If the South is, as Tom Doak has described it, America’s laggard for classic golf course architecture, then Mississippi is the region’s concrete shoes.
For a multitude of reasons, golf’s golden age passed Mississippi by with little more than a passing glance. A century later, Mississippi’s portfolio of world-class golf courses stands toe to toe with any of its neighboring states, but that collection consists mostly of courses built in the past 40 years.
Great Southern Golf Club, in seaside Gulfport, has stood as the lone, proud exception to that statement, because Great Southern boasts a pedigree that no other course in Mississippi can: a Donald Ross design. Great Southern’s golden days, like golf architecture’s golden era, are behind her. The course is not immaculately maintained, and her length — just 6,278 yards, using every inch of the property — made her a victim of modern equipment long ago. Still, of Mississippi’s 160 or so golf courses, Great Southern is the only one that can claim a Ross lineage.
Except, perhaps, that it can’t.
Contemporary news reports and an utter lack of rebuttal evidence point away from Ross and, instead, strongly suggest that a little-known New York club pro is Great Southern’s true forebearer. Great Southern’s origin myth appears to be just that: myth.
On the one hand, obviously, it doesn’t matter. On the other hand — just as obviously — if you’re a struggling, 110-year-old golf club whose last claim to fame is that you’re Mississippi’s only connection to golf’s golden age, it means everything.
. . .
On the simplest level, Donald Ross was a golf pro and club maker who designed courses. But it would be difficult to overstate his place in American golf history. Ross was a Scotsman by birth, but by the time he died in 1948, he’d spent a half-century designing golf courses in nearly every corner of America. If his career had included only the “greatest hits” that even casual golf fans recognize — Pinehurst No. 2, Aronimink, Seminole — he still would be regarded as one of America’s most important architects. But he designed scores of other courses, the overwhelming majority of which are favorably regarded. Ross’ reputation as one of the titans of American golf course architecture is richly deserved.
The definitive list of courses that can be credibly attributed to Ross is kept by the Donald Ross Society. As of December 2018, the Society’s count of Ross courses stood at 462.
None of them was located in Mississippi. Not Great Southern, not any. The Society knows of no proof that Great Southern is a Ross design.
That doesn’t necessarily disprove Great Southern’s claim, of course; the Society often learns about Ross designs that it previously hadn’t recognized. But the Society’s list is the product of more than 30 years of work. No one has made a greater effort to catalog the work to which Ross rightly deserves credit. And the Society doesn’t count Great Southern.
. . .
The Boston Globe (Dec. 28, 1913).
No matter who designed it, some things can’t be taken away from Great Southern — like its history. Throughout the early 20th century, it was undeniably a gem of southern golf. A newspaper ad from 1910 describes it as a “magnificent course, which Northern experts have declared to be the equal of any nine-hole course in the entire South.” In the winter of 1913-14, President Woodrow Wilson visited the Gulf Coast and played the course every day. “President Wilson appears to have improved greatly in health,” a local newspaper reported in January 1914, a couple of weeks after Wilson arrived. “His bronzed skin shows the glow of physical well-being and it is evident that his outings and golf games have done him much good.”
The Boston Globe (Feb. 20, 1945).
Great Southern was a frequent host of Mississippi’s amateur championship. It also hosted a short-lived professional event, the Gulfport Open, which Sam Snead won over Byron Nelson in February 1945 in a 19-hole playoff (Snead won $1,333.33 in war bonds). Mickey Wright won an LPGA event at the course in 1964.
Even in the mid-20th century, the course (which, by the late 1940s, played just over 6,000 yards) apparently was having trouble keeping up with increased distances; the hickory shafts that golfers played at Great Southern’s birth had given way to steel shafts. But it was still no push-over. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger described Great Southern in 1949 as “[s]ix thousand and six tree-lined yards,” where “the ‘play-for-fun’ golfers will have a mighty hard time.” The newspaper’s preview of the 1958 state am similarly described Great Southern as “a tree-lined and well-trapped challenge.”
“You know, some of these pros who visited here, looked at the card and thought they would have a very easy time of it,” Great Southern pro Jim Wilson told the Clarion-Ledger in 1949. “But they have found that it wasn’t as easy as they thought.”
