Robert Green

How to make that curtain call

Arnold Palmer has known it. So has Jack Nicklaus. Perhaps very soon, so will Severiano Ballesteros. Tom Watson – maybe him, too. And Britain’s greatest-ever golfer, Nick Faldo...well, he may want to wait another five years for that famous, much-photographed, career-defining, career-ending Swilcan Bridge moment. The R-word can be a tough act to stage-manage.

The five aforementioned men are, of course, great Open champions of the past, even while some of them continue to entertain us in the present. Between them they have brandished the claret jug a total of 16 separate times. That’s more majors than Tiger Woods has won. Three of the five have won the title at St Andrews – Nicklaus twice – while Palmer (1960) and Watson (1984) have been thwarted there with victory tantalisingly close to their grasp.

It was in 1995 that Palmer, the man generally recognised as reviving the fortunes of the Open Championship, bade farewell to his Open career with a flourishing yet somehow typically modest wave from the Swilcan Bridge as he played the 18th hole of the Old Course for a final time. It was in the second round, obviously, but no one cared that he’d not made the cut. Well, except for Arnie himself, of course. What mattered was that in 1960 he’d made the journey to Scotland as the reigning Masters and US Open champion and thereby indicated to his contemporaries in American golf that the annual trip to Britain every July was a peregrination worth making. For his pains, he was denied victory in the Centenary Open by Kel Nagle, who pipped him by a stroke. In the next two years, however, no one could deny the great man.

In 2005, it was the turn of Jack Nicklaus to bid farewell to the championship he had graced since 1962, the year of Palmer’s second and last triumph. Inside this issue you will see the photograph of Jack’s final appearance on the Swilcan Bridge.

Fifty years on from Palmer’s debut in the championship, we have reached the 150th Open, again staged at St Andrews. Per legend, like London buses, the retirements of the greats this time around could come in threes.

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