Born in the small town of Kingussie, Scotland, D. Scott Chisholm would come to the United States in 1899 and make his name decades later as a golf writer during the Roaring ‘20s some 5,000 miles from his birthplace. He was an early and avid promoter of the game of golf, specifically in Southern California.

From his home in Ojai, Calif., Chisholm penned columns for the Los Angeles Evening Express newspaper and is even credited in some golf circles as a co-founder of the then-Los Angeles Open (now Genesis Invitational). Chisholm had written that Los Angeles should stage a tournament as part of something he had dreamed up called “Golf Week.” He imagined, through his column, that the festival would put the game of golf on a grand stage and show off Southern California’s winter weather to the rest of the world. L.A.’s Junior Chamber of Commerce, without crediting Chisholm, executed a very similar idea to the one he had written about and the first Los Angeles Open was held at The Los Angeles CC in 1926. Chisholm started the tradition of announcing golfers arriving to the 18th green at every Los Angeles Open, a signature moment of the event that carried on at the tournament after his passing and which was depicted in Ben Hogan’s biopic film, Follow the Sun. Fittingly, the championship, now known as The Genesis Invitational, celebrated its 100th edition just weeks before Chisholm’s induction into the Southern California Golf Hall of Fame.

Though hailing from Scotland, Chisholm had an unabashed, public love for the golf that Southern California offered. In 1929, citing Lakeside CC, Annandale CC, Wilshire CC and many others, he wrote in the American Golfer that “California was the standard of golf course architecture.” He would also say in the same article that public courses like Griffith Park GC and Western Avenue GC were just as beautiful and desirable to him as their neighboring private clubs.  

Chisholm also wrote for Pacific Golf & Motor and The Fairway. He was a noted photographer whose portfolio was vital to documenting the early game and which later became the basis for the Ralph W. Miller Golf Library’s photo collection.

Chisholm co-founded the National Association of Left-Handed Golfers (NALG) and served as its first president in 1936. The NALG was solely responsible, decades later, for raising the manufacturing quality standards of left-handed golf equipment. Ninety years on, the NALG is still a functioning and robust organization.

In his obituary that appeared in a 1958 issue of Golfdom, it was reported that many Southern California professional and amateur golfers threw a big party for Chisholm’s 80th birthday, which occurred a few months before his death. That same article referred to Chisholm as “one of the kindliest and most generous of men.”