This Friday is a bit of a sad anniversary – 53 years ago, Grantland Rice, one of the best golf writers ever and a resident of East Hampton, passed away, only a couple of days after finishing his last golf piece, on the 1929 U.S. Open at Winged Foot and his good friend Bobby Jones.

Golf writer Grantland Rice.

First, though, a brief detour to another Open. The British Open begins next Thursday, and it is the first of golf's majors to test Tiger Woods's commitment to the sport as a family man. His daughter, Sam, was born the day after he finished in second place at the U.S. Open at Oakmont last month. It would have been headline-making theater if Tiger had managed to tie for the lead on that Sunday and then the following day he is in the 18-hole playoff for the National Championship as his wife goes into labor. What would he have done? We'll never know, thanks to the mercy of the golf gods. As far as we know, Woods will be defending at the British Open next week, but if little Sam should come down with the sniffles . . .

More on the Open later.

Recently, there was a column in Golf Digest that championed the election of Dan Jenkins to the Golf Hall of Fame and by extension that writers who have made strong contributions to the game should be eligible. There is a writer in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Henry Chapman, whose great-grandson, by the way, lives in Sag Harbor. Chapman invented the box score, among other innovations, and was an enthusiastic promoter of baseball when the sport was first attracting attention in the 1870s and 1880s.

I agree with Golf Digest, though Jenkins wouldn't be my first choice. Bernard Darwin was the finest golf writer ever, but he was British and they can do what they want with him. I tip my cap to Walter Travis, who could write about golf almost as well as he could play it, but my two choices to go into the Golf Hall of Fame would be Herbert Warren Wind and Grantland Rice, possibly with Rice a nose ahead because he was doing it first.

Rice was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee on November 1, 1880. After graduating from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he went into journalism, doing general assignment reporting for The Atlanta Journal and The Cleveland News. The Nashville Tennessean was looking for a sportswriter, and Rice was hired. Thus a great career began.

Rice did not write about golf exclusively. He covered baseball, horse racing, and especially football. This is perhaps his most famous passage, about the Notre Dame v. Army game at the Polo Grounds in New York: "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below."

In two important ways Rice established his golf credentials. One was seeing the talent in a teenage Bobby Jones and writing about it. A fellow Southerner, Rice wrote about Jones's early achievements in Georgia, and then when he went to work for New York City dailies he had a bigger forum for touting Jones's national and then international victories. After Jones retired from competitive golf in 1930, he and Rice continued to play golf together and remained friends.

The other important way that Rice solidified his golf reputation was being editor of The American Golfer. The publication was founded in 1908 by the great amateur player Walter Travis, who could also write wonderfully about the game. He had won the British Amateur Championship in 1904, the being the first American to do so that signified the ascendancy of American golf which in the 1920s would overtake our British cousins. The American Golfer was a strong advocate for golf in the U.S. as the game was expanding here.

Because of age and declining health, Travis turned the editor reins over to Rice in 1919. Rice persuaded such literary luminaries as Ring Lardner, O.B. Keeler, Rex Beach, and John R, Tunis to write for the magazine. Even Walter Hagen was a columnist, though it was believed that the only thing he ever wrote were IOUs. The American Golfer was a victim of the Depression, folding in 1936.

In 1928, Lardner and "Granny" Rice and their wives, who were also close friends, bought a four-acre tract of beachfront property in East Hampton. There they built summer homes that were not separated by a fence. Rice's house was a four-bedroom Cape complete with maid's quarters. Lardner built a 13-room manse. Rice wrote that the summer of 1929 when they moved in was "absolutely lovely" and that "perched on our porch on our dune, we could stare straight out and into the bull rings of Lisbon . . . or perhaps it was the clearness of the gin cocktails. At any rate, nothing but gulls, whales and water separated us from Portugal and Spain."

It was not all bliss in East Hampton, however. In 1931, two powerful nor'easters struck the East End and the two houses required some hefty repairs. Two years later, Lardner died, and vacations weren't the same after that.

Still, Rice enjoyed the next 20 years in East Hampton. He became a member of the Maidstone Club and played golf regularly there. He and his wife were part of the summer social scene. He died on July 13, 1954 in New York City, having just taken a train in from East Hampton to turn in his last magazine article for a publication that would make its debut the following month: Sports Illustrated.

Rice was called the Dean of American sportswriters beginning in the 1920s, which among other things was known as the "Golden Age of Sports." He belongs in the Golf Hall of Fame as does Herbert Warren Wind, and then we'll see about Dan Jenkins. Rice was passionate about golf and about writing, and his contributions to the game are the equal of many of those already in the Hall of Fame.

Last year, the British Open returned to Royal Liverpool for the first time in 39 years, but what didn't change very much is that Woods won it for his third claret jug. In the final round he fought off challenges from Ernie Els, Sergio Garcia, and Chris DiMarco. This year's Open is at Carnoustie, one of the great old courses in Scotland. Some of you may recall that when the Open was last held there, we witnessed the ghastly collapse of Jean Van de Velde that allowed Scotsman Paul Lawrie to win.

The earliest reference to golf at Carnoustie is a 1527 document which records that Sir Robert Maule "exercisit at the gowf" on the Links of Barry, an area filled with dunes on the Tayside coast that encompasses the present course. In 1842, the Carnoustie and Taymouth Golf Club was formed. Over the years the club has produced excellent teachers and players including Stewart Maiden, who became the head pro at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta and began working with a talented child, Bobby Jones; Alex and Willie Smith, both U.S. Open winners; and Macdonald Smith, who won 40 tournaments around the world.

The first Open at Carnoustie was in 1931; ironically, the year after Jones retired. It was won by Tommy Armour, who hailed from Edinburgh. It was won there by Henry Cotton in 1936, and it was at Carnoustie that Ben Hogan earned his third consecutive major in 1953. Fifteen years later, Gary Player secured the claret jug, and it was there in 1975 that Tom Watson won the first of his five British Open championships.

I didn't come close in my picks for the winner of the U.S. Open, but undaunted, I will try again. Jack Nicklaus has said that being a father made him a better player. We'll see if that is true for Tiger. Certainly, wanting to defend the championship and win the first major after his daughter's birth will be strong incentives. I'm also thinking that Sergio Garcia will finally break through at the British Open, an event his future father-in-law, Greg Norman, won twice. And once again I'm going to go with Adam Scott – this fellow is right on the cusp of being #2 to Tiger in the world rankings.

No matter what, it will be a great week for golf.