There was a quite splendid irrelevant stat shown on the BBC last Saturday, just ahead of the Sheffield Wednesday v Newcastle United FA Cup third round match. Noting that both teams have a more glorious past than recent achievements (although Newcastle may rewrite that storyline this season), they unearthed the marvellous fact that when our monarch is a king, Newcastle are historically the second most successful team in England, with nine trophies (one behind Arsenal). Wednesday rank third equal, with Everton, on six. (It is an often overlooked facet of the late queen’s reign that European club football competitions only began after she was crowned.)
So, I thought, what happens when one looks at the Open Championship when it was played with a king rather than a queen to reign over us? The Open didn’t begin until the 23rd year of Queen Victoria’s reign, so the first time it was contested with a man installed at Buckingham Palace was in 1901, when Edward VII was king and James Braid won the Open at Muirfield.
In all, there were 40 championships played under the combined monarchies of Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI before the passing of the latter in February 1952, when Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne (albeit her coronation was not until the following year). The two World Wars meant there were 10 years during this period when there was no Open. The 40 championships in question produced 24 British winners, 13 Americans, two by a South African (Bobby Locke) and one by a Frenchman, Arnaud Massy, who remains the only man from that country to claim golf’s oldest title, to the chagrin in particular of Jean van de Velde. The king’s sequence concluded in 1951 with victory for Max Faulkner at Portrush. When the Open was next played there, in 2019, it preceded another hiatus: the 2020 Open was cancelled, in this case due to covid rather than armed conflict.
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And the 40 most recent Open Championships, in the second part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign? There have been 18 American winners, seven from GB&I, four from Australia, three from Ireland (two for Padraig Harrington and one for Shane Lowry), three from South Africa (two for Ernie Els and one for Louis Oosthuizen), two for Spain (Seve Ballesteros) and one each for Zimbabwe (Nick Price), Sweden (Henrik Stenson) and Italy (Francesco Molinari). Which demonstrates what, exactly? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But there is this.
Last year at St Andrews saw the staging of the 150th Open. By a quirk of whatever, 110 of those championships were played with a queen as our head of state. Make of that what you will also, but one thing is for sure: that statistic stands quite dramatically out of kilter with the way that women golfers in general have frequently been widely regarded by their equivalent menfolk during that same period.
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com plus you can read more by him on golf at robertgreengolf.com
