A decade-and-a-half after he bade farewell to major championship golf, at the age of 65, having missed the cut in the Open Championship on the Old Course at the spiritual home of golf, St. Andrews, in 2005, Jack Nicklaus remains the most successful major winner of all time. Although well past his prime, Nicklaus received a ten-minute standing ovation from the crowd, in recognition of his long, illustrious career, as he paused on the iconic Swilcan Bridge on the eighteenth fairway at St. Andrews.
All told, Nicklaus won 117 professional tournaments, including the Masters Tournament six times, the PGA Championship five times, the US Open four times and the Open Championship three times. His career total of 18 major championship victories is three ahead of his nearest rival, Tiger Woods, and seven ahead of anyone else in the history of professional golf.
Born in Columbus, Ohio on January 21, 1940, Nicklaus started playing golf at the age of ten and was US Amateur Champion twice, in 1959 and 1961, before announcing that he was turning professional. The following year he won his first major professional title, the US Open at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he defeated Arnold Palmer in an eighteen-hole playoff. Nicklaus’ nickname, ‘Golden Bear’, derived from his blonde locks and thickset frame, was apparently coined by Australian journalist Don Lawrence during the 1967 US Open.
By that stage of his career, Nicklaus had already become the youngest player to win all four major championships, couresty of a one-shot victory over Doug Sanders in the Open Championship at Muirfield in 1966, at the age of 26. Two decades later, at the age of 46, he won his final major championship, playing the back nine at Augusta in six-under-par, despite a bogey on the par-three twelfth hole, to win the 1986 Masters Tournament by a single shot; Nicklaus remains the oldest Masters winner in history.
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Born in Plumstead, South East London on August 22, 1957, Steve Davis was introduced to snooker at an early age by his late father, Bill, who died in March, 2016, at the age of 89. However, it was after he joined forces with Barry Hearn – nowadays, of course, chairman of World Snooker, but at that time chairman of Lucania Snooker Clubs – as an 18-year-old that he began his rise to prominence. Davis turned professional in September, 1978 and, in 1980, won his maiden professional title in the UK Championship at the Guild Hall, Preston, where he whitewashed Terry Griffiths 9-0 in the semi-final and demolished Alex Higgins 16-6 in the final.
Davis reached the last 16 of the World Championship at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield in 1979 and the quarter-final in 1980, losing 13-11 and 13-9 to Dennis Taylor and Alex, respectively, before winning the first of six world titles in 1981. Notwithstanding a shock 10-1 defeat at the hands of Tony Knowles in the last 32 in 1982, Davis went on to dominate the World Championship, and snooker as a whole, throughout the Eighties. He was world champion again in 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1989, and runner-up in 1985 and 1986.
Indeed, the final frame of the 1985 World Championship, in which Dennis Taylor potted the crucial final black to beat Davis 18-17, having trailed 8-0 early in the second session of the match, is probably the most famous frame in the history of snooker. The so-called ‘black ball final’ lasted nearly 15 hours, eventually finishing after midnight, and attracted a record 18.5 million television viewers.
Davis also had the distinction of compiling the first televised maximum break, against John Spencer in the quarter-final of the Lada Classic in 1982. He announced his retirement from professional snooker, at the age of 58, in April, 2016, having won 81 professional titles, including 28 ranking titles.
