Editor’s Note: Lifelong Flossmoor resident Tom Dobrez has authored the definitive history of the village. His book, to be released in mid-November, is “A More Perfect Place-The Story of Flossmoor.” In conjunction with Flossmoor’s Future, the Foundation for the Preservation of Flossmoor History and Vicki Stephenson of HF Homes, there will be a movie to accompany the book. A history trolley tour around the village and the movie’s premiere are planned for Nov. 29. Details are at FlossmoorHistorybook.com. The book can be ordered at flossmoorhistorybook.com or purchased at Gypsy Fix in Flossmoor.
The Homewood-Flossmoor Chronicle is sharing a segment from the book’s Chapter 2.
Where the Streets Have Golf Names
“Hail the Gang’s All Here!” proclaimed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on Sept. 17, 1923, the headline quivering with excitement. The nation’s sporting elite had descended upon a village that, in the curious way of American ambition, existed before it had a name. The 1923 U.S. Amateur Championship had brought the luminaries of the fairway to the gentle rises and swales of a country club built a quarter-century earlier. A place whose very name evokes the Scottish origins of the game itself — Flossmoor. They came to compete against the best in the game at the crown jewel of American sport in the days before professional golf commanded the public’s imagination.
In these late summer days, when Calvin Coolidge occupied the White House and America’s prosperity seemed without limit, the names that filled the competitive roster were made up of golf royalty: Bobby Jones, Francis Ouimet, Chick Evans, Bob Gardner, the reigning Amateur champion Jess Sweetser, and a cagey veteran named Max Marston. They were drawn to test their mettle against the “real rough” of Flossmoor. Cheering them were thousands who came by rail, stepping from the Illinois Central train cars onto a platform that served a village not yet born.
These titans of the golf world navigated the “untrammeled sweeps of Flossmoor” in match play format. Each hole becomes its own battlefield. The victor determined not in cumulative strokes but in holes won and lost. For the legendary Bobby Jones, the tournament would deliver a bitter lesson he would later transform into triumph. After falling to Marston in the second round, Jones experienced what female golf star Patty Berg would later call the “Flossmoor realization.” The epiphany that his true opponent was not the other players but the golf course itself.
This enlightened focus, which Jones detailed in his classic memoir “Down the Fairway,” would become the foundation of his approach to championship golf. After his defeat at Flossmoor, Jones would embark on one of sport’s most remarkable runs, winning four of the next five U.S. Amateur championships and prevailing in 18 of his next 20 matches.
Ouimet, whose victory over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the 1913 U.S. Open had catapulted American golf onto the world stage, stalked the Chicago south suburban fairways in search of another title. Chick Evans entered as a tournament favorite, playing on what many considered his home course. And Jess Sweetser sought to cement his place in golfing lore by repeating as champion. All their hopes would be dimmed by a veteran no one saw coming.
Max Marston, a 31-year-old Philadelphian with steady nerves and strategic cunning, would ultimately inscribe his name in the championship ledger in a match described by the Boston Globe as “one of the greatest battles in golf history.” Marston’s final match against Sweetser unfolded as a titanic struggle, extending beyond the scheduled 36 holes when the competitors remained deadlocked after a full day’s play. Marston’s victory hinged upon his mastery of the “stymie” — that curious rule, since relegated to golf’s antiquarian past, which permitted a player’s ball to remain in place even if it obstructed an opponent’s path to the hole. (Not until 1952 would the universal practice of marking one’s ball on the green become standard procedure.) On Flossmoor’s long par-three second hole, Marston would effectively block Sweetser’s path to the hole, clearing his way to victory as “the gamest but not the greatest amateur walked off with the title.”
The tournament’s conclusion unleashed what the Chicago Tribune described as an “excited mob” of spectators. “The great gallery, weary and excited, sprinted again, wave after wave down the hills, charged over bridges, and spread into a skirmish line 300 yards long,” the front-page story capturing the democratic fervor of the moment. “The gallery was almost beyond control then. Women scaled the mounds, crawled up the hills at the back of the green, lifted skirts, and raced with the men for points of vantage.”
In that moment, as thousands converged to witness Marston’s triumph, Flossmoor transcended its status as a simple golf course. It became hallowed ground in the American sporting consciousness — a place where history was made before the town that bears its name had even come into existence. Such is the peculiar alchemy of place and time, when a patch of earth becomes, through the convergence of human drama and collective witness, something greater than the sum of its fairways and greens. The little golf gem would soon become a village built on vision and individual contributions of its populace. If a town needs a starting point, Flossmoor’s is clearly the first tee.
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