Byron Nelson

Byron Nelson was a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on February 4, 1912 near Waxahachie in Texas. His full name was John Byron Nelson Jr. When he was about eleven the family moved to Fort Worth, and he learned the game while caddying at Glen Garden Country Club. At fourteen, in the club’s caddie tournament, he beat the man who would become the great Ben Hogan by a single stroke after a nine-hole playoff. He turned professional in 1932, and took the Masters in 1937 and 1942, the U.S. Open in 1939 and the PGA Championship in 1940 and 1945, five majors in all. On the PGA Tour he won 52 times.

The season everyone remembers is 1945. That year he won eleven tournaments in a row and eighteen in all. In 1946, at 34, he stepped back from the front rank, bought a ranch at Roanoke in Texas and took up ranching. Through the 1960s and 1970s he worked as a commentator on televised golf, and he became a mentor to younger players such as Ken Venturi and Tom Watson. In 1968 he lent his name to the PGA Tour event then played in Dallas, which became the Byron Nelson Classic — the first tournament on the PGA Tour to be named after a professional golfer.

As a designer he laid out Preston Trail Golf Club, the course that hosted that tournament, together with the golf course architect Ralph Plummer. The event was played there from 1968 to 1982. TPC Las Colinas at Irving in Texas, which opened in 1983 and is now the course of The Ritz-Carlton Dallas, Las Colinas, was designed by the architect Jay Morrish on the advice of Nelson and Ben Crenshaw. The same tournament was held there until 2017.

He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974 and received the Bob Jones Award from the United States Golf Association (USGA) in the same year. In 1994 the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) gave him its Old Tom Morris Award, the highest honour the association bestows, and in 1997 he was given the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award. He died at Roanoke on September 26, 2006, at the age of 94, and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal that same year. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Byron Nelson.

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