Like father, like sons

John Reid, leader of the Apple Tree Gang, did not go to Yale, but he sent his two sons to New Haven. The older, John Reid, Jr., (Class of 1899) helped found the Yale University Golf Club in 1896 and was a member of the team that won the first intercollegiate championship, sponsored by the usga in 1897. The same year, he won the University Championship and was elected vice-captain of the team. He was the individual intercollegiate champion in spring of 1898 and led the Yale squad to the intercollegiate championship in the fall. A year after he graduated, his brother Archibald (Class of 1904) arrived to continue the family golfing tradition. Archie was a member of the 1902 intercollegiate champion team and captain in 1904.

John Sr. was proud of his sons, but it seems he set a high standard. Both John Jr. and Archie competed successfully after college. One year, Archie was defeated in his United States Amateur match. His father, reading this in his morning newspaper at breakfast, was said to have turned gruffly to his wife, “I see whereyour son has lost a golf match!” But, it surely was his son John Jr., who, as the usga secretary, presented the trophy to Francis Ouimet, the winner of the US Open in 1913 at The Country Club in Brookline. Ouimet, an unheralded twenty-year old American amateur, bested the English professionals, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in a thirty-six hole playoff. Ouimet made “the shots heard round the world” in the “greatest game ever played,” described so dramatically in Mark Frost’s book of that title.