The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), for example, shows us the costumes, hairstyles, cars, houses, and even golf clubs of the period from the 1890s to 1913, but it fails to maintain historical accuracy on two counts: lawns and golf course greens. With all this attention to detail, films like The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) missed the point on grass because engineered lawns have become so naturalized that it is assumed that they were always a necessary component of a home; the same might be said of the short, striped, and irrigated weedless greens and fairways passed off as historically accurate in all three films. These three films maintain historical accuracy except when it comes to lawns and golf courses because the grass aesthetic is seen as a given so deeply engrained that we now consider a perfect lawn and golf green natural. Grassy lawns and golf courses are a construction, not a natural phenomenon.
Few would argue that sports drives (as it has from the beginning) the need for pristine turf grass on lawns as well as fairways. According to Niveau, “Golf courses were the earliest instigators of lawn competition. With the development of public courses in the late 1800s, many homeowners found that keeping their lawns up to the exacting standards of the fairway was time-consuming and expensive. … Thoroughly engineered and subject to the laws of industry, horticulture, genetic science, and applied botany, the lawn is anything but natural.”
A good example of this American grass aesthetic comes from Bruce Dawson, the production designer for Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. When he talked about the historical accuracy of Bobby Jones, he validated the use of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, saying it hadn’t changed, but he admitted, “Maybe a bit on the golf course where they’ve added irrigation, but audiences will believe it’s period” (quoted in Kelley).
Filmed on location in Atlanta, Covington, Southern California, and, of course, St. Andrews Golf Course in Scotland, Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004), like the other two historical golf films discussed here, presents current golf course greens as “period,” and audiences believe it. Although The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) was filmed in Kahnawake, Quebec, Canada, it too passes off a present day golf course as the same as one at the turn of the century. And The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) includes film footage from various golf courses in South Carolina and Georgia, including Hilton Head, South Carolina and Jekyll Island, Georgia, all in 2000, not the 1920s.
Setting these present day golf courses up as historically accurate representations of courses from the turn of the century through the 1930s serves as a reminder of how normalized grass lawns and greens have become. Viewers fail to notice the lack of weeds and even dandelions in any of these films. Golf courses grasses are presented as a uniform length, color, and texture, with no mixing of grass seed. And homes near courses, even in the city, have bright green lawns in front of them. Grass lawns and greens have become so normalized that it’s almost impossible to imagine a home without a grass lawn or a golf course without unified green grass, free of weeds and pests and cut short with a striped pattern.
In fact, until the twentieth century, most Americans had no lawns at all, and pristine front lawns were impossible to attain until after World War II. Instead, if Americans’ houses were in town, they were “built close to the street with perhaps a small, fenced front garden. On farms, houses and farm buildings were surrounded by pasture, fields, or gardens and a bare, packed dirt farmyard” (Jenkins 2). Houses in Southern American states had “yards of swept dirt or sand, covered with pine straw. In the Southwest, adobe houses turned inward on interior courtyards” (Jenkins 2). Instead of a natural given, then, the grass lawns we now see as the norm were a constructed idea, with definitions of “lawn” changing from the sixteenth century till today. Unfenced front lawns have become normalized in the United States today but were a relatively recent addition to American culture and are still shunned by some European, South American, African, and Asian immigrants (Jenkins 3).
Lawns—and our view of them as natural—are clearly a cultural construction. According to Virginia Scott Jenkins, “American front lawns are a result of two separate, although equally important, influences: the ability to grow appropriate grass and to keep it irrigated and mown, and the aesthetic desire for a lawn in front of the house” (9). The idea of the front lawn in America, then, was not always the norm. In fact, until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, grassy lawns were not possible in the United States and, until at least the 1950s, could not be weed free and homogeneous.
Jenkins recounts how lawn grasses were actually imported from Europe because they were not indigenous to the United States and reminds us that “before the invention of the hand-pushed lawn mower, the rubber hose and sprinkler, pesticides, herbicides and commercial fertilizer, and the introduction of appropriate lawn grasses, lawns as we know them today were impossible” (9-10). Jenkins asserts that Americans, who moved to homes in the suburbs from the late 19th until the mid-twentieth century “were taught to incorporate the new lawn aesthetic into the landscape and had to learn how to take care of their lawns” in a “slow process” that ensured that by the 1950s “front lawns had become thoroughly integrated into the American landscape” (10).
