Peter Thompson and Amy Alcott: The Melbourne Tiger and the Perfectionist

With five wins, Peter Thompson and Amy Alcott are eighth in the grand prix winner rankings.

Thomson, known as The Tiger of Melborune, was a cerebral golfer. His clean, energetic game was based on cool logic and a knack for reducing things to their simplest essentials. His style was free of the extraneous, so the path he would take to victory seemed a remarkably straight line.

Between 1954 and 1965, the Australian won the British Open five times. He and Young Tom Morris were among the four men to win it three times in a row. He won 26 times in Europe, 19 in Australia and New Zealand and 11 in Asia and Japan. He played only a few seasons in the United States, earning one victory, the 1956 Texas Open, where he closed with a 63 and defeated Cary Middlecoff and Gene Littler in a playoff.

Thomson was better on courses where bouncing and running the ball was more important than long shots. Mainly for that reason, he did not excel when playing on the longer, well-manicured courses in the United States. Aside from his victory in Texas, Thomson’s best performance in a U.S. event was a fourth place finish in the 1956 U.S. Open and a fifth in the 1957 Masters. He never played in the PGA Championship.

That apparent gap in his sporting background is why Thomson’s victory in the 1965 British Open at Birkdale is considered the finest moment of his career. By that year, most of America’s prominent professionals were competing in the oldest championship, and Thomson beat them all handily.

“The most important facets of golf,” Thompson said, “are careful planning, calm and clear thinking, and the ordinary logic of common sense.”

But even without that victory, Thomson’s bravery at the championships was beyond reproach. With his confident stride and serene smile, he had the aura of a winner. “I have never seen a golfer who seemed so sure of his destiny,” wrote Pat Ward-Thomas. “There is about him an unmistakable air of success.”

Thomson was born on August 23, 1929 in Melbourne, Australia. As a child, he played his first shots on the sly at a nine-hole club called Royal Park. When the members saw his talent, he was granted playing privileges and, by the age of 15, he was the club’s champion. After a two-year apprenticeship as an assistant pro at Melbourne’s famous sand belt, Thomson turned pro and quickly mastered Australian golf. “I felt he had that inevitable something when I first saw him,” said top Australian pro Norman von Nida. As a young pro, he was deeply influenced by friendships with Bobby Locke, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.

Thomson was gifted with a real affinity for being in the middle of the tense final moments of a championship. “That was the real thrill for me,” he said in his biography. “I’ve seen a lot of people find themselves in that situation, and I suspect very few like it, but I really enjoyed it.”

By temperament, Thomson seemed really resistant to pressure. His grip was light, its movement, elegant and its stroke, without apparent physical effort. With the putter was reliable and occasionally brilliant. “There were no ornaments,” von Nida said, “so virtually nothing could go wrong.”

Above all, Thomson had an intelligence for the game. “The most important facets of golf are careful planning, calm and clear thinking, and the ordinary logic of common sense,” he once wrote. It was the same cool detachment with which he separated his competitive self from the rest of his life. He was a truly balanced man in a world that normally required obsessive and narrow dedication. Thomson enjoyed reading, opera and painting. He ran for elected office in Australia in 1982, narrowly losing. After his competitive rounds, when overseas, he often wrote compelling articles and columns for the Melbourne Herald. Later in his career, he designed golf courses, especially in Asia, where he was also instrumental in establishing professional courses.

Thomson made a brief attempt on the Champions Tour and the results were outstanding. In 1985 he won nine tournaments, a record he shares with Hale Irwin.

On June 20, 2018, at the age of 88, one of the greats of world golf passed away.

AMY ALCOTT

“You have to be a perfectionist. You have to hate playing badly more than you love playing well. You have to loathe losing more than you love winning.” This was the philosophy of Amy Alcott, one of the great American golfers of the last quarter of the 20th century.

Alcott had been waiting to join the World Golf Hall of Fame for a long time. She had been on the verge of entering the Hall of Fame ever since she won her third Dinah Shore Classic in 1991 and dove into the lake by the 18th hole to celebrate the occasion. It was one of the shining moments of Alcott’s illustrious career, but she had since been remembered for what she had failed to achieve: that elusive 30th victory that would grant her instant access through the LPGA’s points system to the Hall of Fame.

Each time she competed, Alcott said she heard well-meaning fans say the following, “Come on, Amy, you can win one more and get in (to the Hall of Fame).” These warm shows of support were a constant reminder of how close she really was to joining an elite group.

On February 9, 1999 Alcott’s wait ended, not when he won again, but when LPGA members overwhelmingly voted in favor of a points system for active players and the creation of a 12-person veterans committee.

She and Beth Daniel were the immediate beneficiaries of the new qualification standards .

The old rankings were considered the most rigorous in professional sports. Only 14 players had met the standards since 1950, and none since Betsy King in 1985.

“The purpose of the Hall of Fame is to honor those players who dominated women’s golf during their era,” said then LPGA commissioner Jim Ritts.

“As the Tour has grown, the existing criteria have prevented some of the top players from gaining recognition. The distinguishing feature of the recently approved criteria is that the Hall of Fame will continue to be based on athletic performance and yet is an attainable achievement for today’s elite players.”

Indeed, Alcott was a dominant player in her day. Born in Kansas City in 1956, Alcott joined the LPGA in 1975 after winning the 1973 USGA Girls at age 17. On her 19th birthday, in the third LPGA Tour tournament she played, she won the Orange Blossom Classic and was later named the tour’s Rookie of the Year.

Amy accumulated 29 victories during her professional career, including five major
s. With her two victories in 1986, including her win at the Nabisco Dinah Shore, Alcott recorded 15 top-10 finishes that season and became only the third LPGA member to surpass the $2 million mark in career prize money. Alcott continued her winning ways and reached $3 million in earnings in 1994.

After leaving competition as a player, Amy remained deeply involved with the sport, actively participating in the California PGA Foundation and even naming an LPGA tournament from 2001-2004, the Office Depot Championship Hosted by Amy Alcott.

She has also been involved in the design of golf courses, such as Indian Canyons Golf Course in Palm Springs, California, and Brick Landing Golf Club in Ocean Isle, North Carolina. In March 2012 the firm of which she is a partner was the winner to design the golf course in Rio de Janeiro for the Brazil 2016 Olympic Games. ■