Since Jack Nicklaus takes the time each year to honor one or more of the game’s all-time greats at the Memorial Tournament, I figured I’d help the cause by providing a little background on this year’s four honorees.  So, once again borrowing from The Book of Golfers, we have:

RALPH GULDAHL  (USA)    
Born: Dallas, TX  11/22/1911   Died: Sherman Oaks, CA  6/11/1987

The son of Hungarian immigrants, Texan Ralph Guldahl turned professional in 1930 and enjoyed some early success, finishing second at the 1933 U.S. Open at Chicago’s North Shore GC when a missed five-footer at the 72nd left him one stroke behind amateur Johnny Goodman.  In the mid-’30s, mired in a horrific slump, Guldahl worked as a carpenter on the Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood.  But by the latter half of the decade, he was, if one heavily values Major championship play, arguably the finest golfer in the world.

Guldahl’s Major record from 1936-39 remains, to this day, terribly impressive.  At the Masters he finished second in 1937 and ’38, then won it in 1939, coming home in 33 on Sunday to edge Sam Snead by one.  At the U.S. Open, Guldahl won in 1937 at Oakland Hills, twice shooting 69 to set a new record of 281, thus prompting Robert Trent Jones’s controversial makeover of the course prior to its next Open in 1951.  In 1938 he defended his title at Cherry Hills, this time closing with a 69 to run away from Dick Metz by six.  Perhaps better suited to medal than match play, he wasn’t much of a factor at the PGA, but in the era’s “other” Major, he won three consecutive Western Opens from 1936-38, the last by seven strokes over Snead in St. Louis.  Only once an entrant in the British Open (while traveling with the 1937 Ryder Cup team), Guldahl finished 11th in his links golf debut at redoubtable Carnoustie.

As compelling as the tall and powerful Guldahl’s run was, his disappearance from the top ranks after 1940 is at least as interesting.  Stories abound of his losing his game literally overnight, partially as a result of analyzing his swing for the first time while writing a book.  Thus having made his money and tired of the incessant travel, Guldahl essentially left the Tour near the start of the war, though he did appear in a total of six Masters and U.S. Opens after it.

TONY JACKLIN  (UK)    

The son of a truck driver in Scunthorpe, England, Tony Jacklin, C.B.E., (b.7/7/1944) may not have put up career numbers to match the likes of the Triumvirate, Henry Cotton or Nick Faldo, but in his particular place and time, Jacklin’s performances in several prominent events served to make him a timeless British golfing hero.

A professional since 1962, Jacklin’s first important win came at the 1967 British Masters, by which time he had already taken several lesser titles in New Zealand and South Africa.  Playing frequently in America as well, he won the 1968 Jacksonville Open and in so doing became the first Englishman in 40 years to claim a PGA Tour title.  But even with this growing résumé, few were ready to predict victory at the 1969 Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes, where Jacklin’s rock-steady total of 280 bettered Bob Charles by two to capture the Claret Jug.  The wildly popular win represented the end of a dark time in British golf, for no homebred had taken the title since Max Faulkner in 1951, and Jacklin became a national icon virtually overnight. 

Hardly content to rest on his laurels, Jacklin then made further history by braving heavy winds and a controversial Hazeltine National GC to win the 1970 U.S. Open, surprising the Americans with rounds of 71-70-70-70, for a 281 total that left the field a distant seven shots in arrears.  It was truly stunning stuff and a splendid high point in postwar British golf, for in addition to holding both national Opens, Jacklin was now the first Briton to take the American title since Ted Ray in 1920.  He further backed his fine play with several strong continental victories over the next two seasons, an epic outgoing 29 during the first round of the 1970 Open Championship at St Andrews, and a second win at the Jacksonville Open in 1972.

Jacklin’s peak, however, met a bloody end later that season at the Open Championship at Muirfield, where he came up the 71st fairway tied with Lee Trevino, but with Trevino laying three in greenside rough and Jacklin sitting two just 30 yards shy of the putting surface.  Trevino proceeded to chip in, a rattled Jacklin took three putts for a six and what seemed a third Major title was gone in a snap.  Jacklin would later win four events in South America, occasionally contend in America (e.g., second to Tom Watson at the 1977 Bing Crosby) and, much later, take two titles on the Champions Tour, but for all intents and purposes, as a world-class player he was finished.

Jacklin did, however, make an enormous mark as a four-time Ryder Cup Captain, losing narrowly at PGA National in 1983, then gaining the first British/European victory since 1957 at The Belfry in 1985.  He further burnished his résumé when two years later his troops became the first ever to win the Cup on American soil (at Muirfield Village), then retained it in his final go-round with a 1989 tie, once again at The Belfry.  A 2-1-1 Captain’s ledger seems a suitable legacy for a man whose own Cup playing record was 13-14-8, no small accomplishment on teams whose overall record was 0-6-1.

CHARLES BLAIR MACDONALD  (Canada/USA)    
Born: Niagara Falls, Ontario  11/14/1855   Died: Southampton, NY  4/23/1939

One who can genuinely carry the title “father of American golf,” Charles Blair Macdonald was a tall, barrel-chested man whose superb mix of know-how, leadership, commitment to doing things right, outsized ego and a clear streak of arrogance fairly mirrored the personality of his adopted country, the USA.  And adopted is indeed an accurate word, for while Macdonald lived nearly his whole life in America, he was actually born to a Scottish father and Canadian mother just across the border in Ontario.  He did, however, grow up in Chicago before pursuing his higher education at St Andrews University where, surrounded by men like Old Tom Morris and David Strath – and regularly playing with Young Tom! – he fell utterly in love with the royal and ancient game.

