World Cup and History of Golf Tournaments

  
 

World Cup and History of Golf Tournaments

THE WORLD CUP

The World Cup started as the Canada Cup and is played for by teams of two players from each country. There is also a prize for the lowest individual score. The competition started in 1953 and was first won by Argentina, represented by Antonio Cerda and Roberto de Vicenzo, who so unluckily lost the Masters in 1968 by signing for a 66 when he had taken 65. Thereafter, it has been won more often than not by the USA which has won it 21 times in all, including four times running from 1992 to 1995 when represented by Fred Couples and Davis Love III. Other winners include Taiwan, Sweden, South Africa, Canada, Germany, Ireland and Wales.

1890-1945

The first competitions in the 1860s were small affairs dominated by the professional golfers of Scotland. Professionals were not generally held in very high regard. They occupied a no-man's land, part teacher, part club maker and mender, ball-maker and part green keeper. In the twentieth century this changed and, as the game of golf took hold of the collective imagination of each nation, they became heroes, feted in the press, with increasingly greater financial rewards open to them. At the turn of the twentieth century the golfing world was dominated by the "Great Triumvirate" from Great Britain of J. H. Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid. After World War I the domination of the game crossed the Atlantic, and many would claim it has stayed there ever since.

Apart from the "Great Triumvirate", there were a number of outstanding players on both sides of the Atlantic. John Ball from Liverpool was one of the most successful amateur players of all time, winning the British Amateur Championship no fewer than eight times between 1888 and 1912. He also became the first amateur and the first Englishman to win the Open when he won at Prestwick in 1890. Ball's main rival as an amateur was Harold H. Hilton who, like Ball, came from Liverpool.

Hilton won the Amateur Championship four times; he won the Open twice in 1892 and 1897, when he beat James Braid into second place. Hilton then went to the USA and his tour was dubbed "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage". In 1911 he beat Fred Herreshoff at the 37th hole to become the only Bridsh winner of the US Amateur Championship in I the history of the event.

The first US Amateur Champion was the redoubtable Charles Blair Macdonald who had such an immense influence on the evolution of golf in the USA. He was followed by two great amateurs, Walter Travis and Jerome Travers.

Travis won the US Amateur Championship in 1900, 1901 and 1903, and the British Championship in 1904. This was a great achievement and a breakthrough for the sport in the USA as it was the first time an American had won any title in Britain. Travers won his first US Amateur title in 1907 and then again in 1908, 1912 and 1913, adding the US Open in 1915. Charles "Chick" Evans was another great American amateur player. He won the US Open and the US Amateur in 1916, the first player to win both titles in the same year, and the US Amateur again in 1920.

Francis Ouimet, another amateur, achieved instant fame when he beat Vardon and Ted Ray in 1913 in a play-off at Brookline to win the US Open by five shots. It was billed throughout the USA as a great David and Goliath contest. Ouimet was an unknown twenty-year-old amateur who worked as a caddie at Brookline Country Club. Vardon and Ray were in the USA playing exhibition matches and had just finished first and second in the Open championship in 1912. The US Open was postponed to allow the two to compete and Vardon, who had won the US title in 1900, was acknowledged at that time as the finest player in the world. Ouimet won the US Amateur Championship in 1914 and again 17 years later in 1931.

In the 1920s the amateur and professional game on both sides of the Atlantic was dominated by Bobby Jones. Jones won the US Amateur title five times in seven years from 1924 to 1930 in addition to his three Open and four US Open titles. Another successful American amateur was Lawson Little who won both the British and American titles in 1934 and 1935. He then turned professional and won the US Open in 1940. He started a trend of successful American amateurs turning professional which, in the 1950s and 1960s, saw Palmer and Nicklaus graduate from the amateur ranks.

The American professional golf tournaments started out as adjuncts to the Amateur championships, which were much more popular and attracted bigger entries. At that time golf was played more by the affluent middle and upper classes. The prestige of professionals improved only slowly until the arrival of Hagen, Sarazen and Snead who became national heroes in the 1930s. The first "home-bred" American to win the US Open was Johnny McDermott who won at Chicago in 1911 and repeated his success the following year. Before he made that breakthrough the tournament had been dominated by expatriate Scots like Laurie Auchterlonie, Willie Anderson and the Smith brothers, Alex and Willie. To this day, Willie Anderson is the only person to have won that championship three years in succession. The USA had been waiting for McDermott's win with nationalistic fervour, but it was as nothing compared with Ouimet's success which overnight transformed the popularity of the game. In 1913 fewer than 350,000 people played golf in the USA; ten years later the number had grown to over two million.

In the 1920s and 1930s Americans came to dominate the golfing world on both sides of the Atlantic. The first American winner of the Open was Jock Hutchison in 1921 and he was followed in swift succession by Walter Hagen, "Long" Jim Barnes and Bobby Jones. Indeed Arthur Havers' victory in the Open at Troon in 1923 was the only British success in 13 years before Henry Cotton's first Open victory at Royal St George's in 1934. Bobby Jones won the title three times and Walter Hagen four times. The British Amateur Championship was also won by a number of American golfers: in 1926,Jess Sweetser; 1930, Bobby Jones; 1934 and 1935, Lawson Little; 1937, Robert Sweeny; and 1938, Charlie Yates. The American domination of the game, which was to last until the 1980s, had started.