PETER THOMSON 1929-2018
Peter Thomson is the greatest golfer this country has ever produced. But he was far more than that.
Peter Thomson was the greatest golfer this country ever produced. But he was far more than that. Brendan Moloney provides an insight into Thomson’s incredible career and life.
Australia lost its finest golfer and the world an elder statesman with the death of Peter Thomson at his home in Melbourne on June 20 aged 88.
The winner of five British Opens was the last link with a golden era of Australian sport, following the loss of his great mates Kel Nagle and Richie Benaud early in 2015.
Thomson, who first came to notice by winning his club championship on the Royal Park public course in 1946 when he was 16, achieved the seemingly impossible early in his professional career. At the time it was not known if the sound barrier or the four-minute mile could be broken or Mount Everest conquered.
Add to this aspirational list, in the minds of golfers at least, the notion of an Australian winning the Open Championship. We hoped for the best but the general feeling was that a non-British player had as much chance as the Socceroos winning the World Cup. Like Chuck Yeager, Roger Bannister and Edmund Hillary, he showed in 1954 that with ability and persistence it could be done.
At Royal Birkdale he became the first Australian to have his name engraved on the old claret jug in the championship’s 94-year history. This breakthrough paved the way for fellow Australians Nagle, Greg Norman (twice) and Ian Baker-Finch to achieve their greatest victories. He went on to win again in 1955, ‘56, ‘58 and ‘65 and notch up another 100 or so titles around the world including 10 dierent
national Opens and a stunning nine victories on the American senior tour in 1985.
O the course he was an outstanding contributor to the game, serving as President of the Australian PGA for 32 years, designing and building courses in Australia and around the world, helping establish the Asian Tour and working behind the scenes for the Odyssey House drug rehabilitation organisation where he was chairman for five years. He also wrote for newspapers and magazines over six decades and was patron of the Australian Golf Writers Association. In 1979 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his service to golf and in 2001 became an Ocer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his contributions as a player and administrator and for community service. He remains the only winning captain of the International Team in the Presidents Cup.
When he died at home after a brave, four-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, a state funeral was o ered by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. In
APART FROM HIS EFFORTLESS SWING, HE WAS NOTED FOR HIS INCREDIBLE INTELLECT, QUICK WIT AND DRY SENSE OF HUMOUR.
keeping with the Thomson ethos of playing down his considerable achievements, this was politely declined. The world, however, was not prepared to let the occasion pass without a fitting tribute.
The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews sent the most famous trophy in sport out with CEO Martin Slumbers for the memorial service at the Melbourne Cricket Club and former captain Sandy Dawson (after Viscount Bruce of Melbourne, only the second Australian in the role) was among the speakers.
Through Dawson the spirit of Peter Thomson shone on the sombre occasion. Apart from his effortless swing, he was noted for his incredible intellect, quick wit and dry sense of humour. Dawson brought the memories flooding back with a story about the five-time Open champion playing for the R&A against a team of university students. One polite young opponent remarked that he looked as if he’d been a really good player in his prime. Thomson agreed that he did have his moments. Asked if he’d ever won a tournament, he said, a few. What was your biggest win? When told the Open, the kid said: “Wow, when did you win that?” The young man’s face grew even redder as he reeled o the five years.
The sense of humour was a family trait that came to the fore in the hours after his death. They sent out a statement to the media which was immediately picked up and went around the world. Son Andrew revealed: “Dad received a number of electronic newsletters. A couple began: ‘Dear Peter, We are saddened to learn
WHEN PETER SPOKE HE ACTUALLY SAID SOMETHING, A QUALITY WHICH SEEMS TO ELUDE MANY IN THE MODERN GAME. –DANIEL ANDREWS
of the passing of one of the icons of Australian golf...’ We got a great laugh out of that.” He also told the story of taking the Open trophy to school for show and tell in 1965 and returning home in tears because one of the other boys claimed his father had a dozen like it. When the R&A ocials heard this story from Thomson himself many years later, they did not know whether to laugh or cry. Premier Andrews, a keen golfer with a sense of the game’s history, described Thomson as a tactician and strategist. “He could not only see the line of change in a golf hole, he could find it with precision and elegance,” he said, “his remarkable playing record makes him our best ever male golfer and a true great of the game.
“He is no less a figure as a prolific writer, leader among professionals and course architects. His body of work is unparalleled. Despite the simplicity of his accurate, precise play, Peter Thomson was a man of complex and diverse interests. Golfer yet, but much more than that. Extremely well read, a critical thinker, a lover of the arts, a person for whom family was central and an opera of opinion, informed and insightful opinion. In fact, wisdom is the only way to put it.”
Quoting the great American golf writer Herbert Warren Wind, Andrews continued: “‘An intelligent, thoughtful, well-read man with a mind of his own and the stubbornness that usually accompanies this trait ... quite a dierent person from the ordinary American professional’. Herb was right. When Peter spoke he actually said something, a quality which
seems to elude many in the modern game.”
After learning at Royal Park beside the Melbourne Zoo, Thomson was recruited by Victoria Golf Club and was part of the great 1948 pennant team that included Doug Bachli, who brought more glory home in 1954 by becoming the first Australian to win the British Amateur Championship. At the time of his death, Thomson was a member of 19 golf clubs including Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula where he played most. In his 70s he put in five cards for a handicap so he could play in the competitions with wife, Mary, and his family.
