Bobby Locke was the first great champion to come from outside Britain or America. He was the first of many fine South African players such as Gary Player, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen. He was a superb putter who rolled them in from all over the green. With Locke, the game began to expand its horizons around the globe. Norman Von Nida was a pioneer in Australia, followed by Peter Thomson, who brought a considered, intellectual approach to links golf and who emulated Taylor and Braid’s five Open victories. Flory Van Donck led the way in Europe, while Christy O’Connor Snr showed that an Irishman could match Sam Snead for a swing with grace and elegance. Amateurs were still big news and Joe Carr was Ireland’s most famous player, while Sir Michael Bonallack began a career which saw him dominate the scene in Britain in a prelude to a long and successful administrative career with the R&A. In Canada, Marlene Stewart Streit was peerless, reducing many an opponent to a crumpled mess thanks to her relentless putting. Her compatriot, Moe Norman, had an unorthodox swing but was the straightest hitter of all time and, despite withdrawing early from competing at the highest level, was still a genius who was only really appreciated late in life.
Until now, Arnaud Massy aside, the game had been dominated by Britain and America. This was about to change. Jim Ferrier was an Australian who had emigrated to America before he won the 1947 USPGA but the game’s expansion became obvious when Bobby Locke and Peter Thomson won eight out of ten Opens between 1949 and ’58, with Gary Player and Kel Nagle winning the next two. The only interlopers were Max Faulkner, who prevented Locke’s hat-trick of titles in 1951, and Ben Hogan in 1953.
He was christened Arthur D’Arcy Locke, but his father named him after his hero, Bobby Jones. Where Locke surpassed even Jones was in being one of the game’s greatest ever putters. ‘Very early in my career I realised that putting was half the game of golf,’ he said. ‘No matter how well I might play the long shots, if I couldn’t putt I would never win.’ Just as he played with a pronounced hook with the long clubs, Locke developed a closed-stance putting style, which pulled the ball from right-to-left and was effective on any surface.
He used the same hickory-shafted putter which had been given to him when he was nine. Peter Alliss once hit some putts with it. ‘The moment it was in your hands you had the same feeling a violinist must get when allowed to hold a Stradivarius,’ Alliss said. ‘When you put the club behind the ball you felt it wanted to swing the way the master swung it – eerie.’ Sam Snead said: ‘He’d hit a 50-footer and before the ball got halfway he’d be tipping his hat to the crowd.’ Snead might have beaten Locke into second place at the 1946 Open but in a series of exhibitions in South Africa between the two, Locke won 12 of the 16 matches.
On the strength of that performance, Locke went to America and in two-and-a-half years won 11 of 59 events with ten second places. Once he won by 16 strokes. The locals were not happy. They called the jowly Locke ‘Old Muffin Face’ or ‘Old Baggy Pants’, since he often wore plus-fours. One promoter who did not want Locke to win his event was told by other players to put the pins on the right of every green, since Locke hooked the ball. The tactic worked but ignored the fact that he was a great chipper of the ball. In 1949, having missed a couple of tournaments he had entered, Locke was banned by the Tour. Gene Sarazen called it the ‘most disgraceful action by any golf organisation’. Although the ban was soon lifted, Locke was ever after happier playing in Britain.
In 1960, Locke almost died and he lost the sight in his left eye after his car was hit by a train at a level crossing. He played only rarely after that and died of meningitis in 1987, while his surviving wife and daughter, who had become increasingly eccentric, tragically committed suicide together some years later.
Flory Van Donck never won the Open but the Sunday Chronicle Cricket and Golf Annuals of the early 1950s list him as one of the ‘Stars to follow’ and described him as a ‘frequent and popular visitor from Belgium.’ The son of a greenkeeper from Brussels, Van Donck became the finest player on the continent of Europe between Arnaud Massy and the Ballesteros-Langer era. He won in Britain but was prolific in Europe, winning seven times in 1953 to claim the Vardon Trophy as winner of the order of merit.
The national Opens on the European continent had been running for some time. The French Open dates from 1906, the Belgian Open from 1910, the German Open from 1911, the Dutch Open from 1912, the Swiss Open from 1923 and the Italian Open from 1925. Of these, the French was the most important, having been won four times by Massy, twice by JH Taylor and Henry Cotton and once each by James Braid and Walter Hagen. Bobby Locke won it in 1952 and ’53, and Byron Nelson, with a superb display of iron shots despite having retired from full-time golf a decade earlier, in 1955. Van Donck won the French Open three times, in 1954, ’57 and ’58.
