With seven wins each, they share seventh place in the ranking of major winners. They are American Gene Sarazen and Korea’s Inbee Park.
Modern golf cannot be understood without the figure of Gene Sarazen, one of the greatest golfers in history, who dominated the sport in the 1920s and 1930s. The son of Italian immigrants, Gene, who changed his birth name because his Italian name – Eugenio Saraceni – sounded like a violinist, treasured many triumphs in his long life and was the first golfer to win all four Grand Slam tournaments.
The Landowner, as he was known for his ownership of large tracts of land, was born in Harrison, near New York City, on February 27, 1902. The son of an Italian emigrant who never understood golf, Gene changed his name after winning his first tournament, where he managed to win twenty dollars. He had scored a hole-in-one in his first tournament and when it appeared in the newspapers he did not like the way his name looked “as it sounded like that of a violinist”, as he said.
When he started caddying when he was only eight years old, no one could have imagined that this small boy (he did not exceed 165 centimeters) would He was a very slight build and was going to be one of the best golfers in history. Moreover, at that time only stockbrokers and bankers practiced this sport, so in order to become a professional he had to overcome a series of social barriers.
In 1918 he nearly died from a flu epidemic. When he was cured he moved to Florida, where he worked unloading bricks, while improving his game. And he really did, for only four years later he had won his first two Grand Slam tournaments (the US Open and the PGA Championship, both in 1922) and a year later, at only 21 years of age, after repeating his triumph in the PGA, he would have three victories in the most important tournaments in the world. His talent was certainly immeasurable.
Gene spent the rest of the twenties competing mainly in exhibition tournaments. It was not until 1932 that he won another major, the US Open. Thus began his best year, in which he also won the British Open. In the English tournament his victory was possible, in addition to his game, thanks to one of his brilliant inventions: he designed and used a special club to get the ball out of the sand of the bunker. Although its creation dates back to 1931, he did not take it out earlier to avoid its prohibition. Today it is part of every golfer’s bag of clubs.
Sarazen won his third victory in the PGA tournament in 1933, becoming two years later, in 1935, after his victory in the Masters, the first golfer to win all four tournaments that make up the Grand Slam (British Open, Masters, U.S. Open and the U.S. PGA). Besides him, only four other players have achieved it subsequently: Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.
The victory in the 1935 Augusta Masters has also gone down in history because when Gene was three strokes behind the leader on the last day, he hit an albatross on the 15th hole, which is considered the best shot of all time. It went down in history as “the shot the whole world heard”. The following day he won the first hole of the playoff.
Over the years he began to alternate tournaments on the PGA Tour with the Senior Tour. He won the US PGA Senior in 1954 and 1958. He made the newspaper pages again when in 1973 he became the oldest player -71 years old- to get a hole in one in the British Open.
Sarazen was a member of the Ryder Cup team six consecutive times (between 1927 and 1937). He has been a member of the American Professional Golfers Association Hall of Fame since 1941 and was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974. As one of the pioneer participants of the Augusta Masters, since 1981, along with Nelson and Sam Snead, he was one of the official openers of the tournament each year. When the American Tour introduced the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, Gene was the first recipient.
Gene Sarazen passed away in the state of Florida on May 13, 1999 due to pneumonia. He was 97 years old and left an incomparable golfing wake as a memory.
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INBEE PARK
She was only 19 when she became the youngest player to win the U.S. Women’s Open. It was 2008 and that was the first victory for Insee Park, a young North Korean girl who had started playing golf at the age of 10 and moved with her family to the United States at the age of 12 to focus her life on the sport. She quickly showed her talent on the American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) circuit. She was named AJGA Player of the Year in 2002, the season in which she won the U.S. Junior Girls Championship.
After high school, she moved to Las Vegas and played for the University of Nevada team for a year. In 2006 she turned professional thanks to a rule change on the LPGA Tour that allowed her to go from amateur to professional status at 17 instead of 18. She earned her LPGA Tour card for 2007 by placing third on the Futures Tour.
A year later, the young North Korean achieved her first LPGA Tour win, in one of the majors, the U.S. Women’s Open, no less. She was two weeks shy of her 20th birthday and became the third youngest player to win a major on the LPGA Tour.
She would not win again on that circuit until four years later, in 2012, although in that period she did triumph several times in Japan, and in 2010 and 2011 she recorded eleven top 10s on the LPGA Tour.
2012 was Park’s breakthrough season. In 15 appearances on the American Tour, she racked up two wins, 12 top 10s and ten top 5s, including a second place finish at the Women’s British Open.
And 2013 was even better: six wins – including three majors: Kraft Nabisco Championship, Wegmans LPGA Championship and U.S. Women’s Open – in the 13 tournaments she played on the LPGA Tour. Park became the first golfer in the modern LPGA era (with four or more majors) to do so. With such extraordinary results, it was not surprising that Park reached the number one position in world golf, which happened for the first time in April 2013. She finished that year as the LPGA Tour’s earnings leader and Player of the Year.
In 2014 she added three wins to her resume, including another LPGA Championship, and the following year she added another four, including that same major, now renamed the Women’s PGA Championship, and the British Open.
In 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Games she became the first female player to win an Olympic gold medal in golf since Margaret Ives Abbott in 1900.
Despite that medal, 2016 was one of Park’s worst seasons due to injuries, one to her back and another to the thumb of her left hand. Finishing a tournament became for her a titanic task and she was falling cruelly in all the cuts. Despite everything, she was determined to go to the Olympics and, although she had the Korean media against her, she managed to be chosen. In the Rio final she faced the then world number one, Lydia Ko, and won by five strokes. A quarter of her country’s population watched Park’s triumph live on television, even though it was half past one in the morning in South Korea.
“This is definitely one of the special moments in my golf career and in my whole life. I feel great,” said Park, who earned induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame earlier that year. “To represent your country, to win gold, it’s very special. It’s really everything I wanted. I’m happy,” added the Olympic champion.
“Somewhere in my heart, after I made the decision to play, I really believed I could do it. If I didn’t trust myself, I wouldn’t be playing this week,” she stated.
Inbee still struggled with injuries in 2017, although she managed to play quite well during the early part of the season. In fact, after a modest return to action in Thailand, she managed her 18th career win, the HSBC Women’s Championship in Singapore. Park had other good results (five top 10s) but her back injury forced her to end her season in August.
In 2018 he did not play many tournaments, even though he had ostensibly improved from his back ailment. She still managed her nineteenth and so far last victory -Bank of Hope Founders Cup-, and a few weeks later she was fighting in playoff for her eighth major, at the ANA Inspiration, but succumbed to Sweden’s Pernilla Lindberg, who was getting her first victory on the LPGA Tour. She tied for eighth at the Evian and was ninth at the US Women’s Open. She missed the cut in the other two majors, something that had never happened before in her career.
Her best results in 2019 have been two second place finishes at the Kia Classic and the Arkansas Championship. In the majors, she has had two top 10s (seventh at the Women’s PGA Championship and eighth at the Evian Championship), was sixteenth at the US Women’s Open, 68th at the ANA Inspiration and missed the cut at the Women’s British Open.
She has six top 10 finishes this season and has earned $709,000 in prize money on the LPGA Tour (more than $15 million in her career). Inbee is currently eighth in the world rankings.
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