Tony Jacklin: the trucker’s son who took on America

An achievement can be rendered remarkable not only by how long since someone has achieved it, but also how long before someone replicates it. Tony Jacklin’s victory at the 1970 US Open was notable on both measures. It had been more than 40 years since a European had won the trophy and it would be another 40 years before another would. From the President down, golf was the American game and they made darn sure they won their own show. When Jacklin, aged 25 and the 1969 Open champion, won at Hazeltine in Chaska, Minnesota, by seven strokes he was, as the Peter Dobereiner profile is headlined “the best golfer in the world”. And then… no more Majors.

Dobereiner was the “doyen” of golf writers, writing about golf every day before opening a bottle of claret (he could have taken even John Arlott into the later rounds) and talking about it. He knew his golf, and golfers, knowing this, respected him even when he was critical.

This is no patsy profile. Jacklin is described as “headstrong, conceited and temperamental” and although “a likeable lad” often “a right pain in the neck”.

Even the compliments are barbed: “Jacklin has the aptitudes of a hermit crab.” In true golf-rom style the golfer’s potential is realised by the love of a good woman. “On a trip home he saw an attractive girl at a dance and told himself: ‘That’s the one for me.’ She wasn’t so sure. She thought him too full of himself. Still, one dance wouldn’t hurt. It was enough.”

Jacklin was the fourth player – after Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player – to sign with agent Mark McCormack. This is noted by Dobereiner who, in his rather curmudgeonly pay-off line, seems a little too concerned with the money Jacklin makes. Perhaps an example of a writer inspired by a love for the game not quite coming to terms with the fact those he is writing about are in it for the money.

Jacklin, the son of a Scunthorpe lorry driver, learned the game on a golf course in Lincolnshire. He was an apprentice at the hardly salubrious Potters Bar golf course. Unable to afford to be an amateur, there were a few tough years before, uniquely, he took himself off to play “big golf” in the States. He succeeded and set the template for those who played for him as he went on to be the most successful Ryder Cup captain in history.

The unique speed of his victories (“Boom-boom! And I’d won the Open. No time to think. Next I’d won the American Open before I knew it”) turned out to be curse not blessing as he battled to repeat his success. The extent of this struggle was revealed in a 10,000 word interview he gave to Kenneth Harris, which ran on consecutive front pages of the Observer Review on 7 and 14 July 1974. The length, placing and billing of the interview illustrated how significant a figure the now somewhat underestimated Jacklin was. As a self-examination of what goes through a golfer’s head, it is unparalleled: “Golf is about character… No game gives a chance for such highly focused post-mortems… Confidence is concentration. Concentration is exclusion. Exclusion is self-sufficiency. You don’t care about anybody or anything outside your own mind.”

Dobereiner continued talking to golfers. Putting an arm round Greg Norman the night before he went out to defend a six-shot lead in the final round of the 1996 US Masters, he said: “Don’t worry, Greg, old son. Not even you can fuck this one up.” Norman did; Dobereiner died months later.