Roger Hill Hickory Golf Profile
Profile of Roger Hill: Grand Rapids photographer turned hickory golfer, SoHG co-founder, and Michigan Hickory Tour commissioner.
Roger Hill came to golf late and to hickory golf almost by accident, and ended up helping build the institutions that govern the modern game's oldest form of play. Through his late thirties the Grand Rapids commercial photographer would have named hockey, tennis, cross-country skiing, and fly-fishing as his sports. A client trip changed that: a furniture manufacturer booked Hill and his assistant, Ralph Livingston III, for the Furniture Market in High Point, North Carolina, talked the two non-golfers into trying the game, and the pair spent the drives home through golf-course country playing as many evening holes as the light allowed. The conversion to hickory came through his wife, Chris, who gave him three wood-shafted clubs for their anniversary—intending them as den decorations. Hill took them to the studio for show-and-tell instead, and after trips with Livingston to the Golf Collectors Society shows in Dayton and Ypsilanti, both men were collecting and playing in earnest.
By 1990 Hill was competing with hickories around the United States and Britain, joining both the Golf Collectors Society and its British counterpart. His record includes a Stableford win at the 1997 BGCS Open Meeting at Western Gailes, three consecutive Musselburgh Foursome championships, podium finishes in the Scottish Hickory Championship, and appearances in all ten Hickory Grail matches played to date. He served on the GCS board and eventually as its president during the 1990s, the decade when competitive hickory play outgrew the collectors' organization that had incubated it. When the GCS declined to take up the work of structuring that growth, Hill was among the group that founded the Society of Hickory Golfers at the 2000 Virginia Beach meeting, and he spent nearly a decade afterward as the Society's membership secretary.
The local legacy is the part that matters most from West Michigan. In 2016 Hill founded the Michigan Hickory Tour, organizing regular competitive hickory events through the state's summers; its membership calls him the Commissioner. He keeps a membership at Thousand Oaks Golf Club in Grand Rapids and for many years held one at Machrihanish in Scotland. Retired from his Photosphere Studio photography business, he is co-author, with Peter Georgiady, of a history of the Scottish clubmaker George Nicoll of Leven. For anyone in the Grand Rapids orbit looking for the wood-shaft game played seriously and socially, Hill's tour is the door to knock on.
