By Peter F. Stevens

"Diversity" has long proven a watchword at the William J. Devine Golf Course at Franklin Park. Since long-overdue renovations in the 1980s brought the venerable old tract back from the debris-choked ruin it had been well on its way to becoming, golfers of all races and backgrounds have streamed onto the rejuvenated fairways and greens that still bear so many of famed Scottish-American architect Donald Ross's landscaping touches &emdash; as well as a few torments for players who select the wrong club from their bags.

In 1890, roughly two years after a transplanted Scot named John Reid and several friends laid out a crude three-hole course in Yonkers, New York, and kindled a passion for the game that would spread throughout the nation, a rough course was laid out at Franklin Park. Opened as a course "for everyone," Franklin Park claimed a niche in early American golf as the nation's second public course. Van Cortlandt Park, a layout in the Bronx, beat Franklin Park to the proverbial punch.

In an era when most of the courses sprouting throughout the Northeast served as toney preserves for the nation's "high and mighty," Franklin Park and Van Cortlandt allowed "everyman" (and eventually "everywoman") to put hickory-shafted club to gutta-percha (a resiny, malleable sustance from a tropical Asian tree) ball. The "place for local golfers to be" by the turn of the twentieth century, the Dorchester course even saw its share of well-heeled country-club players who waited at the gate with "rougher sorts" for their turn to tee off on the public turf.

Every time a golfer steps up to Franklin Park's first tee, he or she not only shares a historical kinship with generations of local golfers, but also with at least two of golf's legendary figures: Francis Ouimet and Bobby Jones. Ouimet shocked the golf world by defeating Britain's "Great Triumvirate" &emdash; Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J.T. Taylor &emdash; in the 1913 U.S. Open, up the road at The Country Club, in Brookline. Before Ouimet unleashed his surprise on the vaunted golfers from the very cradle of the game and proved that an American could beat the best from "across the pond," he honed his prodigious shotmaking talents at of Franklin Park. Noted golf historian Robert T. Sommers points out that the Dorchester public course offered fertile ground for Ouimet's work ethic: "To get to Franklin Park he [Ouimet] had to walk a mile and a half with his clubs slung over his shoulder to the end of the street-car line, ride into Brookline, transfer to another line, then change once more. Leaving the last street car, he would walk nearly a mile to the course, play six full rounds of the nine hole course &emdash; fifty-four holes in all &emdash; then go back the way he had come and arrive home exhausted. He was thirteen."

For Ouimet, who grew up in modest circumstances near the rarified acreage of The Country Club and caddied for Brahmin movers and shakers at the Clyde Street preserve, Franklin Park proved a Godsend. He could play there without having to worry that a shouting, purple-faced grounds-keeper or member would chase him from the greens. To get onto the Brookline course, the youth had to rely on subterfuge: he would wake at 4:30 a.m., sneak with a few battered clubs across the street and onto The Country Club tract, and, while constantly looking over his shoulder, play a few holes until a greenskeeper spotted him and ran him off.

Francis Ouimet knew better in this one instance than his mother. Anyone who glimpsed the teenager smacking drives, whistling "brassies and mashies" (early century clubs), and draining putts at Franklin Park caught a legend-in-the-making.

Bobby Jones, the sweet-swinging Georgian still hailed by many as the best ever, Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus, and Woods notwithstanding, came to know every inch of the Dorchester course as a Harvard student in the second decade of the century. Today, the 12th hole is still dubbed the "Bobby Jones hole." According to Franklin Park history, Jones, an undergraduate at Harvard, practiced his soon-to-be-immortal "Carnoustie swing" (taught to him by Steward Maiden, a professional who hailed from that Scottish club) on the 12th. Jones chose a tough hole, one sloping uphill from left to right with a pinched fairway flanked by trees on both sides. He needed to launch a perfect drive to have a chance at reaching the elevated, tricky green in two.

While Bobby Jones and Francis Ouimet figure in the annals and lore of Franklin Park, the Dorchester course can claim special status as the site that changed the very way in which golf was and is played. The course's earliest players teed off in the traditional way &emdash; they bent down at each "driving area," carefully fashioned tiny, cone-shaped piles of dirt or sand, and carefully perched balls atop the diminutive mounds. In 1899, all of that changed, thanks to a local dentist named Dr. George F. Grant.

Dr. Grant held not only the first Harvard Dental School degree awarded to an African-American, but also a deep interest in physics &emdash; including the physics of golf. At Franklin Park, he studied the makeshift "natural" tees and pondered the results of drives lofted or topped down the fairways. He noticed that no matter how flawless the swing, virtually every drive off the tiny mounds differed in height and length, and fingered the traditional "sand pile" as the culprit. What was needed, he determined, was a dose of links engineering and physics.

With the same craft and precision that he employed to fashion fillings and false teeth, Grant went to work on a cure for "drivers' dilemma." His solution would prove nothing short of landmark &emdash; the first artificial golf tee.

On December 12, 1899, following months of trial and error, after months of studying drives at Franklin Park, Grant submitted an application and a detailed design to the U.S. Patent Office. The local dentist's opening lines proclaimed, "Be it known that I, George F. Grant, of Boston...have invented the Golf-Tee."

Grant's invention consisted of a small, wooden shaft with a tapered and pointed base and "a flexible tubular concave shoulder to hold the golf ball": the world's first patented golf tee. Inspired by the tribulations of Franklin Park golfers, his creation would literally lift the level of play by professionals and duffers alike.

Grant wrote: "This invention has for its object the production of a simple, cheap, and effective tee for use in the game of golf, obviating the use of the conical mounds of sand or similar material formed by the fingers of the player on which the ball is supported when driving off....By the use of the tee...the player is sure that his ball is uniformly elevated from the ground at each drive, and the uncertainty of a sand [or dirt] tee is overcome, as it is practically impossible to make them of uniform height each time."

Simplicity, genius, innovation, or a mix of all of these &emdash; Grant's invention literally changed the way golfers played the game and did so in a welcome way.

At first glance, one might assume that the dentist reaped a fortune from his creation. But the era's murky copyright infringement laws allowed sharp-eyed entrepreneurs to "tweak" the dentist's design and to market their own tees. Grant's invention did show up on courses from Franklin Park to St. Andrews, but the profits did not turn up in his bank account.

Dr. George Grant did not parlay his innovation into a fortune, but today, wherever golfers tee it up, the legacy of the local dentist flourishes. At Franklin Park Golf Course, Dr. Grant's gift to generations of golfers literally got off the ground.

Next Week: A Look at the Hole-by-Hole History of Franklin Park Golf Course

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of Notorious and Notable New Englanders and Links Lore &emdash; Dramatic Moments and Forgotten Milestones from Golf's History, Brassey's.)