Other than its build-out at the turn of the 20th century, the only major work at Great Southern was architect Brian Curley’s low-budget renovation in the late 1990s. And in Curley’s mind, it didn’t exactly jump out at him as a Ross design. “There were certainly Ross influences to some extent,” Curley wrote in an e-mail, “but it was a course that had a lot of different things going on with varied bunker styles and no dominant thread of design thought. It seems like a course that had been tinkered with over the years. I was trying to bring a continuity of design.”
That meant “squaring off” some greens, modestly doming some others (a style for which Ross is famous), and retouching bunkers to include grass faces and flat bottoms — which would have been common in the days of Great Southern’s youth.
But Curley’s work clearly was a renovation in the truest sense of the word, not a restoration. Great Southern had no original plans for Curley to restore — and which could prove or disprove Great Southern’s claim as Mississippi’s only star in the Ross galaxy.
“No, there was never any evidence of it being a Ross course,” Curley e-mailed. “No plans, etc. No idea.”
. . .
The fourth green, square edges and all, at Great Southern Golf Club in Gulfport, Miss.
Great Southern is unambiguous about its heritage: it’s a Ross course, the club says. No doubt about it, as far as the club is concerned. Great Southern points to the course’s squared-off greens as proof. But Curley says he added those in the 1990s, and at any rate, squared-off greens were not unique to Ross’ designs (pre-renovation aerial photos appear to be inconclusive, but at the very least, they do not rebut Curley).
In Great Southern’s defense, it’s not the only one under the impression that Ross laid out its holes. The Biloxi Sun Herald described Great Southern in a 2017 article as a Ross course, without any hint that the lineage might be questionable. A November 1999 Associated Press report about the club’s renovation describes Great Southern as a “Donald Ross-inspired course.” It’s not clear where either article got that information.
The club’s website explains the story this way: that the course opened in 1908, designed by Donald Ross, and built by Charles Nieman, whom the website described as “a contractor out of New Orleans.”
In fairness, it’s a more detailed telling than one would expect from something made up out of whole cloth. But it’s demonstrably wrong.
For starters, the course did not open in 1908. Local newspapers reported that construction began shortly after a storm in late September 1909; progress moved so quickly that play was expected to begin by the end of that year, but by mid-December 1909, the Biloxi Daily Herald still was referring to the course’s construction as an ongoing affair. More likely it opened in 1910.
That doesn’t mean that the meat of the story — that Ross designed the course — is wrong. But it creates credibility problems right out of the gate for Great Southern’s version of its creation story. And evidence that might rebut those suspicions isn’t apparent.
“The way Ross often worked was that he’d get one gig somewhere and then do a bunch more,” said Steve MacQuarrie, who leads the Donald Ross Society’s Historical Network. “That’s why Chicago and Detroit have so many Ross courses. If someone had hired him in Atlanta, then there’d be three or four of them there. But there aren’t.”
And Ross’ works are rare commodities throughout the Deep South: he has no courses in Louisiana or Arkansas, and only a small handful in Alabama and Texas.
“You wouldn’t expect to see one in the middle of nowhere and none anywhere else nearby,” MacQuarrie said.
Curley, who oversaw the 1990s renovation, cautions that he knows of no proof that Ross wasn’t Great Southern’s sire; just that he’s never seen proof that Ross was involved.
“The people I dealt with (who were great) felt strongly that it was [a Ross design],” Curley wrote in an e-mail. “It very well could have been, or at least he may have spent some time there at some point. I have no idea.”
And if the club ever had direct evidence of its architect’s identity that Curley simply missed, then it washed away in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina wiped Great Southern’s clubhouse off the face of the Earth.
But that’s not to say that all of the puzzle’s pieces are lost to history.
. . .
The Great Southern Hotel (credit: Gulfport Historical Society).
The magnificence of the Great Southern Hotel, the relative brevity of that magnificence, and the decades of destitution that followed (it fell on hard times during the Great Depression before being demolished in 1951) all combine for a remarkable microcosm of Mississippi history. When it opened in July 1903, the hotel stood three stories high with 250 rooms — all of which had electric light, hot and cold running water, and working telephones. The Illustrated Buffalo Express (Buffalo, N.Y.) praised the hotel’s “superb cuisine and all the luxurious comfort of the modern high-class hotel.” Describing the Great Southern a few months after its opening, a New York newspaper reported that it was “said to be the finest hotel in the South.”
