“But he only won one major” is what some unthinking soul might say of Max Faulkner, the 1951 winner of the Claret Jug at Royal Portrush, home of this year’s Open. To play down the worth of a one-time major winner never makes sense, and still more so when the player in question is Faulkner. He was one of the greatest characters in the game’s history.
His colourful plus twos – or fours – would put people in mind of a Ben Hogan or a Gene Sarazen and, though he enjoyed raising people’s spirits in those postwar years, he would insist that his well-planned attire added to his game.
As he explained in “Golf: right from the start,” an instruction book written in tandem with that celebrated author and illustrator, George Houghton, the smarter he felt, the better his form: “When I am well-dressed, I have a comfortable feeling of well-being and confidence … I would never put my money on a man who plays in dirty shoes or who tucks his trousers into his socks … Take my tip, always wear good clothes for golf. You start off with a certain superiority that is good for you and bad for your opponents.”
The only trouble with this is that the “gentlemen,” as the amateur game’s aristocracy were still known in the ’50s, were inclined to think of themselves as being a cut above the professionals. Just listen to what one of the leading scribes of the day – the Daily Telegraph’s Leonard Crawley – had to say of Faulkner in the wake of his final round 74 at Portrush: “Faulkner is highly strung. He has tried to hide this very human weakness by dressing himself in gaudy clothes.”
He was not wrong about the player’s sometimes nervous disposition but, in today’s lingo at least, it would have been a bit rich for the flamboyantly moustachioed Crawley to go on to describe the winner’s clothes as “gaudy.”
Probably because the story was too good to be left untold, Faulkner eventually admitted to having felt nervous over his 2-footer on Portrush’s 72nd green. Though he had been six shots ahead after the first three rounds, his lead had been dripping away and he thought he needed that putt to win. Only when he came to address the ball, as he told the three-time European Ryder Cup team captain, Scotland’s Bernard Gallacher, did a picture in his mind emerge of the hole filling up with concrete. In a lovely Faulkner obituary written for Golf World, John Huggan wrote: “He backed off, went over to the side of the green and lit a cigarette. At which point a gap appeared in the concrete. So he threw down the fag and tapped the ball in.”
There are plenty of golfers who can tell you of a day when they played better than they know how and Faulkner was one of that breed. At Portrush, he said that he benefited from what he described as “a mystery guiding light.”
Born on 29th July 1916 in Bexhill-on-Sea on the south coast of England, Faulkner was the oldest of Gus and Ellen Faulkner’s three children. Gus was a teaching professional who had been an assistant to the legendary James Braid prior to World War I before taking his family to the Pennard Golf Club in Wales. Eighteen years further on, Gus became the professional at Bramley Golf Club in Surrey and Max became his assistant.
Faulkner, at 12, had vowed to win the Open and, when he was 17, his father somehow contrived to break a few rules in entering him for the 1934 Open at Royal St George’s in Sandwich. The teenager played well for his age but missed the halfway cut. In 1939 at St Andrews, he shared the lead after the first round in what was the last of the pre-war Opens and finished in the top 25. By then, he was starting out on his training as a PE instructor in the Royal Air Force.
That he concentrated on boxing and became a winner of the Forces’ middleweight boxing title no doubt contributed to the strength he unleashed on the golfing community on his return to competitive game in 1946. He was tied sixth and tied fifth in the Opens of ’49 and ’50, with those results suggesting that his burgeoning number of supporters would have backed him to win the following year.
That light could well have guided his second at the par-4 16th (now the 18th) in the third round. It was a shot which started out on the edge of an out-of-bounds fence and looped its way round every obstacle to finish close to the flag.
“The story could have been the tragedy of my life,” explained Faulkner, in one of those riveting little touches which made his book so special. “Instead,” he added, “it has been a joy to tell.
“There was a stile, I was near out of bounds and a barbed wire fence. And my ball was only a yard away [from the stile] and I had to swing the club very upright.”
