How appropriate it was that news of the death of Peter McEvoy, Britain’s greatest amateur golfer who later captained GB&I to successive victories in the Walker Cup and later still became a golf course designer and chairman of the Walker Cup selection committee, among numerous other pursuits, should have come at the time of the 89th Masters. McEvoy was 72.
He was an amateur from the top of his head to the soles of his feet and much of what Augusta National stands for in golf would be what he stood for as well. The title of a book he wrote is revealing – “For Love or Money,” and if any confirmation is needed, it comes at the book’s end. The last words are “For Love or Money … For love.”
Peter loved golf, loved amateur golf, loved links golf. He told a story once of two men who had played a round of golf on a well-known British links in summer when, naturally enough, the weather was wretched. At the end, one turned to the other and, with rain dripping from his nose, his hair blown askew by the wind and his feet in puddles of water inside his golf shoes, said with a smile: “Aren’t we lucky to be able to play here instead of in 100 degrees in Spain?”
“I think I would have been bored. Warm up before a round, play 18, hit more balls – then what do you do for the rest of the day? Sit in the clubhouse reading golf magazines?”
PETER McEVOY (on never turning pro)
Over dinner one night in the early ’80s, I asked him why he hadn’t turned pro, because he had clearly been good enough to do so. This was after he had become the first British amateur to play all four rounds at the Masters, finishing 53rd in 1978, after he had won the 1977 and 1978 British Amateurs and was leading amateur in the 1978 and ’79 Open Championships, tying for 39th in the former and 17th in the latter. And it was when he was in the middle of a run of successful appearances for England that may never be matched in which he won 111 of his 153 matches.
His answer was revealing and quick in coming. He had a restless mind and was unafraid to be iconoclastic. What else would you expect from a man whose middle name was Aloysius, so named by his father after the Catholic saint and the teddy bear in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”?
“I think I would have been bored,” he replied. “Warm up before a round, play 18, hit more balls – then what do you do for the rest of the day? Sit in the clubhouse reading golf magazines?”
Instead he played amateur golf and used his inventive mind to pursue other interests, such as designing golf courses and inventing a shortened form of the game called PowerPlay Golf. He played in five Walker Cup teams starting in 1977, including the 1989 match at Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta, where the visiting side won an historic victory, and he represented GB&I five times in the Eisenhower Trophy. GB&I won the team event in 1988 and McEvoy the individual event. “That might have been his crowning achievement,” Peter Dawson, the former chief executive of the R&A and a longtime friend and golfing partner of McEvoy’s, said.
After his playing career ended he turned to another strength of his – captaining and then selecting teams. He led the 1999 Walker Cup side that triumphed at Nairn, Scotland, and the 2001 team that won at Ocean Forest in Sea Island, Georgia, two years later, the first time GB&I retained the trophy. Just as he was shrewd in conversation so he was very shrewd as a captain, though he was helped considerably in these matches by having players such as Luke Donald and Paul Casey in his teams. “If I had to choose between a scrapper and a swinger I would always go for the scrapper,” he said once when talking about his selection policy.
“He understood what motivated each player,” Dawson said. “He invested a lot of time in getting to know each player. He was not a captain who appeared [to his players] to be from another era and of course this inspired confidence in him from his players.”
“When Peter [McEvoy] spoke, others listened,” Rhys Davies, who made his debut in the 2005 Walker Cup at Chicago Golf Club, said. “He was always calm under pressure and had a clear vision of what the day ahead would look like. Instructions he gave me the night before my first-ever match about the environment I would face were entirely true, right down to the emotions I would feel and the atmosphere I would play under. This made it easier to deal with in real time as he had highlighted it in such a calm yet exact way.”
Dawson knew McEvoy well, having played hundreds of times with him, at weekends in friendly games and sometimes in county matches for Warwickshire. “One year he holed a 40-foot putt to tie me in the Warwickshire Open and then hammered me in the 18-hole playoff later,” Dawson said. “He kept it [his ball] in play. His distance control was excellent. I’ve seen better ball strikers but he was a very good putter.”
“Peter was one of the most thoughtful men in golf, whose balance of tradition and evolution was an art,” Davies said. “[He was] constantly looking for opportunities to gain an upper hand over his opponents while maintaining the spirit and respect of the game.”
Dawson, speaking from Augusta National Golf Club, said: “It [his death] is very sad. He was one of my oldest friends. It was a privilege to have known him.”
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: Peter McEvoy raises the Walker Cup after captaining GB&I to victory in 1999.
John Mummert, usga