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Thorny Lea Celebrates 102-Year History With MembersFirst Contact Larry Gulko (July 17, 2003) - Thorny Lea Golf Club selected MembersFirst to enhance their member communications. The club will use the MembersFirst Web-base interactive marketing and member communications system to increase member participation at events and tournaments and to inform members of timely club information and news. In addition, the club looks forward to allowing members to register for events online and thus, drives revenues. The first hooks and slices at Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton were executed on Alfred Morse's cow pasture that now serves as the club's sixteenth fairway. The founders of Thorny Lea were West Elm Street friends and neighbors who had common interests. Most were professionals or leaders in the shoe manufacturing industry, Brockton's primary export at the end of the 19th of the century. They also shared a passion for a game that was quickly gaining popularity in America: golf. Thorny Lea was the dream of two men, William Monroe Nute and Herbert L. Tinkham. Nute was a 39-year-old executive for Howard & Foster Shoe Company. Tinkham, was a 34-year-old son-in-law of W. L. Douglas and served as a treasurer for W. L. Douglas Shoe Company. Nute and Tinkham herded cattle away from what is now our sixteenth fairway and stepped off a rudimentary layout of five holes. The holes were short and primitive. The fairways were far from manicured. Grass didn,t need mowing, either. Morse's cows maintained the fairways by eating the overgrowth. The greens, however, were another matter. In an effort to keep them smooth for putting, wire fences were built around each green. Often, the cows would break through the fence and feast. It was Nute's wife, Harriet, who came up with the name for the club. Several names were suggested and rejected. Harriet Nute had been reading a Scottish novel in which a setting was described a thorney, briery place. It made her think of her husband, William, because most of his golfing hours were spent extricating his errant shots out of similar patches of shrubbery. The name of the club during it earliest years was Thorney Lea and remained so until 1906 when it changed to Thorny Lea. The transformation was not a mandate of the membership. It came about because of an engraver's error. The club commissioned a silver cup, which was going to be presented to the annual club champion. However, when the cup arrived, members quickly spotted that the club was spelled Thorny Lea. They agreed it was easier to change the club's name to Thorny Lea than it would be to purchase a new cup. There have been plenty of golfing exhibitions at Thorny Lea. When it was a nine-hole course, two of Great Britain's top players, George Duncan and Abe Mitchell, played against Brockton champions and a Harvard law student, the immortal Bobby Jones in 1923. Thorny Lea nearly became a Donald Ross course in 1924. The famed architect surveyed the land in 1923 and gave an estimate of the cost expanding Thorny Lea to 18 holes by constructing nine additional holes. Although the club went on record as favoring an 18-hole course, there was a change of opinion among some members and instead they voted to make improvements to the existing nine holes. Nevertheless, it was only a matter of time before Thorny Lea expanded to 18 holes, Boston-based golf course architect, Wayne E. Stiles, who along with John Van Kleek, designed several noteworthy courses in the Northeast, including Taconic Golf Club in Williamstown, were hired. The project officially opened on June 20, 1925 with an exhibition match between nationally renowned golfers. Francis Ouimet, the 1913 US Open winner, and Marden, then the Brockton Country Club champion, squared off against perennial Massachusetts Amateur champion Fred Wright and Thorny Lea champion Alan W Barlow. Ouimet and Wright both scored 1- over par 73s and the match was even after 18 holes. There were several other matches over the years. Walter Hagan and Horton Smith visited Thorny Lea in June of 1928. Gene Sarazen and Babe Didrikson played an exhibition in 1935. Thorny Lea produced noteworthy amateur and professional champions over the next 75 years; however, the member who rose to the loftiest heights in the world of golf was a writer, Herbert Warren Wind. Identifying Wind as simply a writer is denigrating his work. He was the Poet Laureate of American Golf in the 20th century. His father, Max Wind, was a successful businessman in Brockton's shoe industry who took a membership around the time when the club expanded to eighteen holes. Herbert Warren Wind was taught how the game should be played. It was a time when proper etiquette was as important as a well-grooved swing. In the 1950s Thorny Lea became a Mecca for good golfers, a breeding ground of