Edward Stimpson, a natural engineer from Massachusetts, attended as a spectator the US Open of 1935 held at Oakmont. He was a golf enthusiast, a very good amateur player, and a greens scholar. It was there that he witnessed a putt by Gene Sarazen that blew his mind. The great champion barely touched the ball to set it in motion, and it ended up off the green. The USGA recounts that in that edition, players threatened to boycott the tournament due to the speed of the greens. Well, Stimpson, after seeing Sarazen live, decided to invent a device to measure the speed of the greens, with the aim of quantifying when and how a tournament organiser could go overboard when preparing the course. Thus, the Stimpmeter was born, a device that even today, 90 years later, is still used worldwide, from the smallest tournament to the Majors.
The story is beautiful, complete, and widely spread in the popular lore of the United States. The only problem is that it is false. Edward Stimpson could not have witnessed Gene Sarazen’s putt simply because he was not there. His son confirmed it in 2016. “My mother gave birth in September of that year, and it is impossible that my father left her alone at home pregnant. Moreover, he had financial problems to afford a trip to the US Open at Oakmont,” he assures. That the legend is false does not mean it lacks some truth. A lot of truth. In some way, it is very true that the Stimpmeter was born at that US Open at Oakmont, even if its creator was not there.
Stimpson grew up playing golf at the Brae Burn Country Club, a classic course designed by Donald Ross that hosted the U.S. Open of 1919 won by Walter Hagen. Brae Burn, located in Newton, Massachusetts, bore Ross’s hallmark at its finest: greens with huge slopes, mostly from back to front. All players knew that the ball had to be left short of the hole. Stimpson, captain of the Harvard golf team, won the Massachusetts State Championship there in 1935. His victory was no surprise. Stimpson was a scholar of greens and the mentality of putting.
“He missed a 45-centimetre putt in the final of the New England Amateur Championship at the Rhode Island Country Club in 1926,” his son recounted. “After that, he never conceded a putt again. I played a lot of golf with him and never heard an ‘it’s given’. It left a mark.” At the same time, he was convinced that putting largely depended on knowing the speed of the greens, and in the 1930s, they were very inconsistent. He became a member of The Country Club (in Brookline, Massachusetts) and played many amateur tournaments. Stimpson already believed that a uniform measurement system could be implemented to help players and course caretakers.
He set out to find it himself and went down to his basement to work with wood and mathematical equations. “He was very analytical,” his son said. “He wanted to find a way to putt on tricky greens.” And what does all this have to do with that US Open at Oakmont in 1935? Well, it turns out that the stories that came from there, including the threat of a players’ strike, pushed Stimpson to seek the measuring instrument with more determination. He knew and admired Gene Sarazen and believed that golf did not need excessively fast greens. Thus, he created the first Stimpmeter in 1936, although the USGA did not officially adopt it until 1977.
“Throughout all those years, my father was in constant contact with members of the USGA executive committee, many of them members of The Country Club,” his son recounted. “He corresponded with many people in golf. They knew what the Stimpmeter was and used it on many occasions.” It simply was not official, although Stimpson attended Massachusetts Golf Association tournaments and some USGA events to measure the speed of the greens with his device. He would let a ball roll down a V-shaped wooden apparatus held about 38 centimetres off the ground and measured how far the ball went.
Stimpson’s passion for measuring the speed of the greens was never aimed at making them faster. In fact, “he would sit in his armchair to watch the Masters – his son recounted – and timed the putts, did his calculations, and I remember him telling Hord Hardin (then president of Augusta National): ‘your greens are too fast’.” Hardin replied:
“We do not keep records of the speed of the greens.” What Hardin did not know was that data on the speeds of Augusta’s greens were being sent to Stimpson, who became even more determined in his crusade upon seeing he was right.
In 1977, Frank Thomas of the USGA dusted off the Stimpmeter, adjusted it, and the USGA Speedstick was born. If Stimpson felt offended, he never said so. But when a member of The Country Club and his fervent supporter, Arthur Rice, insisted that the device should be called “Stimpmeter,” the claim was successful. Also, the public recognition. During the last three years of his life, Edward Stimpson received many accolades. He died in 1985 at the age of 80, but his legacy has remained forever in golf. And yes, in some way, the birth of the Stimpmeter is intimately linked to Oakmont, considered by many to have the fastest average greens in the United States. Even though Stimpson was never there…
We will see what the Stimpmeter says about the speed of Oakmont’s greens this week.
