Tag: Amateur Athletics

On a Tourney Win

Margaret Abbott was an American amateur golfer at a time when “ladies” didn’t really play competitive sports. She was born in 1878 in India where her parents had moved because her father had business there. Her mother was equally accomplished, becoming a newspaper reporter and literary editor for many newspapers in the United States. And Margaret herself lived a privileged, full, and varied life before dying in the 1950s. She studied in the United States and abroad, but it was while her family lived in Chicago that Margaret first began to take golf seriously.

And she was naturally athletic. A couple of local amateur golfers (true gentlemen of the time refrained from being crass professionals, don’t you know) from the club where her parents were members took Margaret under their wings and taught her all they knew about the game. Under their tutelage, Margaret’s golf game rapidly advanced far beyond others her gender and years. She won several tournaments in and around Chicago and beyond and developed a reputation for being a fierce competitor.

Then, in 1899, Margaret and her mother traveled (by themselves! Amazing!) to Paris for the pair of them to study art. Margaret’s mother also used the time to pen a travel book for American women who had the same desire, entitled A Woman’s Paris: A Handbook for Everyday Living in the French Capital. The two women had a wonderful time, enjoying all that the fin de siècle era Parisian culture had to offer.

It was while the pair were in France in the summer of 1900 that they noticed a newspaper article stating that, in association with all that was going on in Paris that year, a golf tournament was open for any and all entrants. And there was indeed a great number of events happening in Paris that summer. The Paris World Fair was held that year. The French capital city hosted the second incarnation of the modern Olympics that summer as well. The city was filled with tourists from across the globe. And then here was this golf tournament. Now, Margaret’s mother was no slouch at golf, either, and the mother-daughter team decided to enter the tournament.

And Margaret won. By two strokes. And Margaret’s mother finished the tournament a respectable seventh. And, for her win, Margaret was awarded a beautiful porcelain bowl that had gilded embellishments around it. The story of this American girl winning the Paris golf tournament made the US papers, but the story was quickly forgotten.

Margaret got married eventually upon her return to the United States. She raised a family. She played some golf, but an old knee injury made her give up the sport. Almost thirty years after her death, her son, Philip, received a phone call from a professor at the University of Florida, a woman named Dr. Paula Welch. Dr. Welch asked Philip about his mother, about her life and then about what she told him of the tournament she won in Paris three-quarters of a century earlier.

Philip was surprised. His mother really hadn’t spoken much about it, he said sheepishly. I mean, he said, it was only another tournament, and she competed in many during that time. According to Philip, Dr. Welch was silent on the other end of the phone line for a moment. In fact, he wasn’t sure if the professor were still there. Finally, Dr. Welch spoke, and what she said stunned Margaret’s son.

“You mean your mother didn’t tell you that she was the first American woman to have won a gold medal in the Olympics?” she asked.

On a Savage Defeat

The college baseball team from Tennessee was really, really good. In fact, the team was suspiciously too good. As it rampaged its way through other college and university teams across the southern United States in 1916, the scores they racked up raised eyebrows among the teams they defeated along the way. Something was fishy, here.

It used to be that there was a sharp division between professional athletes and amateur sportsmen. Amateur sports were gentlemanly, they were more about competing and doing your best and learning life lessons rather than winning. That applied to collegiate athletics as well. So, when it became increasingly clear that this small private school from middle Tennessee was most likely using professional baseball players to build a reputation for itself, it rankled people closely associated with amateur athletics.

One of the people who was furious about this situation was legendary football coach John Heisman. Heisman was a passionate stickler for keeping college athletics pure and untainted by what he considered the vulgarity of professional sports. And, on top of that passion, Heisman was also the baseball coach for Georgia Tech University, a team this group of “ringers” from Tennessee had beaten.

The pros not only easily beat Heisman’s college boys, but they actually embarrassed both Heisman and his team by blanking the Yellow Jacket ball players by the score of 22-0. Now, if another institution of higher learning fielded a baseball team with amateur student-athletes and beat Heisman’s team, then the ol’ ball coach would have accepted that. But Heisman also knew that true gentlemen, true sportsmen, shouldn’t take pride in humiliating other amateurs who were playing sports to better themselves and not to win at all costs. And he hated cheaters.

Heisman vowed to get revenge, ten-fold. And he did.

That year before, in 1915, Tech had agreed to play the same Tennessee college in the other sport Heisman coached, football. However, the college had disbanded its football team in the interim months. When it became time to play the football game in the fall of 1916, the college sheepishly wrote Heisman to say that they no longer had a football team. Heisman insisted. He pointed to the contract that said the two schools would play each other in both baseball and football. He said that Tech would be entitled to receive $3000 dollars in 1916 money for the little college to break the contract.

And so, little Cumberland College of Lebanon, Tennessee, put together a team of college kids who’d never played organized football before and traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to play mighty Georgia Tech in football. This time, there would be no pro players for Cumberland.

Heisman got his revenge for Cumberland using pro baseball players by eviscerating the visiting team.

The final score?

222-0.