By Mark Tallentire
Peter Thomson’s family has a special relationship with the British Open, and the son of the five-time champion was present for the 2023 tournament at Royal Liverpool last week.
Andrew Thomson was also at St Andrews last year to witness Cameron Smith’s victory, and this time at Hoylake he watched the resurgent Jason Day finish in an encouraging tie for second.
Andrew Thomson at Birkdale with the Dunlop Maxflis his father Peter Thomson won with at Lytham in 1958.
Apart from enjoying the golf, Thomson jnr is in the UK in a dual capacity: working for a golf magazine and keeping an ancient part of the game alive.
Thomson, who lives in Japan and is chairman of the Japan Hickory Association, has been taking time to play several courses – Royal Ashdown Forest, The Berkshire, Birkdale, Prestwick and Walton Heath – with the hickory-shaft clubs first used in the early part of the last century, which went out of fashion about 1930.
The hickory clubs have been sourced from a couple of collectors in Melbourne who hold stocks of 400 to 500 – and from country antique shops in Victoria where they occasionally turn up. He now has about 40 of them. In Melbourne, there are between 50 to 60 hickory players, and about the same number in Japan.
Thomson, a 10 handicapper, has a picture of his father – who passed away in 2018 at the age of 88 – celebrating his Royal Lytham win in 1958 with a hickory putter held aloft, the only one of the five Opens where he used it. He had always wondered what became of the club. The answer was in the picture.
Peter Thomson, holding the hickory putter, celebrates victory in the British Open in 1958.Credit: Reuters
“When we got to Lytham they showed me the Gradidge putter Dad used, and which he had given them to display,” Thomson said. “We had lunch and then went out and had a putt with it on the 18th. Dad said he started using it in the late ’50s, ‘Because it worked’.”
Last year, Thomson brought a jar of his late father’s ashes and sprinkled them on the 18th greens of the four courses where Peter was victorious: Royal Liverpool, Royal Birkdale, Royal Lytham and St Andrews. This time he dropped off one of his father’s branded drivers at Walton Heath in Surrey, the venue for next month’s Women’s British Open and a course where Peter won the News of the World Match Play championship three times.
“Last year, I played with a set of Dad’s Dunlop Maxfli clubs, which we think he used when he won the Open at Lytham in 1958,” he said. “I played Hoylake, Birkdale and Lytham with them, trying to imagine the shots he made.”
He picked them up at a memorabilia auction in Melbourne for $1200. The auctioneer found a logo beneath the grip with a “Claret Jug” imposed on a Union Jack and 54, 55, 56 written beneath it, the years Peter won his first three Opens.
Peter Thomson with the famous Claret Jug in 1958.Credit: Reuters
“The auctioneer said they believed they were Dad’s and I viewed them the day before,” he said. “Mum said she thought she remembered him giving a set to a charity auction. The irons had been regripped, but they are fine, but the six iron only goes as far as a modern eight.”
Peter Thomson, who moved on to the seniors tour and had his last tournament win in 1988, moved into the world of course design as his playing days wound down. He helped create more than 100 courses worldwide, but he kept in touch with the professional game and continued to play exhibitions and socially.
He also helped to coach Ian Baker-Finch, at one point a prospective son-in-law, who he thought had the right stuff to win an Open title (IBF did just that in 1991, also at Birkdale). He also gave a 12-year-old Adam Scott early inspiration when the youngster caddied for him at one of the courses he designed, Twin Waters on the Sunshine Coast, where Scott’s father was the professional.
“Dad always said, ‘If you want to win an Open, you have to learn how to par the last four holes’,” Andrew said.
That remains as true now as it did then. The British Opens of 1984 and 2012 are cases in point, when Baker-Finch and Scott both had one hand on the Claret Jug only to drop it emphatically.
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