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The Open Champions Classic:  Royal Liverpool, 2000















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.

Nick Faldo at Hoylake for his Faldo Junior SeriesThe 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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