With the establishment of the Open, now one of the modern game’s four majors but initially from more humble beginnings in the second half of the 19th century, so came golf’s first great heroes. A motley collection of mainly Scottish caddies, the game’s first professionals, gathered each year to play for the Challenge Belt – although after Young Tom Morris had won this three times in a row, he was awarded it outright. The original trophy was replaced, after a year’s hiatus, by the claret jug that is still competed for today – Young Tom won that as well, before dying at the tragically young age of 24.
These early days of the Open were a fascinating time, with John Ball becoming the first amateur winner. With Harold Hilton, another Open champion, and Freddie Tait also making their mark, the Amateur Championship quickly established itself as a coveted title. Golf reached its seminal moment, however, in the golden age of the Great Triumvirate. JH Taylor was the first to win the Open, while James Braid dominated over a short span. But Harry Vardon superseded both, winning the Claret Jug six times – still a record – as well as the US Open. With a swing that produced wonderfully consistent golf, he pioneered a new way of playing the game. There was no greater pioneer, however, than where the story starts, with Allan Robertson.
As we have seen, while Allan Robertson lived the concept of championship golf did not exist. Instead, it was in money matches that Robertson earned his formidable reputation as the best player of the age. The St. Andrews man once beat Musselburgh’s big-hitting Willie Dunn in a match of 20 rounds over ten days. It was said he never lost a singles match on even terms, while Robertson and his apprentice Tom Morris were unbeaten at foursomes. Robertson picked his duels, however, and never took up a standing challenge from Willie Park, nor went head-to-head with Morris once the latter reached his prime.
Acknowledged as the game’s first professional, Robertson, like his father and grandfather before him, was a caddie for the members of the Royal and Ancient (R&A) and a maker of feathery golf balls (balls consisting of feathers in a leather casing), over 2,000 a year emerging from his kitchen and selling for half a crown each. He was also responsible for some of the key improvements to the Old Course and, in summer, he would rise at dawn to play the links, perhaps the first to develop his game by actually practising.
He was not a long hitter, but kept control of the ball and was deadly at running the ball up towards the hole. He was barred from entering the occasional competition for caddies – to give the others a chance. James Balfour, a prominent R&A member, described a ‘short, little, active man, with a pleasant face and a merry twinkle in his eye. His style was neat and effective. With him the game was one of head as much as of hand; he always kept cool, and generally pulled through a match, even when he fell behind. He was a natural gentleman.’
But he was also a master of the dark arts, the game’s first serious hustler. With the honour on the tee, he might make a great show of putting all his energy into a swing, only to hold back at the last minute and have his ball finish just short of a bunker. His opponent, believing trouble was out of reach, would inevitably knock his drive into the trap, and be praised for his great strength. On the final hole of a tight match, Robertson would remove his jacket, roll up his sleeves and spit on his hands – all designed to unsettle his rival. Or when partnering a weak club member who faced a dicey shot over severe trouble, he would persuade him to choose an air-shot, allowing Robertson to hit to safety rather than risk losing ball and hole.
‘It’s nae gowff,’ Robertson said of the new gutty ball, a solid ball made from the Malaysian percha tree, that would make his feathery-making operation obsolete. Eventually accepting the change, he developed new techniques using iron-headed clubs, as opposed to the wooden-headed clubs then in use. In 1858 he birdied the final hole of the Old Course for a 79, the first time anyone had broken 80 on the links – hardly anyone else could break 100. A year later he was dead of jaundice, at the age of 44. ‘They may toll the bells and shut up the shops at St. Andrews, for their greatest is gone,’ said one tribute. It would be the following year before the annual crowning of the game’s champion golfer would begin.
The first staging of what is now called the Open Championship was at Prestwick in 1860. Eight caddies, who the following day would be back carrying the clubs of their amateur masters, contested the title over three rounds of the 12-hole course in one day. Tom Morris, the home professional, was the favourite. Willie Park, from Musselburgh, was the winner. He won by two strokes and was the first to claim the Challenge Belt, made of red Moroccan leather by Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall. A replica was presented to South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen on winning the 150th anniversary Open at St. Andrews in 2010.
