America's love affair with the Silver Scot

ONE by one the legends fell away, beaten by the brutality of Oakmont. Ted Ray was one of the first to go, then Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen. All immortals, all with a tale of woe to tell about what happened to them in the 1927 US Open. Oh yes, even 80 years ago, Oakmont was a beast.

Big Ted was one of the wisest heads in golf. Past his best, sure, but still a battler and one of the leading group after the opening round. Where'd it all go wrong, they asked him. "Let's see," he replied. "Thirty eight putts in my first round, 40 putts in my second round..." Slick greens were Ted's undoing. He'd never seen them so quick. Shaved to the bone, they were. He was considered one of the world's greatest putters but no matter what he did he couldn't get their measure. Three different weapons he used. No good. "I thought of pasting a bit of stamp-paper on my blade," he said. "That slows your ball up a bit. But I couldn't get the touch."

Jones was the defending champion. The King. Up to the 13th hole in the third round he looked good for another major, but then Oakmont bit him hard. In four holes he dropped seven shots and disappeared from view; an also-ran. By his side, as ever, was his friend OB Keeler. "Would you have believed that Bobby Jones ever would shoot four competitive rounds on any course and never hit a 74?" Keeler wrote. He later penned an essay wondering if Oakmont '27 was just "too much golf course".

Not for The Haig, it wasn't. Not for three rounds anyhow, not for a man who had already won eight majors and who was sitting pretty to win a ninth. Hagen was a character, a prime mover in the popularisation of golf in America. His motto was: "You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry. Don't worry and be sure to smell the flowers along the way." But unless the flowers were in the bunkers in that final round Hagen wouldn't have smelt them. The greens were one thing, the sand-traps quite another. He found his share and shot 81. Bye-bye, Haig.

Every one of its bunkers, numbering almost 300, were ploughed and when the rain fell it settled between the ridges. Getting out of there was an achievement, getting it any distance was an impossibility. "Two hundred yards from the pin or 20 yards, you pick out the niblick [equivalent to a 9-iron] and blast," said Ray. "Here, the 100-player, the 80-player, the 75-player, has only one shot to play from the sand and neither boldness nor skill will help him correct a position which may not have been all his fault in the first place. He has one shot - the blast."

Ray, Jones and Hagen were gone but Sarazen was looking ominous. The 7,000 yards of Oakmont took its toll on him during his third round of 80 but even par in his fourth took him closer to the leaders. On the back nine he had them in their sights until the deathly bunkers ended his run as abruptly as they did Hagen's. At that point, the winner looked certain. Harry Cooper was in the clubhouse on 301. "The run-of-the-mill golfing fan will never understand what golf it required to shave 300 that close," wrote Keeler.

Lighthorse Harry from Leatherhead headed for the locker room with a smile on his face when he heard that his last remaining danger, Tommy Armour, had hit the rocks on the 621-yard, par five 12th. The "ghost hole", the "Octopus 12th" as the great writer Grantland Rice called it.

Armour had taken seven and now needed to cover the last six holes in 1-under to force a play-off the following day. Out on the course he started to prepare the loser's speech. In the locker room, Lighthorse Harry changed for the presentation. Everybody knew Armour's story, his days as a machine gunner with the Black Watch in the Great War, his heroism in the Tank Corps, how he seized an enemy tank single-handed by strangling a German officer and received an audience with King George V as a result. A brave man, sure, but a superman? "A near miracle under the strain," wrote Rice of Armour's task. Nobody expected him to achieve it.

Remarkably, he parred his way through five holes and standing on the 18th tee, Armour needed a birdie to tie. He drove 250-yards down the middle then nailed a 3-iron to 10ft and holed the putt. The galleries went wild. Cooper gulped. How was that finish possible, he asked reporters. Next day he turned up for the play-off as the underdog. "It was emphatically an Armour gallery," reported The Scotsman. "Armour was the public's choice. It seemed that Cooper's chesty attitude did not appeal to Pittsburgers. Everybody in that huge crowd was neutral - they didn't care how many strokes Armour won by."

In the end he won by three, a 76 to Cooper's 79. It had been a US Open almost beyond comparison in terms of difficulty and that 301 total remains the highest winning mark of the past 80 years. Not that it took any from the Scot's glory. "Armour, the victor, was swept off his feet by an enthusiastic mob that tossed him to their shoulder," wrote the New York Times. They'd write plenty more about him from that day on. As his legend grew, everybody did.

The more you read about Tommy Armour, the more you realise that the Silver Scot was one of the most charismatic men ever to play golf. He was a war hero and a champion - he won more than 40 tournaments including the US Open, the PGA in 1930 and the Open at Carnoustie in 1931 - despite having lost an eye in battle and having metal plates in his head and in his left arm. He was a drinker, a gambler, a womaniser, a master bridge player and an accomplished classical violinist. Byron Nelson once said that Armour was "absolutely the most gifted story-teller I've ever known in golf. He could take the worst story you ever heard and make it great."

