This year’s Ryder Cup, hosted at Bethpage Black in Farmington, New York, on Long Island over the weekend of September 26, marks the 45th time the match-play tournament has been held between the United States and European golfers. The two countries alternate hosting the tournament, and compete for a handsome namesake trophy, a 17-inch-tall gold cup, donated and commissioned by British seed merchant Samuel Ryder, the tournament’s namesake.
But the tournament was born in Toledo, Ohio, as the brainchild of one of the city’s most notable citizens of the early 20th century: Sylvanus P. Jermain, whom Golf Illustrated referred to as “The Father of Public Golf in America.”
“He really was a visionary,” Judd Silverman, president and CEO of the Toledo Classic golf tournament and a student of the game and its history, said. “Samuel Ryder donated the trophy, but S.P. Jermain had the idea, and it’s a shame he’s never really gotten his due.”
S.P. Jermain was born in Adrian, Michigan, in 1859. Twelve years later, the family moved across the border to Toledo. At the time, the city was the third largest in Ohio, behind Cleveland and Cincinnati, but it would grow exponentially in Jermain’s lifetime.
As treasurer of the Woolson Spice Co., Jermain was successful in business and became one of the founders of the city’s Manufacturers’ Association, but he became better known in his lifetime for his work in parks and public planning.
Jermain, an asthmatic, saw public parks in visits to New York and Chicago and wanted to duplicate them in Toledo, an industrial port city that was growing bigger by the day. A bond issue passed in 1891, and a board of parks commissioners was founded, with Jermain as a member. Jermain was instrumental in establishing plans for city parks and boulevards, and in 1915, a park was named for him.
In 1892, the city acquired 280 acres with the Ottawa River running through it. The new Ottawa Park applied ideas used by Frederick Law Olmsted in his designs for Central Park in New York and Belle Isle Park in Detroit, and in 1899, a nine-hole golf course was added, the first public golf course in the Midwest, and possibly the first outside of New York City. Notably, it was free to use at its inception. (Golf, at the time, was the domain of exclusive clubs, a reputation the sport hasn’t shed entirely to this day.)
Jermain believed golf was great exercise and great fellowship, and wanted to make it readily accessible. In fact, he wrote a rule book, “The American Code of Golf,” that streamlined the Royal & Ancient rules.
“Golf had its birth upon the free lands and in the purest spirit of democracy,” he wrote in an essay, “The Benefits of Golf.” “Its annals are replete with the very best in the common fellowship of men.”
“He really wanted the common man to be able to play golf,” Silverman said.
But Jermain also wanted to establish one of the finest private clubs in the country. The sport’s popularity led Jermain to become one of the founding members of a private club in Toledo. In 1903, articles of incorporation were signed for the new Inverness Golf Club, which would be built on 80 acres of land in Adams Township. Jermain was not only one of the founders and original investors, but was also elected the club’s first president. (Jermain went so far as to communicate with the club’s namesake village in Scotland for use of the name and village crest.) It was at Inverness that the seeds were planted for the Ryder Cup.
In sports in the early 1900s, amateurism was prized. “A gentleman never competes for money directly or indirectly,” said football coach Walter Camp in 1900, and indeed, it wasn’t until midcentury that the NFL approached the popularity of the college game. Golf and tennis — perhaps not coincidentally, both upper-class pursuits — were the same way. The sports were expensive, requiring equipment and travel, which typically cost more than any type of prize money winners might receive. And those amateurs looked down on professional players.
That’s why what happened at Inverness in 1920 was so revolutionary.
At Jermain’s insistence, the clubhouse — newly rebuilt following a fire in 1918 — opened its doors to welcome professional and amateur players into the facility. (Prior to that, it was not uncommon for players to dress at their hotels, come to the course, and put their spikes on in the parking lot.)
The tournament turned out to be a corker. Englishman Harry Vardon (the golfer who popularized the overlap grip) was leading by five strokes with seven holes to play. He then bogeyed the next four holes, and double-bogeyed the one after that, allowing Ted Ray to overtake him and win the tournament by one stroke. At 43, Ray held the record for the oldest U.S. Open winner for more than 60 years.
“The tournament was run off in flawless style without a hitch and will go on record as one of the greatest championships ever held,” sportswriter Grantland Rice said following the tournament. (Rice was a scratch golfer himself.)
The duel between the two British rivals in Toledo left Jermain inspired. Less than three weeks after the tournament, the Sun & New York Herald reported that Jermain was itching for a match between English and American golfers, saying that Jermain had written to the British Professional Golfers’ Association that the club was planning such a matchup, with Walter L. Ross, then the club’s president, offering a trophy for use.
There was a competition between American and British golfers at Gleneagles in Scotland in 1921, prior to the British Open, and another in 1926 at Wentworth. But the Ryder Cup was first formally awarded in 1927, after the Americans won in a landslide at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts.
“The credit for the idea should go to Sylvanus P. Jermain of Toledo,” said PGA President George Sargent in a 1931 interview, by which time the Ryder Cup had become a regular tradition.
Jermain remained an evangelist for golf until his death in 1935. In an editorial after his death, the Toledo Times noted not just Jermain’s contributions to golf, but to the city.
“There is a monument to Mr. Jermain at the first tee in Ottawa park, the golf course he fostered in the face of terrible criticism,” it stated in an editorial. “There are others too-the parks and boulevards, the Civic Center that no longer is a dream, underground telephone and telegraph wires, a metropolitan fire department, the high-pressure pumping system, the Toledo Chamber of Commerce, and many other worthwhile civic achievements.”
Among the memorials for Jermain was a floral arrangement sent by Bobby Jones. The Toledo News-Bee wrote it was “the respects of the world’s greatest golfer to the world’s greatest friend of golfers.”
