Genevieve Hecker Stout (2020)

“By all odds the best woman player in the United States whom I have seen is Mrs. Charles T. Stout… Never have I seen a player display more ideal form than does she in every particular…. Besides the beautiful style in which she plays, the main beauty of her game is that it is so evenly developed, and not one stroke perfected at the expense of others.”

That was the opinion of two-time British Ladies Amateur champion Rhona Adair, expressed in a chapter she contributed to Golf For Women, the first instruction book written specifically for female golfers. Its author – the aforementioned Mrs. Stout — was a lifelong Met Area resident, two-time U.S. Women’s Amateur winner, four-time Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association champion, and contributor to the magazine Golf — the first woman to write extensively about the game.

Genevieve Hecker was born in Darien, Conn., in 1883 into a family in the milling business (Hecker’s flour). They belonged to Wee Burn Country Club; in 1899 there were four Heckers facing off in the semifinals of the club championships: 15-year-old Genevieve and her sister Louise in the women’s, and their brothers George and Fred in the men’s. (Genevieve and George triumphed, and both went on to win their respective finals.) She got her first exposure to the national scene that year in the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Philadelphia Country Club, where she qualified for match play but fell in the first round. Nonetheless, many took notice of her game and pegged her as a coming star.

At the 1900 Women’s Met championship (the Amateur, as there were no women professionals at the time), the 16-year-old Hecker defeated three-time U.S. titleholder Beatrix Hoyt in the semifinals, and then trounced the reigning U.S. champ Ruth Underhill 9 and 7 in the finals. The New York Times  noted, “With one-half of the match finished, Miss Hecker stood 8 up and had made a new woman’s record for the nine holes of 45 strokes, a score that barely half a dozen men of the club are able to make.”

Her play was not as breathtaking in the 1901 Met final at Nassau CC, but she again defeated Underhill, this time 2 and 1 (after taking a 5-up lead with five to play). Four months later at Baltusrol she won her first Cox Trophy – the same trophy awarded in the event today — as USGA Women’s champion; a year later, now playing out of Apawamis, she made it back-to-back national titles at The Country Club in Brookline. (The Times noted on the second occasion, “Miss Hecker played a magnificent game, her driving was superb, her putting less weak than usual, and her honors were thoroughly won.”)

In April 1903, at age 19, she married Charles T. Stout of Staten Island. He first saw her at the Women’s Am at Baltusrol in ’01; he told the Times that her brilliant play was what attracted him to her. Thereafter it would be as Mrs. Charles T. Stout that she continued to make her mark on Met Area golf.

Her most lasting contribution to the game is her book Golf for Women, published in 1904 by Baker & Taylor. Noting that “there had never been a book which presented the Royal and Ancient game to the feminine inquiring mind,” she undertook the task herself. She presents the fundamentals of grip, stance, swing, and follow-through in admirable detail, with just enough emphasis on the unique female perspective. “Perhaps the greatest fault among women [golfers] is impatience. They are so anxious to make their shot that many and many a time they step up to the ball and play it with no more than a casual glance.” She notes later that “(w)omen, I am proud to say, show a relatively greater degree of nerve in golf than do men, and particularly is this so when on the putting-green.”

Though she never again reached a national finals, she won the Women’s Met in 1905 and ’06, and when the WMGA released its first handicap list in 1910, she was assigned the lowest figure in the region at plus-one. She and Charles raised two sons, John M. and Charles H. She stepped away from competitive golf (playing, she estimated, eight rounds in a dozen years), and when she returned and won a WMGA one-day event at Siwanoy in 1925, the Times called it “one of the most remarkable comebacks in the history of golf.” She continued to compete in local tournaments and matches at least through the 1920s.

She passed away on July 29, 1960, at her home on West Seventy-Seventh Street. She is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery; there is no individual marker for her, and she is presumed to be in the same plot as her husband Charles, who had died thirteen years earlier. Her golf was but a small slice of her life, but her accomplishments and contributions make her well worthy of inclusion in the MGA Hall of Merit.

Photos Courtesy USGA.