Harry Vardon

Harry Vardon was a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on May 9, 1870 at Grouville on Jersey in the Channel Islands. He learned the game as a boy caddying at Royal Jersey, and in 1890 became greenkeeper at Studley Royal Golf Club in Yorkshire. He was then professional at Bury Golf Club before taking the post of professional at Ganton Golf Club in 1896. In that same year he won The Open Championship for the first time, and with further wins in 1898, 1899, 1903, 1911 and 1914 he took it six times in all. Six Open titles remains a record that has never been beaten.

In 1900 he toured the United States and Canada, playing more than ninety matches, and closed the tour by winning the U.S. Open. At the U.S. Open of 1913 he lost the play-off to the twenty-year-old Francis Ouimet and finished second, and in 1920, at the age of fifty, he tied for second there again. He won 48 times as a professional. With James Braid and J. H. Taylor he was known as the Great Triumvirate, and from the middle of the 1890s to the middle of the 1910s the three of them stood at the centre of the game. He is remembered for popularising the overlapping grip, in which the fingers of the two hands interlace, and that grip is still called the Vardon grip today. After he contracted tuberculosis in 1903 his health troubled him for the rest of his life.

Alongside his playing career he designed courses across Britain. Woodhall Spa Golf Club in England asked him to lay out an eighteen-hole course, and he visited the site in January 1903. That course was later worked on by Harry Colt and by Stafford Vere Hotchkin, and it is the Hotchkin Course of today. In July 1908 Little Aston Golf Club in England asked him to build their course, and Colt afterwards reworked the bunkering and other features. Llandrindod Wells Golf Club in Wales and Radcliffe-on-Trent Golf Club in England are also attributed to Vardon.

Early in the 1900s he moved to South Herts Golf Club in north London, where he was professional until his death. He died at Whetstone in London on March 20, 1937, at the age of 66. The PGA of America named the prize it gives to the player with the lowest scoring average of the year on the PGA Tour the Vardon Trophy. In 1974 he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame as one of its first members. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Harry Vardon.

See the other golf course architects here.