Park, the son of a farmer, learnt the game by playing with a whittled stick. He was a prodigiously long driver of the ball and a fine putter – he used the same club for both facets of the game. He arrived in St. Andrews in 1854 as a wiry youngster of 20 and challenged the great Allan Robertson to a game. Robertson never did play Park but a match was arranged with George Morris, Tom’s brother. George was thrashed, losing the first eight holes, so Tom, now based in Prestwick, ventured east to regain family honour. He could not. Over rounds at St. Andrews, North Berwick and Musselburgh, Park prevailed.
The pair would battle many times over the decades, often partnered by Tom’s son, Tommy, and Willie’s brother Mungo. In their last head-to-head match at Musselburgh in 1882, Park was two-up with six to play when the referee stopped the match because spectators were interfering with play. Morris and the referee retired to the pub but Park stayed out and sent word that, if they did not return, he would play the remaining holes anyway and claim the match. Which he did.
In the first nine Opens – amateurs were allowed to play from 1861 – Park won three times, finished runner-up four times and was never worse than fourth. He won a fourth title in 1875. Mungo Park, five years younger, also became Open champion in 1874, while Willie’s son, Willie junior, was the champion in 1887 and ’89. Willie junior then devoted more time to his club-making business and he became one of the first commercial course designers, with the Old Course at Sunningdale among his gems. He also wrote well on the game and said: ‘The man who can putt is a match for anyone.’ As a fine putter it applied to himself, as well as to his father.
As well as issuing a standing challenging to anyone in the world to a £100-a-side match, Willie Park Snr also took on club golfers while standing on one leg and playing one-handed. They say he only lost once. While putting, he was one of the first to stress the importance of never leaving the ball short of the hole, in stark contrast to his great rival, Tom Morris.
Tom Morris’s one flaw as a golfer was his putting. ‘He would be a much better player,’ his son chided, ‘if the hole was a yard closer.’ Worse, from close range he was shaky. A letter was once delivered to him successfully, addressed to ‘The Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick’. He was not offended. As someone who lived to the age of 86 and survived his wife, daughter and three sons, perhaps he knew there were worse things in life than missing a few putts.
By the time of his death, from a fall down the stairs at the New Club in St. Andrews, Morris was much loved as the game’s ‘Grand Old Man’. His influence on the game outweighed anyone else’s in the second half of the 19th century. He first started playing golf in St. Andrews as a six-year-old. He was an apprentice of Allan Robertson but they fell out for a time when he was found using the new gutty ball, which his employer had banned.
Morris went to Prestwick in 1851 as Keeper of the Green, establishing the course that would host the first 12 Opens. He was runner-up in the first of them but then won a year later and the year after that by 13 strokes, a record for major championships that would stand until Tiger Woods won the 2000 US Open by 15 strokes. He won again in 1864, the year he returned to St. Andrews to become Keeper of the Green on the Old Course, paid a salary of £50 a year by the R&A. The course we know today essentially evolved under Old Tom’s care.
He also laid out many other courses, including the New Course at St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Muirfield, Dornoch and County Down. He influenced some of the finest course architects, including Donald Ross, Charles Blair Macdonald and Harry Colt, while Dr Alister Mackenzie studied his work extensively.
Morris was a man of deep religious conviction and established the convention that the Old Course should be rested on a Sunday. He also bathed in the sea, summer and winter, east coast or west, every day. Horace Hutchinson described his golfing style: ‘There is a great deal of body swing in his driving stroke. It is a rather slow swing, the kind of swing that permits a man to use a rather supple club. Tom’s clubs are supple and flat in the lie and his swing is a flat one, rather of the “auld wife cutting hay” style, according to Bob Martin’s description of his own fine driving manner – generally sending the ball away with a fine flat trajectory that gives a good run.’
