Gene Sarazen

Gene Sarazen was a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on February 27, 1902 at Harrison in New York State. He was born Eugenio Saraceni, into a family of Sicilian immigrants, and learned the game after taking up caddying at the age of ten. He won the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship in 1922, the PGA Championship again in 1923, the Open Championship and the U.S. Open in 1932, the PGA Championship once more in 1933 and the Masters in 1935. That made seven majors, and with them he became the first man to win all four of the game’s major championships, the career grand slam. On the PGA Tour he won 38 times. He played for the United States in six consecutive Ryder Cups from 1927 to 1937. Together with the amateur Bobby Jones, born in the same year, and with Walter Hagen, he was one of the players who defined golf in the 1920s.

At the 1932 Open Championship he put a sand wedge of his own devising into play for the first time and won with it. The club, with extra weight behind the sole to keep it from digging into the sand, is regarded as the origin of the modern sand wedge. At the 1935 Masters, on the 15th hole in the final round, the second shot he struck with a spoon, the equivalent of a 4-wood, went straight into the hole for a double eagle, an albatross. It drew him level at the top, and he won the play-off the following day. The bridge in front of the 15th green was named the Sarazen Bridge in 1955, twenty years after that stroke. From 1981 to 1999 he served as an honorary starter at the Masters alongside Byron Nelson and Sam Snead.

As a designer, Sunset Hill Golf Club at Brookfield in Connecticut is Sarazen’s work. It is a nine-hole public course, and the club’s own site says it was laid out in 1936 with Sarazen’s help. He built it to practise on while he was at his home in Brookfield, and from the end of the 1930s it was opened to the public as well. Late in life he took a hand in the design of Slammer & Squire at World Golf Village in St. Augustine, Florida, which opened in 1998. According to the club’s site the course is the work of three men, the architect Bobby Weed together with Sam Snead, known as the Slammer, and Sarazen, known as the Squire, and the name of the course comes from the two nicknames.

In 1992 he received the Bob Jones Award, given by the United States Golf Association (USGA) in recognition of sportsmanship, and in 1974 he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He died at Naples in Florida on May 13, 1999, at the age of 97. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Gene Sarazen.

See the other golf course architects here.