Reaching for what he called “a baffy thing,” better known as a 4-wood, he decided to employ a bit of the trick-shot artistry he had mastered in childhood.
“I had to hit this ball out of bounds through a barbed wire fence, and curl it. I hit it with no follow-through, otherwise I'd have torn my hands to pieces on the barbed wire fence that my bottom was leaning against.
“And this ball shot underneath, it didn't raise for 30 yards, hardly at all. It went under the wire and it started to curl and it curled right round, 40 yards or more, onto the green. [In normal circumstances] it was only a 6-iron shot but my ball travelled about 180 yards in a big circle. And it pitched on the green, stopped like a niblick and finished about five yards from the pin.”
At that point, Frank Stranahan, his American playing companion and the winner of the 1948 and 1950 British Amateur championships, had broken what had up until then been a complete silence – one requested by Faulkner because Stranahan could be a bit of a chatterbox. He walked 50 yards across the fairway to congratulate him. “Max,” he said, “that’s the greatest shot I ever saw in my life.”
What could easily have been a 6 turned into a 4.
Without a doubt, the most famous of the stories attaching to Faulkner’s ’51 Open concerned his autograph signing. Having built up six-shot advantage after three rounds, he was alleged to have started signing balls and notebooks as follows: “Max Faulkner, Open champion 1951.”
It was an hour after Faulkner had returned his closing 74 that Antonio Cerdá, the Argentinian who had started to give chase, approached that same 16th hole needing a birdie to draw level. He did indeed match Faulkner at this point, but only insofar as he pulled his tee shot into the same stretch of wire-netting. “Poor Cerdá,” said Faulkner, who clearly felt for the fellow. “He fluffed his second, took a disastrous 6 and the championship was mine.”
The Faulkner fans were ecstatic, and what would have impressed them as much as anything about their eccentric hero was how, instead of doing what people would have expected of him in enjoying a good old Irish celebration, he hurried back to London to prepare for a father-and-son school cricket match. Presumably, he would have worn smart cricket whites and you would have to think that even Leonard Crawley, a county cricketer and a golfing Blue at Cambridge, would have approved.
The story has two versions, the first of which was penned by Henry Longhurst in his Sunday Times column.
“As an inveterate toucher of wood and non-tempter of Fate,” wrote Longhurst, “I can still hardly believe the gods of golf allowed him [Faulkner] to do this but, when he was two or three shots ahead, he signed the books of the autograph hunters, ‘Open champion 1951.’ I moved silently away lest Fate mistake me for an accomplice and in some way give me the hammer too. But he won.”
Now for the second version.
In “The Open, a Twentieth-century History” by Francis Murray, and again elsewhere, Faulkner claimed that the story was grossly exaggerated. He said he had been walking on to the first tee for the final round when he bent down to do up his shoelaces, and it was when he stood up that he was asked for an autograph by a little boy. The child handed over a golf ball for signing purposes and, after Faulkner had obliged, the father asked if he would add the words “Open champion 1951 … because you’re going to win, aren’t you?”
No sooner had he answered that extra request than Faulkner muttered an under-his-breath, “My God what have I done … I’d better win now.”
His memory knew no bounds. He ended up having the greatest respect for Stranahan, while there was another U.S. and British Amateur champion, Dick Chapman, whose side he took when Sam Snead, the third member of his group at a North and South tournament, became impatient with the amateur. Chapman, who was aiming for a 68, had asked his companions if they minded if he waited for the latest gust of wind to stop before he hit his drive.
Faulkner said that was fine by him but Snead was not having it. He knocked Chapman’s ball off the tee and went ahead with his own shot.
After Chapman reported Snead to the officials for his poor manners, Snead confronted Faulkner in the changing room and said he took a dim view of the tale telling. According to one account, Faulkner didn’t back down. “I told him: ‘Get out of here before I put my bloody hands round your throat,’” he recalled. “Christ, he ran straight off.”
Neil Coles, now 90, will tell you that when Faulkner wasn’t going through one of his drinking spells, “he was a very kind man, very approachable. People loved him.”