After the death of Robertson, Morris and Willie Park were the pre-eminent professionals of the time – until his son, Tommy, came along. Tommy was dashing and daring, everything his father was not. ‘I could cope with Allan myself,’ Old Tom said, ‘but never with Tommy.’ In 1867, at the age of 46 years and 99 days, Old Tom won his fourth Open title and remains the oldest ever winner.
In 1868, at the age of 17 years, five months and eight days, Tommy Morris – later to be written into golfing legend as ‘Young Tom’ – won his first Open and remains the youngest ever winner. He was aided by the championship’s first hole-in-one on Prestwick’s eighth hole. Once he started winning, he did not stop. He won the next year and again in 1870, when his three-round, 36-hole score was 149, which remained the lowest ever until the championship expanded to 72 holes in 1892. He won by 12 strokes and The Field reported: ‘His play was excellent. In fact, we never saw golf clubs handled so beautifully.’
Under the rules bequeathing the Challenge Belt, anyone winning it three times in a row was allowed to keep it. The belt remained on the Morris sideboard until Old Tom’s death in 1908, when it was relocated to the R&A clubhouse. There was no Open in 1871. With no trophy to play for, once again, as in the days of Allan Robertson, golf had an undisputed champion.
When the Open resumed in 1872, with a new silver claret jug to play for, Morris won again, and remains the only player to win four times in succession. He was the game’s original boy wonder. He first started hitting balls on the beach at Prestwick but his game really developed after the family returned to St. Andrews. Aged 13, he accompanied his father to a tournament in Perth but played in a private match against a local boy. His score would have won the official competition. Aged 16, he beat all the professionals at Carnoustie, winning a playoff against Willie Park and Bob Andrew.
Young Tom never cared for the deferential life of a club caddie. Instead, he saw himself solely as a player. ‘His exuberant address and slashing full swing was regarded as the only model for a first class player,’ wrote contemporary golf author Garden Smith, who added that notions of ‘slow back’, ‘keep your eye on the ball’ and ‘stand firm on your legs’ were ‘conspicuous by their absence’.
In 1874, Tommy married Margaret Drinnen and in September the following year they were expecting their first child. Tommy and his father went off to play against the Park brothers at North Berwick but word came that they should return home. They sailed back that night but it was too late. Meg and the baby had died in childbirth. Tommy was distraught with grief. He played golf only twice more, the last time in a six-day, 12-round match in December. They played through snowstorms and Tommy won but, now drinking heavily, his health was deteriorating. He was found on the morning of Christmas Day, dead of a ruptured artery that had bled into his lungs – although the romantic legend endures that he died of a broken heart.
He was buried in the cemetery in the grounds of the ruined St. Andrews cathedral, walking distance from the Old Course. A monument was erected with the inscription: ‘Deeply regretted by numerous friends and all golfers. He thrice in succession won the champion’s Belt and held it without rivalry and yet without envy. His many amiable qualities being no less acknowledged than his golfing achievements.’
If Young Tom was the first player we would recognise today as a tournament professional, John Ball was the opposite – the game’s first great amateur champion. His father was the owner of the Royal Hotel at Hoylake, which provided the headquarters for the Royal Liverpool Golf Club when it was founded in 1869. Ball was eight at the time and living on the edge of the links immediately gave him a new passion. He was talented and proficient enough to finish tied for fourth place in the Open at Prestwick in 1878 as a 16-year-old (some texts say he was 14 but the dates suggest otherwise).
As a prize he received ten shillings, a payment which became relevant when his club decided to put on a national championship for amateur players in 1885. The only problem was that no one knew quite what an amateur was. The suggestion was someone who did not take prize money from a competition, which ruled out the Elie stonemason Douglas Rolland, who was runner-up at the 1884 Open and accepted the prize. But what about Ball, the host club’s ace? The club decided to place a statute of limitation on the acceptance of prize money and Ball was cleared to enter.
