Golf”s first major tournament of the new calendar year, the Masters, concludes Sunday at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. In June they”ll play the United States Open in our neck of the woods at San Francisco”s Olympic Club. Then in July they”ll tee it up at Royal Lytham for the playing of the British Open. The fourth and final major of the year, the PGA Championship, will be held at Kiawah Island in mid-August.
Golf”s four majors are the game”s version of the Super Bowl, World Series, Kentucky Derby and Daytona all rolled into one, yet played out at different times. They are four separate high-profile, high-pressure, big-money tourneys that represent golf”s history, tradition and importance. Fans of the game remember Ben Hogan for his four U.S. Open triumphs and have a hard time recalling his five wins at the Colonial. Ken Venturi will forever be remembered as the 1964 U.S. Open champ, fan-favorite Freddie Couples will always be seen as the ”92 Masters winner, and Davis Love III is fondly recalled for the rainbow when he finished out on the 18th green to win the 1997 PGA. In golf, it”s always about performance in the majors as well as the accumulation of majors.
Yet all this talk about major titles hasn”t always been a consistent theme during golf”s 150-year history of major championships. The first British Open was contested in 1860 at Prestwick in western Scotland. The early Open Championship fields oftentimes had seldom more than 40 entrants. There was little money to be won. It was all about the honor and glory of winning a 36-hole golf tournament. With limited fields, golfers such as Willie Park, Old Tom Morris, Young Tom Morris, Jamie Anderson and Bob Ferguson won three or more Open titles before the first U.S. Open was ever contested.
From 1895 through the cancellation of tournament golf in 1915 because of World War I, the triumvirate of Harry Vardon with six Open victories, J.H. Taylor with five, and James Braid with five controlled the golf scene in the United Kingdom.
When the United States Open was first held in 1895, it had a larger field and many transplanted professionals who first took up the game in Great Britain and Ireland. Scott Willie Anderson won four U.S. Opens between 1901 and 1905. Harry Vardon won the 1900 U.S. Open, becoming the first golfer to hold both Open titles. Yet no one was talking about the fact that Vardon had seven majors or led the world rankings. Majors weren”t a concept back then.
Golf became very popular in America after the conclusion of World War II and an American triumvirate of Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and amateur Bobby Jones won the lion”s share of National Open titles. Hagen would win two U.S. Opens, Sarazen would get two also, and Jones would prevail in four. Joining Vardon as the only winners of both versions of the Opens were Walter Hagen with four British wins, Sarazen with one, and Jones with three.
By 1930, Vardon had accumulated seven wins in the Opens, Hagen was close behind with six. The amateur Jones had just as many with seven titles. Yet golf”s journalists at the time didn”t exactly see it that way. Bobby Jones had also won the 1930 British Amateur title as well as U.S. Amateur titles in 1924, ”25, ”27, ”28 and 1930. If you counted those events, Jones had 13 majors. Yet could it truly be a major if Hagen and Sarazen couldn”t get into the field?
The British Amateur and the U.S. Amateur weren”t the only “new” majors as ordained by the press. The PGA Championship, first contested in 1916, featured a top-notch field of the day”s best professionals competing in a grueling match play format. The PGA was considered a very major test of golf and by 1930 Hagen had accumulated five PGA victories while Sarazen added three more. Because he was an amateur, Jones wasn”t eligible to play in the PGA. So, with this concocted system in place, Jones had 13 majors, Hagen had 11, Vardon remained at seven, and Sarazen had six major titles.
After his 1930 Grand Slam, Jones retired from the game. He was 28 years old. He was a nervous wreck from a decade of competitive golf. He was happily married with three children, he wanted to focus on building up his Atlanta law firm, and he wanted to build his dream golf course with noted architect Dr. Alister Mackenzie of Pasatiempo and Cypress Point fame.
Jones and Mackenzie broke ground at what would be Augusta National on the site of an old nursery in 1931. It would officially open in 1933 and by the end of the first year of its operation, the club was in financial disarray. Funding for the course hadn”t fully come through, membership was much lower than anticipated, and the country was in the heart of the Depression.
Jones” friend and partner in Augusta National, Wall Street financier Clifford Roberts, pushed through the idea of an invitational tournament at Augusta National. It would promote the new course, it would lead to increased membership, and to make the tourney a big splash with the media, it would feature the great Bobby Jones, coming out of retirement, to play alongside the stars of the day, including Walter Hagen, Craig Wood, Billy Burke, Paul Runyan and the inaugural champion, Horton Smith. The Augusta National Invitational got great press and it was determined that the club would continue to run the tourney in early April from that point on.
In 1935 it was called the Masters for the first time. Gene Sarazen made a final-round double-eagle on the 15th hole and won a three-way playoff the next day. Early champions such as Byron Nelson, Jimmy Demaret, Sam Snead and Ben Hogan enhanced the appeal of the Masters. In 1960, Arnold Palmer won the Masters and the U.S. Open, and then proclaimed that he would enter the British Open and the PGA in the quest of the professional grand slam. Journalist Bob Drum ran with Palmer”s quote, and suddenly majors and the grand slam were a part of golf”s legacy, whether Harry Vardon or Walter Hagen or Bobby Jones knew about it or not. The game of golf has evolved over the years from its hardscrabble beginning to today”s million dollar first-place checks. Yet when all is said and done, winning the Masters or any of the other three majors will make a career. After all, your name is in the record books alongside Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
