American golf is indebted to the many hundreds of Scots who became the first professionals in the country and popularised the game. Many shared a first name with Willie Anderson, who is the only player to win the US Open three times in a row and shares the record of four titles in all. Yet the US Open was established as long ago as 1895, while American golf only really took off after Francis Ouimet, a 20-year-old amateur, won the competition in 1913. Not only was it his debut in the championship – and since then only Ben Curtis and Keegan Bradley have won a major on their first attempt – in the playoff he defeated the mighty British professionals Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. It was a sensation.
Soon Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen emerged, but this was the Age of the Emperor, Bobby Jones. Learning the game from his Scottish professional at the Atlanta Athletic Club, Stewart Maiden, Jones became the most famous golfer in the world. In 1930 he claimed the Grand Slam – the Open and Amateur titles of both Britain and America. His feat has never been repeated and possibly never will. Having completed all he set out to do, he retired, but his legacy to the game includes Augusta National and the Masters tournament. Jones himself, however, said he was outclassed by the first great woman player, Joyce Wethered, who rose to prominence in an emerging women’s game in the 1920s.
If you were Scottish, a golf professional and named ‘Willie’ there was a job for you in America at the end of the 19th century. Willie Anderson was one to make the transatlantic crossing and became the first man to win the US Open four times. The feat has never been beaten and only equalled by Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus.
Anderson was part of a mass emigration. Around 250 men from Carnoustie alone were said to have gone to America. Willie Smith, one of four brothers from the town, set up at Midlothian in Illinois, with brother Alex at Nassau in New York; Willie Campbell became the professional at The Country Club in Brookline, Willie Davis at Newport, Rhode Island and Willie Dunn at Shinnecock Hills.
Dunn’s father was the Willie Dunn who had challenged Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris. The son had originally gone to France, building courses in Biarritz, and was said to have taught more earls, lords and duchesses than any other professional. He also met WK Vanderbilt, who persuaded him over to New York. In 1894 Dunn won a so-called ‘Open’ matchplay competition, beating Campbell in the final, but in the first official Open run by the newly created United States Golf Association, he lost by two strokes to Horace Rawlins, who originated from the Isle of Wight.
Anderson was from North Berwick, where his father Tom was the greenkeeper, but was only 14 or so when he was persuaded to go to America by Frank Legh Slazenger, one of the sporting goods family who set up in New York. He taught the members at Misquamicut in Rhode Island, while practicising his own game, and in 1897 was runner-up to Joe Lloyd in the US Open, starting a sequence of 11 top-five finishes in 14 years, his worst result being 15th.
His first win came at Myopia Hunt in 1901, beating Alex Smith in the first playoff at a US Open. Anderson was respected and admired by his peers but was generally a dour man, though on the first morning of the championship his ire was piqued by a club member who announced that the professionals, who were not allowed in the clubhouse at a US Open until Ted Ray’s win in 1920, would be eating in the kitchen. Anderson was swishing a club and started to do so with more intensity until he slammed the club into the lawn and spat: ‘Nae, nae. We’re nae goin t’ eat in the kitchen.’ A tent was hastily erected.
Anderson won in another playoff in 1903 and then won again the following two years, the only hat-trick of victories the US Open has seen. He also won four Western Opens, at the time another big tournament. He was said to have played with great accuracy but his personality never shone through his golf. ‘They don’t know me,’ Anderson would wail at his lack of any wider recognition. He died young, officially from arteriosclerosis, probably caused by heavy drinking, just days after completing a series of exhibitions in 1910.
The first American champion on British soil was an Australian. Walter Travis went to America as a youngster and only turned to a sporting life late in the day. He was 34 or 35 when he decided to see how successful he could be at golf if he applied himself fully. Within two years of taking up the game he was a semi-finalist in the US Amateur and won the title at the age of 38 in 1900. A small man, always puffing on a black cigar, Travis was a short hitter but a deadly putter. He retained his title a year later despite the championship being interrupted for a week by the assassination of President McKinley.
