The raucous life and times of A.W. Tillinghast, the father of Philadelphia Cricket Club’s masterpiece

By the time A.W. Tillinghast finished the Wissahickon Course at Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1922, one of more than 250 courses he either built, rebuilt, or influenced, he was 46, and he’d lived a life worthy of the big screen.

He’d run with a Philadelphia gang. He’d attended Brown University. He’d married a society belle and fathered two daughters. He’d learned the game of golf at the Old Course in St. Andrews, at the feet of none other than Old Tom Morris. He’d served as a consultant as George Crump built Pine Valley in South Jersey, generally considered the best course in the world. And not only had Tillinghast begun building U.S. Open venues, he’d played in two of them himself.

Cricket has seen its share of big names walk its rolling fairways, but the Truist Championship will be the most significant event yet at one of Tillinghast’s less significant courses. Of course, that depends on how one judges significance.

Measuring strictly by past prestige, the nod likely would go to Baltusrol’s upper and lower tracks, which have shared nine men’s major tournaments. One might argue that Winged Foot, with seven men’s majors but a more devilish challenge, is more significant. A more proletarian argument can be made for Bethpage Black, a public course on Long Island, which has seen three majors and will host this year’s Ryder Cup. Cricket’s biggest tournament to date: the 2016 Constellation Senior Players Championship.

However, a sentimentalist might argue quite loudly (as the boisterous Tillinghast would) that Tillinghast’s most significant creation was, in fact, the Wissahickon Course at Cricket. He campaigned to create it. He conceived it. He executed it. He remained a member his entire life, even when finance and circumstance drove him first to California, then, finally, to Ohio, where he lived his final years.

At any rate, from May 8 to 11, the rest of the world will have its best chance to date to glimpse Tillie’s tour de force set in the horse country of Flourtown.

The world, no doubt, will be impressed.

“Certainly,” said golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Jr., “it has stood the test of time.”

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Consider this: Of the scores of courses touched one way or another by Tillie, it was in the waters of Wissahickon Creek, whose tributary Lorraine Run meanders through the property, that Tillinghast requested that some of his ashes be spread.

He never wanted to leave Cricket.

What could be more significant than that?

Pinehurst likes to call itself the cradle of American golf, but, with its wealth of designers and world-class courses, no area contributed to the game’s growth and refinement more than did Philadelphia.

“If Philadelphia wasn’t the center of the American golf universe,” said Gil Hanse, one of the most prolific architects and renovators in history, “it was pretty close.”

Similarly, perhaps no native-born American contributed more to the country’s golf explosion than Tillie.

An American centennial baby, Albert Warren Tillinghast was born in 1876 in North Philadelphia to a wealthy rubber merchant named Benjamin Collins Tillinghast. Tillinghast spent much of his youth learning to play cricket and polo, but he was by no measure a dandy: He joined the notorious Kelly Street Gang, drank hard, gambled, played billiards, and, eventually, golfed.

In 1894 he married young society beauty Lillian Heath Quigley, and so his father sought to settle him, if not into the family business then at least into a pursuit worthy of their aristocratic station. He took Tillie to see Old Tom.

The father and son traveled to Scotland, where A.W. learned the game and its management at the feet of Old Tom, who oversaw St. Andrews Links and generally is considered the godfather of golf. It would be like learning basketball from Red Auerbach. Several trips to Scotland sharpened Tillinghast’s skills and steeped him in the history and theory of the game.

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He became a top amateur in the United States, finishing 25th in the 1910 U.S. Open, held at the old St. Martin’s course at the home base of the Philadelphia Cricket Club, in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. By the end of the next year he’d designed his first course, Shawnee Country Club, about 100 miles north of Philadelphia — a job he accepted despite having never organized anything more complex than a bridge party.

The success of Shawnee launched Tillinghast’s career as a course designer, and he set up shop in New York City. As the years passed he lobbied for the Cricket Club to build a satellite course on farmland in nearby Flourtown, since the club didn’t own the land on which St. Martin’s was built and the track was not large enough to compete with other championship courses being constructed around the nation. Finally, the membership agreed.

When he’d finished with Cricket, he’d left his stamp as designer, consultant, or renovator at more than 60 courses from Florida to Texas to California, where he redesigned the San Francisco Golf Club, still consistently a top-50 club in America.

