Peter Thomson
Outstanding Australian golfer who won the Open five times and brought good humour and rare psychological insight to the game
PETER THOMSON, who has died aged 88, was a great Australian golfer, celebrated above all for his extraordinary record in the Open championship. Between 1952 and 1958 he never came lower than second in this event, which he won from 1954 to 1956, and again in 1958. After that Thomson seemed to fade, as the Open assumed an increasingly international aspect. Gary Player and Arnold Palmer came to the fore, and the gigantic shadow of Nicklaus began to loom.
Critics began to downgrade Thomson’s performances during the 1950s, as though they had been achieved against second-rate opposition. At Royal Birkdale in 1965, however, he administered the best possible riposte. In the last round he led the tournament by three strokes at the 10th hole, but by only one at the 14th. “I’ve seen a lot of people in that situation,” he observed, “and I suspect that very few of them like it, but I really enjoyed it.”
For the second round running he birdied the last two holes, respectively 500 and 510 yards, to secure his fifth Open victory by two strokes. Jack Nicklaus was nine and Arnold Palmer 10 strokes behind.
Thomson’s low hitting meant that his game was well adapted to links golf, where the wind is so often a factor. His faultless rhythmical swing did not propel the ball vast distances; on form, however, he scarcely seemed capable of a bad shot. His clinical golfing brain grasped that it was far more important consistently to avoid error than to dazzle with the occasional spectacular stroke, while his rare ability to assess possibilities at a glance ensured that he invariably chose the sensible shot.
At the same time he recognised that the essential challenge lay at a deeper level. “The great fight in golf,” he wrote, “is not with the course, or the conditions, or your clubs. It is with yourself. This is the battle that is never won. I would say, very seriously, that if you want to play the game with maximum pleasure and if you want to play it well, the first thing to do is to get to know yourself. ”
Not that, to outside observers, Thomson seemed much given to introspection. As he strode down the fairway, with a half-smile on his face, he seemed the picture of calm self-assurance. Some of his fellow professionals, indeed, judged him arrogant and disdainful, not least in his dry sense of humour. “Well,” he would tell an opponent on a tee with a lake to the left, “you won’t want to hook again at this hole.”
There was even the odd accusation of gamesmanship. Christie O’connor once complained that Thomson deliberately waggled white shoes in order to put him off. In fact Thomson was scrupulously fair. In the Australian Open of 1957 he gave himself a two-shot penalty when he, and he alone, realised that he was carrying 15 clubs in his bag instead of the regulation 14. And in 1966 he lost the Dunlop Masters after adding a stroke because his ball had moved when he was addressing it.
In contrast to many of his rivals, however, Thomson was neither dim, humourless nor self-obsessed. His provocative ways, such as they were, reflected a need to keep his spirits light. “The knitted brow,” he insisted, “is not a sign of special concentration; it’s an indication of anxiety. The players to fear were the ones with cheerful eyes and a calm smile.”
Above all, he discerned boredom as the principal enemy. Boredom, he wrote, “destroys interest, incentive, concentration, and eventually application. It wrecks a golfer.” So, for all his fierce urge to win, Thomson never became a monomaniac. “It must surely dawn on even the dumbest in time,” he wrote in 1968, “that golf, as demanding as it is, is not the whole of life or even an adequate substitute for some creative, satisfying occupation. Those who try to make it so end up disappointed if not a little disillusioned.”
In many tournament golfers, including to a degree himself, he saw “misfits who have drifted into it at an early age, when our narrow view of the world showed nothing else. Why then should some of us be blamed for not coming out on top? Indeed, why should those who win be acclaimed? For being more desperate than the rest?”
Peter William Thomson was born on August 23 1929 in West Brunswick, Melbourne. Frank Sedgman, the tennis player, had been born in the same suburb two years before, while the cricketer Neil Harvey hailed from Fitzroy, a few miles to the east.
There was an artistic streak in the Thomson family, which Peter inherited. His father drew for billboards, though he was often out of work in the Depression, and eventually found employment delivering for a dairy. A fine cricketer, he had no interest in golf, while his smashed-up nose betrayed his love of fighting.
Peter would have two brothers, but one was seven and the other 13 years younger, so he grew up as something of a loner. At Brunswick Technical School he was outstanding, both academically and in sport. He became a fine cricketer, bowling leg-breaks and scoring prolifically as a left-handed batsman – a stance adopted in imitation of his father despite his own right-handedness. His hero, naturally, was Don Bradman.
Golf he initially regarded as an occupation for geriatrics, until one day he happened upon a set of right-handed hickory-shafted clubs in the house. As chance had it, the Royal Park Golf Club was only a minute’s walk away from the Thomsons’ house, and soon Peter was sneaking illegally on to the golf course there, undeterred by the roaring of lions from the adjacent zoo.
His only way of providing himself with golf balls was to find them. Before long he was spotted by a member who paid for lessons with the professional Jimmy Grace. In consequence, in 1945 Peter Thomson became the champion at Royal Park.