Travis was an early adopter of the Haskell, the new rubber-wound ball with a solid core devised by Coburn Haskell, of Cleveland. These new balls ran much further than the old gutties but were dismissed as ‘Bounding Billies’ until Travis’s success. A year later Sandy Herd won the Open using a Haskell – the same ball all four rounds, which was unheard of with a gutty – despite having denounced the innovation until he saw John Ball play with one in a practice round the day before the championship.
A third US Amateur title in four years followed in 1903 and the following year Travis journeyed to Sandwich for the British version. Unwittingly, he caused another stir with his equipment. His putting, the strength of his game, had gone off, and just before the event he borrowed from an American colleague a putter, the centre-shafted, mallet-headed Schenectady putter. Suddenly, he re-found his game and beat Harold Hilton and Horace Hutchinson before meeting the very long-hitting Edward Blackwell in the final. Blackwell had the advantage off the tee but was simply putted off the course.
A few years later the centre-shafted putter was banned by the R&A in Britain, although Travis still used it in America. However, he admitted: ‘I have never been able to do anything with it since. I have tried repeatedly but it seems to have lost all its virtue.’ It was eventually retired to a display cabinet at the Garden City club in New York where Travis was a member and redesigned the course. Many years later it was stolen during a party and was never returned. In 1908, Travis played Jerome Travers in the semi-finals of the US Amateur at his home club but came to grief at the 18th in a nasty pit bunker he had inserted by the green and which was particularly despised by his fellow members. Two swipes and the ball had not emerged, so he had to concede.
Travis never felt his historic victory at Sandwich was appreciated by the locals. But Hilton wrote: ‘There may have been more brilliant players performing in that championship but there were none who exhibited more consistent accuracy than the American champion did. If ever a man deserved his success, it was Mr Travis at Sandwich. His game right through the event was the acme of applied science.’
Despite their age gap, Jerry Travers had many great battles with Walter Travis, and the younger man was often the victor. Travers mirrored Travis in many departments of the game, being a shaky driver, often resorting to iron-headed clubs off the tee, but being a magical putter. He even copied Travis and successfully took up with the Schenectady putter.
Travers was born into a wealthy New York family and learned the game on their estate at Oyster Bay on Long Island – with the Carnoustie-born Alex Smith, the 1906 US Open champion (and again in 1910) brought in for expert tuition. His game was well suited to matchplay and he won the US Amateur in 1907 and ’08, but the following year did not bother to enter. Seduced by the bright lights of Broadway, he was a handsome playboy who only played serious golf when the mood took.
Yet by winning four US Amateurs in all – only Bobby Jones has won more – and then the US Open in 1915, Travers was clearly one of the greatest golfers of his time. But his victory at Baltusrol was the last time he took part in a national championship. He retired to concentrate on being a cotton broker on Wall Street but he was later ruined in the stock market crash during the Great Depression. He turned professional but was unsuccessful, and spent the last ten years of his life as an airplane engine inspector for Pratt & Whitney. He did attend Jones’s grand slam-sealing US Amateur victory in 1930 at Merion, paying as any other spectator. When he said no player came near to Jones, a companion suggested Travers himself might have done, but he replied: ‘He could give me strokes and beat me on the best day I ever saw.’
Travers was not the only early American golfing hero to fade away quickly. Johnny McDermott won the US Open as a 19-year-old in 1911 and retained the title a year later. But within two years McDermott had suffered a nervous breakdown and lived the rest of his life, dying one month short of his 80th birthday, cared for by his family and in rest homes.
When Chick Evans, who was the opposite of Travers, a great striker of the ball but a poor putter, won the US Open in 1916, three amateurs had won in four years. Only two more ever did, including Jones. Perhaps the first was the most remarkable, achieved by a young man who gave Travers his most fearsome challenge on the way to his fourth Amateur title in 1913. After the match, Travers sat down with the 20-year-old Francis Ouimet and talked though the match, providing a lifetime’s golfing education in an hour. ‘It may have been this wholehearted kindness to a novice competitor,’ wrote Mark Frost in The Greatest Game Ever Played, ‘that did more to alter the essential history of the game than the many great accomplishments Jerry Travers delivered on the course.’
