Gary Player - The Legend

Player Recalls Storied Career - Legend Started With Humble Beginnings

Feb 22, 2011 | Filed Under: General NewsEvents & Tournaments   

Gary Player left his home in South Africa when he was only 19, with 200 pounds in his pocket that his father, a miner, made a bank overdraft to give his boy.

A year later, Player competed in his first British Open, still so poor that he used his only tie as a belt. He wore his only sweater to hide his makeshift belt.

“I’m so nervous, and it’s hot as hell, and I’ve got this sweater on,” Player said last week at The ACE Group Classic in North Naples, where he recalled a range of topics that included his first Masters victory in 1961, 50 years ago this April.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘Take your sweater off.’ I said, ‘No. I’m feeling great.’ But I didn’t want them to see this knitted tie.”

Last week at The Quarry in North Naples, Player, 75, played a practice round with Tommy Armour III, a second-year member of the Champions Tour.

Decades earlier, Player had played at Winged Foot Golf Club in New York with Armour’s grandfather, the iconic “Silver Scot,” who won three major championships as a contemporary of Bobby Jones in the 1920s and ‘30s.

“Every third hole he said, ‘Wait a minute, laddie. I’ve got to have a wee dram,’ ” Players said. “He still had that Scottish accent ... That’s a bad sign that you’ve played with Tommy Armour and his grandfather.”

A nine-time major winner and member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Player is among the game’s most-respected elder statesmen. But it wasn’t always that way.

In 1961, in only his fifth Masters start, Player beat Arnold Palmer and amateur Charlie Coe by one shot after Palmer made double-bogey from a bunker on the 72nd hole.

Palmer, bidding to become the first ever to win consecutive Masters titles, threw away the victory, many remembered.

But Player, who held a four-shot lead on the back nine in the final round and had to make his own up-and-down from a bunker on No. 18 to win, looks back differently.

“Sports Illustrated was very kind. They said, ‘No, Gary Player won it,’ ” said Player, recalling his attempt to get the gallery to move so he could chip an errant shot from the trees on the par-5 13th hole into the 14th fairway.“I couldn’t get the people to move. I was a young guy over here. I was a guest. If it had been (Jack) Nicklaus, he would have sat on his bag and waited until they moved.”

Player settled for a chip on to the firm 13th fairway that ran downhill and into the creek. He made double-bogey, then a bogey on No. 15.

“They said, ‘This guy went double-bogey, six, but he still won it,’ ” said Player, the first and only non-American to win the Masters until Spain’s Seve Ballesteros in 1980.

A year later, with Player now the one bidding to become the first with consecutive green jackets, Palmer rallied from a two-shot deficit with three holes remaining before defeating Player and Dow Finsterwald in a playoff.

“It’s funny how everybody remembers that,” Player said of Palmer’s loss in 1961, “but they don’t remember what he did to me the next year.”

Long before Tiger Woods’ memorable, 90-degree chip-in for birdie from long and left of the 16th green on his way to victory in the 2005 Masters, Palmer did the same thing from an equally impossible location right of the green to stun Player.

“I said to my caddie, ‘We’ve won.’ Can you imagine? Because I know you cannot get down in two from there,” Player said. “It came down at 100 miles an hour, hit the flag and went right in the hole.”

Trailing by three shots after the front nine in the playoff, Palmer rallied on the back nine to beat Player by three.

“So you know, there’s no such thing as giving it, losing it,” Player said. “There’s only one thing you do: you win it or you lose it. Some guys imagine the stories about how I had it won and how I didn’t win. You can go on with stories forever.”

Article courtesy Seth Soffian, News-Press.com
Photo courtesy of Terry Allen Williams, News-Press.com

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