Chicago golfer Margaret Abbott was the 1st American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics — but she never knew it. Here’s why. (original) (raw)

Margaret Abbott recognized her win at the Prix de la ville de Compiegne in France was significant.

What she didn’t know, however, is that it was a monumental moment in Olympic history that would make her the first American woman to win an event at the Games.

Abbott’s oblivious participation in the Olympics was the result of the event not being certified until after her death in 1955. Her four children were even more confused when they were presented decades later with news of their mother’s historic accomplishment.

“It’s not every day that you learn that your mother was an Olympic champion, 80-odd years after the fact,” Philip Dunne, one of Abbott’s sons, told Golf Digest in 1984. “The champion herself had told us only that she had won the golf championship of Paris — she won the golf championship of France at the resort town of Dinard a few weeks later — and mystified us by insisting that the championship of the city was the more important.”

The title belonged to Abbott for 116 years as women’s golf didn’t reappear as an Olympic event until 2016. Last week, the event returned for the third time, with American Nelly Korda winning the gold medal Saturday.

Here’s a look back at how the young, athletic socialite achieved minor fame — then evaded it — for generations.

‘The Tall Girl Problem’

Margaret Ives Abbott was born in Kolkata (then known as Calcutta) in 1878 to Charles, a merchant whose work was in India, and Mary. He died in 1879, and that’s when Abbott and her Massachusetts-born mother, a descendant of the Pilgrims, moved back to the United States. They arrived in Chicago in 1884.

Soon thereafter, Abbott’s name was often featured in the Tribune’s society pages for dancing the minuet in a charity ball for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; wearing a white tulle and gold gown with pink roses to the Chicago Jubilee Ball at the Auditorium Theatre; and attending a dinner at the home of the McCormick family before attending a dance at the Germania Club.

Abbott — who was nearly 6 feet tall — was also included in a Tribune story about the city’s statuesque women with the headline, “The Tall Girl Problem: How Will Chicago Society Solve It?”

Her mother wrote book reviews under the byline “Mary P. Abbott” for several Chicago publications, including the Tribune, before becoming a literary editor at the Chicago Herald. She also penned her own books, including “Alexia” and “The Beverleys: A Story of Calcutta.” She was friendly with some of the most recognized families in the city during the late 1890s and early 1900s — including the Palmers and the McCormicks.

Golf was a sport played by society’s elite, and Charles Blair Macdonald was its master. Macdonald brought golf to Chicago after being introduced to the game by his grandfather while attending college in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Frustrated that no course existed in Chicago, Macdonald — the “father of American golf architecture” and one of the founders of the United States Golf Association — designed a seven-hole course in Lake Forest. Today it’s known as Onwentsia Club. In 1893, he completed the first 18-hole golf course in the United States in Downers Grove.

The next year, Macdonald constructed another 18 holes in Wheaton, which is still home to the private Chicago Golf Club. Abbott’s mother was a member of the Chicago Golf Club, and a son, Sprague, also took up the sport. Abbott, however, racked up most of the family’s notable local victories.

Abbott and Macdonald partnered in a tournament at Washington Park in 1897. She “had an unfortunate time in bunkers, but played a plucky game,” according to the Tribune, earning second prize — an ebony putter — during a competition at the Chicago Golf Club in 1897.

Abbott never competed in any USGA championships but won several club events in the Chicago area, including a silver-mounted vase in the driving competition at Onwentsia in 1898, one year before the site hosted the U.S. Amateur tournament, and the Deering Cup in Wheaton. She also won a subscription prize at the Wheaton club.

“Miss Abbott plays golf with exceptional grace and looks exceedingly well on the links. Her drive is of considerable length, and on the green she is entirely at her ease,” The Inter Ocean reported on July 31, 1898. “If she continues to advance as rapidly as she has heretofore it is predicted that Miss Abbott will ultimately take a place as one of the best women golfers in the United States.”

By 1899, Abbott and her mother had moved to France, reportedly so Abbott could study art.

Margaret Abbott plays in the women’s individual golf event at a course in Compiegne, France during the Olympic Games in 1900. This photo was published in La Vie au Grand Air magazine on Oct. 14, 1900. Abbott played in white clothes and very likely had some red accessories, thus wearing the traditional colors of the Chicago Golf Club.

An American — and her mom — in Paris

The 1900 Olympics, the second Games of the modern era, featured the debut of women competing in events, including tennis, golf and croquet.

Ten women — five from France and five from the U.S. — participated in the Oct. 4, 1900, golf event on a course located 50 miles north of Paris. Each American participant was already in Europe, either studying or vacationing.

Abbott was declared the winner after one round of just nine holes in which she shot a 47. The top three finishers in the event were American women.

Mary, Abbott’s mother, finished tied for seventh. They are still the only mother-daughter duo to compete in the same event in the Olympics.

Abbott told reporters she and her fellow expats had an advantage over their French rivals.

“The reason American women excel is because they play with men. French women are just beginning to play men — their husbands and brothers. Even in England the golf clubs are mostly for men,” she said, according to the Oct. 8, 1900, edition of the Buffalo Courier.

Others attributed the Americans’ dominance to their lack of high heels and tight-waisted skirts, which their French opponents wore.

Instead of a medal, Abbott was reportedly awarded a bowl.

How could Abbott’s achievement be so easily forgotten?

Let’s just say the 1900 Olympics weren’t well-organized. The events were held in coordination with the World’s Fair — or Paris Exposition — spread out over a span of five months and not well-promoted “to an extent that many athletes never knew they had actually participated in the Olympic Games,” according to the International Olympic Committee.

