Overlooked No More: Joseph Bartholomew, Golf Course Architect

The catch?

“He told me,” Bartholomew later recalled, “‘I can’t give you $3, just 50 cents.’”

Most people wouldn’t dare take such a pay cut, or such a risk. But, Bartholomew said: “I figured I can learn more from Mr. McLeod than I can as a caddie. So, I took it.”

Learn, the young man did.

Bartholomew would one day become the greens superintendent and give lessons — as many as 12 per day at $2 per lesson. And beyond that he would become an admired golf course designer.

But it would take decades for him to get to that point. And through it all — as he rose from caddie to club repairman to superintendent to course designer — Bartholomew, a black man in the Jim Crow South, was barred from playing at Audubon or any other segregated private club, even those whose courses he designed.

Joseph Manuel Bartholomew was born on Aug. 1, 1888, in New Orleans to Manuel and Alice Bartholomew. He was ambitious from a young age. He once asked a teacher if there would be any objection to his completing two grades in one year. “She said no,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1966, “so I went ahead and skipped.”

Bartholomew was in his 30s, in the early 1920s, when local golfers, impressed with his interest in the game and his work as a groundskeeper, collaborated to send him to a golf architecture school in New York, where he studied with the golf course architect Seth Raynor.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/obituaries/joseph-bartholomew-overlooked-black-history-month.html?emc=rss&partner=rss