A Godchild’s Remembrance of Marion Hollins

By Phyllis Theroux

In 1939, the year I was born, my great-aunt Marion Hollins was 47 years old. In the only photograph I have of us together, she is cradling me in her arms, a large, strong featured woman, with chopped brown hair held back on one side by a barrette . She is wearing what she usually wore, a tweed skirt and cardigan sweater, golfer’s clothes - and she is smiling down with delight at her new god-child, a solemn-faced baby who is unaware that she is being held by a golfing legend. 

Everything about Marion Hollins was legendary. Born into a wealthy New York family, she grew up in the Gilded Age, among the barons of sugar, shipping, and railroads. Her father, Harry Bowley Hollins, was William K. Vanderbilt’s close friend and stock broker. She lived a charmed life on a 600 acre “place” in East Islip, Long Island called “Meadow Farm.” It was a child’s delight, with ponies, boats, tennis courts, a pond for ice skating and a private island on the Sound purchased by her father for duck hunting. Everything she needed to become her future self, including a pair of doting parents to give her confidence, was near at hand.

The wealth she grew up with was long gone by the time I was born, but within our family, stories about Marion were passed around like after-dinner mints, to savor amongst ourselves: how she bought out the inventory of Shreve’s in San Francisco when she went shopping, how she struck it rich by drilling for oil in what everybody else thought was a dry hole, how she knew famous people, like Will Rogers and Mary Pickford who came to visit her at “Pasatiempo” for her famous parties and sporting events. But above all else, Marion was a brilliant sports woman, winning the 1921 U.S. Women’s Amateur title, leading the victorious U.S. Curtis Cup team in 1932, and winning the Pebble Beach Open seven times - more or less effortlessly.

Marion was a natural athlete, who made it all seem like fun, which interested her more than fame. Until recently, fame wasn’t interested in her either. I cannot help but think that being a woman had something, perhaps everything to do with it. For of her accomplishments, on the golf course, she was breaking barriers off the course as well. David Outerbridge, author of Champion In A Man’s World, says it best:

“As Marion grew into womanhood, she displayed a well-developed sense of civic responsibility. When the United States nudged toward World War I she took all her trophies…and melted them down for the war effort…She donned a Red Cross uniform and made bandages for the front,…She marched under the Suffragette’s banner ‘Failure is Impossible.’ It was so much her own credo one wonders if she coined the slogan. She was photographed by the press on the avenues and at City Hall rallying support for women’s right to vote.”

These facts are rarely mentioned in stories about Marion Hollins, who is more well-known for starting the first all-women’s golf and tennis club in New York and carving out three world-class golf courses. But, in fact, she had many lives and careers, many of which she pursued simultaneously in a mere 52 years of life which was cut short by a car accident from which she never recovered.

Until then, she led a dazzling life, which died when she did, too young and too unacknowledged. But now her time has come. In 2022, Marion Hollins was inducted into the The World Golf Hall of Fame, in a class which included Tiger Woods. Both of them pushed against barriers, one of gender, the other of color. But in certain ways, I think my great aunt has had the larger influence upon the game. She not only played it like a champion, but she created courses upon which championships continue to be won.

Marion Hollins’ DNA is at work in her descendants, many of whom crackle with the same same high energy and enthusiasm. But her ability to see what isn’t there can’t be inherited, only admired. I do. She was a visionary. She turned obstacles into jumps and sailed across them. She looked at a sand dune and saw a world class golf course. Then, as she tramped over the future site of the 16th hole at Cypress Point, she confronted a question. Could a golf ball make it across the ocean to create a par 3 hole? Her companions said no, it couldn’t be done. Marion fished a golf ball out of her pocket and whacked it effortlessly across the water to land on the other side. Then she did it twice more, just to prove her point.

This is what visionaries do. They see what the rest of us can’t, and make believers out of us. It is what Marion Hollins did all her life.

Phyllis Theroux, who writes about Marion Hollins in her memoir, California & Other States of Grace, is her great-niece.