There is an understandable joy that is still percolating in the aftermath of Rory McIlroy’s Masters win April 13. Most of the emotions can be tied to the fact that many of us can relate not to McIlroy’s uncanny athleticism but to the failures that dogged him.
We have empathy for how in 16 previous visits to Augusta National the Northern Irishman had failed to handle the aura of the Masters, most painfully in 2011 when he had a four-stroke lead standing on the 10th tee but came home in a woeful 43 strokes for 80 total.
Ah, but all of those hiccups were forgiven and all of that heartache faded away a few weeks ago when McIlroy stuffed a wedge within a few feet to defeat Justin Rose on the first playoff hole.
The Green Jacket was his prize and a legion of supporters celebrated. And, oh, how the historical significance quickly dominated the landscape. Maybe not instantly, but certainly within hours the golf world and those who pay attention to it seemed to comprehend how McIlroy had become just the sixth golfer in history to win each of the four major championships – the Masters, the PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and the Open Championship.
The career Grand Slam it is called and the fact that a line of treasured icons – from Byron Nelson to Sam Snead to Arnold Palmer to Lee Trevino to Raymond Floyd to Tom Watson to Phil Mickelson – can lay claim to three-quarters of the Grand Slam, but not the whole pie, confirms the rarified air into which McIlroy moved. He’s now alongside Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.
Here, however, is where our paths likely veer off. To hyperventilate over the McIlroy victory tour – to London and Northern Ireland and back to New York with appearances on TV, most notably with Jimmy Fallon where they re-did a segment of McIlroy’s childhood and chipped balls into a washing machine – is so meh. It’s quintessential 2025, an overload of Social Media piled atop layers of hype and minutia to the nth degree.
Next thing you know, people are forgetting that what McIlroy did in 64 major championship starts – complete the career Grand Slam – Woods did in an eye-opening 21 majors, Nicklaus in 27, and Player in 30.
Then there’s arguably the most astonishing of all the career Grand Slam members – Hogan – for what he did in 1953 remains unmatched. Given that a horrific car crash in February of 1949 left him badly hurt (a double fracture of the pelvis, broken collarbone, cracked ribs, internal injuries, broken left ankle and contusions elsewhere in his left leg), his schedule thereafter was limited to mostly the majors.
But at the age of 40, Hogan won the Masters for a second time, a fourth U.S. Open, then conquered the Open Championship to complete the career Grand Slam. What shouldn’t be overlooked is how in that era Hogan had to also play a 36-hole qualifier just to get into the Open Championship and that it also required his trans-Atlantic flight without benefit of the private-jet express comfort that McIlroy and Woods experience today.
Even within a few weeks of his 1935 Masters win, no one was talking of Gene Sarazen and the career Grand Slam. No, sir. People were abuzz about a match he and Johnny Dawson (in place of the ill Bobby Jones) would have against the legendary Joyce Wethered and Glenna Collett Vare.
It was Hogan’s one and only try at the Open Championship and he remains the only golfer to win the first three professional majors in a calendar year. For those reasons, of the six who have won the career Grand Slam, only Hogan’s accomplishment is scented with a touch of heroism.
For sure, you can brush McIlroy’s achievement with great relief and worthy reverence; he deserves that. Just don’t get so closed-minded with the here and now that you offer very little respect to those who long ago earned their place in history.
Someone, after all, had to be first in line to earn the career Grand Slam, so we’re here to toast the late and great Gene Sarazen and to savor all the flavor that came with his stunning Masters win in 1935.
Start with this: Nowhere in all the dispatches of Sarazen’s albatross at No. 15 in Sunday’s closing 70 to tie Craig Wood and his subsequent victory in the 36-hole playoff did his chroniclers mention a career Grand Slam.
True, it was sprinkled throughout how Sarazen had previously won three PGA Championships, a pair of U.S. Opens, and the Open Championship, but “career Grand Slam” didn’t come along till decades later.
So, no, Sarazen wasn’t reveling in being the only member of “the club” in the weeks after his triumph at Augusta National. Which isn’t to suggest that he didn’t get a chance to bask in the spotlight because at 32 the man who owned a farm in Brookfield, Conn., was a national celebrity. He had his own line of Wilson clubs ($4.95 for each iron, $6.95 for each wood), made the large department store circuit from Boston to New York to Pittsburgh, and endorsed Camel cigarettes.
True, TV wasn’t a thing in 1935, so Sarazen didn’t get to chip golf balls with a celebrity host like Jimmy Fallon. But there were newspapers everywhere and the Masters champion was pictured seemingly every day. Here he is on his farm milking his cow, Betty. There he is welcoming his newest calf, Miss Augusta. Look at him splashing out of sand at a makeshift bunker in a department store.
It was a big news when the great Joyce Wethered paid a visit to the U.S. and agreed to some golf matches with Sarazen. Paired with Collett Vare, Sarazen played against Wethered and Johnny Dawson in one match, then against Jesse Sweetser and Wethered in another.
As it is today, 90 years ago it was a big deal when the Masters champ revealed his schedule. No surprise, Sarazen went to Oakmont in early June and finished T-6 in the U.S. Open. Big surprise, in mid-June he said he wouldn’t play in the Open Championship at Muirfield; instead, Sarazen entered the Massachusetts Open at Oak Hill in Fitchburg, Mass.
It pretty much went as thousands of fans wanted it to go – Sarazen dominating. A second-round 66 lifted him to a seven-stroke lead. The 36-hole finale was for their pure enjoyment. “Playing his last two rounds with the micrometric precision of a golfing automation” is how W.A. Whitcomb of the Boston Globe started his story of Sarazen’s triumph by a whopping 14.
Though he would have a competitive presence for more years, Sarazen never won another major after that 1935 Masters, but forever he had the grandest of attitudes. “I don’t think the world or life owes me anything,” he once said.
He was being humble, because what he is owed is great respect for his place in the game. Celebrate all that McIlroy and a select few others have done, so long as you offer a toast to the first member of the club.
