I don’t believe I’m telling you anything new when I say the world of sports has gotten bigger and richer during the past 50 years. Back in 1967, there was no such thing as March Madness. There were exactly six teams in the National Hockey League. The National Basketball Association had 10 teams, eight of them made the playoffs, and the San Francisco Warriors played 28 games at home, 30 on the road and the other 23 games were contested at neutral sites. Jack Nicklaus won the U.S. Open that summer and pocketed $30,000 for his efforts.
The biennial Ryder Cup Matches were also on a much smaller scale back in 1967. The matches were not televised on prime time, it wasn’t Team USA against the Euros, and it wasn’t always that competitive. Prior to the 1967 matches, the American team held a 13-3 edge over Great Britain and Ireland. There was no European Tour in those days and yet many of the continent’s top players seldom competed in the United States. It was a much different time.
The rules of the matches were different from today’s format as well. Both teams had 10 golfers. Team USA was determined by a top-10 points list and there was no such thing as a wild-card selection. The PGA of America ran the Ryder Cup as it does today, and yet it had a few rules in place that are far removed from today’s format. Most noticeably, one had to be a professional golfer for five years before you could accumulate Ryder Cup points to make the team. A good case in point was Arnold Palmer. Palmer started his professional career in 1955 and won the Canadian Open that year. From 1955 through 1960, Arnie won 21 tour events including three majors. Yet he didn’t play on the Ryder Cup until 1961. Can you imagine Jordan Spieth having to wait until the 2018 Ryder Cup before he could tee it up for Team America?
The team captaincy wasn’t all that prestigious an honor as it is today. Jim Furyk was announced last month as the American captain to great fanfare, some 20 months before the Ryder Cup is contested in Paris in September of 2018. For the first 36 years of Ryder Cup history, the captain was a playing captain, basically the first among equals. Walter Hagen was the playing captain for six Ryder Cups, and in the post-World War II era the captains, all major champions, included Ben Hogan (twice), Sam Snead (twice), Lloyd Mangrum, Chick Harbert, Jackie Burke Jr. and Jerry Barber. Although he had only played in one previous Ryder Cup match, Arnold Palmer was the last of the playing captains in 1963.
The Ryder Cup has always been a three-day affair, but the point system and format were slightly different from the way it is done today. The first-day matches included four alternate shot matches in the morning and four alternate shot matches in the afternoon. Day two entailed four better ball matches in the morning and again in the afternoon. The final day singles were noticeably different in that there were eight-versus-eight morning matches and eight-versus-eight afternoon matches. When you add up all the matches, there were 32 points to be had, and the winning team needed 16 ½ of them to secure Samuel Ryder’s Cup.
Finally, there was a lack of consistency with regard to golf’s rules some 50 years ago. The USGA and the Royal and Ancient weren’t always on the same page because of the parochial nature of the game in 1967. An obvious difference was the size of the golf ball. In the United States, the golf ball had a diameter of 1.68 inches. Overseas the legal ball was noticeably smaller with a diameter of 1.62 inches. Both balls weighed the same and the idea behind the English golf ball size was that it was more effective in windy conditions. For those of you who have played the game for a number of years, you might recall finding or seeing an English golf ball on occasion. The major brand at that time was called the Dunlop 64.
With all this background information, the 1967 Ryder Cup Matches teed it up a little more than 50 years ago at the Champions Golf Club in Houston, Texas. Champions was built by old-time tour pros Jackie Burke Jr. and Jimmy Demaret and would also host the 1969 U.S. Open won by Orville Moody. The American non-playing captain was the iconic 55-year-old Ben Hogan and his squad of 10 golfers included Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper, Julius Boros, Doug Sanders, Gay Brewer, Gene Littler, Bobby Nichols, Al Geiberger, Gardner Dickinson and current Lake County resident, Johnny Pott.
The Great Britain and Ireland team was captained by 54-year-old Dai Rees. Rees had a trio of second-place finishes in the British Open, never played in an American major tournament, and won some 30-plus events worldwide including the Irish Open, the Swiss Open, the South African PGA and the British Masters. His 10-man team included Peter Alliss, Hugh Boyle, Neil Coles, Malcolm Gregson, Brian Huggett, Bernard Hunt, Christy O’Connor Sr., Dave Thomas, George Witt and a talented young player of promise, Tony Jacklin.
Team America played to form during those three days. They led by three points after day one, built the lead to an insurmountable 10 points after day two, and after the two sets of single matches on day three, the final tally was Team USA 23 ½ to Team GB&I 8 ½. The 15-point margin of victory remains the greatest in Ryder Cup history. On the American side, Arnold Palmer and Gardner Dickinson were a perfect 5-0, Johnny Pott was a perfect 4-0, and Bobby Nichols and Billy Casper went 4-0-1. All this happened without Jack Nicklaus playing for the American side. Although he was the game’s top player and had collected seven majors at that point in his career, his five-year PGA “apprenticeship” meant that he could only accumulate points for a portion of the time and he finished 13th in the points race with Dave Marr and Bob Goalby coming in 11th and 12th.
Prior to the start of the matches, Ben Hogan met with his squad of “the best golfers in the world” and had but one request: “I don’t want my name on that trophy as a losing captain.”
Of course, there is a lot more to our 50-year-old story of the 1967 Ryder Cup Matches than just a thumping of the GB&I team by a talented American team. There is the saga of the decision to recruit the captain, the dynamic of the Hogan captaincy, the pairings of the bombers and the control players, the lack of a dress code, and the decision to use the British golf ball at the Ryder Cup in Houston. Next week we go inside the Ryder Cup ropes to reminisce with Johnny Pott about the American team and the historic 1967 Ryder Cup Matches.