While the Open was played under the medal, or strokeplay, format, the Amateur was a knockout under the matchplay format, holes won and lost. It was a test of nerve and Ball was uniquely suited to it. He reached the semi-finals that year and went on to win a never-to-be-matched eight Amateur titles between 1888 and 1912, when he was past his 50th year. As a 60-year-old he reached the last 16, a remarkably lengthy career given it covered the Boer War, during which he served with Cheshire Yeomanry and did not play golf for three years, as well as the First World War.
Ball’s greatest year was 1890 when he won his second Amateur title and then became the first amateur, and the first Englishman, to win the Open. It was at Prestwick, where the course had been extended to 18 holes. Having not played in the event for 12 years, he posted two scores of 82 and beat Willie Fernie and Archie Simpson by three strokes. His triumph did much to popularise the championship in England, where hitherto it had been considered an event for Scottish professionals.
Only Bobby Jones has ever equalled Ball’s feat of winning the Open and the Amateur in the same year, and the only other amateur to win the Open was Harold Hilton, a fellow Hoylake member. While Ball, who retired to a North Wales farm, was undemonstrative, except for his exceptional golf, and shy, Hilton was a man of words. Hilton the historian wrote that Ball ‘was the very first player to impress upon the world the possibilities of iron play. He was the only amateur in those early days who regularly played the ball straight at the pin, shot after shot. The majority were content to place the ball somewhere on the putting green, but he always seemed to play direct for the hole. At the time he was looked upon as a phenomenon whose play could only be admired, not imitated.’
When Ball won his sixth Amateur at St. Andrews in 1907 he was made an honorary member of the R&A. He never won a second Open, but contended again in 1892, when he was the third-round leader but lost to a member of his own club, one Harold Hilton.
Harold Hilton was born in the same year that his club, Royal Liverpool, was founded. His decision to play in the 1892 Open was a late one. He took the overnight train to Edinburgh, arriving on the day before but in time to play three practice rounds over the new links of Muirfield. There was also a new format, with four rounds over two days. The change brought the best out of England’s great amateurs but may have been rued by Horace Hutchinson, twice winner of the Amateur and, like Hilton, one of the game’s great historians, who led after the first day.
Hilton was seven behind at that stage but a brilliant 72 in the third round put him two behind John Ball. Hilton’s 74 to Ball’s 79 in the final round denied Ball a second Open title and when the Open was staged at their home club of Hoylake for the first time in 1897, Hilton triumphed again. This time Hilton overtook James Braid in the final round but had been an earlier starter, so he played billiards while waiting for Braid to finish one stroke adrift.
No British amateur has won the Open since. Hilton was a small but powerful man. Golf writer Bernard Darwin described his style as a ‘little man jumping on his toes and throwing himself and his club after the ball with almost frenetic abandon.’ Others said he looked like a ‘schoolboy giving the ball a really good smack’. Often his cap was dislodged in the process, but doubtless the ever-present cigarette remained in place.
However, the example of Ball, his elder club-mate, and playing on the Hoylake links ensured Hilton learnt to play with control. Not long off the tee, Hilton was a superb striker of long approach shots with wooden clubs. He also showed exceptional touch around the greens.
It was said he was better at medal play than matchplay but he won the Amateur four times, starting with back-to-back titles in 1900 and ’01, and was a runner-up three times. In 1911, at the age of 42, he enjoyed one of the great seasons in golf when he won a third Amateur title, finished third at the Open and then became the first overseas winner of the US Amateur at Apawamis in New York. He was the first to win both Amateur titles in the same year and the last British winner of the US version until Richie Ramsay replicated the feat in 2006.