In 1961 and ‘62, the two of them played together in a variety of exhibition matches to raise money for cancer relief. “I don’t think we’d ever played with or against each other in a competitive context,” said Coles, “but we did well in those matches, raising a lot of money for the charity and having fun in the process.
“Max may have been called the clown prince of golf but he was more of a showman than a show-off. Whenever one of us got a birdie, he would encourage people to throw money on the green. I was the quiet one and, after the match, I would disappear home and he would serve as the master of ceremonies at an auction which would be part of the evening entertainment. Often, he would throw in a clinic as well.”
It was at the end of a particularly hot day in the Manchester area, when players such as Harry Weetman, Ken Bousfield and George Will were involved, that a club captain brought out jugs of lemonade for the party. No-one understood why a club captain would have done such a thing but he spiked Faulkner’s jug with vodka and the former Open champion passed the next few days in recovery or, rather, in a local pub, the Black Boy at Lutterworth.
When, the following week, he reappeared for the next of the exhibition games, his fellow professionals probably had their fingers crossed as he mounted the first tee for a pre-exhibition clinic. Coles, a witness, said he had never seen anything so extraordinary in his life. “Max may not have been in the best shape, but he proceeded to hit one gloriously straight drive after another.”
Where he was overly straight was in driving his Bentley home the following day. Instead of negotiating a major roundabout as per the rules of the road, he drove over the top of it and crashed into a traffic barrier. That was the end of the drinking. Thereafter, he stuck to cups of tea.
The battering taken by the Bentley had not worried him overmuch. He had enjoyed taking it out for a good, fast drive but, far from caring about what went on under its bonnet, Coles said he was infinitely more interested in tinkering with his clubs, of which he had about 300, most of them putters.
For myself, I can remember him turning up to play in the 1970 Pringle Seniors at Longniddry on the East Lothian coast near Edinburgh. He was on the practice putting green ahead of the first round when the head of his favourite putter, one fashioned from assorted bits of scrap metal, collapsed in a little heap. He fetched another putter from his boot and went on to win the tournament. “The rest of his clubs could be weird, too,” chuckled Coles.
Back in 1953, Faulkner had won the News of the World Match Play – a tournament with prestige not far removed from the Open in Britain at the time – when he defeated Wales’ Dai Rees by one hole in the final. Bearing in mind that match play did not come easily to him, he was mighty pleased with the result. He had to hole an 11-footer to avoid going into extra holes and decided that he needed to hit it boldly, almost as if it was the first putt of his round. “I struck the ball firmly,” he said, before adding a beautifully couched: “And it went like a child running to its mother.”
In a Ryder Cup context, however, his putts were less inclined to obey. In fact, he won just one point in his eight matches across five appearances and was only included in the last of his five outings – the 1957 version which GB&I won at Lindrick – because he was out on his own when it came to encouraging his team-mates.
In contrast to Faulkner, Brian Barnes, his son-in-law, had the best day of his golfing career in a Ryder Cup context when he defeated Jack Nicklaus morning and afternoon in the 1975 match. Twenty years later, he won the Senior Open Championship over the same links at Royal Portrush as his father-in-law won the Open.
Faulkner had two fine pupils in Barnes and Tommy Horton, and the older he got the more he dished out advice to all and sundry.
Barnes told another story which appeared in that aforementioned Golf World obituary. It told how, when he was in his late 80s, Faulkner would see himself as the official mole catcher at West Chiltington Golf Club in Sussex and how he would give lessons to passersby.
“Every now and then,” said Barnes, “I would hear someone in the bar asking who the old guy was who had given him a swing tip at the 10th.”
I asked Coles if he thought Faulkner, who died in 2005 at the age of 88, was a bit like Bryson DeChambeau. “No,” returned Coles. “He wasn’t like him and there was no-one who came close to being like him.”
Rather than dishing out the high fives of today, Max Faulkner’s interaction with his fans came from the heart.
Top: Max Faulkner
Courtesy USGA Archives