Heroes of Golf: Harry Vardon
Golf's First Globetrotter

By Matt Sullivan
LINKS Magazine

The more triumphant Vardon became, the more utterly he routed his rivals, the more his style became admired. And when he was making victorious progresses up and down the country, 'Have you tried the Vardon grip?' was almost as common a greeting amongst golfers as 'Good morning.'"
--Bernard Darwin

Harry Vardon may not have invented the overlapping grip that is used by virtually all golfers everywhere, but his tremendous success popularized it immensely. Remarkably, this may not have been his greatest contribution to the game of golf.

True, folks all over the golfing globe may only associate Vardon with the grip they use. A smaller group knows of Vardon because of the astonishing playing record he compiled. Inevitably, over the past 10 years, as Tom Watson chased that elusive sixth British Open crown, we were reminded that only Vardon among all of history's greats had ever claimed the Claret jug six times.

Even fewer people are aware that in addition to his six British Open wins, Vardon was the British Open runner-up four times and finished in the top five on six other occasions. Between 1898 and 1903 he finished first three times and second three times. That adds up to 16 top-five finishes in a 21-year span. So dominant was Vardon in his heyday that he won 62 tournaments--in an era where there were only a handful of tournaments contested each year--and once won 14 events in a row.

Historians know Vardon as the strongest third of the Great Triumvirate, which consisted of he, J.H. Taylor and James Braid. The trio dominated the British Open for two decades in a fashion that will never be approached again.

From 1894 to 1914, there were only five years the British Open wasn't won by one of the Big Three. Vardon won six; Braid and Taylor five each. Three times they finished in the top three spots and never once did one of them fail to finish in the top three. They were so good that for the first time the public actually began paying attention to golfing records. They also played the role of the gentleman golfer to a tee, doing as much as anyone to vault the perception of golf professional as an honorable trade.

Nonetheless, while Vardon's prodigous accomplishments made him a hero in Britian, he wasn't satisfied with having that kind of an impact solely on one continent. While Vardon's legacy will always be his grip, he also pioneered golf travel. His three trailblazing tours of America--in 1900, 1913 and 1920--helped key a huge surge in popularity for the game in the U.S. If there hadn't been a Harry Vardon winning the 1900 U.S. Open; if there hadn't been a Harry Vardon losing a U.S. Open playoff in 1913 to Francis Ouimet; if there hadn't been a Harry Vardon nearly winning the 1920 U.S. Open at age 50, American golf may never have advanced much further than a curious pastime for the wealthy. Vardon's travels and travails from 1900 to 1920 energized the sport in America in a manner comparable to what Bobby Jones accomplished in the '20s and to what Arnold Palmer did in the '60s. He is not only a hero of British golf, but of American golf as well.

Those long sea voyages did provide Vardon time to chronicle his life and his methods in four books, entitled My Golfing Life, The Complete Golfer, How to Play Golf, and Progressive Golf.

Born the son of a gardener in Grouville, Isle of Jersey, England, in 1870, it began for Vardon like it did for young golfers everywhere. When Vardon was about seven, a course was constructed in his neighborhood and he and his brother Tom were drawn there by the promise of picking up some pocket change by caddieing.

Vardon wrote: "From that day a new feature entered our lives. As far as I can remember we did not think very much of this new game, but after carrying a few times we began to see the new possibilities in it."

A career in golf was perhaps the farthest thing from his mind until his younger brother Tom secured a club professional job at St. Anne's by the Sea and networked Harry into a similar position at Ripon shortly after his 20th birthday.

Despite his gift, there were periods of his life when Vardon played golf once a year and could have easily done without even that. He had been preparing to follow his father's footsteps into gardening and in his late teens was apprenticed to a retired army officer. They enjoyed a casual round of golf together and despite Harry's lackadaisical approach to the game, his talent was evident. His employer offered him some prophetic advice.

"Harry, my boy, never give up your golf, it may be useful to you someday." Vardon was self-taught for a variety of reasons, perhaps the biggest of which was that he wasn't all that interested in improving.

"I never had a lesson in my life," he wrote. "For one thing, there was no one to teach me and for another, I had made very little effort to seriously improve my golf. I had played more or less as other young golfers would play, just for the fun of the thing. But anything in the nature of attempting to think things out had not occured to me."

It wasn't just his grip that everyone coveted. There was a time when there was no higher praise to be lavished on a golfer than to have their swing mentioned in the same sentence as Vardon's. Vardon's swing was elegant, a thing of rhythm and grace.

"I cannot believe that anyone ever had or will have a greater genius for hitting a golf ball than Harry Vardon," wrote famed golf writer Bernard Darwin.