In 1911 Hilton became founding editor of Golf Monthly magazine, while he also went on to be editor of Golf Illustrated. One of his perks in 1914 was deciding the pairings for the Golf Illustrated Gold Vase, a warm-up for the Amateur. Hilton put himself alongside the visiting American Francis Ouimet, the sensational winner of the US Open the previous year. The hospitality went no further and Hilton was the winner. Along with Ball, Hilton ranks as one of Britain’s greatest amateurs but if he had a nemesis, it was the son of an Edinburgh professor.
There was no loss of honour, for Harold Hilton or anybody else, in losing to Freddie Tait. Both times Tait won the Amateur Championship he beat Hilton, in the final in 1896 and in the fourth round two years later when Hilton was the reigning Open champion. A lieutenant in the Black Watch, Tait was not just a crack rifle shot but also a fine rugby player and cricketer, as well as a golfer from an early age. He was the third son of Professor Peter Tait, of Edinburgh University, who was a member of the R&A and spent his summers in St. Andrews playing up to five rounds a day.
Once, the professor experimented with playing at night after coating some balls in phosphorescent paint. Alas, the round came to an end when the hand of a playing partner was burned after the flammable paint set his glove alight. He also had a theory that a gutty ball could not be hit further than 191 yards, but on a frosty morning in 1893 his son reached the green at the 13th hole of the Old Course with a blow of 341 yards. The same year Freddie scored a 72 on the Old, although it did not count as a new record since it was not from the medal tees.
Tait was known for his long driving and was sometimes crooked but made the most remarkable recoveries. He sounds like the Seve Ballesteros of his day, described by Bernard Darwin as a ‘very great golfer with a certain exciting quality in his game that has never been surpassed.’ When one drive veered off line and through a spectator’s hat, the irritated wearer requested compensation. After Tait complained at forking out five shillings, Old Tom Morris told him: ‘You ought to be glad it was only a new hat you had to buy and not an oak coffin.’
Tait was steady enough at medal play to finish in the top nine at the Open in five out of six years, twice being third and four times ranking as the best amateur. But he was at his best in the head-to-head format. If he had Hilton’s number, Tait himself had some titanic matches against Hoylake’s other great champion, John Ball. They met in the final of the 1899 Amateur at Prestwick and Ball only triumphed at the 37th hole. It was Tait’s last appearance in the championship, although a few weeks later he got revenge on Ball in a match at Royal Lytham after being four-down with 13 holes to play. It was his last match. That autumn, he sailed to South Africa for the Boer War and was shot dead leading a charge at Koodoosberg. The R&A’s history, Champions & Guardians, says the news was ‘received with stunned disbelief, not just by the golfing world, for Tait was a household name and he was everybody’s hero. His infectious humour, his high spirits and his friendly disposition were combined with generosity and modesty, all of which endeared him to fellow soldiers and fellow golfers alike.’
In the affections of the golfing world Tait, who passed away aged just 30, was a third great amateur along with Ball and Hilton. Soon, however, three great professionals would overshadow all.
Over the two decades up to the First World War the game was dominated by the Great Triumvirate of JH Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid. The trio won 16 out of 21 Open Championships and in the five other years one, or even two, of them were second. John Henry Taylor, known as ‘JH’, became the first English professional to win, in 1894 at Sandwich, the first time the Open was staged outside Scotland, and he retained the title at St. Andrews. A hat-trick of victories was only prevented by Vardon after a 36-hole playoff at Muirfield in 1896.
Taylor grew up near the great links of Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! and learned the game as a caddie and greenkeeper. Having left school at the age of 11, he worked as a boot boy, a gardener’s boy and a builder’s labourer. Of the Triumvirate, Taylor was the first to blossom, finishing tenth when he, and Vardon, made their Open debuts in 1893.
By nature and nurture, Taylor was ideally suited to the challenge of battling the elements on the links. He was stockily built and had a low, flat, punchy swing which kept the ball under the wind, something he had many hours to perfect at Westward Ho! It was said of him: ‘When he pulled down his cap, stuck out his chin and embedded his large boots in the ground, he could hit straight through the wind as though it were not there.’
