Cornish Golfer

Tag: golf

  • A Sweet Inheritance

    A Sweet Inheritance

    Barnes and Hogan: Master and Student —Part II

    Ben Hogan’s personal golf library, consigned directly by the Hogan family, sold for $5,198 at auction this past weekend. The collection comprised 18 golf books — most of them autographed by the author and inscribed to Hogan himself — spanning the ages from Horace Hutchinson’s Hints for Golf (1886) through to modern titles like Sir Nick Faldo’s Swing for Life.

    Ben Hogan’s personal library
    Photo credit: Golden Age Auctions

    Barnes’s influence on Hogan stretched beyond his own instructional book Picture Analysis of Golf Strokes, which was among those volumes. It was Jim Barnes who carried the torch from the Great Triumvirate of Vardon, Taylor and Braid through to the American Triumvirate of Hogan, Snead and Nelson — all three remarkably born in the same year.

    A fit and healthy Jim Barnes, age 54, on the first tee at the 1940 PGA Championship, Hershey Country Club, Pennsylvania

    In 1940 Barnes was still teeing it up, twenty-four years after winning the inaugural PGA (he also won the second). This time the venue was Hershey Country Club, in the shadow of the Chocolate Factory, where Hogan would later serve more than a decade as resident professional. Hershey had already been the stage for Hogan’s first professional win in 1938. Barnes’s own final victory would come the following year at the New Jersey State Open.

    In the field at Hershey were the rising American Triumvirate — Hogan, Snead and Nelson. With twelve rounds of golf crammed into seven days, it was little wonder that Barnes was eliminated early. Hogan fell in the quarter-finals, and Nelson went on to beat Snead by one hole in the final.

    Photo credit: Hershey Country Club

    Between them, the three would go on to win seven PGA Championships in the next eleven years.

    From hickory to steel, the torch had passed.

  • “For Ringo”

    “For Ringo”

    Who can ever forget the Miracle in Medinah? 

    My abiding memory is the putt Martin Kaymer holed at the last, as the European team go into raptures of celebration and disbelief.  One special image stays with me.  Justin Rose smiling as he looks up to the heavens and points, whilst clutching the silhouette of Seve on his sleeve.  

    Alongside that picture, I can hear Olly’s breaking voice, spoken through his own tears:

    ‘This one’s For Him.’

    ***

    Cornwall is a Nation; the Cornish are its proud People; and Truro’s towering Gothic-revival monolith, is the Cornish People’s Cathedral.

    ‘The Land of Saints’, a painting on display in the Cathedral, Truro, Cornwall

    On Thursday July 18, 2024 on the first day of The Open Championship at Troon, the Cornish gathered to celebrate the life of one of its favourite sons.

    In the Land of the Giants, Andrew John Ring stood taller than most. He was my best friend, without compare, and by the look of the 600 or so others that congregated outside and inside Truro Cathedral that day, he was the best friend of hundreds more.

    We sang ‘The White Rose’ and ‘Cornwall My Home’.  We raised a glass beneath the Flag of St Piran in the sunshine thereafter. ‘For Ringo’ was the toast.  

    Across the lands, absent Cornish friends including European Challenge Tour winner Rhys Enoch in South Africa celebrated too. PGA Tour winner Harry Hall in America would follow proceedings.

    Closer to home, also unable to attend that day, the Cornwall Senior golf team wore black ribbons as they won through to the County Finals.

    Wind the clock forward three months, and that Cornwall Senior Golf team would capture the National Title for the first time in the County’s history, in a dramatic finale that no one could have predicted, had they not known the power of the spirits working that day.

    The players wore caps with a message

    For Cornwall to triumph on that final day, they needed a win over Durham and the other two County teams to tie. 

    Incredibly, the final match of Cornwall’s contest was won with the final putt, by the last man, on the last green.  

    Celebrations and thanksgiving after the final putt is holed

    Then the wait. Not long though, for the resulting 4.5: 4.5 tie between the other two Counties, capitulated by an improbable missed putt, sealed Cornwall’s moment to celebrate and disbelieve. 

    If only the players for the other competing counties had known that the whole sequence of events were predetermined — ‘For Ringo’.

    There could be no better epitaph. 

    Let it be a prelude to many more celebrations of Cornish national triumph and let no-one doubt the power of the spirit of a great man looking down.  

    ‘This one’s For Him’

    ***

    Postscript

    On Monday May 5 2025, the Truro Golf Club marked their respect for Andrew Ring by officially dedicating their newly refurbished facility in his honour.