And, like a true Philadelphian, he did, indeed, leave his stamp.

Prohibition was the law of the land in Tillie’s heyday but was little more than a nuisance to the man himself. Like many rich and famous men of his time, he drank constantly and without inhibition. He was no more faithful to his marriage than necessary.

As a designer, Tillinghast was a harsh taskmaster in a brutally harsh profession, when moving earth involved shovels and mules and weeks spent sweltering in deserts or swamps or shadeless farmlands.

The enduring image of Tillie is a man with a full mustache, waxed at the tips, in his shirtsleeves and vest, with long boots and walking stick, flask at the ready, directing laborers like an Egyptian foreman at the crypts.

He made millions, but in the spirit of the Roaring Twenties he spent with abandon. He lived in a mansion in New Jersey, threw lavish parties, entertained celebrities, and made rash investments. He rode to work each day in the city in a limousine. He stayed in the most expensive hotels when traveling.

He also was given to violent outbursts, firing his guns, and disappearing for weeks at a time. His biographer, Philip Young, has since contended that, given Tillinghast’s delusions of grandeur, his wild mood swings, and bouts of depression, he might have been bipolar, an affliction then known as manic-depressive. In those days such mental illnesses were seldom acknowledged, much less treated.

There is a school of thought that his behaviors have been exaggerated by journalists and explained by this possible diagnosis. There is no argument that Tillie could be wild, gruff, and expansive, traits shared by so many men of genius.

At any rate, a heart condition and diabetes were diagnosed in the late 1920s, which tempered his drinking, and then the Great Depression ruined the market for golf course design. He moved to California and sold antiques in the late 1930s, but a heart attack in 1940 forced him and his wife to move in with one of his daughters in Ohio. By then he’d degraded into an angry old man. A second heart attack killed him on May 19, 1942. He was 66.

Tillinghast’s decline and his disposition, marks of shame in the prudish, elitist golf world of the mid-20th century, rendered him obscure. Then, in 1974, USGA executive Frank Hannigan noticed that four of the USGA’s events, including the U.S. Open at Winged Foot, would be played on Tillinghast courses. Hannigan wrote a tribute to Tillinghast in Golf Digest. That spurred a Tillie renaissance. In 2015, he finally was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, and his legend grew larger.

He has been credited with coining the term birdie, though Tillinghast himself credits one of his golf-crazed playing partners who routinely took day trips from snowy Philadelphia to Atlantic City to play wintertime golf on courses that wouldn’t hold snow. Tillinghast conceived of soft spikes to better preserve greens, he offered the first official ranking of the world’s golfers, and he helped found the PGA of America.

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Tillinghast would have loved that a golf journal revived his legacy, because he was an accomplished photographer and a literary man before anything else. For most of his life, Tillinghast wrote extensively on golf, both as a columnist or humorist, when he often would use a pseudonym, and as a fictionist, penning The Cobble Valley Golf Game and The Mutt, and, to a degree as a poet. Consider, from Young’s biography, Tillinghast, Creator of Golf Courses, the piece, “The Duffer”:

It’s safe to say that Tillie’s truest artistry was found on the fairways.

Tillinghast was a contemporary of Alister MacKenzie, who designed Augusta National; Donald Ross, who designed Pinehurst No. 2 and Aronimink; and barely preceded the rise of Robert Trent Jones Sr., whose sons Rees and Robert Jr. followed in their father’s footsteps, as well as those of Tillinghast, who influenced Robert Jr. greatly.

Robert Jr. is a published poet, and it is pleasant to hear him speak of Tillie’s concepts.

“He was always using whatever the earth gave him. Tillinghast crafted the bunkers to look like sand dunes,” he said. “Ross? His bunkers sometimes look like bathtubs.”

Tillinghast’s skill dictated the character of his courses. The hazards at Pinehurst No. 2 and Aronimink might suck in an otherwise fine shot. Tillinghast’s courses, and especially Cricket, seem fairer.

“His playing ability informed his design. He crafted a course,” Jones said. “His greens — they were sweeping. If you correctly read a putt a certain way, or if you hit your shot correctly, it will go where you intend it. You will be rewarded.”

As a generation of golfers and golf fans will find out, that’s exactly what will happen at Cricket.

For information on the Truist Championship, May 8 to 11 at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Flourtown, go to truistchampionship.com.