Saying Goodbye to a Friend

Thoughts on writing, golf, and friendship.

As many of you know, for much of the past decade, I have been writing a book about my great-great-grandmother, Bessie Anthony — winner of the 1903 U.S. Women’s Amateur and the first Western woman to take home the country’s highest golf prize. In writing a book about an early feminist trailblazer, I feel compelled to share that many of my biggest supporters have been men. Today, I want to talk about three of these men — golf historians John Connolly, John Moran, and Don Holton — who together make up what they like to call the “Bessie fan club.” Just as Bessie leaned on her “Old Steadys” Laurie Auchterlonie and Richard Leslie during some of the toughest moments of her career, John, John, and Don have faithfully stuck by my side, never wavering in their belief in me or my book. “We are your musketeers, and musketeers have to stick together,” John Connolly often likes to remind me.

Tim and I with John Connolly, John Moran, and Don Holton at the Chicago Golf Club (June 2021)

This spring, we lost Don after a long and difficult battle with ALS. Don was the historian at the Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park, Illinois — a place that figures prominently in Bessie’s story. Built in 1896 on a 100-acre farm about twenty-three miles north of Chicago, Exmoor was named in honor of R.D. Blackmore’s popular English novel, Lorna Doone, thanks to its whirling brooks and moorish-like terrain. Both then and now, the club makes quite an impact with its towering Doric columns and sprawling verandas, which overlook what is still one of the toughest courses in the U.S. It was on this course where, in September 1903, Bessie won her THIRD consecutive Women’s Western Amateur before taking home the national women’s championship in October.

Exmoor Country Club from The Golfer’s Green Book (1901)

I first met Don in 2018, when he invited me to Exmoor to explore the club’s archives. Needless to say, it was one of the coolest days of my life. From sunup to sundown, he took me and John Connolly around the entire course and clubhouse, showing us the archive while sharing amazing story after amazing story. After treating us to lunch, he had the idea to take my picture in the very same spot where Bessie’s picture was taken at the 1903 Women’s Western Amateur, 115 years before.

A slideshow Don made of our day together…a day of memories indeed!

As Exmoor’s historian, Don had been working for years on a biography of Exmoor member and Bessie’s contemporary H. Chandler Egan (1884-1936), who famously took home two consecutive national championships in 1904 and 1905 as well as the gold medal at the 1904 Summer Olympic Games. At a time when Brits and Scots were still predominant, Egan completely revolutionized the game, and many regarded him as “the best golfer in the world.”

A phenomenal article Don wrote about H. Chandler Egan for Pebble Beach Magazine in 2016.

From his three grandsons, Don inherited Egan’s archive, encompassing seventeen scrapbooks, thousands of newspaper articles, and dozens of medals and trophies, including his Olympic medal. As is the case with so many sports legends from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Egan’s grandsons had no idea about their grandfather’s story until their mother, Egan’s daughter, passed away in 2012 at the age of 101. “The sons knew their mom had ‘grandpa’s stuff’ in the attic,” Don wrote to me, “but they never looked seriously until her death.”

A small snapshot of the Chandler Egan archive — an absolute treasure trove!

Over the next few years, Don and I became like writing pen pals. In emails, he talked about the responsibility he felt to illuminate Egan’s life and achievements and how connected he felt to him, as if they were in engaged in constant conversation. “What I would give to have been there,” he said of Exmoor’s earliest days when Egan was unstoppable. As we both worked on our respective books, Don sent me countless pictures, newspaper clippings, and books — anything he could find on Bessie — as he insisted that I keep at it, always reminding me that Bessie’s story was one that needed to be told. Perhaps my favorite part of our correspondence were all the quotes he would send me about writing. So often, writing a book can feel like a solitary, even selfish exercise, but Don made it feel like an “adventure” that was both meaningful and worthwhile. He understood what it was like to immerse oneself in a new time and place and to walk in another’s shoes. “Empathy,” he said, is the “prime directive” in telling another person’s story. Of course, he also understood that “the real test of a writer is whether he can edit his own work, especially when every word is pure gold.”

He was joking when he wrote that, but the thing is that was Don — pure gold.

Last weekend, Don’s family and friends gathered to celebrate his life at the North Shore Unitarian Church, where he was a member for many decades. Church, his wife Valerie said in her eulogy, was a big part of Don’s life, but so too was golf — what Valerie described as Don’s “second church of rolling hills, blue skies, and birdsong.” It was on the golf course where Don felt the keenest sense of the sacred; and it was also on the golf course where he never failed to astonish everyone with his swing — as “poetic and lyrical as a Mozart sonata,” Valerie said.

I never got the chance to speak to Don about what he believed happens after we die, if anything. What I do know is that his spirit will live on in the beautiful words he wrote, and that he will always be a part of this story.

So, for now, goodbye, “Old Steady,” and thank you for everything.

Thank you so much for reading.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

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