Peter Thomson had 5 British Open wins
Peter Thomson, the Australian who won five British Opens and became the only player in the 20th century to win that major in three consecutive years, died Wednesday in Melbourne, Australia. He was 88.
His death was announced by Golf Australia, the sport’s governing body in that country, which said he had been treated for Parkinson’s disease for the past four years.
At a time when Australians had made little impact on international golf, Thomson emerged as a leading player on links far from his homeland, winning the British Open each summer from 1954 to ’56 and again in ’58 and ’65.
Thomson played for only a few seasons in the United States, where courses were more suited to long hitters than to his finesse game: low, running shots on hard courses, ideal for the British seaside venues. But he flourished in his brief run on the U.S. Senior Tour, winning a record nine times in 1985.
Thomson lacked the charisma of latter-day Australian golf star Greg Norman, but he won dozens of tournaments around the world and encouraged the development of pro golf in Asia in the 1960s.
Many of the United States’ leading pros did not compete in Britain in the ’50s. But Thomson proved himself as an elite golfer on the world scene with his final British Open victory, when he left Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus far behind and overtook defending champion Tony Lema in winning at Royal Birkdale, also the site of Thomson’s first Open victory.
“What they used to nominate as the Big Three — that was Palmer, Nicklaus and Player — had sort of overwhelmed the golf scene, and it was a question of which of the three was going to win,” Thomson told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in 2005, recalling his victory 40 years earlier.
“And here’s little me, got in the way,” he said. “I didn’t doubt myself, that I could do it as well as they could, but I think the general world of golf did, that I was a back number, and here were the modern heroes, and I proved that to be wrong.”
Peter William Thomson was born on Aug. 23, 1929, in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne. As a youngster, he sneaked onto a nine-hole club, Royal Park, and when the members saw how talented he was they gave him club privileges.
By the time he was 16, he had become the club champion.
Thomson scored his first victory as a pro in 1950 when he captured the first of his nine New Zealand Open championships. He was among four golfers with five British Open triumphs, a total exceeded only by Harry Vardon’s six.
His only victory on the regular PGA Tour came in 1956 at the Texas International Open. He was fourth in the ’56 U.S. Open and fifth in the ’57 Masters. He never played in the PGA Championship.