EDITOR’S NOTE: Golf Digest Writer-at-Large and World Golf Hall of Famer Dan Jenkins died March 7 at age 90. In his very last piece for us, he introduces Golf Digest’s Greatest of All Time Invitational, with the top 32 within the legendary occasion advancing from stroke-play qualifying at Augusta National to fit the play. Beginning day by day March 20, Senior Writer Guy Yocom will record the fit-play results, main to the very last at Pebble Beach. Screenwriter Mark Frost, whose books have covered “The Greatest Game Ever Played” and “The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever,” will write two variations of the final with exceptional winners. It will surely go beyond the majors this year if I’ve looked up the word effectively. I communicate of Golf Digest’s Greatest of All Time Invitational—The GOAT, for quick—that started at the Augusta National Golf Club. It changed into one of the maximum fascinating tournaments ever contested, although ultimately it becomes somewhat predictable that an immortal would win it, seeing as how there have been only a few lurkers and slugs within the discipline. The opposition became touched with sentiment during. It started with the whole ceremony at the No. 1 tee Thursday. Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, of their three-piece wool fits that mixed in with the colour in their beards and sideburns, hit the ceremonial tee pictures.
They each nailed a gutty down the center of the green, Young Tom’s drive wearing more than 70 yards in the air. In an interview later within the morning, Young Tom stated he might are becoming more distance if it hadn’t been for the fact that he became lifeless. The elite seventy two competition were very a lot alive, but, and in the prime in their careers, keen to determine who would be successful at seventy two holes of stroke play. The event committee wisely despatched out the three fastest players in golfing history within the first institution: Byron Nelson, Tom Watson and Lanny Wadkins. They won’t be the three fastest in case you rely those early years of the British Open when Prestwick became a 12-hollow golf direction and a mild-running fifty two turned into a remarkable round, but they had been masses fast enough. Wadkins, the first exchange, had changed John Ball of Great Britain inside the event. Ball, an eight-time winner of the British Amateur and the primary participant to win the British Amateur and British Open inside the equal year, which he did in 1890, made the experience to Augusta and performed one practice spherical, however he withdrew in a huff, complaining that nobody in town had heard of him except Ben Crenshaw and Herbert Warren Wind. Byron’s 68 made him the chief in the clubhouse for three hours. He stated it became “just the funniest factor” that he went 2–three—birdie, eagle—at the twelfth and thirteenth holes. It became the same thing he’d performed in 1937, while he overtook Ralph Guldahl to win his first Masters.
