Doug Sanders RIP

I am not one for watching replays of golf tourneys – you know the result and nothing to bet on.

Golf does not need spectators in the way football does, indeed some players might welcome the absence of raucous spectators such as you find towards the end of the final day on the US PGA. So I anticipate a fairly swift return to the US PGA behind closed doors.

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Doug Sanders aged 86 on April 12.

His whole career has been defined by missing a four foot tiddler to win the 1970 Open at St Andrews.

The 18th where the fairways merge is not that difficult, it’s the 17th, the Road Hole that claims a few aspiring winners.

Doug Sanders, having negotiated the 17th, took four shots on the 18th from 74 yards. He still had a short putt to win.

When he removed some probably non-existent piece of fluff in his line my old boss Henry Longhurst groaned into his pink gin. Sanders fluffed it.

The following day he lost the play-off to Jack Nicklaus.

He still won 20 PGA events and finished runner up in every Major in the year once.

He had a flat swing which did not make him an elegant player but this was compensated by his debonair dress sense earning him the nick name “the peacock of the fairways”.

I had the privilege of knowing Ken Wolstenholme.

When he lectured on commentary he would produce a clip of the Sanders miss and ask if the audience what they they noticed about Longhurst’s commentary.

They replied his silence. There was nothing anyone could add.