Before John Shippen came along, the head golf professionals were from Scotland where the game originated many years earlier. Golf in America was devoted mostly to amateurs at the private clubs. As it happens, blacks and Native Americans were the first Americans to take up the trade of golf professional, the person who repaired golf clubs and taught members how to play the game.
Shippen, a well-known golfer and teacher, was in demand and worked at several clubs. After a short stint as Maidstone’s first professional, he went to Aronomink Golf Club in Pennsylvania. A few years later he came back to Maidstone and stayed as head professional a dozen years.
In 1913 he left Maidstone and became a teacher to wealthy players as well as top world-ranked amateurs while serving as a professional at a club in New Jersey. After a couple of years, he returned to Shinnecock Hills as a greenskeeper and spent two years there before moving on to the National Golf Links of America, also on Long Island, as head professional.
Interestingly, Shippen was a professional at three of the most prestigious and elite clubs in the Hamptons. As Golf Digest calls it, “If Shinnecock is the alpha Hamptons club, National and Maidstone are close betas.” In fact, Maidstone, where Shippen was the first head professional, is probably the most exclusive club. It has refused memberships to Groucho Marx, George Plimpton, and Diana Ross, among others.
Shippen competed in professional tournaments for several years, but eventually— due to the strengthening of Jim Crow laws throughout the United States — he and other blacks were excluded from these competitions. He had spent his entire life in the world of white golf. Perhaps these developments caused him to move into the world of black golf.
In 1932 Shippen became greenskeeper and head professional at the black-owned Shady Rest Country club in Scotch Plains, N.J., where he remained for 32 years. He died in 1968, at 89 years of age.
Note: On Monday the USGA and the Shinnecock Indian Nation reached an agreement for the USGA to establish a permanent golf training facility on the Shinnecock tribal grounds. It will be the Oscar Bunn Golf Facility. It is fitting to give it that name, as Bunn was a laborer and caddie at Shinnecock and went on to become a top player and head professional at Lake Placid, NY; Jacksonville, FL; and New Britain, CT. But why the need for an agreement, and with the USGA. Well, Shinnecock Hills Golf Club received that name for a good reason. It was built on a strip of land once owned by the Shinnecock Nation, and we know how historically lands often got transferred from Native Americans to whites. Feeling betrayed the Shinnecock Nation started picketing the golf event on Monday to protest the fraying of their relationship which through previous U.S. Opens at the club had benefitted the Shinnecock Nation financially.