Pat Ward-Thomas, in Not Only Golf, described the scene at the French Open of that time: ‘Invariably the championship came after the Open in Britain and made a soothing contrast. Flory Van Donck, with his courtly manner and perfect style, and Robert de Vicenzo often played supremely well in France, and watching was a pleasure because there were only a hundred or so spectators. Quite often they included the Duke of Windsor who made a most agreeable and keen watching companion. He was always interested in the Argentinean players, Vicenzo, Tony Cerda and others and would hasten in pursuit of them.’
Van Donck dominated golf in his home country, winning the Belgium Professional title 16 times between 1939–56. He also won the Belgium Open five times, the Dutch five times, the Italian four times, the German and Swiss Opens twice and the Portuguese Open once. He represented his country many times in the Canada Cup, which became the World Cup, including as a 67-year-old in 1979. In 1960 he took the individual honours ahead of the likes of Snead, Palmer, Locke, Player and Nagle.
In the Open Van Donck finished in the top ten in all but two years between 1948 and 1959, and was also twice runner-up, in 1956 to Peter Thomson and in 1959 to Gary Player. In 1956 at Hoylake, when the rules allowed a player to leave the flagstick in the hole even while putting, he saw putts hit the pin twice and bounce out both times.
Tall with an unorthodox swing, Van Donck was a fine putter, despite holding the shaft with his hands separated and low and with the toe of the putter cocked in the air, as Isao Aoki did later on. ‘A prince among golfers,’ pronounced Donald Steel.
Norman Von Nida was never the biggest man but he had qualities for golf that were honed in the most unorthodox fashion – between rounds caddying at Royal Queensland he was working at an abattoir. ‘I had to break open the heads of sheep after their skulls had been partially split by a machine. My forearms, hands and fingers became incredibly strong … and I was unbeatable in an arm wrestle against anyone my size.’
Von Nida is the ‘father’ of Australian golf. He was the first Australian to travel around the world, winning the Philippine Open in 1938 and ’39 after a three-week boat journey there and back each time, and then becoming a leading player in Europe after the Second World War. He was a contrast in many ways. He was a tough competitor. He arrived in Britain in 1946 with £17 in his pocket and had to win to make money. He won twice that year and seven times the next year, claiming the Vardon Trophy.
He had a temper. He never played much in America after one incident in 1948 when he and his playing partner got into a score-card dispute after a round and had to be separated by the police as they traded blows in front of the clubhouse.
Dennis Von Nida, his estranged son by his first marriage, claimed after his father’s death that he never shared his winnings with his family but among Australia’s golfers he was known as a generous mentor, whether with his time or even lending money to a player so he could stay on tour. Peter Thomson, David Graham, Bruce Crampton and Jack Newton were thankful for Von Nida’s help in their careers.
In the Open, between 1946 and ’48, Von Nida was fourth, sixth and third. The joint third-round leader in 1947, he fell back with a 76. He called his three Australian Open titles his biggest achievement but he was also the runner-up six times. In discussing the distractions that afflict golfers, such as the ‘roar of butterflies in an adjacent meadow,’ as PG Wodehouse put it, Henry Longhurst wrote: ‘From reading his book I fancy that Von Nida would have won a post-war championship if part of his mind had not been engaged on looking for things or people which could later be held to have put him off.’
Late in his life Von Nida went blind but still played golf. ‘All I’ve got to do is swing the club and allow someone to tell me where it went,’ he said. ‘I can tell by the feel of the club contacting the ball, relatively in what direction it’s gone and how far it’s gone.’ He also continued to offer lessons by listening to the sound of contact between club and ball. In 1998 at Royal Adelaide he advised Nick Faldo, after an opening 77, that his left-hand grip was too tight. Faldo said his golf was ‘like a new day’ when he scored a 69 in the second round.
