Heroes of Golf: Vernon Macan

Architect Ahead of his Time

By Jeff Mingay

Vernon Macan arrived in Victoria, British Columbia in May 1912, and was surprised he had missed the golf season. Canadian winters are kind to this provincial capital on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and without mechanical mowers, it was far easier to keep fairways and greens playable during the winter months, when grasses are dormant.

Macan shrugged off his scheduling error and made plans to enter the 1912 British Columbia Amateur championship that December at Victoria Golf Club. An accomplished tournament golfer, Macan had won often in his native Ireland and fared well in Britain too. Two years earlier, he had advanced to the third round of the British Amateur, losing a hard fought match to J.E. Laidlay at Hoylake. So it came as no surprise when Macan defeated the perpetual provincial champion, Harvey Combe, by five strokes to claim the 1912 BC Amateur title. The following year, Macan repeated as provincial champion and also won the Washington State Amateur championship and the prestigious Pacific Northwest Amateur. In doing so, he became a recognized authority in the region on all matters concerning the game, including course architecture, for which he had a true passion.

As early as 1913, Macan's first 18-hole golf course design was unveiled at Colwood Golf Club on the outskirts of Victoria. During his years on the golf team at Dublin’s Trinty College in the late 1890s, Macan made several trips to St. Andrews, Scotland, out of which sprang a lifelong love affair with The Old Course. In the spirit of St. Andrews, his Colwood featured wide fairways and large, rolling greens. It was the first course in British Columbia - perhaps the Pacific Northwest - to be laid-out in a strategic style, so as to cater to golfers of all abilities.

"I do not believe super tests of professional golfer's skills is the answer to golf course development," Macan wrote years later. "Take care of the man who pays the bills. He is the foundation of our clubs. Any great golf course must supply maximum enjoyment to the mass of a club membership and is incidentally a fine test of golf."

Colwood, which was granted an official "Royal" prefix by King George V in 1931, proved to be the first of some 70 layouts designed or remodeled by Macan between 1913 and 1964. His work not only revolutionized the art of golf course design in the Pacific Northwest, but also had a profound impact on the development of the game along the west coast during the first half of the 20th century.

Born in Dublin on May 23, 1882, Vernon Macan attended Shrewsbury School as a boy and was introduced to golf at nearby Shrewsbury Golf Club around 1891. His father, and namesake, Dr. Arthur Vernon Macan, was a prominent physician, knighted in 1903 for his outstanding contribution to medicine in Great Britain. During the late 1880s, shortly after his own wife had died during childbirth, Dr. Macan instigated sweeping changes to standard hospital practices (principally in regard to hygiene) that almost instantly reduced the childbirth mortality rate in Dublin from 90 to 10 percent.

In 1900, Vernon Macan enrolled at his father's alma mater, Trinty College. But rather than pursue a career in medicine, he elected to study law. Macan's decision had very little to due with any sincere interest in becoming a barrister, writes his biographer, Michael Riste. Rather, it’s more likely Macan sought to become a lawyer because the local bar association had a golf club affiliated with the seaside links at Portmarnock.

Following his marriage to Juliet Richard in 1911, Macan went to work for his father-in-law at the Richard Law Firm in Dublin. Within a year, his lack of interest in the profession was obvious, and Mr. Richard presented him with an ultimatum: Practice law or practice your golf? Macan chose the latter. And when he left for Victoria the following spring, without his pregnant wife in tow, there was speculation Macan was a "remittance man" –one who had accepted financial incentive from his family to leave Ireland and never return. This speculation has never been confirmed.

Macan laid-out one more course at Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island prior to the outbreak of the First World War. By that time, Julia and his newborn daughter had joined him in Victoria.

Although he was 33 years old with a professional designation that presumably could have exempted him from active military service, Macan voluntarily enlisted with the 88th Victoria Fusiliers in January 1916. He was trained as a machine-gunner and, on April 10, 1917, participated in the Allied assault on Vimy Ridge in France. During the early hours of that legendary battle, Macan was struck in the left foot with an exploded shell casing and was immediately evacuated to London. He remained in a critical state for nearly a month, and the severity of his wounds eventually resulted in the amputation of his left leg from the knee down. It was not until early December 1917 that Macan was permitted to leave hospital, at which time he returned with his wife and young daughter to Dublin.