Francis Ouimet’s victory in the 1913 US Open changed the history of the game in the United States. Golf was now an American sport, not merely an imported British pastime. Here an American hero was born, the 20-year-old unknown defeating the mighty Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. It was a fairytale win, the original Cinderella story (for Caddyshack fans) but also, said golf writer Bernard Darwin, ‘the most momentous in all golf history’. Darwin was not only there at Brookline, he was the marker for the playoff. So taken was he with Ouimet that he could not help hoping the youngster would prevail.
Ouimet almost did not play. He had impressed at that year’s US Amateur but was worried he would not get any more time off from his job as a clerk in a sporting goods store in Boston, although he did hope to get a glimpse of Vardon and Ray. Robert Watson, the president of the USGA, nonetheless put his name in the draw and his boss said: ‘As well as you are entered, you had better plan to play.’
Ouimet lived across Clyde Street from The Country Club at Brookline. Looking out over the 17th fairway from his bedroom window and collecting lost balls sparked his interest in the game. He and his brother played on a crude course amid the rubble of the backyard. Later he played at a local public course or sneaked on to The Country Club at 4.30 in the morning, until a greenkeeper shooed him off. He caddied at the club and one day a member asked him to play. Caddies were expressly banned from playing but the caddiemaster turned a blind eye, as he did when other members started asking to play with the youngster.
He was the son of a French-Canadian father and an Irish mother, hardly the background of the other amateurs in the field. But rounds of 77, 74 and 74 put him level with Vardon and Ray. All three had 79s in the last round, played in the rain, with Ouimet birdying the 17th hole (and single-putting the last four holes) to force the tie. The following day he won the playoff with a score of 72 to Vardon’s 77 and Ray’s 78. Throughout, he was constantly encouraged by his ten-year-old caddie, Eddie Lowery, no bigger than the bag but who continually urged his man to: ‘Be sure and keep your eye on the ball.’
If Ouimet’s reception from the gallery had been rapturous the day before, now it bordered on the hysterical. The young champion was hoisted onto his supporters’ shoulders and paraded in front of the clubhouse. At one point they stopped and Ouimet lowered his head as a woman whispered in his ear. Then he said: ‘Thank you, mother. I’ll be home soon.’
Robert Sommers, the USGA historian, wrote: ‘Francis Ouimet became a national hero. To the public he was the all-American boy, the young man from a family of modest means who had entered a field dominated by professionals and amateurs of wealth and social position and had shown he could play the game better than any of them. He was an unassuming hero, partly because of his solid upbringing.’ A year later Ouimet won the US Amateur title, as he would again 17 years later, and in 1951 became the first overseas captain of the Royal and Ancient.
Just as American amateur golf was reaching its peak – Bobby Jones was still to come – came the founding of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America in New York in 1916, some 15 years after the British original. One of the key people behind the organisation was businessman Rodman Wanamaker, whose huge trophy is awarded to the winner of the PGA Championship (distinguished here as the USPGA). The event was played as matchplay for its first 39 editions and although the designation of ‘major’ evolved later, it was considered a significant tournament alongside the US Open. The first champion was Jim Barnes in 1916 and he retained the title three years later when the tournament resumed after the First World War.
Barnes was another naturalised American. He was from Cornwall and was an assistant professional at West Cornwall before moving to San Francisco at the age of 19. He was known as ‘Long Jim’ since, at six foot, four inches, he was the first tall man to become successful in the game. No one above six foot had previously survived at the top of the game but Barnes proved there was no inherent disadvantage in being so tall. He even played well in the wind, having learnt to play on the links of Cornwall.