Of course, in 1903, Mississippi was a rural, agrarian, and poor state, just as it is now. Joseph T. Jones, the hotel’s founder and owner of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, would have known that as well as anyone. So he wisely marketed Gulfport as a winter destination for chilly northerners.
“It is a magnificent wintering place down there because it does not get damp or foggy, as is the case in Florida,” Jones told a reporter. “And Gulfport is but 24 hours’ ride from Chicago and Cincinnati.”
The northerners proved a receptive audience. And with them, they brought to Gulfport their fad whose seeds Ross was busy planting in the Northeast and on the East Coast: golf.
By 1909, the decision had been made: the hotel would build a golf course. And as with the hotel, no expense was spared: shortly after construction began, a local newspaper declared the course destined to be “the finest golf links in the entire south, not excepting the beautiful links in the Audubon Park New Orleans and the famous golf courses of Florida.” Gulf Coast Country Club (known also in those days as Mississippi Coast Country Club) was born.
But the accounts of Gulf Coast Country Club’s birth are glaring in their lack of one detail: Ross. They make no mention of him at all.
To be sure, 1909 was relatively early in Ross’ 50-year career. But even then, his presence in Gulfport, Mississippi, would have attracted attention. Ross already had designed three courses at Pinehurst, which he had established as the epicenter of American golf. And the Great Southern Hotel was nothing if not a marketing juggernaut. If America’s most famous golf course architect had come to Gulfport to design the extravagant hotel’s new course, then presumably, some newspaper reporter somewhere would have been made aware.
The New Orleans Times-Democrat (May 26, 1910).
But the newspapers are silent.
Well, sort of.
The newspapers do not mention Donald Ross. But the May 26, 1910, edition of the New Orleans Times-Democrat very clearly attributes the work: “The course at present has nine holes, but provision has been made for twice that number if it is found necessary. The course was laid out by Charles G. Neiman of Buffalo, N.Y., one of the best golf experts of the East.”
. . .
Donald Ross is arguably the most accomplished figure in American golf course architecture. Charles Nieman is not.
Nieman (the Times-Democrat misspelled his name) is not completely absent from Great Southern Golf Club’s telling of its history. The way the club’s website tells the story is that Ross designed the course and that Nieman — a contractor from New Orleans, according to the club — merely built out Ross’ plan.
But that tale is hard to square with Ross’ complete absence from the historical record. It’s even harder to square with the Times-Democrat’s report that the course “was laid out” by Nieman.
If that were the only account of Nieman as the course’s designer, then perhaps it could be chalked up to misunderstanding. But it’s not. A December 1909 story in the Biloxi Daily Herald reports that Nieman “ha[d] been employed to lay out and construct the golf links.”
And Nieman wasn’t just there at Great Southern’s birth; he raised it. He was the club’s first superintendent and taught lessons. The Buffalo Commercial referred to Nieman in November 1910 as Gulf Coast Country Club’s “manager,” and the Herald explained that Nieman “ha[d] laid out and directed the construction of many first class golf links.”
The Jackson, Miss. Daily News (Dec. 6, 1914).
In December 1914, Nieman was back in Mississippi after an apparent absence. The Jackson Daily News announced his return by glowingly introducing him to readers as “the golf expert of Lake View, N.Y., who laid out the beautiful links of the Gulf Coast Country club, between Biloxi and Gulfport, several years ago.”
The December 1914 story also cuts against Great Southern’s description of Nieman as a contractor. “He has been a professional golfer for twenty years and is up on the fine points,” the Daily News reported. “He will tell you if you shake or move your head the fraction of an inch when you drive or putt you are making a terrible mistake and can never hope to improve until you get out of such a bad habit[.]” And the Herald, on the eve of the course’s construction, reported that Nieman was “late instructor and steward of the Wanakah Golf Club of Buffalo, N.Y.”
Nieman wasn’t a contractor. He built some golf courses, but he was a club pro, like Ross.
Like Ross, but not.