Can a golfer be too intelligent to be a great champion? Peter Thomson is the first witness for the defence, personification in golf of CLR James’s famous aphorism: ‘What does he know of cricket who only cricket knows?’ Pat Ward-Thomas visited Thomson in Melbourne: ‘In his home one would be pressed to find any evidence that he had played the game seriously. I saw no cases of trophies, no array of medals and, as I recall, few golf books in his library. Thomson is a man of varied tastes as could be judged by the people one met in his house. Although playing golf, designing courses and writing have been his profession he and his appealing wife Mary, do not seem to allow them to obtrude into their private life.’
Among Thomson’s few failures was a narrow defeat when he stood for the Australian parliament, although his son Andrew did succeed in politics and became the minister for sport and tourism. Another relative failure was his record in America, where he won just once. But on the Seniors tour, that great career mulligan, he won nine times in 1985 at the age of 56. He promptly went back to writing (never with a ghostwriter), commentating and designing courses. Late in life he liked nothing better than spending the summer months in St. Andrews, while in his pioneering days of travelling around Asia and Europe, he often went sightseeing instead of practising.
Thomson thought the game a simple matter. With the proper fundamentals of grip, alignment and posture, the swing followed naturally. If he ever needed to correct a fault, he would head for an armchair, think it through, and go out to hit balls to confirm his diagnosis. Growing up in Melbourne, he relished hard and fast courses and the links of Britain were perfect for him. He often eschewed a driver but hit long-iron shots low with plenty of roll, while he mastered the art of running up an approach to the green. ‘Thomson was the first person to play golf as if it were chess,’ said Peter Alliss. John Jacobs said: ‘He plotted his way around a course, always keeping the ball in play.’ ‘Peter is the only player I have ever been on a course with whose swing got slower as the situation got tighter,’ said George Will, the Scottish Ryder Cup golfer.
At the Open Thomson was exceptional. From his debut in 1951 to ’71 he was only out of the top-nine three times. In seven Opens from 1952 his finishes were: second (to Locke), second (to Hogan), first, first, first, second (to Locke), first. He was the only player in the 20th century to win a hat-trick of titles, and if the strength of the fields in the 1950s was not quite as strong as it would become in subsequent decades, he won a fifth title in 1965 against American stars such as Palmer, Nicklaus and Lema. He joined James Braid and JH Taylor with five wins, only matched since by Tom Watson, and only surpassed by Harry Vardon.
When the 150th anniversary Open Championship took place at St. Andrews in 2010, one absent friend was the winner of the Centenary Open, Kel Nagle, the oldest surviving Open champion. Travelling for the 89-year-old was out of the question but he was busy at home sharing memories with his four children, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. It was a surprise victory in 1960, also at St. Andrews, as the 39-year-old Australian held off Arnold Palmer in his full pomp. The winner of that year’s Masters and US Open, Palmer was charging hard and birdied the 18th while Nagle watched from the 17th green. As well as seeing Palmer hole out, the mighty roar that went up told Nagle he needed to hole his eight-footer for par to stay one stroke ahead. He did. It was one of the great pressure putts in championship golf. At the last, his four-footer for a birdie lipped out to a foot. Nagle recalled: ‘I could hear Henry Longhurst in the commentary box saying, “Be careful, be careful.” It went in pretty hard.’
Palmer had failed to match Ben Hogan’s three major titles in one year but, arguably, it was the best result for the Open. Palmer came back the next year to win the claret jug, and did so again in 1962, when Nagle was the runner-up. Palmer kept coming back and brought all the other great Americans with him.
The one person who thought Nagle would win was Peter Thomson. The pair were firm friends and it was the younger man who encouraged Nagle to once again try his luck in Britain after two undistinguished appearances early in the 1950s. A wild player in his younger days, Nagle gradually learnt how to play more steadily, keeping the ball in play, his development no doubt helped by playing with Thomson. The pair won the Canada Cup for Australia in 1954 and ’59, the latter on home soil at Royal Melbourne. It was then that Thomson told Nagle: ‘You’re playing well. You’re driving well, your irons are good and you’re putting good. You can win the Open.’ When they arrived at St. Andrews, Thomson showed Nagle the tricks of the Old Course. He learnt well.
Nagle was a contender at the Open throughout the 1960s and lost a playoff for the US Open to Gary Player in 1965. Thomson said: ‘There was absolutely no malice in him, or vice of any kind, and he was always in good humour.’