This success attracted a second sponsor, a publican called Harry Young, who introduced the young prodigy to Victoria Golf Club. In no time Thomson was representing the club, and honing his game on the sand belt courses south of Melbourne.
Meanwhile in 1943 Thomson had gone on to Footscray Technical School, with the aim of becoming a geologist and the ambition of discovering minerals. In 1946 he completed his final year with distinction.
By now, though, golf was dominating his life. Ivo Whitton, five times winner of the Australian Open, found him a job at the Spalding factory to cover his expenses while he made his name. This did not take long; in 1948 Thomson won the Victoria State Open.
Next year he turned professional, becoming assistant to George Naismith at the Riverside Golf Club in east Melbourne. Professionals usually had to serve two years’ apprenticeship before being allowed to compete on the Australian tour, but exemptions applied to the Australian Open, and to the Victorian Close, which Thomson won in 1949.
He now decided to compete in America for three months, but returned home after three weeks. “I realised the standard I would have to attain to survive,” he commented, “and I was well aware I wasn’t at that standard.”
In 1950 he shot 29 on the first nine holes of the last round in the Australian Open, but just failed to catch Norman von Nida. In compensation he won the New Zealand Masters by 10 shots, and the New Zealand Open by nine – the first of seven victories in that event.
In 1951-52 and again in 1955-56 Thomson played a series of exhibition matches in South Africa against Bobby Locke, perhaps the greatest match player of those times. Although Thomson narrowly had the worst of these encounters, he learnt an enormous amount about coping with pressure and getting the best out of his game. In fact, he almost pipped Locke with a fantastic finish in the Open of 1952, at Royal Lytham and St Annes.
Two years later, at Royal Birkdale, Thomson again showed his mettle during the last round when, under extreme pressure at the 16th, he played a superb bunker shot – not usually his forte – to within inches of the hole. He reckoned this was the best stroke he ever played, and it secured him his first victory in the Open. At 24 he was the youngest champion since Bobby Jones in 1926.
In 1955 the Open was at St Andrews, and televised for the first time. Thomson flirted with disaster when he registered a double bogey seven at the 14th in the last round, but serenely recovered to take the title again. When he repeated this success at Hoylake in 1956, he became the first player to win three successive titles since Bob Ferguson in 1882 – and that was 10 years before the Open became a 72- hole contest.
Bobby Locke triumphed at St Andrews in 1957, despite failing to replace his ball correctly after marking it. Thomson, who had come second, discussed the penalty that might have been invoked in a newspaper article, and even though he added that Locke “thoroughly deserved his win”, his criticism put an end to their friendship.
Normal service was resumed at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 1958. Though Thomson seemed to have ruined his chances when he double-bogeyed the 15th in the last round, he kept his cool to win a play-off against Dave Thomas.
Between 1951 and 1971, there were only three years when Thomson failed to finish among the top 10 in the Open. He was third at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 1967, and showed his class at Turnberry in 1977 with a masterly 67 in the third round. His last appearance in the Open was at St Andrews in 1984.
In his career Thomson won 68 tournaments, including three victories (1951, 1967 and 1972) in the Australian Open. He also played magnificently with his great friend Kel Nagle in the Canada Cup, winning in 1954 and 1959, and coming second in 1955 and 1961.
The one flaw in Thomson’s career was his record in the United States, where his only victory on the tour was the Texan Open of 1956, thanks to a last round of 63 which forced a play-off. Yet his performances across the Atlantic were more impressive than they appeared at first sight.
Between 1953 and 1959 he finished in the top 10 in 42 American tournaments, and in the top five on 19 occasions. “After eight or 10 weeks’ play in America,” he reckoned, “the Open seemed second-grade by comparison.” For a long time Thomson campaigned against the introduction of the large American ball into Europe and Australia, though this cause was lost in the 1970s.
Thomson finally showed the Americans what he was capable of in 1985 when he won nine events on the Seniors tour. In 1988 he was elected to the United States Golf Association’s Hall of Fame.
After he stopped playing, Thomson used his talent as a draftsman to win both plaudits and riches in golf course design. In 1982 he stood as a Liberal Party candidate for Prahran in Melbourne, but lost in a general swing to the Australian Labor Party, and never returned to politics.
Thomson was President of the Australian PGA from 1962 to 1988. On three occasions he was non-playing captain of the international (but non-european) team that contested the President’s Cup with the USA. The Americans triumphed in 1996 and 2000, but Thomson drew great satisfaction from victory at the Royal Melbourne Golf Club in 1998.
He was appointed CBE in 1980 and an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001. In 2005 he received an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews.
Peter Thomson married first, in 1952 (dissolved 1960) Lois Brauer; they had a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1960, Mary Kelly, with whom he had a son and two daughters.
Peter Thomson, born August 23 1929, died June 20 2018