His greatest achievement was winning the US Open in 1921 at Columbia, where he led from start to finish and won by nine strokes from Walter Hagen and Fred McLeod. Barnes might have won more titles but for Hagen, who beat him in the final of the USPGA in 1921 and ’24. Barnes was also runner-up to Hagen in the 1922 Open at Royal St. George’s but three years later Barnes won the claret jug having started the final round five strokes behind Macdonald Smith. Another of the Carnoustie brothers, Smith was an early contender for the best player never to win a major, finishing within three strokes of the champion on nine occasions. In the last Open to be played at Prestwick, the large gallery so overwhelmed the course that Smith, needing to score a 78 to win, could only return an 82. Barnes had become the second player, after Hagen, to win all three of what we now call major championships prior to the creation of the Masters.
Barnes was a quiet, modest man and always proud of his English roots. Prior to the Sandwich Open in 1922, he played a round at neighbouring Prince’s and was followed throughout by Laddie Lucas, the six-year-old son of the club’s secretary. After the round, Barnes gave Laddie two dozen brand new golf balls and said he could keep any that he drove into the fairway from the first tee. Despite a strong crosswind, Lucas hit all 24 onto the fairway and the supply lasted him over two years. In the Second World War, Lucas was a renowned fighter pilot and once had to crash land on Prince’s, which had been taken over by the military. When he ended up in a bunker at the ninth, he said: ‘Never could hit that fairway.’
Like Ted Ray, George Duncan was a successor to the Great Triumvirate and came to prominence before the First World War. He claimed the claret jug in the first post-War Open but golf had changed. The Americans were now about to dominate. Following Duncan’s win in 1920, 11 of the next 13 Opens were won by visitors from across the Atlantic. Only Arthur Havers in 1923 bucked the trend as a home-based champion.
Instead of Duncan, it might have been Abe Mitchell in 1920. Mitchell led by six strokes after the first two rounds at Deal, with Duncan 13 behind. No one else has ever recovered from such a position to win the Open. Feeling his driving had let him down after twin rounds of 80, Duncan visited the exhibition tent and bought a new driver. The transformation was complete as the next day he returned rounds of 71 and 72 to beat Sandy Herd by two strokes. Mitchell had collapsed in the third round, an 84 eating up his advantage and a 76 in the last round dropping him to fourth place. Mitchell was thought one of the best British players never to win the Open but, as the personal coach of St. Albans seed merchant Samuel Ryder, he played a crucial part in the establishment of a soon-to-be regular transatlantic match that would become the Ryder Cup.
Duncan was the son of an Aberdeenshire village policeman and apprenticed as a carpenter before turning professional at 17. His key characteristic can be guessed from the title of his autobiography, Golf at the Gallop. Never the most secure putter, his policy was: ‘If you are going to miss ’em, miss ’em quick.’ James Braid, however, wrote: ‘I cannot make him out; he plays so fast that he looks like he doesn’t care, but I suppose it must be his way.’
Two years after his Open win, Duncan had a chance at Sandwich to tie Walter Hagen, whose clubhouse target was considered so secure that telegrams had been sent to London proclaiming a new champion. But Duncan, still out on the course, sent approach shot after approach shot rifling at the flags, until the last where he needed a four to force a playoff. His second shot, struck possibly too well in that it did not fade back from the left, found a dip to the left of the green. In the blink of an eye that it took to play his chip, the ball returned to his feet and he took a five. Duncan’s Hollow, as it became known, was also visited in 1985 by Sandy Lyle, who also fluffed his chip but found a five was still good enough to win. Duncan had some revenge in 1929, in the first Ryder Cup on home soil, when the Scot trounced Hagen, his opposite number as captain, 10 and 8.
In 1921 Jock Hutchinson, St. Andrews born and bred but, like Jim Barnes, a naturalised American, won the Open on the Old Course but his provenance, Bernard Darwin wrote, ‘did not seem so much comfort in practice as in theory.’ America was about to unleash its own triumvirate of stars: Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Bobby Jones.
