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BACK NEXT Chapter 6 The International Golfer Page 44

Dansmore ShuteShute had three-putted the final green at Southport & Ainsdale two weeks before to lose the Ryder Cup, but recovered well to shoot four rounds of 73 at St Andrews and tie with compatriot Craig Wood. In the final round, on the long 5th, the big hitting Wood had driven into a bunker 425 yards down wind from the tee, an incredible shot which caused Bernard Darwin to write: “That the thing happened there is no shadow of doubt, as to how it happened I give it up”. He then took another four to get down. Wood, the perennial runner-up, was defeated in the 36-hole play-off, one of the three majors he lost that way. Shute’s win was the tenth in a row for the USA.

Three men finished a shot behind. Defending champion Gene Sarazen, my partner from the previous year, had taken three to get out of Hill bunker on the short 11th in round two – in spite of his blaster. Darwin described it as “the most dreadful bunker in all golf”. It is so deep and Gene was so small that, for those watching from the green, only the puffs of sand betrayed his presence. There was an embarrassing incident when the Championship Committee had to investigate an over zealous steward’s accusation that he had taken four shots in the sand, without the benefit of TV replays of course. He had actually swung his club in frustration after failing to get out of the sand and had not made another stroke - his score of 6 was found to be correct. In the final round he found the dreaded Hell bunker on 14 and, in throwing caution to the winds, he left it in and had an eight. He did not realise that the leaders were faltering and he could play safely out of Hell. Despite his new club the St Andrews bunkers had cost Gene a second Open. His Ryder Cup team mate – Leo DiegelLeo Diegel, had a short putt on the 18th to tie the lead, but his suspect nerves and his unorthodox putting style let him down. If anything it was a worse miss than the Doug Sanders putt on the same green that cost him the 1970 Open. Did Leo miss the ball altogether to incur that tragic extra stroke? Bernard Darwin described the scene thus: “Finally he laid his putt apparently stone-dead in three at the ‘Home’ hole and missed the putt by the widest possible margin”. In his book Golf Between Two Wars Darwin said that Leo had utterly failed to hit it, which was reasonably taken to mean that he had not just missed the putt – he had missed the ball, although that other doyen of commentators, Henry Longhurst, did not see it that way. The news reels do not seem to have captured the putt, but if Leo did have an air shot it was a very costly lapse of concentration that was to be repeated fifty years later by his compatriot Hale Irwin. His miss from 3 inches, repeated many times on TV, came in the 1983 Open; He finished just one shot out of a tie with the champion - Tom Watson.

Leo used a long putter, the handle of which was anchored to his waist - an early appearance of the ‘belly’ putter that is now so popular – hence his extraordinary hunched style, with elbows out and forearms parallel to the ground. Gene Sarazen said that he putted: “Like a man seized with cramps”. The method was widely copied for a while and it became known as ‘diegeling’, after Bernard Darwin created the verb ‘to diegel’ and conjugated it – ‘I diegel, thou diegelest, we all diegel’. (Note the similarity with the Wills cigarette card depicting my brother George in Chapter 3). The third man in the second placed group was the leading Britain - Syd Easterbrook. He was the hero in the narrow victory over the Americans in the Ryder Cup, when he had beaten Shute in the decisive match. He was the only British player in the top six and had been in a position to win, after starting the last round as joint leader with Diegel, Cotton, Mitchell and Joe Kirkwood, the Australian born Trick Shot Artist, who had also finished 4th in 1923 and would again in1934. (He was in the top ten in four Opens) A seven at the 14th finally put paid to Syd’s challenge, but in the foreword to Kirkwood’s book Links of Life, author Barbara Fey said that it was the “bookies and bettors” who toppled Joe, a startling accusation, which she explained as follows. “With the lack of control over the gallery crowds in those days, his ball was surreptitiously moved and trampled on; noise came inopportunely from the spectators with more than coincidence during putts and stroke play. And on the final round, when he was well within the winner’s circle, a man yelled an obscenity during the back swing of his drive, causing Joe to falter and slip his shot off line. The ball hit a spectator full face, injuring him badly and frightening Joe so much that finishing the round became a dull nightmare. There was such a quantity of money riding on the outcome of the match that the bookmakers couldn’t afford to let the newcomer win and had set out to sabotage the tournament, which they did.” Kirkwood was three ahead of Shute after three rounds and he did decline dramatically with 81 to finish tied for 14th, but twenty-five players did not break 80 in the windy final round. What part the lack of crowd control played in his demise is open to debate, but when the Open returned to St Andrews six years later matters came to a head and I would be a victim of the unruly galleries-as you will hear in Chapter 13.



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