The British Open was first contested on Scotland’s western coast at Prestwick a little more than 155 years ago. Willie Park Sr. won that first Open Championship, and for the next 12 years Park, Tom Morris Sr., and Tom Morris Jr. would end up taking home 11 claret jugs. Park, Old Tom and Young Tom were the first real golfing triumvirate. Of course, the game of golf way back then was nothing like today’s modern game in a variety of ways. That inaugural British Open was first contested in 1860 and the Masters wouldn’t even exist for another seven decades, so it’s difficult to compare eras. Yet I’m of the opinion that the game’s top eras were historically based upon the existence of golfing triumvirates, just like today.
Golf was very much an English, Irish and Scottish game when those first Open Championships were initially held. On the other side of the pond, the game hadn’t come to North America, so there were no comparable country clubs, public courses and amateur and open championships. However, some 30 years later, just prior to the turn of the century, another threesome of top-flight British professionals took the game by storm and also assisted with the initial growth of the game in the United States and Canada.
In 1894, J.H. Taylor won the British Open at Royal St. Georges. From that year through the last Open Championship contested prior to the start of World War I in 1914, Taylor, James Braid and Harry Vardon captured a total of 16 of 21 titles. Vardon won the Open six times while Taylor and Braid found the winner’s circle five times apiece. Vardon also won the 1900 United States Open and lost a playoff to Francis Ouimet in the 1913 U.S. Open.
True, Vardon, Braid and Taylor were much better than their fellow competitors, but they were also so heavily involved in the game during its formative stages. They did as much with their promotional efforts as they did with their talents to help grow the game on both sides of the Atlantic. Vardon was considered an instructional wizard who is given credit for popularizing the overlapping “Vardon grip.” (As an aside, the PGA Tour player who is the annual leader in stroke average is awarded the Vardon Trophy). All three were golf course architects with credit for the design of Gleneagles to Braid, Royal Birkdale to Taylor, and Whitehall to Vardon.
Vardon, Briad and Taylor played competitively for two decades, won constantly and traveled the world to play in tournaments and exhibitions. Braid won the British PGA four times as well as 12 other tourneys. Taylor won the French and German Opens as well as 13 other events. Vardon was the top dog among the Great Triumvirate, as they came to be known, winning 41 times. He initially won the Open Championship in 1896, won back-to-back titles in 1898 and 1899, and then won three more times in 1903, 1911 and finally 1914. Vardon is the only professional to win the Open six times and Braid and Taylor join Tom Watson and Australian Peter Thomson with their five claret jugs, second best in the tournament’s history. The Great Triumvirate helped the game grow from the turn of the century until the onset of World War I.
It’s never a clean break from one era to another, but the end of the dominant days of the Vardon, Braid and Taylor trio in 1914 piggybacked upon the start of the next great generation as Walter Hagen captured the U.S. Open later that summer. Hagen and the rest had to put their games on hold until the conclusion of the Great War, but when the game resumed at full force in the Roaring 20s, another threesome found its way onto golf’s center stage.
By then there were active tours in the United States and Great Britain, and with the start of international matches such as the Ryder Cup and the Walker Cup, professionals from both sides of the Atlantic ventured back and forth on the luxury ocean liners of the day. The British Open and the U.S. Open were standard fare for the game’s greats along with tournaments of note such as the PGA Championship, the Western Open, the Canadian Open, and the Texas Open.
Hagen was joined atop tournament leader boards by a diminutive Italian-American from upstate New York, Eugenio Saraceni, who changed his name to Gene Sarazen, and a dignified, highly educated Southern amateur named Bobby Jones. Hagen would end up winning 13 major titles at a time when there was no Masters. Only Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would have more. He would win a pair of National Opens, four British Opens and five PGA Championships. He won 75 total tourneys world-wide with 45 victories in America. On top of that, he was the golfing king of his time and was considered the sporting equal to contemporaries Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey and Bill Tilden.
Sarazen was the overachiever of his era who showed enough moxie to win a pair of National Opens, one British Open, three PGAs, and toward the end of his career, the second annual Masters Tournament with the “shot heard round the world,” a final-round double-eagle on the par-5 15th hole. Sarazen won 48 times with 39 wins in America. Jones, who was always an amateur golfer, played in professional tour events and top-notch amateur tournaments. He won the U.S. Open four times, captured the British Open three times, took home five U.S. Amateur championships as well as a British Amateur. In 1930 Jones won both Opens and both Amateurs, a feat called the Grand Slam.
Along the way, Hagen helped found the PGA of America, Jones built Augusta National and started the Masters, Sarazen invented the sand wedge, and all three promoted the game on the big screen with lesson shorties at movie theatres. They also wandered the world as evidenced by victories in places such as Australia, continental Europe and Central America.
The game’s more memorable eras have been dominated by golfing threesomes. Nowadays, we appear to be in the beginning of the Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy and Jason Day era. Prior to the beginning of the 20th century, Harry Vardon, J.H. Taylor, and James Braid were kings of the links. After World War I, the game was dominated by Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Bobby Jones. Next week we’ll explore the exploits of the other great troikas of the game, namely the 1940s and 1950s dominance of Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, followed by the game’s golden era of the 1960s and 1970s that featured Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus.
