Tom Watson

Tom Watson is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on September 4, 1949 at Kansas City in Missouri. His full name is Thomas Sturges Watson, and he went to Stanford University. He took the Open Championship five times, in 1975, 1977, 1980, 1982 and 1983, the Masters in 1977 and 1981 and the U.S. Open in 1982, eight majors in all, and he won 39 times on the PGA Tour. He captained the United States side in the Ryder Cup in 1993 and again in 2014, and he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1988.

The first design work he had a hand in was The Links at Spanish Bay at Pebble Beach in California, which he laid out together with Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Frank “Sandy” Tatum and which opened in November 1987. By the account of the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) he has since designed more than a dozen courses around the world, among them The National Golf Club of Kansas City at Parkville in Missouri, Cassique at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, and the reworking of the Old Course at Ballybunion in Ireland. At Ballybunion he also carried out, with Graham Webster, a complete rebuilding of the Cashen course, which was renamed Watson Cashen after him. What he holds to in design is to take his cue from what the site itself offers, to work in a playfulness that stays in the memory, and to keep the course playable for golfers of every standard, so that it is one a player will want to come back to.

In Asia he designed and supervised the Tom Watson Golf Course at the Phoenix Seagaia Resort in Miyazaki, Japan. It opened in 1993, and the resort describes it as the only resort golf course in the world to carry Tom Watson’s name. At the neighbouring Phoenix Country Club, home of the Dunlop Phoenix Tournament, Watson won in 1980 and in 1997. The ASGCA also says that he is at work on projects in China. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Watson.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: B Wendell Jones（Flickr） / CC BY-SA 2.0