Everything has led to this.
TheOpen.com’s Decades of The Open series is chronicling the amazing journey of golf and its original championship in the runup to The 150th Open at St Andrews in July.
You can read all of the previous Decades of The Open articles via the links below:
1860s | 1870s | 1880s | 1890s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s
We now move on to the 1980s, a decade that featured several notable successes for European players but was book-ended by American victories.
Bill Rogers was something of a surprise champion at Royal St George’s in 1981, but the early ’80s at The Open were otherwise dominated by one man.
Tom Watson had already completed two wonderful victories in the previous decade, winning on his debut at Carnoustie in 1975 before outgunning the great Jack Nicklaus in the “Duel in the Sun” at Turnberry in 1977.
Yet Watson was far from finished there. After leading from the front in the final round at Muirfield in 1980 en route to his third Open title, he capitalised on slip-ups from Bobby Clampett and Nick Price to claim an unlikely victory at Royal Troon in 1982.
That gave Watson four Open wins at four different Scottish venues, and he immediately added a fifth the following year at Royal Birkdale in England, where a sweetly-struck 2-iron approach into the 72nd hole all but secured a one-stroke triumph over Hale Irwin and Andy Bean.
Watson’s fifth Open win in nine appearances drew him level with James Braid, J.H. Taylor and Peter Thomson as the second-most prolific winner of golf’s original championship, behind only Harry Vardon.
He would come agonisingly close to tying Vardon 12 months later in 1984, before finishing second again in the most extraordinary circumstances a quarter of a century later at Turnberry in 2009.
To read more about The Open in the 1980s, click HERE.
The R&A