Taylor was in the top ten at the Open for 17 straight years, was a runner-up six times and the champion five times, equalling Braid and one short of Vardon’s record. His greatest performance came at St. Andrews in 1900 when, uniquely, he returned the lowest score in each round to beat Vardon by eight strokes with Braid five further adrift in third place. The same year he was runner-up to Vardon at the US Open while two more Open titles arrived in 1909 and ’13, the latter at the age of 42.
For over 40 years Taylor was the professional at Royal Mid-Surrey and, as well as helping to found the Artisan Golfers’ Association and the Public Golf Courses Association, he was the father of the Professional Golfers’ Association. Bernard Darwin credited him with ‘turning a feckless company into a self-respecting and respected body of men.’ A natural leader, Taylor was the non-playing captain when Britain won the Ryder Cup at Southport and Ainsdale in 1933. Although his formal schooling was brief, he was a superb speaker and became a gifted writer, forsaking a ‘ghost’ for his acclaimed autobiography, Golf, My Life’s Work.
Along with Braid and 1893 Open champion Willie Auchterlonie, he was among the first professionals elected as honorary members of the R&A in 1950. Having retired to a home on the hill overlooking Westward Ho!, where the view he said was the ‘finest in all of Christendom’, Taylor received what he regarded as his greatest honour when he was made president of Royal North Devon in 1957. For a brief period, Taylor had been the best player in the game, but that ended the day in 1896, as a double reigning Open champion, when he was defeated 8 and 6 (over 36 holes) at Ganton by the club’s young professional.
He might have given JH Taylor a couple of years start, but once Harry Vardon began winning, he found it difficult to stop. While there was then no organised tour outside the majors, one estimate suggests at one point Vardon won 17 tournaments out of 22, and finished runner-up in the other five. His place in the game’s history is secured by his six Open victories, a record yet to be matched. In three appearances in the US Open, Vardon finished first, second, second. As a great champion who popularised the game, Vardon was the natural successor to Young Tom Morris, but his impact was all the greater for his triumphs on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘I do not think anyone who saw him in his prime, will disagree as to this, that a greater golfing genius is inconceivable,’ wrote Bernard Darwin.
Vardon started as a caddie at Grouville, near St. Helier on Jersey. His father always thought his brother Tom was the better golfer but Harry became the better winner. Tom, who was the professional at Royal St. George’s before moving to America, never won the Open but was second in 1903, inevitably to Harry. That was the year Harry suffered from fainting fits and was later diagnosed with tuberculosis. He often suffered from ill health, but it was the saving of him in 1912 when he had to cancel a trip to America, having been booked to sail on the Titanic.
His slim frame belied the length he possessed off the tee. His was an easy style, both elegant and effective. His upright swing was in contrast to the popular ‘St. Andrews swing’, where the club was swept around the body. Vardon’s success changed the mechanics of the swing forever. He also used the overlapping grip where the little finger of the right hand covers the index finger of the left. He was not the first player to use it, but the most famous; hence it became known as the ‘Vardon grip’.
The key to Vardon’s game was his accuracy. Taylor said: ‘Vardon played fewer shots out of the rough than anyone who has ever swung a golf club. If the test of a player be that he makes fewer bad shots than the remainder, then I give Vardon the palm. He hit the ball in the centre of every club with greater frequency than any other player, and in this most difficult feat lay his great strength as a player.’ His relative weakness was his putting. He was fine on the approach putts but suffered over the short ones – the ‘jumps’ he called it; we would say the ‘yips’ today. ‘I think I know as well as anyone how not to do it,’ he said.
In 1900, when he beat Taylor to win the US Open at Chicago, Vardon embarked on a nine-month tour of America, playing exhibitions and making appearances at sporting goods stores on behalf of equipment manufacturer Spalding. Everywhere he drew crowds and there was a significant advance in interest in the game, just as there was when he returned in 1913, but he lost, along with Ted Ray, in a playoff to the 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet, perhaps the game’s greatest giant-killing act. Vardon was 50 when he returned to the USA in 1920 and almost won the title back.