As with Arnold Palmer in the Swinging Sixties and Seve Ballesteros in Europe in the Eighties, so Walter Hagen in the Roaring Twenties was the perfect golfer at the right time. He was a flamboyant showman who proved golf could provide the most exciting entertainment. Gene Sarazen said about Hagen what others later would say of Palmer and Ballesteros: ‘All the professionals who have a chance to go after the big money should say a silent thanks to Walter each time they stretch a cheque between their fingers. It was Walter who made professional golf what it is.’
There were the stories of taking time to ‘smell the roses’, of being out all night and turning up at the course in a tuxedo, and of enquiring of his opponents: ‘So which one of you is going to finish second?’ Herb Warren Wind said he broke ‘eleven of the Ten Commandments and kept on going.’ At the 1920 Open at Deal, told he could not enter the clubhouse, he merely dined and changed his shoes in his Austin-Daimler parked by the front door.
A well-built man who once toyed with the idea of becoming a baseball player, Hagen had an inconsistent, swaying swing which produced many a horrendous shot. He accepted wherever he ended up and got on with the recovery. From 100 yards and in, he was superb. He pitched brilliantly, he was precise from sand long before the sand wedge was invented and he was an inspired putter.
It added up to an alluring package. ‘Anyone who knew Hagen,’ wrote Henry Longhurst, ‘would probably go further to see him play again in his prime than anyone else in the world.’ Then there were the clothes. At the time when most pros were still dressing in sack coats and brogues, Hagen wore silk shirts, florid cravats, alpaca sweaters, screaming argyles and black-and-white shoes he had custom-made at a $100 a pair, reported Charles Price.
Hagen was the son of a blacksmith from Rochester, New York, where he became one of the first American-born club professionals. After winning his second US Open in 1919, he gave up his then position at Oakland Hills to become ‘unattached’, a full-time tournament professional, a modern Young Tom Morris. ‘The Haig’, or ‘Sir Walter’, hired a manager and set up exhibition tours which, over the years, took him around the globe.
But as Al Laney wrote, ‘All of us who wrote golf in Hagen’s day made too much of his flamboyant showmanship and not nearly enough of his golf.’ His total of 11 major titles has only been surpassed by Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. He won four Opens out of six, and, at matchplay, five USPGAs out of six, finishing runner-up the other year after an epic final against Sarazen.
Facing Hagen head-to-head was virtually impossible. Bernard Darwin wrote: ‘His demeanour to his opponents, though entirely correct, had yet a certain suppressed truculence; he exhibited so supreme a confidence that they could not get it out of their minds and could not live against it.’ Bobby Jones was one of the few to withstand the glare. ‘I love to play with Walter,’ he said. ‘He goes along chin up, smiling away; never grousing about his luck, playing the ball as he finds it. He can come nearer beating the luck itself than anybody I know.’
Who invented the sand wedge? Who was the only player to beat Walter Hagen in six years at the USPGA? Who was a contemporary of Bobby Jones but won first and kept playing longer? Who won the only Open at Prince’s? Who was the first to win all four major championships? Who hit the ‘shot heard around the world’? Who starred in a film with Buster Keaton? Who was christened Eugenio Saraceni but changed his name aged 17 because he did not want to sound like a violinist? The answer is Gene Sarazen.
The son of an Italian immigrant carpenter, Sarazen started caddying at the age of ten. He almost died of pneumonia while working as an apprentice to his father – the same illness finally claimed him aged 97 – and after weeks in hospital, his doctors recommended an outdoor lifestyle. Golf it was, then. He won the 1922 US Open aged 20 and then added the USPGA title. Walter Hagen had won the Open and the two played a 72-hole match for the ‘world championship’ which the younger Sarazen won. Hagen had not played in the USPGA, even though he had won in 1921, but the two met in the final in 1923, with Sarazen winning at the 38th hole – Hagen went on to win the next four USPGAs.
