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Open Championship 1900: St Andrews
The Western Mail seemed to take some delight in reporting the result that ‘for the seventh successive year the highest honour a golfer can aspire to has been won by an Englishman’. It was true no Scotsman had won since Willie Auchterlonie in 1893 but the ‘sensational Yorkshire player’ Taylor defeated, and who had won three of the last four, was as English as I am, coming, as he did, from Jersey in the Channel Islands. Taylor held a lead of four strokes after the first two rounds on the first day. The second morning saw the course obscured by haar from the North Sea which was followed by a strong north-easterly gale bringing rain, in other words a standard St Andrews summer day. In these conditions Vardon produced a round requiring 80 strokes, ‘giving nothing away [but] at the same time he did nothing miraculous’. Taylor was out just before him and ‘his play through the green was marked with the keenest precision. He made no mistakes whatever. Once his ball jumped the hole and twice it hung on the very lip; a half turn would have given him it’. The result was a 78 and a six stroke advantage over Vardon for the final round. No other player came close to these two third round scores. The afternoon produced a shift in the weather with still air and the course benefitting from the morning’s rain. As for Taylor’s final round, ‘Positively the man played like a machine. He hit every ball as true as if it was out of a rifle’. Vardon shot a 77, equalling Sandy Herd’s record of five years before but Taylor produced a 75, winning by eight strokes. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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