Player added: ‘I can honestly say I never met anybody in my life that didn’t really like Kel Nagle.’ Yet the late Henry Cooper said this of playing in a pro-am for the first time alongside Nagle: ‘I was sweating up. I could feel my legs trembling like I’d been hit by a perfect left hook and the palms of my hands were moist. I don’t think I ever felt more nervous than I did that day before any of my fights, whether they were championship fights or stepping into the ring with Ali.’
Irishman Fred Daly won the Open in 1947 and his ‘round, loveable’ compatriot Harry Bradshaw might have done so a year later but for the incident of playing out of a broken bottle rather than asking for relief. Christy O’Connor, however, was probably the greatest Irish golfer of his era. Peter Dobereiner summed up how he should be remembered. ‘Christy is a difficult man to place in the pecking order of the golfing greats because his record lacks a single major championship. But you only have to see his fluid, self-taught swing to appreciate that this is no first-class second-rater but a man to be numbered among the very best in the history of golf.’
Henry Longhurst wrote he swung the club ‘by the pure light of nature’. Lee Trevino said: ‘To me, only three players have ever looked entirely natural swinging a golf club – Christy O’Connor, Roberto de Vicenzo and Neil Coles. Christy flows through the ball like fine wine.’ Coles, incidentally, along with O’Connor, dominated the British professional scene for years, winning in six different decades. The longevity of O’Connor’s swing was demonstrated by his six wins in eight years at the PGA Seniors Championship.
The son of a farmer, his swing was honed in Galway and could be adapted to all weathers and clubs. The legendary story goes, details varying in the telling, of a young pup boasting about hitting a shorter club into a par-three than Himself, as O’Connor was known, who promptly found the green with every club in his bag, including the putter. Then there was a centenary exhibition at Westward Ho! in 1964 where O’Connor and Max Faulkner played in Norfolk jackets, breeches and deerstalkers with five hickory clubs against the modern attire and equipment of Peter Alliss and Brian Huggett. The ‘ancients’ received shots but O’Connor, the star throughout, fading, drawing, hitting low or high at will, sealed the win by pitching in from 35 yards over a stream at the last hole.
‘Himself was a genius, a legend,’ said Alliss, who was his foursomes partner for many of O’Connor’s ten successive Ryder Cups. O’Connor and Bradshaw won the Canada Cup for Ireland in 1958 in Mexico City but at the Open he had three near-misses out of 11 top-tens. He won 24 times in Britain and Ireland, including the first ever four-figure and five-figure winner’s cheques. His putting was not up to the rest of his game but Pat Ward-Thomas called him an ‘amiable soul who enjoyed the convivial things in life and was the most accomplished stroke-maker of the post-Cotton generation in these isles.’
Once, after a fog delay had ruled out play the previous day, O’Connor was feeling the worse for wear the next morning, so he ordered a golf writer to collect a jug of black coffee, containing the hair of the dog, and to proceed 250 yards down the right side of the first fairway and head 20 yards into the woods. A ball arrived at the precise spot, followed by Himself, who drained the lot.
In the 1959 Dunlop Masters at Portmarnock, Christy O’Connor saved the blushes of the professionals by coming from four strokes behind in the last round to beat Joe Carr. A year later, Carr was two off the lead of Kel Nagle at the Centenary Open when he made a cracking start to the final round, only for a storm to wash out the day. The scores did not count, the round started afresh the next day and Carr dropped to eighth place.
Carr was an amateur but that was no bar to him being possibly the biggest personality in the game in Britain and Ireland after the War. ‘He became the most popular citizen in all of Ireland,’ wrote Pat Ward-Thomas, ‘not only because of his golf but because of an appealingly uninhibited outlook, gentleness of spirit and charming manners to everyone with whom he was in contact. In victory he was always modest and chivalrous towards opponents; while defeat was accepted with good humour and grace.’
He was lean and lanky, a dashing golfer who hit the ball huge distances and often came up with wonderful recoveries. He was bold, a great exponent of head-to-head matchplay, a ruthless winner but also a good loser. As a baby he was adopted by his mother’s sister, who was the stewardess, and her husband the steward, at Portmarnock. Later in life, he would hit balls in the morning from his back garden onto neighbouring Sutton Golf Club and then head into Dublin to work in his clothing business. He won the British Amateur three times, played in 11 Walker Cups, and was captain when Britain and Ireland tied in Baltimore in 1965, a rare non-defeat.
