This story first appeared in the Fall 2025 edition of Northern Ohio Golfer Magazine, the official print publication of the Northern Ohio Golf Association. NOGA members who provide an address in their GHIN account receive a copy mailed to their home twice per year. Not yet a NOGA member? Join for 2026 now!
FROM THE NOGA ARCHIVES
One of the most storied private golf clubs in the Cleveland area, The Country Club, was founded in 1889 with no plans for a golf course. That changed when the founding club president, Samuel Mather, took a trip to the St. Andrews Club in New Jersey and became obsessed with the game. Six years later, a nine-hole course opened adjacent to the original clubhouse in what is now Bratenahl.
The club continued to thrive in the ensuing years, adding nine more holes in 1909 to create a complete eighteen-hole layout. But as the club grew, so did the industrial property surrounding it. By the early 1920s, the distractions lining the course had multiplied and become too much for the membership. The solution came in the form of an offer from the Van Sweringen brothers, founders of the Shaker Heights community. They proposed that the club relocate to their new development in Pepper Pike, where they offered a large plot of land and a loan to build a new clubhouse.
The new club, in its present-day location, opened in 1930. Just five years later, The Country Club hosted the 1935 National Amateur Golf Championship, now known as the U.S. Amateur. The committee could not have known that hosting the tournament would etch the club into amateur golf history for more than 90 years and counting.
Lawson Little Jr. entered the 1935 National Amateur Golf Championship hot off wins at the 1934 National Amateur and the 1934 and 1935 British Amateur Championships. Little continued his dominance at The Country Club, setting the record at the time for the longest amateur championship match-play win streak. Winning both tournaments consecutively for two years brought about the coining of the term “The Little Slam,” with Lawson Little Jr. holding both the U.S. and British Amateur Championships twice simultaneously.
In 2018, CBS Sports commentator Jim Nantz, a member of The Country Club, published a piece in Golf Digest referencing Lawson Little Jr. and calling him “the most underappreciated golfer of the first half of the 20th century.” Nantz shared his thoughts highlighting a specific day he spent playing at The Country Club, in June of 2015.
“On this day, I followed a personal ritual at the par-5 16th hole. Mounted on a large rock there is a plaque noting the spot where Lawson Little Jr. closed out Walter Emery, 4 and 2, to win the 1935 U.S. Amateur. I always pause at the plaque for a few moments and give it a little pat, because Lawson Little is special to me. Although I never knew him—he passed away from a heart attack in 1968 at age 57—I’ve always felt connected to him. Just as many golfers feel a kinship with Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones after studying their lives, such is the closeness I feel with Lawson Little Jr.”
The interpersonal connection between a golf historian such as Nantz and a past champion such as Lawson Little Jr. — ninety years removed from his national amateur victory in Pepper Pike — shows how influential The Country Club has been to the preservation and advancement of the game of golf in Northern Ohio.
