There are any number of medical situations which can assail a golfer. Back problems, shoulder injuries, tendinitis and a worn hip joint to name but four. Yet there is one condition which most of us manage to avoid pretty successfully – the pain and strain attached to a series of wins.
Byron Nelson, the winner of 11 tournaments in a row in 1945, was one of the afflicted. So much so that he retired at the age of 34 in favour of running the ranch he had always wanted in rural Texas.
He wrote of his streak in his 1993 autobiography, telling nothing but the truth. “One thing I should mention,” began the relevant lines, “my game had gotten so good and so dependable that there were times when I would actually get bored of playing. Having the extra incentive of buying a ranch one day made things a lot more interesting. Each drive, each iron, each chip meant another sheep, another cow, another acre, another ten acres … ”
“When I bought the ranch,” he later told Golf Monthly, “I really loved it. I felt free, a different type of freedom and I loved it.”
His way of drawing a line under his golfing career came when he finished seventh in his defence of the Fort Worth Open in ’46. The tournament over, he went on a hunting trip before packing up his golf clubs and sending them back to MacGregor. He asked if they would keep them until he wanted them again. That way, if someone wanted him to play, he could always say he didn’t have any clubs, “and that would get me off the hook.”
“You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there, it’s such an amazing moment. Then it’s like, OK, what are we going to eat for dinner?”
Scottie Scheffler
At the time of writing, Scottie Scheffler may not have come close to winning Nelson’s 11 tournaments in a row, or even Tiger Woods’ five. However, in following his nine wins across 2024 with another five this year, he has made it abundantly clear that winning, at least for him, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
In that startling press conference of his at the start of Open Championship week at Royal Portrush, he happened to mention his earlier-in-the season victory at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson tournament.
“I literally worked my entire life to become good at golf to have an opportunity to win that tournament. You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there, it’s such an amazing moment.
“Then it’s like, OK, what are we going to eat for dinner? Life goes on … This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment (and presumably from the number of good causes to which he has been able to contribute) but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.”
Spectators would maybe have understood still more of what he was getting at from the laissez-faire way in which, when he won the Open, he used one hand to cart the Claret Jug around and the other to hug baby Bennett.
Among the women, Jin Young Ko underwent much the same feelings as Nelson when, after lasting a record 114 holes without a bogey in 2019, she missed a short putt at the ninth in the Portland Classic which would have made it 115. “Now it’s done, I’m free,” came her relieved summation.
Of Nancy Lopez, Annika Sörenstam and Nelly Korda, all of whom won five LPGA tournaments in succession, Lopez was alone in finding the experience fun. “I did a lot of press conferences (her first husband was a TV commentator) and played a lot of golf, probably when I didn’t want to. I was tired but it was fun.”
Sörenstam always felt pressure because of what people expected of her: “It just becomes so big.” As for Korda’s fifth win in a row – at last year’s Chevron Championship – it left her so shattered that she could not face playing in the next event.
Pádraig Harrington is one player to have enjoyed winning, Tiger Woods another. Harrington, when asked what he thought of Scheffler’s comments, talked of how he, personally, was still celebrating the U.S. Senior Open he had won a few weeks earlier. For Woods, the pinnacle of his profession had to be when, at the age of 43, he came back to win the 2019 Masters in front of his son, Charlie. And the obvious pleasure he got from watching Charlie making his first hole-in-one last year.
As to what level of success it takes to keep your average golfer hale and hearty, the winning of the odd medal and the occasional flush shot should probably do the trick.
Lewine Mair
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Byron Nelson
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