Carr was naturally a team man and his contribution was as much off the course as on it, for his record appears better as an individual than on international duty, when he would wear a white cap with a green pom-pom. Henry Longhurst observed: ‘In team matches he has carried an appallingly heavy load of responsibility. He has always been our trump card, the one card that is expected surely to win us a trick, and I believe this has borne heavily on him.’ Carr was constantly urged by spectators to ‘Have a go, Joe!’ and according to Longhurst he did just that. ‘It still gives me a pleasure to see Joe lash out at one. There are those, though not many, who hit it as far, but none in my opinion who hit it with such controlled abandon.’
Carr was the first non-American to be awarded the Bob Jones award for sportsmanship by the USGA in 1967 and was the first Irishman to become captain of the R&A in 1991, apparently going for a dip in St. Andrews Bay prior to the driving-in ceremony to sober up after a fine party the night before. ‘I consider myself very fortunate to have played golf in the Joe Carr era,’ said Michael Bonallack. ‘I still have yet to meet a finer sportsman.’
In 1968, Michael Bonallack beat Joe Carr in the final of the Amateur Championship at Troon. Bonallack beat everyone that year. It was also the start of a hat-trick of Amateur wins, a unique feat. His tally of five Amateurs remains second only to John Ball’s eight but his five English Amateur titles and his four English Strokeplay titles are records. He won all three in 1968. He was not quite the last of the career amateurs. Peter McEvoy, now an innovator as the brains behind PowerPlay Golf, the new nine-hole format with two pins per green, won two Amateurs, as did Gary Wolstenholme, who turned professional to join the Seniors tour. These days, youngsters barely stay amateur long enough to play in multiple Amateurs, let alone win them. Bonallack never thought he was good enough, at least not until later in his career when the titles kept stacking up.
People underestimated Bonallack. At one Amateur, Scotland’s Gordon Cosh asked: ‘Who is that? And how does he get a handicap low enough to play in this?’ The answer was Bonallack and he was the defending champion. His swing was likened to ‘heaving a sack of coal into the cellar’, while when putting he spread his legs wide, crouching low as if sniffing the top of the putter handle. But his was a triumph of substance over style. When it mattered, the putts went in. In one championship final, he got up-and-down from off the green 22 times, more than enough to crush the spirit of his opponent. He had the champion’s ability to raise his game or make a decisive thrust, always with a friendly countenance but also ruthless determination. ‘Year after year writing of his golf became an exercise in restraint of superlatives and seeking varied phrases with which to analyse and praise him,’ said golf writer Pat Ward-Thomas.
Both his sister Sally and wife Angela were golfing champions and played in the Curtis Cup, as Bonallack did nine times in the Walker Cup. His crowning glory was as playing captain when Britain and Ireland beat America for only the second time at St. Andrews in 1971. ‘It does not get, it cannot get, any better than that,’ he said. Ward-Thomas wrote: ‘The triumph belonged first and foremost to Bonallack who, in his calm, unshakeable fashion, had instilled in his team confidence and faith in their ability to win. He said later that he had never doubted their capacity to do so. That they succeeded was his fitting reward.’
Bonallack later filled many administrative roles but when asked to consider becoming secretary of the R&A replied: ‘Don’t be bloody stupid.’ He reconsidered and was praised for his stewardship of the game and the Open between 1983 and 1999. He is one of four golfing knights along with Henry Cotton, Bob Charles and Nick Faldo. Telling his wife she would no longer be ‘Mrs Bonallack’, Angela gasped: ‘Who is she and do I know her?’ before he could say that from now on she would be ‘Lady Bonallack’.
