With Gary Player still going strong as his 90th birthday looms later this year, there are not many players better placed to compare the different eras of the game.
Gary Player made his major championship debut in 1956, and went on to win nine times on the game’s biggest stages. He is, of course, one of only six men to have won the current career grand slam, completing the achievement in 1965.
Player’s longevity in the game is unrivalled. He also won nine senior major titles. And it would be no surprise to see him still hitting the opening tee shot at The Masters alongside an elderly Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods one day.
Mickelson is indeed the oldest major champion in history following his triumph at the 2021 PGA Championship. But had events played out differently 12 years earlier, that record would still belong to someone else.
Gary Player once named the most unlucky shot in golf history
One of the most incredible performances in a major since the turn of the century came at Turnberry in 2009, when 59-year-old Tom Watson needed just a par on the 72nd hole to win The Open Championship for a sixth time – 26 years after his most recent win at the event.
Of course, many remember what happened next, with Watson making a bogey and ending up in a playoff with Stewart Cink. Cink acknowledged that he was perhaps the most unpopular man on the grounds after emerging victorious.
It seemed that Watson was fractions away from winning. His iron shot into the final green looked to be exactly what he needed – before it continued to run off the back of the green. And he was unable to get up and down.
And speaking to The Scotsman in 2012, Player suggested that he could not believe the break Watson received with his approach.
“The standard of senior play is also very high. Take Tom Watson at Turnberry in 2009. I reckon that [his second shot] was the most unlucky golf shot in history,” he said.
“He hit a perfect shot in there but lost The Open. If he’d won that it would have been the greatest achievement in history.”
The mistake Tom Watson suggested cost him a sixth Open Championship title
Interestingly, Watson appeared to acknowledge at the time that he had made the mistake which led to that bogey on the final hole.
The American noted that his club selection cost him.
“I put myself in position to win, didn’t do it in the last hole. In retrospect I probably would have hit a nine iron rather than an eight iron. I hit the eight iron just the way I meant to. I was thinking nine, but I said, I’ll hit an eight, and I caught it just the way I wanted to, and sure enough, it went too far,” he said.
Watson made the cut at The Open as recently as 2014. But it would have set a record which surely would have never been broken had he managed to get across the line in 2009.
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