{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
At many of golf’s big events of the past 30 years, one figure has not only been present but quite often front and centre stage. Once seen, this rangy figure is rarely forgotten. He is tall, slightly stooped under the burden of camera equipment that weighs as much as a young child and includes a lens the size of a bazooka. He is nearly always inside the ropes, roaming restlessly up and down the fairways or making a pell-mell dash from one side of a green to the other.
This figure is Englishman Dave Cannon, 64, golf’s preeminent photographer who has covered more than 100 major championships, taken millions of photographs, travelled the equivalent of circling the world 100 times and spent more than 5,000 nights in hotel rooms. Yet he might be best known by many who have seen him on a golf course as the photographer with the hat, the bloke with the bazooka, the snapper with the titfer.
Said hat is a cousin of the Australian bushwhacker’s hat, the sort that has corks hanging from it and almost as instantly recognisable. Cannon’s is known as the Tilley Outback and its Canadian makers, showing no modesty at all, claim it to be “the finest in all the world” and “guaranteed for life.” According to its makers, it is practically impossible to destroy. “It floats, ties on, repels rain, blocks UV rays, won’t shrink … ” Come to think of it, it probably can boil an egg.
But the hat did not help Cannon earn the level of respect that he has in golf. It is not as if he has inherited his talent as a photographer because he has not. His father was in advertising and his maternal grandfather was the author Nichol Smith, an expert on Sir Walter Scott and professor of English at Merton College at Oxford.
Cannon’s backstory is of a young man who loved golf, became a county golfer good enough at it to have tied eighth in a British Youths’ Championship (ahead of Sandy Lyle) and to have finished 15th in the Brabazon Trophy, one of British amateur golf’s important events. As a boy he was mad about sport, plastering the walls of his study at school with photographs of sports personalities.
He listened to the news of Tony Jacklin’s victory in the 1970 US Open on a crackly portable radio hidden under the pillow of his bed. He dreamed of a career as a pro but seeing Nick Faldo play made him realise the gap between the two of them was too wide. To earn the money to continue to play as an amateur he became a travelling salesman peddling nylon sheets until he met the man who would start him on his lifelong career.
When a picture of Cannon’s from the previous day’s rugby match appeared in the Sunday Express in 1977 it was as if he had his first hole-in-one: “ … From that moment on there was nothing else I wanted to do except take sports pictures.”
Neville Chadwick was a sports photographer in Leicester taking photographs of the city’s football and rugby teams. One day he invited Cannon to join him. That was it. Soon Cannon had sold his car, bought some Canon equipment which he could neither afford nor use properly and was taking photographs at weekends for Chadwick’s agency while continuing to sell nylon sheets.