Matchless Book Review - GolfBlogger Golf Blog

Matchless: Joyce Wethered, Glenna Collett And The Rise of Women’s Golf
by Stephen Proctor
Grade: A+
Teacher’s Comments: A wonderful account of a largely forgotten part of golf’s history.

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The 1920s have aptly been called “The Golden Age of Sports.” Baseball, college football, boxing, auto racing, horse racing, golf and others dominated the headlines. Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby. Red Grange and George Gipp. Knute Rockne, Amos Alonzo Stagg and Pop Warner. Jim Thorpe and the fledgling NFL. Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. Bill Tilden and Rene Lacoste (yes, the shirt). Man O War and The Triple Crown. Gaston Chevrolet (yes, the car company is named for the driver), Indianapolis and Le Mans. Olympic Stars Johnny Weissmuller (later famous as Tarzan in the movies) and Paavo Nurmi.

And, of course, Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Chick Evans, Francis Ouimet, Ted Ray, Tommy Armour and other stars of the links.

Sadly forgotten by modern audiences, but also making headlines in the 1920s was a coterie of women golfers such as Joyce Wethered, Glenna Collett, Alexa Stirling, Cecil Leitch, Marion Hollins and Molly Gourlay.

Stephen Proctor’s Matchless is a long overdue look at women’s golf in the Golden Age of Sports, told through the framework of the careers of two players without peer: Joyce Weathered and Glenna Collett.

Wethered, an Englishwoman, was renowned for a swing that was compared to Bobby Jones. Indeed, frame by frame examination of film at the time found the two were nearly identical. Wethered won the British Ladies Amateur four times and the English Ladies Amateur Championship for five consecutive years. Wethered was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1975.

Collett, an American, was known for her powerful, accurate drives and strong iron play. She once drove a ball 307 yards off the tee. In 1924, she won 59 of 60 events she entered. She won six US Women’s Amateurs between 1922 and 1935 and 49 championships overall. She was a member of the American Team that won the first Curtis Cup, and served as player-captain in 1934, 1936, 1938 and 1948.

The LPGA’s Vare Trophy is named for Collett (her married name was Vare). Collett-Vare was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1975.

The two first met in competition at Troon at the 1925 British Ladies Amateur. Wethered defeated Collett 4-and-3 in the 18-hole semifinals. That match tripped off a transatlantic rivalry that had its peak in 1929 at the British Ladies Amateur at St. Andrews. That match, which takes an entire chapter of Proctor’s history, drew 10,000 spectators and left legendary golf writer Bernard Darwin without words: “Many epithets will be used the describe the flucuations fo the match and the quality of the play,” Darwin wrote. “I feel unqual to the effort.”

Collett never did defeat Wethered head to head.

Through the careers of these two legendary women, Proctor introduces the reader to other impactful, but largely forgotten women stars of that day.

I was particularly intrigued by Marion Hollins, who followed a fine playing career with an even more impactful career as a golf course developer. She was instrumental in the development of Cypress Point, Pasatiempo and the Women’s National Golf and Tennis Club on Long Island. She also worked as athletic director of Del Monte Properties.

Moly Gourlay was a British golfer who, after a top flight playing career, went on to become the first female golf architect.

In addition to describing the golf competition and players, Proctor draws a through line connecting the women’s game to larger societal changes in those days and also to more modern institutions. The LPGA, for example, is the result of the proof of concept pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s that people would turn out to see women’s golf. Ten thousand showed for the 1929 British Women’s Amateur. Wethered’s 1935 US exhibition tour drew significant crowds.

And, Proctor argues, sports in general and golf in particular were part of the larger picture:

Golf’s ongoing conversation about men and women had never been solely about performance on the field. Since the days when Lottie Dod was winning tennis and golf championships and scaling the world’s tallest mountains, sport had been merely another stage for demonstrating that there was no limit to what women might accomplish.

Proctor is a skilled writer who brings to life the lives of the women, of their competitions and of the time in which they played. Further, Matchless is meticulously researched, with thirty pages of notes and bibliography at the end. The combination of detail and vivid, but concise writing makes Matchless an engrossing read.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in golf history.

Also, check out my review of another of Proctor’s books: The Long Golden Afternoon, which covers golf history from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War.