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British Open History

The Open Championship was first played on 17 October 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club. The inaugural tournament was restricted to professionals, and attracted a field of eight, who played three rounds of Prestwick's twelve-hole course in a single day. Willie Park Senior won with a score of 174, beating the favourite, Old Tom Morris, by two strokes. The following year the tournament was opened to amateurs; eight of them joined ten professionals in the field.

Originally, the trophy presented to the event's winner was the Champion's Belt, a red leather belt with a silver buckle. There was no prize money in the first three Opens. In 1863, a prize fund of £10 (then $50) was introduced, which was shared between the second- third- and fourth-placed professionals, with the Champion still just getting to keep the belt for a year. In 1864 Old Tom Morris won the first Champion's cash prize of £6. By 2004, the winners cheque had increased one hundred and twenty thousand fold to £720,000, or perhaps two thousand fold after allowing for inflation. The Champions Belt was retired in 1870, when Young Tom Morris was allowed to keep it for winning the tournament three consecutive times. It was then replaced by the present trophy, The Golf Champion Trophy, better known by its popular name of The Claret Jug.

style="text-align: justify;"Prestwick Golf Club administered The Open from 1860 to 1870. In 1871, it agreed to organise it jointly with The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. In 1892 the event was doubled in length from thirty six to seventy two holes, that is four rounds of what was by then the standard complement of eighteen holes. In the same year the prize fund reached £100. Due to an increasing number of entrants, a cut was introduced after two rounds in 1898. In 1920 full responsibility for The Open Championship was handed over to The Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

The early winners were all Scottish professionals, who in those days worked as greenkeepers, clubmakers, and caddies to supplement their modest winnings from championships and challenge matches. The Open has always been dominated by professionals, amateurs only accumulating six wins, all of them between 1890 and 1930. The last of these was Bobby Jones's third Open and part of his celebrated Grand Slam. Jones was one of four Americans who won The Open between the First and Second World Wars, the first of whom had been Walter Hagen in 1922. These Americans and the French winner of the 1907 Open, Arnaud Massy, were the only winners from outside Scotland and England up to 1939.

The first post World War II winner was the American Sam Snead in 1946. In 1947 Fred Daly of Northern Ireland was victorious. While there have been many English and Scottish champions, Daly remains the only winner from either side of the Irish border, and there has never been a Welsh champion. Otherwise the early post war years The Open was dominated by golfers from the Commonwealth, with South African Bobby Locke and Australian Peter Thomson winning the Claret Jug in nine of the eleven championships from 1948 and 1958 between them.

Another South African, Gary Player was Champion in 1959. This was at the beginning of the "Big Three" era in professional golf, the three players in question being Player, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Palmer first competed in 1960, when he came second to the little known Australian Kel Nagle, but he won the two following years. While he was far from being the first American Open Champion, he was the first of their compatriots that many Americans saw win the tournament on television, and his charismatic success is often credited with persuading leading American golfers to make the "British Open" a routine part of their schedule, rather than an optional extra. Of course, the spread of trans-Atlantic air travel also helped a great deal.

Nicklaus' Open Championship victories came in 1966, 1970 and 1978. This tally of three wins isn't very remarkable, and indeed he won all of the other three majors more often, but it greatly understates how prominent he was at the tournament throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He finished in the top five sixteen times, which is tied most in Open history with John Henry Taylor and easily the most in the post war era. This included seven second places. Nicklaus holds the records for most rounds under par (61) and most aggregates under par (14). At Turnberry in 1977 he was involved in one of the most celebrated contests in golf history, when his duel with Tom Watson went to the final shot before Watson emerged as the champion for the second time.

Watson won five Opens, more than anyone else has since the 1950s, but his final win in 1983 brought down the curtain on an era of U.S. domination. In the next eleven years there was only one American winner, with the others coming from Europe and the Commonwealth. The European winners of this era, Spaniard Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, who was the first Scottish winner for over half a century, and the Englishman Nick Faldo, were also leading lights among the group of players who began to get the better of the Americans in the Ryder Cup during this period.

In 1995, The Open became part of the PGA Tour's official schedule. John Daly's win in that year, which was a huge surprise even though he had won a major before, began another era of American domination. Tiger Woods has won two Championships to date, both at St Andrews in 2000 and again in 2005. There was a dramatic moment at St Andrews in 2000, as the aging Jack Nicklaus waved farewell to the crowds while the young challenger to his crown as the greatest golfer of all time watched from a nearby tee; Nicklaus afterwards decided to play in the 2005 Open when the R&A moved the location to St. Andrews, and gave what will presumably be his truly final farewell to the fans. In 2002, all Open wins before 1995 were retrospectively classified as PGA Tour wins. Recent years have been notable for the number of wins by previously obscure golfers, including Paul Lawrie in 1999, Ben Curtis in 2003 and Todd Hamilton in 2004.

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