ABERDONIAN TOM BENDELOW NO NEARER PLACE IN HALL OF FAME

By COLIN FARQUHARSON
Colin@scottishgolfview.com
So CBS TV golf producer Frank Chirkinian, 84, is to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame on May 9. Frank who?
When it became widely known last month that he was undergoing treatment for advanced lung cancer, the World Golf Hall of Fame board, representing different elements of the golf establishment — including the US PGA Tour, the LPGA, the PGA of America and the European Tour — held an emergency vote, and Chirkinian was elected.
He will be inducted, in the category of Lifetime Achievement.
It helps, of course, to be American. I have never heard of Frank Chirkinian and I doubt if many people on this side of the Atlantic have either.
So where does that leave the case for Aberdeen-born Tom Bendelow, pictured above, who emigrated to the United States in 1892, aged 24, and became the most prolific designer of courses in the boom time of golf across North America.
Before he died in 1936, Tom is credited with laying out well over 600 courses across the States and Canada. The true figure may well be nearer 1,000.
It has become fashionable within the ranks of the US media to ridicule the work of Bendelow, pouring scorn on his modus operandi of being able to lay out a course in an afternoon or a day at the most with a supply of posts to mark where the tees, fairways and greens would be.
But that was the way it was done in the early 1900s.
His most famous designs were Medinah, Big Foot, Olympia Fields, East Lake and Allegheny.
Grandson Stuart Bendelow, born and bred in America, has worked tirelessly for years to gain recognition for Tom's part in bringing golf within reach of the masses in the States.
But Stuart seems to be no nearer getting the name of Tom Bendelow into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Now if Tom had been American and perhaps with strong links to the media, it might have been different.
Don't give up, Stuart! You'll wear them down sooner or later.
Maybe we should enlist the aid of the R and A, whose chief executive, Peter Dawson, has something in common with Tom Bendelow - he also is an Aberdonian.