Marion Hollins
(2019)

One of the most accomplished sportswomen of her day, Marion Hollins was a national champion at golf, an exceptional horsewoman (the New York Times described her in her teens as the greatest woman rider in the country), a local tennis champ, outstanding sharpshooter, competitive swimmer, a canny entrepreneur, and a guiding force behind three exceptional golf clubs on two coasts.

Born in East Islip, Long Island, on December 3, 1892, her father owned a Wall Street brokerage firm and was also the first president of the Metropolitan Golf Association. She did not take up competitive golf until she was 19, yet almost immediately reached the finals of the Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association’s championship (now the Women’s Met Am). A year later, in 1913, she won her first WMGA amateur championship, at Nassau C.C., and also reached the finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Wilmington C.C. In 1915, she was named Secretary of the WMGA. In addition, she was the captain of the U.S. Curtis Cup team for the first Matches, held at Wentworth Golf Club in England, in 1932 and won by the U.S., 5 ½ – 3 1/2.

Her accomplishments off the course were as impressive. She founded the National Women’s Golf & Tennis Club in Glen Head, N.Y., drawing members from around the country to her vision of a club run by and for women. She worked with Devereux Emmet on laying out the course, travelling to Great Britain and bringing back photographs of the holes she favored as inspiration for the design. The club did not survive the Depression, but the course exists today as Glen Head Country Club.

In 1926 she headed west to California, where she was introduced to Samuel F.B. Morse, who was in the process of developing the Monterey Peninsula. Pebble Beach, which opened in 1919, was an immediate success, and Hollins latched on as developer of the second course on the Peninsula, Cypress Point. Seth Raynor had already begun working on a design, but after Raynor’s death she hired Alister MacKenzie to create the course. Working closely with MacKenzie, she made a golf course that is perennially ranked among the world’s best; a few years later they created Pasatiempo in Santa Cruz, California, where MacKenzie lived in a house off the sixth fairway. MacKenzie was chosen by Bobby Jones to aid in the design of a new course in Augusta, Ga.; when his health deteriorated, he sent Hollins east to contribute ideas to what became Augusta National Golf Club.

Hollins died in 1944 in Pacific Grove. As a child of Long Island, a leading golfer with multiple Metropolitan titles, a trailblazing entrepreneur and creator of three golf courses that are still played and revered nearly a hundred years later, she is a most worthy selection for induction into the initial class of the MGA Hall of Merit.