Flamboyance came naturally to Armour. "Had he never won a tournament he would still have been one of the most striking figures in the game," recorded the golf writer, Charles Price. Armour's style marked him out as different. He wore ascots and silk handkerchiefs that hung over the breast pocket of his tailored jackets. He had rugged good looks and, at first, dark and then silver wavy hair. Hence the nickname. Over the years the Black Scot became the Silver Scot.

He was a risk-taker his whole life, be it investing in stocks or punting on a round of golf. He was addicted to it. Henry Cotton, who went to America as a young man in the late 1920s and who was pretty much adopted by Armour, tells a story that gets to the heart of one aspect of him.

"Armour is one of the biggest bluffers in the game," he wrote in 1948. "He's a fine match-maker and a keen money-player. He considers match-making more important than actual play. But I have been engaged in many games with him when he has to pull out the figures to save his money, big money, too!

"I am not sure what Armour likes best, the golf or the betting. He is not satisfied unless he is wagering on every hole, every nine, each round and, if he can, on each shot. When people ask Armour what the 'D' stands for in his name [Thomas Dickson Armour], he always replies, 'Dough,' and he's not far wrong!"

He could charm you one minute and bite your head off the next. Tommy had some temper on him. One time, coming home from a tournament he lost due to poor putting, he chucked his putters (he had many) out the window of the train as it crossed the Forth Bridge.

Clarence Budington Kelland, the famous American writer, once described his friend as having "a mouth like a steel trap, a nose like a ski jump and eyes which indicate he would enjoy seeing you get a compound fracture of the leg". Those eyes were, said Price, "as deep as Rasputin's... Tommy was temperamental and acid-tongued, he was not a man you approached comfortably".

But plenty did. They couldn't keep away. From 1929, and for 25 years, the Boca Raton club in Florida became his fiefdom, where he gave lessons at extortionate prices - his reputation as a tutor rising to near Socratic levels.

The money sat well with Armour but the role of day-to-day instructor never really did. He liked working with ambitious players but had no truck with day-trippers. Patience, after all, was never a virtue of his. His grandson, Tommy Armour III, wrote once about the old man at Boca Raton. "He was asked one afternoon to give a lesson to a wealthy golfer who had taken up the game primarily for the social benefits.

"He watched the man hit a dozen or so shots. The duffer was slapping away at it, feeling pretty good about his progress, when he finally turned to Armour for an evaluation. 'Well, what d'ya think?' he said. 'I think you should give it up,' Armour said, and walked away."

But the Boca Raton was more than a well-paid job. It was a lifestyle in itself, a place where the great and the good of American society came to spend time with Armour. Babe Ruth was a close friend. But, then, so was half of Hollywood, as his son - Tommy II - once recalled.

"Whenever Dad sat around in the clubhouse at Boca Raton, it was though he was holding court. A crowd would gather just to listen to his stories. The waitress always knew to bring over a large tray with several cocktails, usually gin and ginger ale with a bourbon chaser, which he would follow with a Bromo Seltzer. People would look at that tray and their eyes would grow wider.

"Once Errol Flynn and [King Kong star] Bruce Cabot, two of the more notorious ladies' men of their time, dropped by to visit Dad when I was there and every head turned. Those guys had the look of the eagle when they scanned the room. You got the feeling they were undressing every woman in the place."

Many of those who have written about him and those still alive who met him will tell you how Scottish Armour was until they day he died. From the moment he arrived in America in 1923 as a 28-year-old to his death in 1968 aged 72, part of his immense appeal was due to his Scottishness. American's loved that about him. They never tired of it.

Remember that it was the Scots who brought the game to America in the first place. It was the Scots who made the golf clubs and built the courses and won the tournaments. Of the 22 US Opens that had been played prior to Armour's arrival in the new world, 12 of them had been won by his transplanted countrymen. Nationality mattered. With his background and his personality coupled with his tournament victories and, when it suited him, his teaching prowess, Armour became a star and a very wealthy man.

He made a fortune then lost it all in the Wall Street Crash. Then he made another fortune and added to it by writing one of the best-selling golf books of all time. Many of the thousands of Scottish golfers who went to America before him sank without trace and others who achieved remarkable things on the golf course, like four-time US Open winner Willie Anderson, never amounted to anything off it.

Armour did it all. He had it all. The high life was made for him and he embraced every day. As one of his friends once said: "For Tommy Armour, it was always the Roaring Twenties."

Eighty years ago this week, the Silver Scot roared louder than any of them, louder than Ray and Jones and Hagen and Sarazen. All this time later, his memory is roaring still.