Several types of silver and bronze medals — no gold ones — were given to some of the champions of the 1900 Olympics, but not all. The awarding of medals didn’t become an Olympic tradition until 1904.

Athletes competed in a variety of sports and other competitions, including Basque pelota, croquet and tug of war, but there were no opening or closing ceremonies. Croquet had just one spectator, an English man. There was no lighting of the Olympic flame — that tradition didn’t begin until 1928.

Even the poster for the 1900 Paris Olympics, which featured the illustration of a woman akin to Joan of Arc in turn-of-the-century clothes holding fencing equipment, was inaccurate because women didn’t compete in the event until 1924.

Shortly after her win, Abbott attended a “coming out” party for another Chicagoan while still in Paris. There was a rumor circulating in New York and Chicago that she had become engaged to a “Frenchman holding a high government position,” but that was not verified. She continued to play golf in Paris during 1901, including the opening of Paris Golf Club, and won the forerunner of the French Women’s Championship in 1902.

Domestic duties called to her from across the Atlantic Ocean, however, and she returned to the United States later that year.

Margaret Abbott, right, during the Femina Cup in 1902 in La Boulie (Versailles) and published on the cover of the magazine Femina on June 15, 1902.

Life after golf

The engagement of Abbott and Finley Peter Dunne was announced in late November 1902.

Dunne had been a Chicago reporter for seven newspapers, including the Tribune, and was credited for first using “southpaw” — a boxing term — in the late 1880s to describe a left-handed pitcher.

His Mr. Dooley series, which featured a South Side Irish immigrant bartender with strong opinions on social and political issues of the day, brought him fame. The series was reportedly a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, whom it often mocked. Ald. Edward Burke once called Dunne “an 1893 Mike Royko.” Today there’s a bar in Roscoe Village named after Dunne.

Dunne’s biggest contribution to journalism, however, might be the origin of the following quote: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Abbott and Dunne moved to New York City and married at the home of the bride’s mother — just two blocks north of the Empire State Building — on Dec. 9, 1902. The Tribune reported the ceremony “was celebrated as quietly and with as little display as possible,” with only immediate relatives present. Yet they received congratulatory telegrams from Sherlock Holmes author Sir Conan Doyle and “dozens of other lesser literary lights.”

Her image was captured in 1903 by friend Charles Dana Gibson, who was famous for his “Gibson Girl” drawings of young, attractive women.

They had four children.

This portrait of Margaret Abbott, the first American woman to win an event in the Olympics, was completed in 1903 by Charles Dana Gibson, a famous American portraitist. It belonged to Philip Dunne, one of Abbott’s sons.

A trailblazing athlete rediscovered

Abbott’s three sons and a daughter didn’t know about their mother’s achievement until they were contacted in the 1980s by Paula D. Welch, a University of Florida professor emerita and former United States Olympic Committee member. Welch, also the first women’s varsity basketball coach at Florida, came across Abbott’s name on a plaque during a visit to Olympic committee headquarters in New York in 1973 and set out to learn more about the honored golfer.

“I spent about 10 years — not every day of course — tracking Abbott down,” Welch told a reporter before the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. “She never knew she was an Olympic champion. It was a piece of Olympic history that I felt people should know more about.”

Welch assumes the only reason Abbott’s name was remembered at all is because it was captured in the official results for the U.S. team, which were compiled by A.G. Spalding, a fellow Chicagoan, sporting goods businessman and appointed Olympics commissioner. Welch compiled a story based on her research of Abbott’s life that ran in the October 1982 issue of The Olympian and later contacted one of Abbott’s sons — famed screenwriter and founder of the Screen Writers Guild Philip Dunne — to deliver the news.

Abbott’s short obituary in the Tribune on June 11, 1955, failed to mention her Olympic achievement and, instead, focused on her late husband’s accomplishments.

The location of Abbott’s remains is unknown.

Because Abbott’s husband was interred in the mausoleum of a friend, Francis P. Garvan, in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, it’s doubtful she was also buried there.

“It’s possible that she was cremated,” wrote Philippa Dunne, a granddaughter, in an email to the Tribune. “It would have been up to my father and his siblings, and that might have been a good solution given the Garvan mausoleum.”

The New York Times gave a more complete account of Abbott’s life in 2018 but didn’t uncover her final resting place.

The mysterious disappearance of Abbott’s Olympics prize

The silver trophy awarded to Albert Bond Lambert, of St. Louis, for winning the men’s 1900 Olympic golf event is on display at the USGA Golf Museum in Liberty Corner, N.J.

Though her name is now widely known, the whereabouts of Abbott’s Olympics trophy is not. The USGA Golf Museum in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, does not have it. The silver trophy awarded to 1900 men’s Olympic golf champion Albert Lambert and other mementos from the Olympic Games, however, are displayed there. Yet museum officials are unsure if Abbott’s cup would have been identical to Lambert’s award. Descriptions of the trophy also differ among archived stories. No known photos exist of it either.

Abbott’s descendants are also unsure where their matriarch’s trophy could be.

“No one knows what happened to (it). There was talk of getting it reissued … but we dropped it at some point,” granddaughter Philippa Dunne recently wrote in an email to the Tribune. She said she also has some silver cups from other events won by Abbott and an old silver shoe brush, but nothing more.

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Sources: Chicago Tribune archives and reporting; USGA and the USGA Golf Museum; International Olympic Committee; FindaGrave.com; Chicago Golf Club; Golf Digest

Originally Published: August 4, 2021 at 10:13 AM CST