Marion Hollins : Visionary Golf Course Architect & Pioneer of the Game

Pebble Beach - Women’s National Golf & Tennis Club - Cypress Point Club - Pasatiempo - Augusta National

 

Marion Hollins:

A Woman Ahead of Her Time

 

Marion Hollins’s Outstanding
Contributions to Golf

The summary below was provided by the members of Pasatiempo Golf Club and the Cypress Point Club. It is the same information that was considered by the Nominating and Selection Committees of the World Golf Hall of Fame prior to their April 2020 decision to induct Marion Hollins into the WGHOF.

In her time, Marion Hollins was widely considered a peer and equal to several other women amateurs already inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame. Her contributions as a pioneering woman in golf remain important a century later as a role model for women seeking to make their own distinctive mark on the game today, especially as we look forward to some events scheduled in the near future.

The 2022 World Golf Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will take place 101 years after Marion Hollins’ victory in the 1921 U.S. Women’s Amateur. Soon to follow, the 2025 Walker Cup Match will return for the second time to Cypress Point Club, a course that owes its very existence to the determination of founder Marion Hollins and remains without equal as the most important course ever developed by a woman.

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“I was in no way responsible for the hole.
It was largely due to the vision of Marion Hollins.”

Course architect Dr. Alister MacKenzie
describing how the iconic 16th hole at
Cypress Point Club was created

There is perhaps no more iconic hole in the world of golf than the 16th at Cypress Point, and certainly none more directly attributable to a woman. Prior to Cypress Point’s construction in the late-1920s Marion Hollins demonstrated the viability of the hole as a par-3 for all golfers - male or female - by driving a ball across a 200- yard expanse of the Pacific Ocean, landing in the middle of the future site of the 16th green. As course designer Dr. Alister Mackenzie (WGHOF 2005) later wrote, “I was in no way responsible for the hole. It was largely due to the vision of Marion Hollins.”

While Hollins was also a decorated, multi-sport athlete who headlined the generation before Babe Zaharias (WGHOF 1974), her greatest love was golf and her greatest contributions continue to set the standard for golf design and the development of courses, public and private, which are visited and studied to this day by golfers from around the world. Just as new generations of golf architecture enthusiasts have come to appreciate C.B. Macdonald as an amateur champion and innovative course developer in the years following his 2005 induction, so too would appreciation increase for Marion Hollins, Macdonald’s contemporary and female counterpart.

While other amateurs in the Hall may have won more championships, and other contributors may have established more prominent reputations as leaders and visionaries, no woman member of the World Golf Hall of Fame today possesses Marion Hollins’ combination of accomplishments as a both a player and developer of the game’s great courses. Her credentials as U.S. Amateur Champion, as a leader in the women’s game as an early chair of the USGA Women’s Committee and as Captain of the first USA Curtis Cup team, stand alongside her pioneering work as the developer or architect of the Women’s National Golf & Tennis Club in 1923, Cypress Point Club in 1928, and Pasatiempo Golf Club in 1929, among others.

Marion Hollins: Golf Pioneer

U.S. Women’s Amateur Champion (1921)
U.S. Captain of the first Curtis Cup (1932)

  • Qualified 15 times for the US Women’s Amateur Championship–a runner-up in her first attempt, won in 1921

  • Women’s Metropolitan GolfAssociation (MGA) Championship–three-time champion

  • Long Island Championship–twice champion

  • Griswold Cup Challenge–1920 champion

  • Pebble Beach Women’s Championship: 7-Time Champion

The Women's National Golf & Tennis Club (1923):

At a time when women had only recently won the right to vote, Hollins developed the concept of a national women’s golf club. She worked to procure the necessary land, assemble the financing, recruited the members, and oversaw the course construction. Prior to finding the land, she traveled to Great Britain with a camera and small motion picture outfit to scout for holes that fit her vision for the course, following the C.B. MacDonald model. She hired and worked with Devereaux Emmet, who was assisted by C.B. MacDonald and Seth Raynor in the final stages.

Pebble Beach (1922):

Hollins was hired by Sam Morse as Athletic Director and given a leading role in achieving Morse’s dream for the Del Monte Company: to develop the Monterey Peninsula into a golf mecca. 

She initiated several leading golf tournaments for both men and women. In 1923, Hollins launched the Pebble Beach Championship for Women, bringing some of the nation’s top women amateurs to compete at Pebble Beach Golf Links; Hollins won the tournament herself that year and dominated for the next several years, winning five of the first six tournaments. The Pebble Beach Championship for Women soon became the unofficial West Coast Championship.

Cypress Point Club (1928):

Hollins was a primary force in the vision and formation of the famous club. In 1924, Hollins presented Morse with the concept for an elite private club in Pebble Beach. Morse was so impressed that he reserved 150 acres for the project and put her in charge to develop what would eventually become Cypress Point Club. Around the same time, Hollins was assisting Morse with developing the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Morse selected C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor as designers, in part for their contributions to Hollins’ Women’s National Club on Long Island. 

When Seth Raynor died, Hollins hired Alister MacKenzie, whom she met previously while competing in the UK, to design Cypress Point Club. Hollins worked with MacKenzie hole-by-hole on Cypress Point Club. Her shot-making contribution to the design of the 16th hole made it one of the most celebrated, challenging and beautiful golf holes in the world when it opened, and still remains that way today.

Pasatiempo (1929):

Hollins developed and owned Pasatiempo Golf Club near Santa Cruz, an Alister MacKenzie course that opened in 1929. It was the first planned sporting complex/residential complex in North America. Bobby Jones attended at Hollins’ request and played with Hollins in the exhibition group on Opening Day. Jones’ experience playing MacKenzie designs at Cypress Point and Pasatiempo was a key factor in Jones’ decision to select MacKenzie as co-designer of Augusta National.

Augusta National (1931):

Hollins first met Bobby Jones and played with him in an exhibition arranged by Jones at East Lake in Atlanta. Their friendship continued through the 1929 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach and this relationship became key to the development of Augusta National, including Jones’ selection of Alister MacKenzie as co-designer of the course. 

In addition to fostering the MacKenzie relationship, Hollins was instrumental in the founders’ (Jones and Clifford Roberts) decision to select the Olmsted Brothers as landscaping planners. Jones and Roberts used Pasatiempo Estates as a blueprint for Augusta National. MacKenzie sent Hollins to Augusta as his representative and asked her to report back her valued impressions of the course as it was being constructed. 

Roberts questioned MacKenzie as to whether he should be at Augusta to supervise the course development himself, MacKenzie wrote, “I want her views and personal impressions in regard to the way that the work is being carried out,” and added in a subsequent letter, “I do not know of any man who has sounder ideas.”