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Nothing
Less than Golf Royalty for Sarazen |
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By
Steve Ethun
Director of Media Relations
The accomplishments of Gene Sarazen’s 97-year life are
well documented – as well they should be. “The Squire,”
as he became to be known, was one of the paramount golf figures
of the 20th century. After all, this is the man who won the
first modern career Grand Slam in 1935. He hit “The Shot
Heard ’Round the World” during the 1935 Masters
Tournament. He won 39 times on the PGA TOUR, including seven
majors. And in his spare time, the man invented the sand wedge.
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Gene
Sarazen |
He
was born in Harrison, N.Y., on Feb. 27, 1902, as Eugenio Saraceni.
Already a caddie by the age of eight, he would walk four miles
to the nearest club to play as often as possible. He once shared
that he was inspired to play the game after seeing Francis Ouimet
win the U.S. Open in 1913 at The Country Club in Brookline,
Mass.
His professional golf career began at the age of 16. After nearly
dying in 1918 from a flu epidemic, he bought a ticket on a steamship
from New York to Florida for $15. It was there, in Sebring,
where he would unload brick at the shipyard and work on his
game. It was at this stage of his life he changed his last name
to Sarazen. “It looked too much like a violin player,”
he once said of his given name. His father, an immigrant carpenter
from Rome, Italy, was said to only see his son play once –
at the PGA Championship in Pelham, N.Y. His father, he said,
watched him play the 10th hole from the highway.
“I had a 40-foot putt and missed it,” Sarazen recalled
in a 1998 interview, a year before his passing. “That
night he said, ‘You mean to say they pay you fellows to
play that game and you couldn’t put that thing in the
hole?’ I said, `Did you ever try it?’”
It did not take Sarazen long to make an impact at the professional
level. He won his first U.S. Open in which he competed at the
age of 20 in 1922 at Skokie Country Club in suburban Chicago.
That same year, he won his second major by claiming victory
at the PGA Championship at Oakmont, a feat he would repeat in
1923. He had a similar stretch of success during the early 1930s.
In a five-year stretch, he won all four majors: the British
Open (1932), the U.S. Open (1932), the PGA Championship (1933)
and The Masters Tournament (1935).
Later in his life, he became the host of Shell’s Wonderful
World of Golf. He is a charter member of the World Golf Hall
of Fame since his induction in 1974. In 1992, he was given the
Bob Jones Award from the United States Golf Association. In
1996, Sarazen was the first recipient of the PGA TOUR’s
Lifetime Achievement Award. From 1981 until the tournament before
his death, he would hit the opening tee shot of the Masters,
joined for many years by Byron Nelson and Sam Snead.
“Good golf is simply a matter of hitting good shots consistently,”
he said. “And a player can do this for many years after
he has passed his physical peak if his swing is fundamentally
correct.”
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