Upon returning to Illinois in 1875, Macdonald endured what he later referred to as “The Dark Ages,” a 17-year stretch in which his closest run at golf was the beating of makeshift balls around an abandoned army training ground.  Eventually, through little more than his considerable force of will, C.B. wrangled up enough local interest to found the Chicago GC, building a nine-hole course in suburban Belmont in 1892.  Expanded a year later, this would become America’s first 18-hole facility, though the Chicago GC itself would soon move out to Wheaton, where C.B. would construct a newer and better layout in 1895.

That same autumn, Macdonald became the first official U.S. Amateur champion by defeating Charles Sands 12 & 11 in Newport, RI – a victory not without some controversy.  For a year earlier, he had joined a field of competitors in an initial attempt at an American national championship, also at Newport.  Though absolute in his belief (not infrequently stated) that he was the finest golfer in the land, C.B. finished second in that first event, then managed to get the results nullified by disputing a two-stroke penalty and arguing that a “true” championship was decided at match play, not medal.  A month later, at New York’s St Andrew’s GC, Macdonald was again defeated – at match play – in another “national” event, this time blaming his loss on a hangover and further stating that without a national governing body, such events were irrelevant anyway.  But from such petulance, it seems, can come good things, and largely as a result of C.B.’s grumbling, the USGA was soon born.

By 1900, after moving to New York to accept a partnership in the brokerage firm of C.D. Barney & Co., Macdonald became enamored with the idea of building America’s first truly great course, a layout which would replicate (and perhaps even improve upon) the classic holes of the British Isles.  The result, after years of organizing, site searching and planning, was Southampton, NY’s National Golf Links of America, a track whose strategic excellence likely influenced the evolving field of golf architecture more than any design before or since.  Layouts at Sleepy Hollow, Piping Rock, the Greenbrier and the St. Louis GC were soon to follow, though Macdonald was quickly relying more upon the abilities of his construction foreman and hand-picked protégé, Seth Raynor, than his own efforts in the field.  A prominent exception came in 1917 at New York’s Lido GC, perhaps the most ambitious golf design ever undertaken as it involved the importing of some two million cubic yards of sand to fill a site that had previously been largely underwater.  The result, some $800,000 dollars later, was a masterpiece, an American links described by Bernard Darwin as being “the finest course in the world.”  It would, however, flounder during the Depression before expiring altogether during World War II.

His reputation as a master architect secure, Macdonald was seldom really active in the discipline, and it can be fairly suggested that of the 15 or so projects upon which his name appears, Raynor was actually the primary designer of at least half.  C.B. it seems, was perfectly content to remain in Southampton, autocratically overseeing the National while commissioning portraits and statues of himself – paid for, not incidentally, out of the members’ dues.  A true and dedicated amateur, Macdonald never accepted payment for his design work and largely expected the rest of America’s golfers to similarly embrace his traditional values.  Lest anyone be uncertain as to precisely what they were, he laid them out clearly in his autobiography Scotland’s Gift – Golf (Scribner’s, 1928), one of the game’s essential volumes and a fitting memorial to one of its most colorful, bombastic and critically important figures.

CRAIG WOOD  (USA)    
Born: Lake Placid, NY  11/18/1901   Died: Palm Beach, FL  5/8/1968 

Perhaps as popular a player among his peers as has ever teed it up, Craig Ralph Wood came out of Lake Placid, NY to make a major splash in golf during the game’s prewar Golden Age.  The son of a timber company foreman, Wood was big, blond and exceptionally powerful, yet he also possessed the sort of refined skills that led to 21 victories on the PGA Tour between 1928-44.  As a glamour figure golf has seen few grander, for Wood married a beautiful New York heiress and lived the jet set life when jet-setters traveled by Packard.  Yet he was universally hailed as the ultimate non-celebrity, a down-to-earth man who routinely helped younger players and remained modest to the core.  Indeed Sam Snead once called him “the nicest guy I think I’ve ever seen.”

On the links, Wood was a long and superbly straight driver of the ball, an earlier version of Greg Norman.  And beyond the driving, blond hair and gregarious lifestyles, the Wood-Norman similarities hold one more unfortunate component, for Craig Wood was among the unluckiest golfers of all time.  Like Norman, Wood lost all four Major championships in playoffs.  At the Masters, he was the victim of Gene Sarazen’s miraculous double eagle, his seemingly insurmountable three-shot lead vanishing in a heartbeat before Sarazen beat him over 36 holes the next day.  At the U.S. Open it was Byron Nelson beating him in an classic 36-hole playoff which saw both men shoot exceptional 68s over the first 18.  In Britain Wood had largely himself to blame, driving into the Swilcan Burn to commence a 1933 Open Championship playoff at St Andrews, ultimately losing to Denny Shute by five strokes.  And then, inevitably, there was the 1934 PGA Championship.  Facing his own former assistant Paul Runyan in the final, Wood hit his second shot on the first playoff hole, a par 5, to just nine feet while Runyan needed a deflection off of a car tire just to lie 60 yards short in the fairway.  Runyan wedged to a foot, Wood missed and Runyan closed him out on the 38th.

As his 21 titles testify, however, Wood also knew how to win and in 1941, at age 39, he finally broke through to become the first man ever to capture the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same season, the former by three over Byron Nelson, the latter by the same margin over Denny Shute.  By this time, however, any Grand Slam aspirations had died amidst the wartime cancellation of the Open Championship, with the conflict soon removing most big-event play from what little remained of Wood’s prime.

After serving as the golf professional at Winged Foot during the war years, Wood would ultimately retire to the Bahamas and Florida, outliving his wife and dying childless in 1968.