On a rainy Friday in September more than a century ago, thousands of spectators slogged around The Country Club grounds in Brookline, Mass., their focus on a young local golfer attempting to do the impossible. “It was not just men who did this,” John G. Anderson wrote of the scene in Golf magazine. “Ladies these were, hundreds of them ... willing to do all this even though it was only occasionally that they could get to a point of any great vantage from which to view the play.”

To say you had been there would be enough, for history was being made at the 1913 U.S. Open. Just 10 miles or so from where the first battles of the Revolutionary War were fought in Lexington and Concord, an unheralded American, Francis Ouimet, was trying to defeat two titans of golf, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. The championship had even been rescheduled from June to a later date so that Vardon, already a five-time winner of the British Open Championship, and Ray, 1912 British Open champion, would be able to compete while on an exhibition tour of the United States.

That Ouimet – a tall and slender 20-year-old amateur who grew up across the street from The Country Club and caddied there as a boy – was able to rally to tie Vardon and Ray in that soggy fourth round, then soundly defeat the stars in an 18-hole playoff the next day was a tale stranger than fiction.

“When he was 4 years old, he whittled out a golf club and practiced with stones,” Ouimet’s mother, Mary Ellen, recalled decades later. “A prominent golfer saw him swinging at his stones and was so impressed that he patted him on the head and said, ‘Keep it up, son. You’ll be a champion if you practice long enough.’”

The unlikely victory by a humble underdog of modest means was a catalyst for golf in the United States. With Americans having more time for leisure activities and helped by Ouimet’s surprising triumph, golf developed into a more popular pastime.

In less than two decades, the number of courses in the United States increased from 700 to more than 5,000. There were 350,000 golfers in the U.S. when Ouimet defeated Vardon and Ray; a decade later more than 2 million Americans played the game. Ouimet inspired a generation of U.S. golfers, including Bob Jones and Gene Sarazen, each of whom was 11 years old when Ouimet produced his stunning victory.

“As a boy in Atlanta, I waited for the paper to read about Francis’ playoff against Vardon and Ray,” Jones said decades later. “From that time on, he has been an idol of mine. When an idol endures for 40 to 45 years, you know he must have a special quality. There have been many great golfers since Ouimet, but none who gave more to the game.”

The U.S. Open title was just the start of Ouimet’s impact on golf. He won the U.S. Amateur in 1914 and 1931, was runner-up in that championship in 1920 and advanced to the semifinals six additional times. Champion of the 1917 Western Amateur and 1920 North & South Amateur, Ouimet was a fixture in the Walker Cup for nearly 30 years, starting with the first competition between the USA and Great Britain & Ireland in 1922. He played on the American side eight times, twice as playing captain, and captained an additional four teams.

Ouimet grew up in a house at 246 Clyde Street, located about 275 yards from The Country Club’s 17th green, site of pivotal birdie putts he sank in both the fourth round and the playoff of the ’13 Open. Young Francis first watched his older brother, Wilfred, and a friend hit golf shots in the dirt road to a hole dug near a streetlamp. Later, the brothers created a three-hole course in their backyard and used balls scavenged from TCC property, through which Francis walked to elementary school. To obtain his first proper golf club, he traded in several dozen recovered balls at a sporting goods store.

He became a caddie at The Country Club, motivated initially to earn enough to buy a ticket to watch his beloved Boston Americans (later the Red Sox) play baseball. As many caddies have done, Ouimet absorbed the techniques of the good players whose clubs he carried for 25 cents a loop. In his first season, Ouimet observed the interlocking grip of four-time U.S. Open champion Willie Anderson and began holding the club that way himself.

In the summer of 1909, when he was a student at Brookline High School, Ouimet took home his first trophy, at the Greater Boston Interscholastic Championship. After losing in the final in 1912, Ouimet won the 1913 Massachusetts Amateur, the first of his six titles in that event. 

It was a second-round match in the 1913 U.S. Amateur that might have best primed Ouimet for what was to happen at The Country Club. Drawing defending and three-time champion Jerome Travers at Garden City Golf Club on Long Island, Ouimet gave Travers all he could handle before losing, 3 and 2, in the 36-hole match. “I think I have just beaten the best amateur golfer in America,” Travers told a friend.

Despite his local knowledge, Ouimet probably wouldn’t have entered the championship at Brookline if he hadn’t played at Garden City. As he later described, Ouimet was asked by USGA president Robert Watson following his loss to Travers if he wanted to play in the Open. Ouimet told him he hadn’t given it a thought. He was apprehensive about requesting time off at Wright & Ditson, where he sold sporting goods, having already exhausted his vacation, but his boss green-lighted the leave without debate.