The club’s centenary history, published in 2008, contains a chapter on him and the caption under his portrait reads: “P.W. Thomson, B Grade mixed foursomes champion”. In the clubhouse is a room named in his honour and the centrepiece is a picture with Nagle after he beat Arnold Palmer to win the Centenary British Open in 1960. The caption written by Thomson says: “My happiest moment in golf.”
Down the road a bit from Sorrento is Moonah Links, two of the 250 or so courses he’d designed or altered with partners Mike Wolveridge and Ross Perrett since 1965. The championship layout, which hosted the Australian Open in 2003 and 05, is perhaps his favourite, although it was not without its critics, especially among the players. It also caused concern to the project developers who waited in vain for several months for Thomson to produce plans of his vision. Then one day he told them he wanted to see the manager of the farm – as it then was – with his tractor and slasher at 10am the following Sunday.
Then Thomson briefed the manager to follow his vehicle in the long pasture grass with the grass cutter while he outlined the 18 fairways. The job was finished by lunchtime. When the course opened there was still no map – he’d surveyed the entire site with his eyes and feet – and a map was eventually drawn from aerial photographs of the finished product. Another happy memory from that time was pulling out a small vineyard to make way for the 8th hole.
… YOU KNEW IT WAS SUMMER WHEN THERE WERE NECTARINES ON THE GROUND AND PICTURES OF PETER THOMSON IN THE PAPER. – JOHN CLARK
When questioned if this was vandalism, he replied: “I checked with my local bottle shop and was assured that there is no imminent shortage of Australian wine.”
His association with Englishman Wolveridge began in November 1962 at Royal Adelaide where they both played in the Australian Open won by Gary Player. At the mention of this, Wolveridge did a passing impersonation of Player’s South African accent, saying: “Man, I played the best golf of my life.” He said he did a pretty good impersonation of Thomson as well but it was not the time or place.
In a eulogy which could have been straight out of P.G. Wodehouse, only better, he said they met at the home of the great South Australian amateur and administrator Bill AcklandHorman. “The president of everything. I was already an admirer of Peter. In Britain his arrival each year was referred to as the annual slaying of the lambs. I was helping myself to a rissole, which I had known as a war-time treat, when Thomson, Kel Nagle and Ackland-Horman came over. Thus began, over a humble rissole, my lifelong friendship with these three mighty Australians.”
Thomson’s writing career began in the early 1950s for the old Argus newspaper and he was filing his stories while winning his Open Championships, after the presentation and before being interviewed by his opposition. Ranald Macdonald, appointed managing director of The Age in 1964 and Thomson’s nominal boss, said of friend and fellow Sorrento and Royal Melbourne member: “In a world calling out for leadership, integrity, a little humility, generosity of spirit, a sense of proportion and a commitment to public service, Peter Thomson was the exemplar of all those qualities.”
He also revealed Thomson was given a token five pounds a year by Victoria GC to be its touring professional and was never paid. It was not a bad deal for the club because its name appeared on every entry form he filled out. With compound interest and allowing for inflation, Macdonald estimates, the club owes the family a few thousand dollars.
In the great cross section of his admirers was the late Kiwi satirist John Clark, aka Fred Dagg, an enthusiastic and moderately gifted golfer. “When I was growing up in New Zealand,” he wrote on the occasion of Thomson’s 80th birthday, “you knew it was summer when there were nectarines on the ground and pictures of Peter Thomson in the paper. He looked elegant, compact, determined and ironical. I’ve played a bit of golf with Peter over the years and have had the opportunity to study him at close hand. He was elegant, compact, determined, and ironical, and he won the New Zealand Open nine times.”
Tom Watson, the only other man to win the Open five times in the past century, expressed what many were thinking with the words: “The golf world has lost arguably the greatest links player in history.” Next best in the modern era are Bobby Locke with four Opens and Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods with three apiece.
Mary Thomson concluded the public farewell with reference to a photograph of her husband of 60 years taken when he was two in 1931. She remembered her mother-in-law, Grace, talking about visiting a friend who claimed to predict
the future by reading tea leaves. She looked into the baby’s stroller and said: “I see this child as a young man on a great field of green and his name will be known all over the world.”
The last words belong to the man himself. They come from a book he wrote with journalist Desmond Zwar in the 1960s: “You’ll learn a lot about life and human frailty and wickedness and cunning and craft. If you’re lucky, you’ll learn about honour and trust and other high levels of behaviour. Most of all, you’ll learn about yourself. At the end you may have something to show for it, something to pass on, something to share. If you succeed, you will have above and beyond all that a warm and healthy respect for life and love for your family.”
Another thing worth remembering is his view on the golf swing. It is from another book, done with Steve Perkin, son of Graham, legendary editor of The Age: “Draw the club straight back. Never mind about what the books din into you about turns and pivots. Just draw it straight back as far as is comfortable and let nature take its course. Don’t turn away. Just draw it back, but keep your weight squarely on both feet and don’t sway.” Cut it out and put it on the fridge.
Peter Thomson, August 23, 1929 – June 20, 2018, is survived by his wife Mary, son Andrew, daughters Deirdre Baker, Pan Prendergast and Fiona Stanway, their spouses, 11 grandchildren and four great grandchildren.