As far as the Open Championship is concerned, one name reigns supreme, certainly across the last 100 years, and yet it’s a name that gets relatively little coverage these days.
If you asked for the name of the only man to win five Open Championships then, beyond the cognoscenti, you’d hear names like Watson, Nicklaus, Woods, Player, Palmer. But it’s none of these. The five time winner – one behind the great Harry Vardon who posted his six titles before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 – is Australia’s Peter Thomson who enjoyed an extraordinary run of dominance from 1954, when he won his first claret jug, to 1965 when he collected his fifth – and there were two runners up spots in there too.
Ruminating on his fifth title in its August 1965 issue, Golf Monthly reported that, “Thomson has described his latest victory as being his greatest. He is quite justified in doing so. The opposition was probably tougher this year than in any one of his previous victories…it was great in yet another way. It was the first time that he has started so indifferently, in relation to the first round pacesetters, and still come through to win. His first round of 74 this year left him trailing six strokes behind, a position from which a title winner rarely emerges these days.”
They also published the list of prize money at Royal Birkdale in 1965. Thomson, for his pains, earned £1,750, a little short of the $3million on offer this year. You can see how much each golfer picked up here.