excellence. In the last half of the century Thorny Lea became known as the home of champions. In a 30-year span, Thorny Lea golfers won seven Massachusetts State Amateur Championships, and the handicap rolls regularly listed more than 100 golfers with single digit handicaps. John M. Tosca, Jr., and Edward "Smiley" Connell emerged as state champions in the 1950s. Connell won his state championship in 1955 at the Myopia Hunt Cub in South Hamilton, and Tosca won his first championship in 1959 at Taconic in Williamstown. Eleven years later, at the Essex County Club in Manchester-By-The-Sea, Tosca added his second championship. His opponent in the 36-hole final was a fellow Thorny Lea club-mate, Tom Cavicchi, who later turned professional. Thorny Lea's most impressive showing was in the 1981 Massachusetts Amateur Championship at Taconic when ten Thorny Lea golfers qualified for the championship. Of the ten, eight were among the thirty-two who advanced to the match play portion of the championship, with one going on the championship. Steven Tasho won his first of two State Amateur Championships at Taconic, the same club where Tosca had won his first state crown. No club in the State Amateur championship has ever had so much representation in match play. Tasho went on to win a second State Amateur crown at Myopia in 1985, exactly 30 years and on the same course where Smiley Connell began Thorny Lea's dominance in the tournament. The other Thorny Lea golfer to capture the State Amateur in the 20th century was Bruce Douglass, a fair-haired long hitter who came from neighboring Stoughton. Douglass won his first State Amateur in 1975 at Winchester Country Club and followed it up the following year by repeating when the tournament moved to The Country Club in Brookline. In addition to the prestigious State Amateur, Thorny Lea members have won numerous championships and awards over the years. Steve Tasho and Bruce Chalas have teamed to win many a crown. Besides winning the Massachusetts Four-Ball title twice, in 1988 and again in 1994, they added a number of City Four-Balls and Cronin Four-Ball championships to their trophy case. Although Chalas never won the State Amateur, he has an array of championships under his belt. He won the New England Amateur in 1985 and is one of the few local golfers ever to qualify for the US Amateur and the US Open in the same year. In the second half of the century, several acclaimed tournaments were played at Thorny Lea. Beginning in the 1970s, the PGA of America brought its National Assistant Professional Championship here for a 13-year run. The tournament was sponsored by Foot-Joy, a Brockton golf-equipment manufacturing company. It was during this tournament that the course record was set by Ken Allard, out of Katke-Cousins G.C. in Rochester, Michigan. He posted a 7-under 63. PGA Tour players Loren Roberts and Fred Funk jump-started their professional careers with victories at Thorny Lea. Besides winning at Thorny Lea, both professional golfers went on to win a PGA Tour event in the Bay State at Pleasant Valley. Kevin Johnson, who ruled amateur golf in New England during the 1980s, won his second of three consecutive State Amateurs at Thorny Lea in 1988, the first year that tournament was held at the club. Thorny Lea's John Hadges took medallist honors in the stroke play segment of the championship, fashioning a 1-over par 68-73-141. There have been plenty of heroics at Thorny Lea over the first hundred years, but the club shares a couple of hole-in-one heroics that few clubs will ever match. Only a few golfers have matched the deeds of John Gorman and Arnold Swartz, both long-time members. On October 25, 1953, Gorman scored an ace, hitting a 3-iron into the cup on the par-3 17th hole. The following day, he repeated his ace. According to Golf Digest's national hole-in-one clearinghouse, only six golfers, including Arnold Palmer, have ever aced the same hole on consecutive days. Today a plaque sits on the tee to remind everyone what was accomplished on this fearsome par three, the most difficult at Thorny Lea. The following year Swartz began his "Grand Slam of Aces" at Thorny Lea, a feat that took 41 years and countless rounds to accomplish. Swartz is the only club member to have aced all four par threes at the club. The magazine's hole-in-one clearinghouse reported that only 45 golfers had ever completed the hole-in-one cycle at any particular golf course. During Thorny Lea's 102-year existence, there have been four clubhouses. The first was no more than a shed and built in a day, costing just a few dollars. It was improved until World War I when a second clapboard-covered structure was built. That structure was replaced in 1960 by a stone and glass building that cost more than $100,000. In 2000 the club opened its present state-of-the-art facility, one of the finest clubhouses in New England. |