Ouimet sailed through 36 holes in 74-78–152 to comfortably make the U.S. Open field, which in addition to Vardon, Ray and two-time defending champion John McDermott, included Travers, Jock Hutchison, Mike Brady, Alex Smith, French star Louis Tellier, pioneering African-American professional John Shippen and Walter Hagen, who was making his U.S. Open debut.

Ouimet’s caddie was pint-sized, 10-year-old Eddie Lowery, who looked even shorter next to his 6-foot-2 player. “Not much bigger than a peanut,” said Ouimet, “[but he] was a veritable inspiration all around, and a brighter or headier chap it would be hard to find.”

It was “pure accident,” as Eddie put it, that the little fellow ended up alongside Ouimet for 90 monumental holes. At Eddie’s suggestion, he and his 12-year-old brother Jack skipped school to watch qualifying because they read that Vardon and Ray were going to be there. The Lowery boys bumped into Francis before he teed off and Jack was enlisted to carry Ouimet’s bag.

When the Lowerys returned to their home in Newton, they found out a truant officer had been there. “We received quite a lecture from our mother to be sure we went to school the next day,” Eddie said. When the boys left their house the next morning, Jack listened to Mom. Eddie didn’t, taking a train to Brookline and offering to substitute for his brother. Francis thought Eddie was too small to do so, but a tearful plea got him the job.

Vardon, the 43-year-old stylist, and Ray, the 36-year-old slugger, both finished 72 holes at 304 after final-round 79s in miserable conditions. Teeing off after them, Ouimet knew what he had to do, but after shooting a front-nine 43 and making a 5 on the short 10th hole, the amateur appeared to be in dire straits. Ouimet needed to play the last two holes in a total of seven strokes to make it a three-way tie. Moreover, Vardon and Ray were in the gallery to see if the young man was made of the right stuff. He was, a long time before anyone articulated about being in the zone or concentrating on the process. “Each hole, each stroke was apart from the other,” Ouimet said. “It was a wonderful mood to get into. I was numb.”

Ouimet’s approach on No. 17 finished 15 slippery feet from the flagstick. “Even though I knew he had a wonderful temperament for golf, I was surprised to note the sure, easy and confident way he went to that putt,” recalled Travers, who was also watching greenside.

He sank it for a 3. “Nobody who was there will ever forget the wild shouts, the shaking of hands, the throwing of highly respectable hats into the air,” wrote Bernard Darwin in The Times of London. Ouimet made a 4 on the 18th  hole and history the next day, shooting 72 in the playoff against Vardon’s 77 and Ray’s 78 to become the first of only five amateurs – Travers, Chick Evans, Jones (four times) and Johnny Goodman would follow – to win the U.S. Open.

“Vardon and Ray expected me to crack, not having the experience for things like this as they had,” Ouimet said later, “and when I did not crack but went along with them, I think it had an unfavorable effect on them. That is the way I reason it out, because when you expect a man to crack and he doesn’t, you lose a little of your sureness yourself.”

Ouimet’s life was as solid as the golf he played. He married Stella Sullivan in 1918, and the couple raised two daughters, Barbara and Janice, as he settled into a business career in Boston, much of it in finance with Brown Brothers Harriman. Ouimet loved spending time with his five grandchildren.

“We lived nearby and he would take my sister, Nancy, and I for outings every Sunday afternoon,” recalled granddaughter Leslie Shea. “One of my favorite memories is going to the golf course in the spring when the snow was melting and looking for golf balls. Even at his age, he got a kick out of that. It was his happy place.”

Ouimet went on to become the first American captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in 1951 and the first recipient of the USGA’s Bob Jones Award in 1955, but he was most proud of the Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund. Started in 1949, the fund has awarded upwards of $43 million in need-based college assistance to more than 6,300 young people in Massachusetts.

“My mom would tell us how important he’d been in golf,” said another grandchild, Shelia Macomber, “but we just knew him as Grandpa. He was just a down-to-earth man.”

On his 72nd birthday, Ouimet joked to friends, “I am now even fours in years; I wish I could say the same thing of my game.” Just a month before his death at age 74, Ouimet one-putted eight greens on the back nine of a member-guest match in Maine.

Ouimet was a great, and the great ones endure. So does Darwin’s 1913 dispatch to The Times. “It was by far the most enthralling game of golf that I have ever seen,” he wrote, “nor is it, I think, any exaggeration to say that Mr. Ouimet gave an exhibition of skill, nerve and courage that, considering the circumstances, has never been equaled.”