Taylor said Vardon, the long-time professional at South Herts, was always the ‘most courteous and delightful of opponents’, giving the ‘fullest possible credit’ to the winner when defeated. ‘To know him was to love him,’ Taylor added.
James Braid had to wait longer than his contemporaries for his own glory days but, once they arrived, his achievements fully justified expanding the designation of ‘greatest’ to a ‘triumvirate’. For 14 years in a row he was in the top five at the Open. He won his first title in 1901 and then from 1905 won four times in six years to become the first player to claim the title five times, quite a feat given the head start he had given JH Taylor and Harry Vardon, and that they were his chief opponents. Only Taylor, Peter Thomson and Tom Watson have matched the feat, and only Vardon has surpassed it. Braid also won the fledgling British Professional Matchplay Championship, sponsored by the News of the World, four times in nine years.
Braid grew up at Elie, near St. Andrews, the son of a ploughman, and he hardly had the advantages of others in such fertile golfing territory. It was only when he moved down to London to work as an apprentice clubmaker for the Army & Navy Stores that his golfing education took off – for one thing, he could play on his day off on Sundays, which religion prevented him from doing at home.
He developed a powerful swing and drove the ball huge distances but without Vardon’s accuracy. Braid was a stoic, calm sort of chap but his golf was exciting to watch and he had a popular following, always anticipating whatever might happen next, not least his trademark recoveries. Horace Hutchinson said he played with a ‘divine fury’. When he won at Muirfield in 1901, his opening tee shot sailed over a stone wall and out of bounds. By the time he got to the 72nd hole, he had plenty of shots in hand, which could have been a blessing when, playing his approach of 200 years, the shaft of his club splintered, sending his clubhead towards the clubhouse – fortunately the ball finished up safely on the green.
His greatest performance came at Prestwick in 1908 when he compiled scores of 70, 72, 77 and 72 for a total of 291, five better than the Open had seen before. He won by eight and his record score stood until 1927. Throughout his decade of success, Braid’s putting was sublime, while his touch around the green was always delicate for such a tall man with large hands.
Once Walton Heath opened in 1904, Braid became the club professional for 45 years. He also went on to become the most sought-after golf course architect of the 1920s and ’30s. Among his classics are the King’s and Queen’s courses at Gleneagles. More reserved than Vardon or Taylor, Braid nonetheless played an equal part in the Great Triumvirate’s achievements, both on the course and in raising interest in the game generally. ‘He was an immensely painstaking man of few words, a warm and true friend,’ was one tribute.
The five men, other than the Great Triumvirate, who claimed the Open between 1894 and 1914 were the English amateur Harold Hilton (his second victory), two Scots in Sandy Herd and Jack White, the Channel Islander Ted Ray – and a Frenchman. Arnaud Massy was, in the words of Hilton, ‘the first stranger within our gates to annex the blue ribbon of our golfing world, and none can say that he was not fully worthy of the honour.’
Golf was not unknown in France – the club at Pau, near the Pyrenees, has recently celebrated its 150th anniversary – but it was mainly provided for the pleasure of visiting Britons. The only set of clubs right-handed Massy could find when he was learning the game were left-handed. More usually, left-handers were forced to play right-handed due to the unavailability of left-handed sets, although Phil Mickelson is a natural righty who learnt as a lefty by standing opposite his father and mirroring his swing.
In 1902 Massy moved to North Berwick, switched round to playing right-handed and really started practising, although there was time to marry a local lass. His great year was 1907. Early in the year, he beat a number of British players in tournaments staged on the Riviera and won his second successive French Open, while at the end of the season he defeated James Braid over 36-holes at Deal. In between, the Frenchman denied Braid a third successive Open victory at Hoylake.