But how? How in the world would a random club pro from just outside Buffalo, N.Y., end up building a golf course at a destination hotel more than a thousand miles away?
The course’s beautiful site, with the Gulf of Mexico in view from virtually anywhere on the property, was purchased in the fall of 1909 by Bert Jones — son of Joseph, the hotel owner and railroad magnate. Joseph spent much of his later years in Gulfport, but it wasn’t home. Joseph’s home, like Nieman’s, was Buffalo, N.Y. It’s not hard to imagine that they could have known one another.
And maybe Nieman wasn’t just a random club pro. Today, Golf Advisor credits Nieman with just one architecture job. But when Nieman died near Buffalo in May 1965, his obituary in the Buffalo Courier-Express described him as “a builder of about 15 golf courses” in several different states — including Mississippi.
. . .
If any evidence exists that Ross truly did design Great Southern, then it is not apparent. Great Southern’s members have only their faith; the Donald Ross Society has seen no proof; and Curley, who renovated Great Southern in the 1990s, likewise saw no evidence. On the other hand, the evidence suggesting that Nieman designed Great Southern is substantial and uncontradicted.
That the Ross connection is myth seems beyond dispute, then. The question remains, though, of how the myth emerged. Great Southern’s membership could not have simply woven the tale out of whole cloth, either now or 100 years ago; the suggestion is literally a conspiracy theory. More likely is that the myth began as a misunderstanding, told and retold until it grew into a mistaken origin story — the children’s game “Telephone,” played out over a century.
This too is only a theory, but unlike Great Southern’s claim to Ross, this has some grounding in evidence. Great Southern might not have had a Ross connection, but Nieman did: in 1913, Wanakah Country Club — Nieman’s old club near Buffalo, N.Y. — renovated its golf course. The renovation’s designer was Ross: the Donald Ross Society acknowledges it, and the May 29, 1913, issue of The Buffalo Commercial tells that “[w]ork is going rapidly forward with the links under the directions laid out by Donald Ross, the well known golf expert.”
That same year, Nieman apparently was gone from Great Southern; the New Orleans Times-Democrat named Jack Delray — not Nieman — as “the professional golfer employed by the Great Southern Hotel.” And a year later, the Jackson Daily News described Nieman’s return to Mississippi as though he had been gone from the state for some length of time: that Nieman “dropped into town yesterday afternoon, and said he came to Mississippi again to see how golf was getting along,” adding that Nieman “probably will be in Jackson for several weeks, maybe longer.”
Buffalo was home; if Nieman was no longer Great Southern’s club pro in 1913, then Buffalo would have been as likely a destination for him as any. Right around the same time, Ross was renovating Wanakah, Nieman’s old stomping grounds.
It seems better than impossible that, at some point — perhaps even Nieman’s return to Mississippi in 1914 — Nieman could have mentioned a Ross design at one of his old clubs, and that someone could have assumed (incorrectly) that Nieman meant Great Southern instead of Wanakah. The game of Telephone would have begun then and there.
. . .
To the left of Great Southern’s 18th fairway, an old live oak — perhaps not unlike the club itself — hangs on for dear life.
Every golf club’s identity — and the self-esteem of its membership — is tied up in its course’s architect. That’s unavoidable. But it’s stupid. Great Southern is 18 holes of scruffy but lovable golf, bisected by railroad tracks with lots of views of the Gulf of Mexico. A president spent his Christmas vacation playing there. Byron Nelson and Sam Snead went down to the wire there. None of that changes if Donald Ross painstakingly designed Great Southern, or if he never even heard of it. If it’s a Ross, or if it isn’t, it’s still the same course today that it was yesterday.
But in Great Southern’s case, there is one other factor perhaps in play: survival. For years, Great Southern has been hanging on for dear life. There was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which walloped Great Southern with a near-direct blow. There was a reported dodged foreclosure in 2012. There was an offer to buy the course and convert it to a housing development in 2017. And in 2018, there were negotiations with two Florida lenders to finance a major renovation; the results of those talks have never been announced.
If Great Southern has any staying power, then its claim as Mississippi’s only golf course with a Ross pedigree surely is its ace in the hole. But if it doesn’t have that — then, what?