In 1923 a group of Syracuse businessmen and professionals, all of them avid golfers, set out to build "a club within the means of the average golfer where golf will be of primary importance and social functions nil. First and last for golf," they proclaimed. It remains, as a brochure from its early days touts, "a championship course of the first caliber that tests the ability of the expert, but is designed primarily to make golf perpetually more interesting and fair to the average player."