It”s Ryder Cup weekend at Gleneagles in the Scottish Highlands. I, for one, will be watching the matches nonstop. Yes, 2:30 a.m. did come around awfully early this morning, yet the whole Ryder Cup history and tradition coupled with the magic of match play makes for can”t-miss theater. The Ryder Cup is three full days of great golfing drama with one highlight after another. And to think, there is zero prize money.
The Ryder Cup used to be played biennially in odd-numbered years, but following the terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center, the matches were postponed for one year and are now contested during even calendar years. With that in mind, I think now is as good a time as any to look back upon Ryder Cup history, some 51 years ago when Team USA played the squad from Great Britain and Ireland at the Atlanta Athletic Club”s East Lake Course in Atlanta.
It was a much different golfing world in early October of 1963. The Ryder Cup was a big deal in a historic and patriotic sense, but like most things 51 years ago, it was nowhere near the sports entertainment mega-draw it is today. The British PGA had its own circuit prior to the advent of the European Tour in the mid-1970s and it held close to 20 events throughout the British Isles and Western Europe. The Ryder Cup team from the other side of the pond was made up entirely of linksters from Great Britain and Ireland. Each team had 10 members instead of the 12 on today”s squads. More matches were played too. The Friday and Saturday formats were similar with fourball and foursome matches in the morning and afternoon. However, on Sunday, instead of 12 vs. 12 individual matches, there were eight individual matches in the morning and another eight in the afternoon. A hot golfer could end up going out for six matches during the course of three days.
There was limited familiarity between the Americans and the Europeans back in 1963. The American golfers exclusively played their tour while the Brits kept to theirs. Dow Finsterwald, the senior member of Team USA at age 44, was a former PGA champion and had been on tour for more than 20 years. Yet he never competed in the British Open. Hall of Fame Irishman Christy O”Connor won 44 times during his stellar professional career. He never traveled to the United States to play in the Masters, the U.S. Open or the PGA. The golf world back then was very insular and very parochial.
Team USA was the stronger team on paper in 1963 with the game”s top golfer, Arnold Palmer, doubling as playing captain. He would be the last playing captain in Ryder Cup history. Palmer was joined by Billy Casper, Julius Boros, Gene Littler, Bob Goalby, Dow Finsterwald and the Bay Area”s Tony Lema. All seven would win a major title sometime during their career. Palmer accumuled seven majors while Casper and Boros won three apiece. The other members of the team included Billy Maxwell, Dave Ragan and the youngster of the group, 27-year-old Johnny Pott.
The Great Britain and Ireland team was captained by Scotland”s John Fallon, a British PGA Tour regular. His 10-man squad was led by the aforementioned O”Connor and fellow Hall of Famer Peter Alliss. Alliss is well known nowadays as the voice of BBC golf. Other GB&I stalwarts included Neil Coles, a British Open runner-up with 45 international victories, Bernard Hunt with 30 career wins, Dave Thomas, twice a British Open runner-up, and Brian Huggett, who joined the list with an Open second place to go along with 29 career wins.
As Johnny Pott told me several years ago, he was quite nervous about participating in his first of what would be three Ryder Cup matches. He made his thoughts known to Palmer. Arnie told Johnny to relax. He”d pair them together to take some of the pressure off Pott. It did play out that way although little did Pott know that he and Palmer would be in the first group on the first day of the Ryder Cup. How”s that for Ryder Cup pressure for a rookie?
The Palmer-Pott duo lost that initial match in foursomes or alternate shot. Pott returned the next day to pair up with Tony Lema and defeat Alliss and Hunt in the better ball or fourball format. Team USA would go on to romp to victory by a 23-9 margin in that 15th edition of the Ryder Cup.
In fact, the Palmer-Pott loss on day one was one of the few highlights for the Great Britain and Ireland team during those three days. The American team prevailed in each session and in the final individual matches on Sunday, they won 7? out of a possible 8 points.
Golf was still a fairly “old world” sport in those days. Only two years earlier, the California Attorney General had ordered PGA Tour events in the state to open its doors to qualified black golfers, demanding that the PGA of America strike down its Caucasian-only clause. On a much lesser note, but still pretty steeped in outdated thinking, qualifying for the Ryder Cup team was a two-year process of accumulating points. The only kicker was that you had to have been a professional golfer for a five-year apprenticeship before you could play on the team. At that time, three-time major winner Jack Nicklaus was arguably one of the top three golfers in the world, but the 23-year-old had only turned pro in 1962. He was unable to play for the American team at East Lake that year and wouldn”t be able to play in the matches until 1969.
The world of golf was in a far different place some 51 years ago. In 1963, the American Ryder Cup team was one of the strongest ever with major champions, downright tough competitors and future Hall of Famers. The team from Great Britain and Ireland was not as experienced, not as talented and ultimately, not as successful. Yet that 15th playing of the Ryder Cup was a most meaningful experience for those 10 men who represented the United States. There was the pressure of playing for your teammates, your tour and your country. There was the pride of having been one of the select few. And over 51 years, there have been the recollections of a most memorable weekend of great drama. While the Ryder Cup has become big business in the 21st century, those linksters of the past have the same thoughts and feelings of those playing today in Scotland. The Johnny Pott of 1963 is the Jimmy Walker of 2014.
