who had been quite active in local civic affairs, died in 1907, not long after returning from a long European tour. He did not seek the limelight.Ĭrump did not marry until he was 35.
He was a big-boned and husky man who had a reputation for living life vigorously, for kindliness, for generosity in his opinions of others, and for good sportsmanship and integrity. Davids Golf Club, Torresdale Country Club, Huntingdon Valley Country Club, Philadelphia Country Club, Country Club of Atlantic City, the Racquet Club, and, one is inclined to suspect, others) he had a multitude of friends. George Crump himself inherited the Colonnade in 1902 and operated it till 1910, when he sold it for $300,000 or $500,000 or $1,000,000-reports of the proceeds vary considerably. In the mid-19th century the Crump family came into possession of the Colonnade Hotel, a landmark at 15th and Chestnut Streets for more than 50 years. His grandfather, William Hawkins Crump, was for a time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and George’s father once served as the British vice-consul in Philadelphia. And he was a man of some means, one who would then have been called "comfortably fixed."Ĭrump was born in 1871. He was also a man of vision and energy who had very decided ideas about the challenges an accomplished player ought to be con-fronted with in striving for "level 4s." He had played most of the important courses, both in this country and abroad. George Crump, the golfer, in his favorite knickers, broad-brimmed hat in hand.īut Crump was a very good player-one of the dozen or so best golfers in the Philadelphia area during the first 15 years of the new century and, in fact, a two-time winner (19) of the Patterson Cup. As Warner Shelley put it succinctly in his invaluable Pine Valley Golf Club: A Chronicle, published in 1982, "He not only had the idea, he found the location, bought the land, designed the course, and then supervised its construction-hole by hole." All this by a man who had never so much as fashioned a practice putting green in his back yard. George Arthur Crump was the progenitor of this incomparable golf course. Of the remaining holes, five are outstanding, two are good, and one, the twelfth, is ordinary, which, at Pine Valley, is tantamount to being a misfit." possesses more classic holes than any other course in the world-ten of the eighteen.
Robert Trent Jones, the doyen of golf architects, once came to grips with this question in a precise mathematical fashion: ". The preeminence of the course near Clementon, New Jersey, is an uncomplicated matter that has no connection with major events: Pine Valley simply has more great golf holes than any other course on the globe. Except for two Walker Cup Matches-and those nearly 50 years apart-Pine Valley has never hosted a national or international competition.
0 kommentar(er)
