The calendar has just turned to February and the year is still very young. Yet following his runaway victory at San Diego and his come-from-behind win last weekend in Dubai, all the talk is about Tiger Woods and the pursuit of the Grand Slam. Of course, we”re still two months away from the commencement of the Masters and more than six months away from the conclusion of the PGA Championship. Nonetheless, the talk is still there.
Can Tiger pull it off? Can he win four consecutive majors at Augusta National, Torrey Pines, Royal Birkdale and Valhalla? Only time will tell and it”s still a crapshoot to assume that as talented as Tiger can be, will he still be able to outlast 155 other golfers of note on four different occasions at four very different venues?
In 1972, Jack Nicklaus won the Masters and the United States Open. A 12-year tour veteran, Nicklaus then went to the British Open that July at Muirfield, site of his first Open triumph in 1966. When the dust finally settled that weekend in 1972, Lee Trevino had pulled out a one-stroke victory over Nicklaus to crush his attempt at the Slam.
A similar scenario played out 12 years earlier. Like Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer was in his golfing prime in 1960. Like Nicklaus, Palmer had won the Masters in April of that year and he then made a dramatic come-from-behind run at Cherry Hills in Denver to win the U.S. Open that June. In July, he headed off to the British Open at venerable St. Andrews with the intent of completing the third leg of the professional Grand Slam.
Palmer trailed by four shots entering the final round. Down only two shots with two holes to play, Palmer got up and down from the difficult Road Hole to par 17, then he birdied the 18th. Three groups back, Australian Kel Nagle made a clutch 10-footer for par on the 17th. He parred the 18th to beat out Palmer by one stroke. The next two years Palmer won consecutive British Open titles, with Nagle serving as his runner-up victim in the ”62 Open at Royal Troon.
To the most knowledgeable of golf fans, Nagle is one of those golfing footnotes, best known as the man who stopped Palmer in his quest to take the third leg of the Grand Slam back in 1960. However, there was a whole lot more to the career of Kel Nagle, a most recent inductee into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
A product of a bygone era, Nagle was born in Sydney, Australia in 1920. As a youth he worked at the local golf course as a caddie and worked his way up, becoming an assistant golf professional at the age of 16. In 1940, he enlisted in the Australian Army and served for six years. He was stationed in New Guinea and served in the artillery. Upon the conclusion of World War II, Nagle returned to golf and started actively competing on the Australian-Asian Tour.
For five years he struggled mightily as a pro, barely making ends meet. A brilliant putter who used the same BullsEye for over 40 years, Nagle was a truly erratic striker of the ball. He won the Australian PGA Championship in 1949 and had his breakthrough year in 1951, winning four times. He would win 61 times on his home tour and would show long-term consistency by posting at least one victory each year from 1949 through 1975.
Travel was a big issue in the lives of international players of that time such as Nagle, Peter Thomson and Gary Player. Often it would take up to two days to fly from Australia to America or from Australia to Europe. Nagle did play actively on the European and American PGA Tours, winning twice in the United States and 11 times in Europe. He also won five times on the Senior Tour and came in second at the 1965 U.S. Open behind Gary Player at Bellerive in St. Louis, losing out in an 18-hole Monday playoff. However, Nagle was never a regular on either foreign tour and concentrated most of his efforts on his home continent.
Kel Nagle is perhaps the first golfer I ever heard attribute golfing success to equipment. Long before the era of club fitting, Nagle struggled with consistent ball striking. Just prior to the 1960 Colonial in Fort Worth, Nagle picked up a MacGregor persimmon driver designed by Toney Penna and was given a set of Spaulding irons by a friend. He came in second that week at Colonial and was able to control his tee shots at Colonial”s many dogleg holes.
Two months later, Nagle won at St. Andrews, keeping his tee shots low in the winds that factored into final-round play. His MacGregor driver now sits in the Old Course Museum at St. Andrews. Nagle also teamed up with countryman Peter Thomson, a five-time British Open champion, to win the 1954 and 1959 World Cup.
Nowadays the 87-year-old Nagle lives close to his birthplace, residing in Harbour City just outside Sydney. He can no longer play golf because of multiple surgeries although he continues to follow the game courtesy of his satellite television.
When it was time to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame last December, Nagle was unable to travel from Australia to Florida. Last month, the HOF came to Australia and held the Nagle part of the ceremony in Sydney. Golfing great Greg Norman inducted Nagle into the Hall, stating “Kel played an important role in the history of the sport, especially as it relates to the progress of golf in Australia.”
Hall of Famer Kel Nagle will be best remembered as the man who held off Arnold Palmer at St. Andrews, denying his quest for the 1960 Grand Slam. In 2008, Tiger woods better anticipate that there will be a modern-era version of Kel Nagle, ready to stop him from achieving golf immortality, ready to win a major title at Woods” expense.
