Golf great Bobby Jones won tournament after tournament, including the British Open three times and the U.S. Open four times. How much money did Jones win in his sterling career? $0. He was the greatest amateur player of all time (his career culminating in the 1930s), and he never turned pro.
Bobby Jones, the golfer, is not the same guy as Robert Trent Jones, the golf course designer.
For that matter, there are two Robert Trent Joneses—Senior and Junior, both golf course designers. Senior died in 2000; Junior is, last time we checked, still going strong.
Chi Chi Rodriguez's real first name is Juan. (And no, this is not the time to tell the joke about the golf gun that shoots a hole in Juan.)
Tiger Woods was the youngest U.S. Amateur Champion ever.
Nancy Lopez won the New Mexico Amateur in 1969 … at the age of twelve.
Lee Trevino's father was a professional grave digger.
As a kid, Lee Trevino used to bet golfers on the local course that he could beat them by playing with a Dr. Pepper bottle that had a stick taped to it. He often won.
Trevino flees from the fairways whenever rain begins to come down. There's good reason for his phobia: he's been hit by lightning. He admits, “When God wants to play through, I let him play through.”
Pro golfing's first millionaires were Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Gary Player.
When you think of professional golf winners, you think big bucks, right? That's not always been the case. During World War II, the total PGA Tour purse was a mere $150,000. Winners had to divide that sum—not in cash, but in the form of war bonds.
Not all pro golfers rake it in when they take on corporate sponsors. Howard Twitty, for example, signed a deal in 1977 with Burger King that didn't pay him a cent. In exchange for sporting their logo on his golf bag, they paid him in Whoppers. A total of 500 of them, to be exact.
Remember the good old days when doctors would take chickens and other essentials in exchange for their services? Well take a gander at some of the more odd prize winnings of these pro golfers:
“You know you're on the Senior Tour when your back goes out more than you do.”
—Bob Bruce
More professional golfers are born in California than any other state, but more live in Florida.
Here are a few of our favorite golfer's nicknames:
Some of the better known professional odd shots include:
Hot shots David Duval, Al Geiberger, and Chip Beck are the only three PGA players to ever officially score a 59 on an eighteen-hole course.
The 1957 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am was played on the surf-and-turf golf course, Pebble Beach. On the ninth hole, overlooking an ocean vista, Tony Lema hit a good shot and jumped for joy. Unfortunately, he was close to the cliffs and ended up tumbling down a steep embankment, suffering bruises but no breaks. Lema didn't have the same good luck on a golf course nine years later, when his private plane crashed into a water hazard in Lansing, Illinois, killing him.
At the 1934 U.S. Open, Bobby Cruickshank got a reminder of why they're called “clubs.” He tossed his golf club into the air in celebration when on the eleventh hole his golf ball miraculously skipped across a water hazard to the other side. Unfortunately, the laws of gravity carry a heavy penalty—the club came down and struck him on the head, knocking him unconscious. Cruickshank played the rest of the round semidazed, coming in third with a 76.
Gary Player had the worst luck with admirers. Not only did a fan shaking his hand at the 1962 Masters sprain it and cost him the tournament, but also in 1964, during the U.S. Open, Player was accidentally shoved into the water by autograph seekers.
In 1977, as a publicity stunt, Arnold Palmer hit a sleeve of golf balls off the Eiffel Tower. As far as we know, no French person was hurt or killed in the making of this stunt.
Greg Norman accidentally hit a rock during a swing of his club at the U.S. Open at Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1988. The effects were gruesome: he badly tore a tendon in his wrist, placing him in the hospital and out of commission for months.
You may know Babe Didrikson Zaharias as the woman who helped found the Ladies' Professional Golf Association. However, her sports career was as diverse as a career could be. Before she was a golfer, she was an all-around track-and-field superstar. She held world records in the following: long jump, 80-meter hurdles, javelin, and high jump. In 1932, she won two gold medals at the Summer Olympics. She also was an excellent basketball player, swimmer, marksman, cyclist, diver, softball player, and skater. Where else could she go but up? Babe went on to become a Hall of Famer in the golf world, winning three separate U.S. Open championships—in 1948, 1950, and 1954—not to mention twenty-eight other tournament wins of her career.
