Royal Liverpool was to stage two more championships before entering
a long period in the wilderness. Peter Thomson completed a hat trick
of titles there in 1956, going on to win five and one of the most
popular champions of all , Roberto de Vicenzo, took the last Hoylake
Open in 1967 - at the age of 44! Now the Open is to return to this
great course in 2006 and, stretched to around 7250 yards, it will
present a stiff examination to the ‘Big Four’ -Tiger, Ernie, Vijay,
Phil - and their rivals. (We now know that Tiger passed the
examination with flying colours, but four years later his colours
have been temporarily lowerered - JMC,2010). Their predecessors have missed out on the
chance to be a Hoylake champion and which of those great players
would have won the four or five Opens Hoylake might have had over
the past thirty-five years comes into the category of Bernard
Darwin’s “interesting but futile ‘ifs’ of history”.
When Royal Liverpool staged its last championship two of the ‘Big
Three’ were in their prime - three time winners Jack Nicklaus, the
defending champion and Gary Player, who would win the following
year. (Arnold Palmer did not enter that year). Both came close in
1967, would one of them have made it four? or perhaps Doug Sanders
would have holed the one that got away at St Andrews in 1970; Would
Tony Jacklin have got the second Open that was so cruelly snatched
from him? Sandy Lyle won the Brabazon Trophy at Hoylake as an
amateur, maybe he would have won a second Open there, or Woosie
might have landed the title that has always eluded him.
The great years of Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Greg Norman have
come and gone while Hoylake was sleeping and Tom Watson could have
made it a record equalling six titles (as he so nearly did in 2009,
JMC) - or would there have been a
surprise winner, like Fred Daly in that 1947 Hoylake Championship or
the two at Sandwich- the Americans Bill Rogers and Ben Curtis in
1981 and 2003?* That’s another thing we shall never know.
[* Or Todd Hamilton at Royal Troon in 2004]
The 1946-7 football season saw the arrival of Matt Busby at Old
Trafford to manage Manchester United, who had not won the League
title, or the Cup, since before the first war. When he arrived the
club that would one day be the wealthiest in the country had debts
of £15,000 and a bombed-out ground. Home games were played at Maine
Road, the ground of his old club Manchester City. United ended the
season as runners up to another of his old clubs, Liverpool, in the
league and were to win the Cup the following year. The ‘Busby
Babes’ were born a few years later and the rest is history.
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