The drive for an ideal lawn aesthetic, however, was also influenced by “the development of public golf courses in the late 1800s” (“The American Lawn”). Rich homeowners with houses built near these golf courses “felt a great deal of pressure to conform,” since “Poorly kept lawns provided a breeding ground for weeds, insects, and undesirable grasses that might spread to the fairways” (“The American Lawn”). Jenkins concurs, asserting that the American lawn industry that began with the first lawn mower in 1869, “nurtured the aesthetic that called for a smooth, green lawn in front of American homes. Advertising and popular magazines, the increasingly popular game of golf, labor-saving inventions, new grasses, and shifts in living and working patterns, combined with tremendous personal mobility, all contributed to a domestic landscape in the United States that is similar from coast to coast” (183-84).
Uniform front lawns and golf courses, then, were constructed as necessary elements of the American aesthetic from the late 1800s forward. Golf courses required closely mowed grasses, and that aesthetic spread to homeowners, especially near greens and fairways. Yet we should keep in mind that the first 18-hole golf course in the United States was not founded until 1893 (in Wheaton, Illinois), and the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) was not founded until 1916. And tournament golf became seen as a spectator sport only during the 1920s (“Golf History: Historical Facts About Golf”). The technology necessary to maintain such a uniform bed of grass was unavailable until after World War II. According to Wendy Munson Scullin, “During World War II, …. it became apparent that a synthetic version of a plant growth hormone could be used to kill plants, thereby disrupting the enemy’s food supply.” H. Patricia Hynes, a professor of environmental health at Boston University explains that “The pesticide [and herbicide] industry is derived from war research, and pesticide-based agriculture constitutes a virtual peacetime war on nature” (quoted in Scullin).
The slow movement toward normalized suburban lawns until World War II is reinforced by economic evidence. Advertisements from the late 1800s (when lawn mowers became available) forward sought to normalize closely-mowed lawns, but, according to Jenkins, “Sales grew slowly despite advertisements that idealized lawn cultivation.” Jenkins argues that “The suburban ideal of 1944—a single-family house, two children, and ‘a carpet of sparkling green turf’—was out of reach for most Americans until the postwar prosperity of the fifties.” It wasn’t until the 1950s that both advertisements for and articles about lawn care burgeoned. Lawn equipment was sold through advertisements featuring sexualized females, but it was also sold by golf greats like Sam Snead. In a 1951 advertisement from Flower Grower, for example, Sam Snead asks readers, “Want a lawn that’s fairway-smooth?” (quoted in Jenkins).
Economic conditions after World War II combined with what John K. Grande calls “a post-War aesthetic born of unbridled optimism about progress.” For Grande, “The American lawn is all about the notion of unlimited resources, of suburban sprawl.” The idea of an unfenced front lawn builds on two fantasies attached to suburban living: “conformity… to maintain the suburban landscape’s illusion of an open, democratic community of neighbors” and “the equally powerful fantasy of individual control of private property” (quoted in Veder). Suburbs produced by inner-city industry contributed both to lawn aesthetic and the development of more egalitarian golf courses.
Lawn care and golf course management seemed to go hand in hand from the late 1800s through the 1950s. Neither lawns nor golf courses could reach the aesthetic ideal sold by advertisements and magazine articles until necessary grass seeds, chemicals, and technology became available after World War II.
Yet golf courses and lawns of today (in the United States and Canada and Scotland) are passed off as exactly the same as those of the 1800s, 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s in the historical golf movies we viewed. Green, weed free and uniform grasses have become not only an expected norm, but also an ideal aesthetic seen as both natural and essential—a given so apart from its origin that it no longer seems like a construction. These grasses seem so normal that viewers of The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005), Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius (2004), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) notice only the precise historical accuracy of the films. They don’t notice the anachronistic portrayal of grasses and greens because they assume lawns and golf courses have always looked that way.
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