In fact, though, it was JH Taylor who was Massy’s chief opponent in the 1907 Open. Taylor led by one with a round to play but Massy’s 77 to Taylor’s 80 brought victory by two strokes to France, for the first and so far last time. Continental Europe had to wait until 1979 for Seve Ballesteros and its next Open champion. A strong wind and occasional lashing rain made that year’s championship the ‘very finest test of the game,’ according to Hilton, yet Massy ‘rose superior to the trying conditions and seemed less affected by them than any of his rivals. One of the great virtues of his style is the firmness of his stance and apparent control of balance. I cannot call to mind any player who seems quite as firm on his feet as Arnaud Massy.’
Massy was also a fine putter, and according to the Shell Encyclopaedia of Golf, ‘he held himself like a Grenadier and made the most of his mighty chest, playing with a fine, ferocious gaiety that made him a most attractive golfer.’ The gaiety was misplaced when he faced Harry Vardon in a 36-hole playoff for the Open at Sandwich in 1911. Well behind playing the then par-three 17th in the afternoon, Massy hit his tee shot to 12 feet only to see Vardon get inside him. Although under strokeplay rules the round should have been completed, Massy conceded. Perhaps apocryphally, he is said to have muttered on the way back to the clubhouse, ‘I cannot play zis damn game.’
Later, returning to France, he became the professional at Chantaco. He won four French Opens in all (and was the runner-up three times), plus the Spanish Open three times and the Belgian Open once. In an era where three men dominated, one Frenchman emphatically made his mark.
Ted Ray was a hard man to overshadow, even for the Great Triumvirate. He was, after all, a ‘huge, lumbering figure of a man with a pipe invariably clenched between his teeth, a trilby hat on his head and a philosophy reflected in the advice he once gave a golfer who wanted to hit the ball further: “Hit it a bloody sight harder, mate.”’ Ray is also one of only three Britons to have won the Open and the US Open.
He grew up in the same village on Jersey as Harry Vardon, seven years the master’s junior. His start was as a caddie at Royal Jersey but it was not long before he followed Vardon to the mainland, eventually succeeding him as the professional at Ganton in 1903. Like everyone else at the time, he had to be patient in waiting for success to arrive but Ray had a determination to improve, and in 1912 at Muirfield he finally won the claret jug, impressively by four strokes from Vardon and by eight from Braid.
Ray was the perfect foil for Vardon when they toured America together in 1913, ultimately losing in a playoff for the US Open to the unheralded Francis Ouimet. Among those who marvelled at the pair, when they played an exhibition at East Lake in Atlanta, was a young Bobby Jones, who admired Vardon’s accuracy and steadiness but was astonished by Ray’s power.
Where Vardon swung effortlessly, Ray gave it the kitchen sink. His swing was like the ‘lurching charge of an enraged Cape buffalo,’ according to one observer. Ray was the biggest hitter of his age, but often erratic, so he developed a fine recovery game. The friends returned to America in 1920 when Vardon, at the age of 50, led the US Open before a late collapse. The highly-strung Leo Diegel also had a chance but imploded and Ray was the beneficiary. In 1970 Tony Jacklin joined Vardon and Ray as the only Britons to have won both Opens, while Graeme McDowell is the only other to win the US version in modern times.
Ray, who had moved to Oxhey in Hertfordshire in 1912, was made an honorary member of the club, a singular tribute for a professional at the time. He remained at the club until shortly before his death, and was always a popular figure. At the age of 50 he was the playing captain of the Ryder Cup team. A fast walker, as well as a fast swinger, he would not have enjoyed the modern trend for deliberate play (i.e. far too slow) by today’s professionals. ‘To think when we ought to play is madness,’ he said.
No foreign player (at least who wasn’t a nationalised American) won the US Open again until Gary Player in 1965. Yet quite apart from the victories of Vardon and Ray in America’s national championship, its early days were dominated by players born in Britain, but who had made their home in the US.
