By 1896, Shinnecock was a well-established club and was selected as the site of that year's U.S. Open. One of the participants in the 1896 Open was John Shippen, who had helped to build the course. Shippen's mother was a Shinnecock Indian and his father was a Black minister. Dunn had befriended him and taught him how to play the game.

When some of the club members sponsored Shippen in the Open, many of the other professionals vehemently objected. However, the first president of the USGA, the sugar magnate Theodore Havemeyer, declared that Shippen was just as eligible to play as anyone else. Havemeyer's decisions helped set the precedent that the U.S. Open is genuinely "open" to any qualifier and enabled John Shippen to become the first player of black ancestry to compete in a golf championship.

While Shinnecock was hosting the championship in 1896, one of its members, 17-year-old Beatrix Hoyt, was competing in her first U.S. Women's Championship. Hoyt, the granddaughter of Salmon P. Chase, who was Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, won the title three straight times and then "retired" from competition at the age of 20. She never married and became a landscape painter and sculptor of animals.

Shinnecock Hills was also the trendsetter for the social exclusiveness that became characteristic of prominent clubs. It was the first course to boast a clubhouse, which ever since have become accepted as de rigeur. Moreover, the clubhouse was designed by Stanford White, the legendary architect of the period. By the turn of the century, Shinnecock had become the first American golf club to be incorporated and have a waiting list.

All of the luminaries who belonged to Shinnecock Hills over the years learned the game under the strict tutelage of a single task-master. Born in County Angus, Scotland, Charlie Thom emigrated to America in 1898 and became the professional at Shinnecock in 1906. He retired in 1961, but at age 96 Charlie Thom is still a fixture of Shinnecock Hills. A truly great player who never felt the need to prove his talents by playing on the tour, Thom is a throwback to the early Scotch golfing missionaries who devoted their lives to spreading the gospel of the game.

One well-known story about Thom has to do with the time he went into New York City to pick up baseball tickets from a Shinnecock member named Charles Steele, a partner in the firm of the famous financier J.P. Morgan. When he arrived, Steele was in a board meeting with Morgan himself, so Thom sent in a note that read: "THE KING OF SHINNECOCK IS WAITING TO SEE MR. STEELE." Thom was then welcomed into the meeting and introduced around. Before he left, Morgan handed him a $20 gold piece, saying, "I don't ever want anyone to say he wasn't paid for the time he spent in conference here."

Charlie Thom, of course, was on hand for that very first Walker Cup Match, played in 1922, at the National Golf Links next door to Shinnecock. Thom could have ably represented either side, but the man who made the biggest splash in the first contest was not even slated as a competitor.

Bernard Darwin, the foremost golf writer of the period, had made one of his rare transatlantic passages to report the maiden Walker Cup Match for The London Times. When the captain of the British squad, Robert Harris, was sidelined by illness, the irrepressible Darwin stepped into the breach and won his singles match.

The British fortunes reached their nadir in 1936. The British squad that year included teenage champion John Langley and another schoolboy star named P.B. "Laddie" Lucas, who was perhaps the handsomest lefthander ever to play the game and in later life a Member of Parliament. Despite this typical effort to inject new blood into its corps of golfing ambassadors, the British were shutout that year at Pine Valley in New Jersey by a score of 9-0.

The English rebounded the very next time around to gain possession of the Walker Cup for the first time at St. Andrews in 1938. The Cup was received amidst general exhiliaration to the lusty strains of "A Wee Deoch and Doris."

The English could not experience true jubilation again, however, until 1971 when the 1938 win at St. Andrews was duplicated. This time the final score was Great Britain and Ireland 13, the United State 9.

Many believed that this year might well turn out to be the era-ending date when the British would summon the supreme effort to vanquish the Americans, which so far they have only been able to do on their native heath. After all, who could blame a British golfer if upon seeing the misty winds careening along the fairways that Willie Dunn laid out on Shinnecock's hills on Long Island, he mistook it for the grizzled links at Musselburgh in the Midlothian, where Dunn was born over a century ago.

Moreover, half of the players on the British team were Scots, while the American team was relatively inexperienced, being the youngest squad the U.S. has fielded since the matches began. The elder statesman for the Americans was Dick Siderowf, a three-time Walker Cupper who has twice won the British Amateur. Siderowf was joined by his three teammates from the World Amateur Team Championship: Bill Sander, Fred Ridley, and John Fought. The other members of the U.S. squad were Mike Brannan, Scott Simpson, Lindy Miller, Vance Heafner, Gary Hallberg and Jay Sigel.

The Walker Cup format is eight single matches in the afternoon and four foursomes in the morning on each of the two days of competition. Each match counts one point, with both sides receiving a point if a match is halved.

On Friday, the first day of play, the British quickly found themselves trailing, 3-1, after losing three of the morning foursomes. The American onslaught continued unabated in the afternoon, as the British could salvage only two of the singles.