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[To see ‘artisan’ against the name of a winner of prestigious
amateur events was none too common. Bill Sutton was also a multiple
winner of the Cheshire Championship, for the first time in 1926 and
again in 1927, beating a Cheshire County team-mate, with an
unforgettable name, Israel Sidebottom, in both finals. Norman Sutton
followed his brother as champion in 1928. (James Braid junior, son
of the great man, won in 1929 when a member at Ringway G. C.)]  A regular column in the Liverpool Echo at that time was Jack
McLean’s Around and About – Home Links, and that week he described
Syd Easterbrook’s “best” worst round at Hesketh. On a very hot
afternoon Syd had told reporters that he did not want to play before
going out to ‘scramble’ a 70 which the author described as “some of
the worst golf – up to a point – he ever played”, but on the greens
he could do nothing wrong. During the round Syd picked up a stray
tee peg and remarked to a lady marker: “I can’t show you how to play
golf but I can show you how to find tees”. “I can find tees myself”,
she told him, “What I want to know is how to find greens.” One of
the handful of spectators shouted: “It’s better to be born lucky
than rich”, when Syd holed a putt ‘from here to hallelujah’ on the
9th green. “Well I’ll be born rich thank you, and risk it”, said Syd.
He told the Echo afterwards that he had tried unsuccessfully to
escape the lure of competitive golf for three years. “Time and again
I have said this is my last event”, he told them. “I want to know
why we continue to play the game”, he went on, “The exasperation of
the club player is no less hard to bear for the pro. I wonder at
myself carrying on”. I think that any club golfer who scored 70 when
playing his ‘worst’ golf could easily answer that question, but Syd
did in fact drop out of the game in later years and became landlord
of a pub; declaring that he hated golf and interesting himself in
greyhound racing. The tournament was quite eventful. Alf Perry got an unusual birdie when he killed a starling on the wing at the 9th and Jack Hargreaves, the Fleetwood pro, lost his ball when a small dog seized it and fled, never to be seen again. (In 1951 Jack was to become the seventh player to be selected for the Ryder Cup but never get a game). My friend Gerry Bond, the pro at the West Lancashire Ladies Club (then separate from the Men’s course), cut his tee shot at the 15th and it finished in the raincoat pocket of a Clerk in holy Orders-the local Cerberus, standing on a road. An official dropped the ball on the grass verge and Gerry, “doubtless feeling that the blessing of the church was with him”, as the Times put it, chipped it dead for his par three. The winner of the £315 first prize and a gold wristwatch was Dick Burton, who had been second in the two previous years. He had a final 68 for a total of 280, three ahead of Charles Whitcombe, who won the inaugural Vardon Trophy that year. He picked up £170  and
also received a gold watch-his fourth at Southport, as did Formby’s
Harry Busson, who finished with a 66 to pip Norman Sutton to third
place. There was no gold watch for me. I had my best round, a 70,
but finished down the field on 292. The diminutive Irishman, Paddy
Mahon was pleased with his sixth place money of £37.10s plus £10 for
the lowest second round score of 66. “I am delighted to have got
this bit of money out of Southport”, he said, “I could not get any
money in Ireland so I came over to England as the only place I could
get any”. It hardly seemed worth coming over for, but it was worth much more then of course - he could have bought 15 suits and 20
pairs of shoes at Blacklers before he went back.
In 2003 the World number one woman golfer Annika Sorenstam caused
quite a stir when she played in a men’s US PGA event.
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[Later followed by Michelle Wie] Sixty-five
years earlier the papers had a picture of me alongside one of a Lady
professional, Poppy Wingate, who played in that Dunlop Southport
tournament. She had made her debut in the 1933 Yorkshire Evening |