Sarazen, meanwhile, became briefly distracted by Hollywood, where he dabbled in movies. As well as becoming a more cautious player, ‘The Squire’ – he lived on a farm for much of his life – also did something about his poor bunker play. By building up the flange of his wedge with solder, Sarazen invented the modern sand wedge, designed to glide through the sand when hitting behind the ball and exploding both sand and ball safely out of the trap. The next summer he returned to England and won the 1932 Open at Prince’s, the neighbouring links to Royal St. George’s.
His association with the Open had started in 1923 at Troon when, even as a two-time major winner, he failed to qualify, and finished at the same venue in 1973, where he holed in one with a five-iron at the Postage Stamp (the eighth hole). The next day he holed out of a bunker for a two.
Sarazen, always genial and dressed in plus-fours, missed the inaugural Masters in 1934 at Bobby Jones’ recently completed Augusta National course, but the following year he hit the ‘shot heard around the world’ when a four-wood approach at the 15th went in the hole for an albatross, or double eagle as the Americans put it. At a stroke he had wiped out a three-shot deficit and he went on to beat Craig Wood in a playoff. Jones’s new tournament never looked back. ‘Sarazen has always been the impatient player who went for everything in the hope of feeling the timely touch of inspiration,’ wrote Jones. ‘When he is right in the mood, he is probably the greatest scorer in the game, possibly that the game has ever seen.’
Yet in 1934 on a world exhibition tour, Sarazen stopped in Fiji on his way to Australia and was practising at Suva when some local caddies, marvelling at his great shots, asked who he was. ‘Don’t you know who I am? My name is Gene Sarazen,’ he said. The reply came: ‘We no hear of Mister Sarazen, but we hear of Mister Jones.’
Bobby Jones was more than a golfer, he was a hero in an era when the word meant something. In the eight seasons between 1923 and 1930, Jones entered 21 national championships and won 13 of them. In that time, the two greatest professionals of the time, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, never won when Jones was in the field. As an amateur, Jones’s ‘majors’ consisted of the Open and Amateur championships of America and Britain. In 1930, he won all four of them, what came to be known as the Grand Slam. Jones was honoured with two tickertape parades in New York that summer. He was aged 28 and, after a few months of consideration, promptly retired from competitive golf. He went out at the top, a peak no one has since come close to scaling.
Jones grew up in Atlanta and was a natural from the beginning, learning the fundamentals from East Lake’s Scottish professional, Stewart Maiden. Bernard Darwin wrote: ‘Harry Vardon and Bobby Jones combined exquisiteness of art with utterly relentless precision in a way not given to any other golfer.’ Darwin also described Jones’s swing: ‘I can remember the precise spot at Hoylake where I first saw the swing soon to be familiar in the imagination of the whole golfing world; so swift in that it occupied so little time, with no suspicion of waggle, and yet so leisurely in its drowsy grace, so lithe and so smooth.’ Here was a thing of beauty to add to the dashing manner he played the game. ‘I can play this game only one way,’ he said, ‘I must play every shot for all there is in it. I can’t play safe.’
He won four US Opens, was runner-up four times and never worse than 11th in 11 appearances. He won the US Amateur five times, still a record. He won three of the four Opens he played, including in 1927 at St. Andrews, a course that had got the better of him six years earlier. He won 58 of 69 matches in the US and British Amateurs. He won the latter only once, at St. Andrews, but it was the start of the Slam. He then won the Open at Hoylake and sailed back to New York. The US Open followed at Interlachen and then the US Amateur at Merion. After winning the final, such was the delirium of the gallery on the way back to the clubhouse the New York Times reported: ‘It was the most triumphant journey that any man ever travelled in sport.’
With degrees in engineering, literature and law from Georgia Tech and Harvard, he went into business and the law on his retirement, and also created the glory that is Augusta National and set up the Masters from 1934, when a few friends came to honour the Emperor. They still do.
In 1958 Jones followed Benjamin Franklin as the only Americans to be given the freedom of the Royal Burgh of St. Andrews. It was an intensely emotional day. ‘If I could take out of my life everything but my experiences in St. Andrews, I would still have led a rich, full life,’ he said.
