According to IBKÜL’s Northern California sales rep and Meadow Club champion Pat Lyle, “ALL the foreign clubs loved our golf tops. Second day we wore navy mini check. The Australian gals wanted to buy our shirts right off our backs!” (Camille Print Long Sleeve Mock Neck Top 10076)
The ladies from the Meadow Club in California stole the show in their IBKÜL golf tops at a recent tournament at Moortown Country Club in Leeds, England.
Moortown and Meadow Club are but two of the more than 50 golf courses designed by Dr. Alister MacKenzie, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, including 3 that remain in the 2016 top 10 golf courses in the world: Augusta National Golf Club and Cypress Point Club in the USA, and Royal Melbourne Golf Club (West Course) in Australia.
This architect of some of the world’s finest courses spanning four continents was also a surgeon, a designer of military camouflage and the author articles and books on golf course design, one published posthumously.
Alister MacKenzie was born near Leeds in 1870. He graduated from Leeds and Cambridge Universities with degrees in chemistry, medicine, and science and joined his father’s medical practice as a GP. As a civilian doctor serving with the British Army in the Boer War (1900-01 he observed the effectiveness of the concealed trenches and camouflage techniques of the Boers. It’s said that MacKenzie used this experience to add subtlety and disguise to his course designs.
An avid golfer, in 1907 he became a founding member and Captain of The Alwoodley Club in Leeds, which was his first course design, followed by Moortown in 1909. From that time until his death 25 year later, Dr. MacKenzie designed, redesigned, or consulted on the design of roughly 65 courses on four continents, a prodigious record, particularly given the limited travel options of the time.
Alister MacKenzie would design many famous clubs in the United States, but in 1927 Meadow Club became his first course design in North America, in his first collaboration with Robert Hunter. An exceptionally beautiful location in Marin County California, it exemplifies MacKenzie’s philosophy: “The chief object of every golf architect or greenkeeper worth his salt is to imitate the beauties of nature so closely as to make his work indistinguishable from nature itself.”