Another lifelong amateur champion was Marlene Streit (née Stewart). And by ‘lifelong’, consider the fact that she won her first Canadian Amateur as a 17-year-old and her third US Women’s Senior Amateur as a 69-year-old. A few days after her 77th birthday in 2011 she scored a 73. Although ranked third behind Mike Weir, the 2003 Masters champion, and George Knudson in SCOREGolf magazine’s list of the top-25 best Canadian golfers, many still consider Streit the greatest. She is the only Canadian inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Her record is amazing. She won the Canadian Amateur 11 times in 22 years. She faced the same opponent, Miss M Gay, in three of those finals and won 9 and 8, 11 and 9, and 8 and 6. She won her national closed championship nine times, including seven times in a row in the 1950s. She won the British Amateur in 1953 and 10,000 people turned out to see her paraded in an open-topped car on her return to Toronto. She won the US Amateur in 1956 beating JoAnne Gunderson (later Carner) in the final. Ten years later Gunderson had her revenge but only at the 41st hole. Streit is the only golfer to have won the Amateur titles of Britain, America, Canada and Australia.
She started caddying at Lookout Point in Fonthill, Ontario at 13 and two years later started swinging a club. The club professional, Gordon McInnis, was the only coach she ever had. She never grew much over five foot tall but said the key to her swing was ‘smoothness, rhythm and balance’, and added: ‘I was uncomplicated. I didn’t have a million thoughts and I didn’t have a million people telling me how to do it. I had one person telling me how to do it.’
Streit had a good short game and was a brilliant putter. She said she did not need to develop a winning instinct, it was just always there. They say you can only beat the people in front of you but, even though Streit never turned professional, she never cared about her opponent’s reputation. ‘I wasn’t intimidated by anybody,’ she said. ‘It didn’t matter if they were well-known Americans. I didn’t like to lose to anyone.’
Streit played in the ‘Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf’ series and beat Marilynn Smith in Oslo but lost to Mickey Wright the following year. She earned $10,000 for her appearances but to protect her amateur status donated the money to what became the Marlene Streit Awards Fund. Young Canadian golfers are still being helped with travelling expenses from the fund. One such, Nancy Harvey, who went on to spend 15 years on the LPGA, said: ‘There’s a great deal of us that, who knows where we would’ve gotten if it weren’t for Marlene. She believed in us and if Marlene believed in you, you were definitely going somewhere.’
Peter Dobereiner said that Moe Norman was the greatest golfer ‘who chose not to play championships’. Norman’s record at the highest level cannot be compared to anyone else’s because he does not have one. Whether that was because he chose not to, or simply could not compete under the greatest pressure, is almost irrelevant. Because Norman was a genius and a legend. Sam Snead and Lee Trevino said Norman was the greatest ball-striker they had ever seen. Tiger Woods said: ‘Only two players have ever truly owned their swings – Moe Norman and Ben Hogan. I want to own mine. That’s where the satisfaction comes from.’
Hogan called any shot that went dead straight an ‘accident’. He watched Norman on the practice range once in the 1950s and muttered ‘accident’ after each of the first half-dozen shots. After a few more shots he walked away telling Norman: ‘Just keep hitting those accidents.’ His accuracy was bewildering to other players. In an exhibition match in Toronto in 1969, Snead laid up in front of a creek that crossed the fairway at 240 yards. Warned by Snead he could not make the carry, Norman merely said he was not trying to carry the water, he was aiming for the bridge. His drive duly landed short, rolled over the bridge and made it safely to the other side.
All the more amazing was that Norman achieved such accuracy from a swing that was purely of his own making and has not been replicated by any other player of standing. He stood straight-legged with feet wide apart and extended his arms as far as he could in front of him. The head of the club was a foot away from the ball rather than directly behind it. He had a short, quick backswing but then he did everything quickly, on the green barely steadying himself over the ball before striking the putt. Clearly, he could putt well at a certain level but on the bigger stages it was a weakness. Nor did he seem to have much desire to score well, or to win. He once walked in from the course after hitting the flagstick on the first three holes. ‘Why go on? Can’t do any better than that.’
Norman was only happy when hitting golf shots. He was shy, afraid of crowds and had an inferiority complex. He won the Canadian Amateur in 1955 and ’56, all manner of provincial tournaments and countless professional events in Canada. But his spell on the USPGA Tour in the late 1950s was short-lived. A player reprimanded him for his clothing and the officials were not happy with his teeing up balls on Coke cans and six-inch tees during tournaments. Instead, he roamed Canada and Florida in the winter, living in motels and his car, playing exhibitions. He broke 33 course records. From 1995 until his death nine years later, Wally Uihlein, of equipment company Titleist, paid Norman $5,000 a month merely for ‘being Moe Norman’.