Jones was quiet and genuinely modest about his achievements. He called penalty strokes on himself and was surprised at the reaction. ‘You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank,’ he said. For the last 23 years of his life he became increasingly incapacitated due to syringomyelia, a disease of the spinal column. Bitter at first, he ‘decided I’d just do the very best I could’. Ben Hogan said of Jones: ‘The man was sick so long and fought it so successfully, I think we’ve finally discovered the secret of his success. It was the strength of his mind.’
Bobby Jones said the finest player he had ever seen was Joyce Wethered, whose battles with Cecil Leitch irreversibly advanced both the standard and the popularity of the women’s game. Their rivalry became front-page news and each defined the other’s greatness. Wethered could not become the queen without dethroning Charlotte Cecilia Pitcairn Leitch, known to all as Cecil.
Leitch was the daughter of Silloth’s doctor. The local golf club, opened by the North British Railway Company a year after her birth, became the playground for Leitch and her sisters, two of whom also earned international honours. In 1908 she caused a stir by reaching the semi-finals of the British Ladies Amateur Championship at the age of 17 and two years later she won a 72-hole challenge match against the mighty Harold Hilton. She received a stroke every other hole but the important thing was the way she finished: from five-down with 15 to play she stormed to a 2 and 1 victory.
She was clearly a force of nature. Bernard Darwin wrote: ‘I have a vision of her with her familiar bandeau on her head and some sort of handkerchief knotted round her neck, affronting the tempest, revelling in her defiance of it. The wide stance, the little duck of the right knee, the follow-through that sends the club through low as if boring its way through the wind. Think of Madame Defarge leading the women of St. Antoine against the Bastille.’
Hitting the ball long and straight, as the links at Silloth demand, Leitch soon became the best woman player, winning the first of five French titles in 1912. The second arrived two years later when she did the double of the English and British titles. Her four British titles is a record shared by Wethered, while she won the Canadian title in 1921 by claiming the final 17 and 15 – she was 14 up at lunch and needed only three more holes in the afternoon.
Her second English title came after the War in 1919 but the following year she ran into Wethered at Sheringham and never won the English again. Leitch did have revenge in 1921, beating Wethered in the final of both the French and the British, but lost in the final of the latter to Wethered in both 1922 and ’25. Her rival was the first to acknowledge how Leitch was inspired on the big occasion. ‘The vitality of her character was capable of electrifying the whole atmosphere,’ Wethered said.
The 1925 final at Troon proved a famous climax to their epic encounters. Henry Longhurst wrote, ‘there are many who say that the concluding stages were the greatest match they have ever seen.’ Three-up earlier in the day, Leitch had to win the last two holes to force extra time and Wethered only won at the 37th. Darwin, who was present, thought Leitch, ‘rather than her conqueror, was the heroine of the day. Everyone who saw that match will always wish that there could for that year have been two queens on twin thrones of exactly equal splendour.’
Acclaimed as the supreme woman golfer of her time, the parallels between Joyce Wethered and Bobby Jones are striking. Both retired at a relatively young age from championship golf after compiling dominating records. Wethered played in five English Ladies Championships and won all five. In the British Ladies she won four times at six attempts, being a finalist and a semi-finalist on the other occasions. Yet she was also a quiet, modest person. In the English final at Sheringham, Norfolk, in 1920 she faced a putt to win when a train steamed past. Asked later about the distraction, she exclaimed, ‘What train?’ Wethered later said: ‘Possibly I was so bewildered at the thought of what I was doing that if the very heavens had fallen, I should not have noticed.’
Jones played with Wethered at St. Andrews in 1930, off the back tees in a decent breeze. She scored a 75. ‘I have not played golf with anyone, man or woman, amateur or professional, who made me feel so utterly outclassed,’ said Jones. ‘It was not so much the score she made as the way she made it. It was impossible to expect that Miss Wethered would ever miss a shot – and she never did.’