Vardon's strength may have been his mastery of the fairway wood. Historians marveled at his ability to hit a full brassie right at the pin.

"He was so accurate with those high-floating, quick-stopping brassie shots that he would put the ball as near the hole in two as his toiling, sweating adversaries would put their third, the chip," wrote Darwin. "What hope was there against such a man? In truth, in his great years, nobody had any real hope."

Vardon also brought a swing to the game that was all his own. The textbook swing at the time was the St. Andrews swing, a sweeping stroke with a wide arc and a closed stance. Vardon, a slight 5'9" and 150 pounds, used an open stance and an upright swing.

"There is some mystery as to why we Jersey players hit up on this method in preference to the other," he wrote. "Possibly it was that we just naturally took the club up to the top by the shortest route."

While many others were said to have used the overlapping grip before he did, Vardon always claimed it as his own invention.

"It differs materially from most others, and if I am asked to offer any excuse for it, I shall say that I adopted it only after a careful trial of all the other grips of which I had ever heard. This grip of mine is sounder in theory and easier in practice, tends to make a better stroke and secure a straighter ball, and that players who adopt it from the beginning will stand a much better chance of driving well at an early stage than if they went in for the old-fashioned two-V."

You'd be hard-pressed to name an American who had the impact on the game Vardon did in the U.S. during those years. The debt American golf owes to Harry Vardon is never more evident than in Ryder Cup years when the matches are held in England. On the eve of the matches, the American team makes a pilgrimage to his grave.

"As I look back on my third visit to the U.S., it is with a feeling of pride and satisfaction that I witnessed the enormous popularity which golf gained in that great country," he wrote. "In 1900, the game had been in its infancy. Now, in 1920, it was the national craze. The skills of the players, I might add, had increased commensurate with the game's popularity. I think in my three visits I helped sow the seeds of all this."

He was nearly as fascinated by American galleries as they were by him. "The Americans seemed to appreciate the way I hit my tee shots for carry," he wrote. "When they saw the ball driven high in this manner, it appeared to them as resembling a home run in their national sport, baseball. Their interest in how the different strokes were executed was quickly aroused, and it was almost laughable to hear the many heated arguments about how I achieved my results."

The journeys were rigorous, however, and filled with more competitive golf than anyone should have had to endure. He logged thousands of miles competing in professional events, exhibition matches and promoting Spalding's new ball, the Vardon Flyer. During his trip in 1920, Vardon spent 41 straight nights sleeping in a rail car. While he enjoyed tremendous success on each of the three tours, clearly they took a toll on his health and his golf. He was never quite the same after his trip in 1900, though he was still never anything less than great. The eyes of America were on his every move.

"The American golf reporters knew very little about the game of golf, but they made up for their lack of knowledge by their wonderful imaginations," he wrote. "It was amusing and a little alarming to open the morning newspaper and find huge headlines commenting on my arrival and giving accounts of exclusive interviews I had given. Maybe, in the excitement of arriving in a strange country, I did not remember everything I had said. However, if I said as much as they printed, I must have done a great deal of talking."

Vardon nearly collapsed after putting out to win the British Open by six strokes in 1903 and shortly after was diagnosed with tuberculosis and confined to a sanitarium. While he rebounded to play the following season, clearly his game would never be what it was in 1898, 1899 and 1900.

Darwin wrote: "There is, I take it, no doubt that he gave a wonderful stimulus to golf throughout the U.S., and there is very little doubt that he left just a little of the fine edge of his game behind him there. Great as he was for years afterwards, he was never again--and this is, I think, his own opinion--quite the same player, never quite so conquering and untiring and confident."

Prohibited from hitting a single golf ball while he recuperated, Vardon anxiously returned to competitive golf only to discover he would be confronted by innovation. The introduction of the rubber-cored ball somewhat diminished the advantage he'd always enjoyed of driving the ball with tremendous carry. The livelier ball also contributed to Vardon's putting woes and he mourned the passing of the gutta-percha frequently. The combination of that and the effect his illness had on his putting were simply too much to overcome.

Vardon's inability to convert from "gimme" range may have been the first documented case of the "yips."

"Perhaps I need not remind that my reputation as a holer-out is deplorable," he wrote. "How many short putts I have missed during the past fifteen or twenty years I should not like to estimate. They must number in the thousands. Once you lose your confidence near the hole, you are in a desperate plight, especially when you have a reputation to uphold and you know that a putt of two feet counts as much as the most difficult iron shot."

Vardon was the professional at South Herts Golf Club in Totteridge at the time of his death from cancer in 1937. He is remembered as an innovator, a champion, a world-traveler and, most of all, as a gentleman.