Throughout his recovery in Ireland, Macan read and re-read all of the available literature on golf course design and construction he could get his hands on, including John L. Low's landmark book, Concerning Golf, published in 1904. Low was the first to codify a set of principles for golf course design. His writings were a major influence on the master architects of the so-called Golden Age of Golf Design, between the wars, Macan included.

On October 11, 1919, Macan returned with his family to British Columbia. The next day, despite the loss of his left leg, he won The Bostock Cup competition at Victoria. Macan’s golfing skill did not decline following the war: His handicap only increased by two points - from 4 to 6.

In 1922, Colwood hosted the Pacific Northwest Golf Association championships. It was largest field ever assembled for the event and nearly all in attendance were enamoured with the golf course. Shortly thereafter, Macan was entertaining a plethora of proposals to design new courses and remodel old ones. Between 1922 and '25, he was in fact the busiest golf course designer in the Pacific Northwest, with projects in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California.

Later in his life, Macan claimed to have worked for every club in Portland with the exception of Portland Golf Club. It was a proud personal moment when his 1924 layout at Portland's Alderwood Country Club was selected to host the 1937 United States Amateur, the first USGA event ever staged in the Pacific Northwest. In the end, Macan was satisfied with the champion: Johnny Goodman, winner of the US Open in 1933, who defeated Ray Billows 1 up in the final.

Macan had considered Alderwood, which no longer exists, to be his finest work. Then he completed Shaughnessy in 1960. Laid-out on a spacious, rolling tract of land along the Fraser River, Shaughnessy benefited from the free hand and generous budget provided to its designer. Macan boldly peppered wide fairways with centrally-located bunkers to create an array of optional routes. And he built large greens, some of which featured massive interior contour and others that retreated from the line of approach. Pitching greens from front to back was a common scheme employed by Macan to promote an earth-bound game.

"I design some of my greens to suit the run-up type of shot," he told Harry Young, the long-time golf columnist for Victoria's Daily Colonist newspaper, in 1963. "This is one of the great shots in golf, but very few of today's top players can execute it. That is why they criticize my work."

During the 1966 Canadian Open, won by Don Massingale, the professionals indeed criticize Macan's work at Shaughnessy. Many of the pros, Jack Nicklaus included, were perplexed when their lofty approach shots would pitch on the front portion of a green and carom over the back. Macan, who passed away in 1964 at the age of 82, was not there to defend his design ideals, but he had explained his thoughts on green design to a group of Shaughnessy members who, years earlier, had voiced similar concerns.

"Today, the uninformed believe a green should be constructed with the slope from back to front, so that it will retain the ball," he said. "In brief, this suggests the shot should be a mechanical operation and the result a mathematical certainty. This is not the game of golf. Golf was not conceived as a mechanical operation but rather full of fun and adventure. Many things could happen to the ball after it pitched on the green. The ill-happenings were not regarded as ill-fortune or ill-luck, but part of the adventure, and the more skilled found methods to overcome the risks of ill-fortune.

"I personally could ask for no better compliment than for a course I have designed to be criticized as calling for a maximum of golfing brain power," he vehemently added. Unfortunately, Macan's work at Shaughnessy has been significantly altered, leaving little more than his original routing intact today.

Robert Trent Jones, Sr. who many modern pundits consider to be the most successful golf course designer in history, described Macan as a man ahead of his own time, particularly in regard to the design of his greens. Speaking with Riste about Macan's work in 1990, Trent Jones said, "Today, the professionals have become so proficient at playing shots from 150 yards and less that the greens must be designed to make this shot more difficult."

Trent Jones speculated that had Macan set up shop on the East Coast, he would be as revered today as his most respected contemporaries, including Donald Ross and A.W. Tillinghast. Macan's brilliant work was so regional in scope that his celebrity remains confined to a small number of clubs in the Pacific Northwest. Though he had arrived there a season off-schedule, he would prove to be a man ahead of his time.

This article appears in the January/February 2002 issue of LINKS magazine

A majority of the information presented here, about the life and works of Vernon Macan, is attributable to thousands of hours of remarkable volunteer research and writing by Michael Riste of Vancouver. Riste is a golf historian, researcher and writer – heavily involved with the British Columbia Golf Museum – who took a special interest in Macan, and has produced a yet unpublished biography. Riste has been of great assist to golf clubs throughout the Pacific Northwest, providing invaluable historical information about Macan the golf architect and his course designs.