Concentration and nerve were backed up by fine putting, a good short game and a long game that produced, Sir Henry Cotton reckoned, shots as straight as only Harry Vardon could have conjured up. She was said to be as accurate with her woods as others were with a wedge. Balance was the key to her swing. ‘I wonder if anyone who watched her can honestly recollect a single stroke during any period of which she was not in perfect equilibrium?’ asked noted golf writer Henry Longhurst.
Born into a golfing family in Surrey, growing up near the West Surrey course, Joyce was pushed on by her golf-mad brother Roger, an Amateur champion himself and the runner-up in the 1921 Open. Aged just 18, and playing to keep a friend company, Joyce won the English title in 1920 by beating her great rival Cecil Leitch in the final, a shock to both of them. Not only did Joyce overcome a huge deficit but also whooping cough, which sidelined her for the next three months.
Perhaps it was an early manifestation of what championship golf took out of her, and after the epic final of the British in 1925 against Leitch she withdrew until tempted back for the British in 1929 only because it was at St. Andrews. Another classic final ensued, this time against the great American Glenna Collett. Five-down after 11 holes, Wethered produced one more mighty comeback and promptly retired again. There was an exhibition tour in America in 1935 and she also continued to play in the Worplesdon Mixed Foursomes, which she won eight times with seven different partners. Bernard Darwin was ‘one of that fortunate body of men who have been hauled through to victory by the scruffs of their necks by Miss Joyce Wethered.’
In 1937 she married Sir John Heathcote-Amory, and moved to Tiverton, in Devon. Her garden became her pride and joy and it was taken over by the National Trust in 1972 when her husband died. She lived on until the day after her 96th birthday.
Glenna Collett, later known by her married name of Vare, was the undisputed queen of American golf in the 1920s and ’30s. She won the US Women’s Amateur title six times between 1922 and ’35 and was runner-up twice. She won two other prime US amateur competitions, the North and South, and the Eastern, six times each, as well as the Canadian title twice and the French in 1925. But the British title always eluded her.
Twice she lost to Joyce Wethered, in the semi-finals in 1925 and in the final in 1929. In the latter, Collett’s brilliance over the opening holes meant she went to the turn of the Old Course in 34 and was five-up after 11 holes. Only Wethered’s very best over the rest of the match prevented a first American victory in the championship. Collett was also denied in the final the following year, by the 19-year-old Diana Fishwick, later mother of television commentator Bruce Critchley.
‘If she is finding her true form, then there is little hope, except by miracle, of surviving,’ wrote Wethered, one of the few capable of coming up with the necessary miracle. In 1924 Collett won 59 out of 60 matches, only losing in the semi-finals of the US Amateur at the 19th hole. In the Curtis Cup – the match between the women amateurs of America and Britain and Ireland in which she played between 1932 and ’48 – her record was won four, halved two and lost one. Her matchplay attributes she described as: ‘love of combat, serenity of mind and fearlessness.’
Learning her golf from former US Open champion Alex Smith, Collett was the first American woman to attack the ball, and drives of over 300 yards were not unknown. Enid Wilson, a Curtis Cup opponent, wrote: ‘Her vigorous game set up an entirely fresh standard for her countrywomen, and the young up-and-coming golfers in the 1930s were inspired by her example.’ One such was Patty Berg, who was 17 when she lost to the 32-year-old mother-of-two in the 1935 final of the US Amateur. Berg became a founder member of the LPGA, which annually awards the Vare Trophy for the season’s best scoring average.
Wethered and Collett were firm friends despite being enemies on the course. When Wethered undertook a tour in America in 1935, she played several matches with Collett. ‘Her charm to my mind as a golfer and a companion lies in a freedom of spirit which does not make her feel that success is everything in the world,’ said Wethered.
Collett said of Wethered: ‘She is as near perfection as I ever dreamed of being when I sat in a deep-seated rocker on the front porch in the cool summer evening years ago and dreamed my best dreams.’
