Everything has led to this.
The Open.com’s Decades of The Open series is celebrating the remarkable journey of golf’s original Championship in the build-up to The 150th Open at St Andrews in 2022.
This latest article focuses on the 1890s, which featured notable amateur successes, significant expansion of the Championship and the emergence of the "Great Triumvirate."
John Ball Jnr made history on three counts in the first Open of the new decade.
Courtesy of a three-stroke triumph at Prestwick, Ball became both the first Englishman and the first amateur to win the Championship.
In addition, he was the first man to win The Amateur Championship and The Open in the same year, a feat since repeated only once, by the great Bobby Jones in 1930.
Before Ball’s triumph, The Open had been won exclusively by Scottish golfers, but the 1890s would provide a significant change in that regard.
Only two of the 10 Opens in this decade were won by Scottish players, Hugh Kirkaldy and William Auchterlonie in 1891 and 1893 respectively, while the Championship also was played outside of its country of origin for the first time, moving south of the border to England as it visited Royal St George’s in 1894 and Royal Liverpool in 1897.
Harold Hilton, another amateur, followed Ball in becoming an English Champion Golfer, winning at Muirfield in 1892 and again on home soil at Hoylake five years later.
The other non-Scottish Champions in the 1890s were two men who would come to enjoy unprecedented success in The Open.
To learn more about their victories and how the rest of the decade unfolded, visit https://www.theopen.com/latest/decades-of-the-open-1890s.
The R&A