Babe Didrikson was set up to play an exhibition game in 1938 Los Angeles to show off her hard drives to the public. Paired with a 250-pound wrestler named George “The Crying Greek from Cripple Creek” Zaharias, Didrikson's life was about to change. When walking the course, somewhere around the seventh hole, Babe realized her partner was staring intently at her. She challenged, “What are you looking at?” George replied, “I'm looking at you. You're my kind of girl.” To which Babe replied, “You're my kind of guy.” George and Babe were married the following year. They were loving and close; virtually inseparable for the next eighteen years, until Babe's death from cancer in 1956.
“It's not enough just to swing at the ball; you've got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it.”
—Babe Didrikson
Too Good of a Sweep: The 1956 Tasmanian Open had an interesting winners' circle. The winner was a guy named Peter Toogood. His dad, Alfred Toogood, came in second. His brother John Toogood, finished third.
Chick Evans Jr. competed in U.S. Amateur Championships in all of the fifty states, the only golfer to ever accomplish this feat. He began by winning his first U.S. Amateur Championship in 1907 and played in his last one in 1962. Evans was seventy-two when he attained his goal.
Boy Wonder: You may think you were introduced to Eldrick “Tiger” Woods when he stormed the amateur circuit not too many years ago. However, a whole audience of Americans first saw him sitting on Fran Tarkenton's lap two decades ago. Woods was featured on the TV show That's Incredible when he was just five years old—the same year he received his first set of golf clubs. He drove whiffle balls over and over again to the Wow's of audience members. Tiger had also wowed fellow golfers that year by hitting in the 90s on an eighteen-hole course his first time playing.
As the story goes, Tiger Woods, as a wee tot, once out-putted a bunch of older junior golfers and won a pocket full of quarters. His father reprimanded him, as Woods Sr. was strictly against gambling. He told Tiger that he didn't want him coming home with any more quarters in his pockets. The next time out, Tiger came back with his pockets filled with dollar bills instead.
Tiger Woods at eighteen was the youngest U.S. Amateur Champion ever.
While playing on the Stanford golf team, “Tiger” picked up a new nickname, according to Sports Illustrated (July 13, 2000). The boys called him “Urkel” after the accordion-playing African American nerd on TV's Family Matters.
Have you seen the cute little tiger club cover that Tiger Woods carries around on one of his drivers? That was a handmade gift from his mother, Kultida (or “Tida”). Inside, an inscription in Thai reads, “Love, from Mom.”
Tiger Woods's mother also believes that red is a “power color” for her son—sort of a spiritual thing, we guess. This is why he wears a red shirt on his last day of tournament play.
Everyone knows Tiger Woods, but do you remember some of these other African American players?
Talk the Talk: If you want to sound like a professional on the golf course, pro golfer Bob Heintz recommends this: “Don't ask a veteran if he's playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. You just say, “So, are you gonna play Pebble this year?” Heintz says he doesn't know why some shortened tournament names identify the city they're played in while others are taken from the title or the sponsor. But he's quick to remind, “The key is to avoid saying the entire name.”
Leo Diegel often won bets with fellow golfers by wagering that he could shoot a 75 or under while playing on just one leg.
Tommy Bolt, professional golf champion in the '50s, was notorious for throwing his clubs when he got angry. Because of his temper, he earned the nickname “Terrible” Tommy Bolt. His club throwing also instigated a new rule in the PGA: No throwing clubs. It's called the “Tommy Bolt Rule” and penalizes a player for throwing any club during play.
The day after the “Tommy Bolt Rule” passed, Bolt became the first golfer to break it. It wasn't that he threw his club in anger, he explained, he just didn't want to see anybody else be the first to break “his” rule.
He must've been the golf team captain at ol' P.U. In the 1959 Memphis Invitational Open, Tommy Bolt was fined heavily for unsportsmanlike conduct. Not for yelling or cursing (which wasn't unusual with Bolt, mind you), but for breaking wind while a fellow player was putting.