Joe Kirkwood, Sr.

Joe Kirkwood, Sr.
— Golfer —
Personal information
Full name Joseph Henry Kirkwood, Sr.
Born (1897-04-03)3 April 1897
Sydney, Australia
Died 29 October 1970(1970-10-29) (aged 73)
Burlington, Vermont, U.S.
Nationality  Australia
Career
Turned professional 1920
Former tour(s) PGA Tour
Professional wins 17
Number of wins by tour
PGA Tour 13
Other 4
Best results in major championships
Masters Tournament T29: 1936
U.S. Open T9: 1933
The Open Championship 4th/T4: 1923, 1927, 1934
PGA Championship T3: 1930

Joseph Henry Kirkwood, Sr. (3 April 1897 – 29 October 1970) was a professional golfer who is acknowledged as having put Australian golf on the world map.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Kirkwood left home at age ten to work on a sheep station in the Australian Outback, where his boss introduced him to the game of golf. He developed his skills to the point where he could compete in his country's most important golf tournaments. Kirkwood won the Australian Open in 1920 and in that year's New Zealand Open he astounded the golfing world with a victory that surpassed the previous tournament record score by twelve strokes.

Kirkwood's success led him to England and Europe where, in his first competition, he defeated the great Harry Vardon. He began playing on the professional tour in the United States in 1923, winning that year's Houston Invitational, and was the first Australian to win on what became the PGA Tour. In 1924, he was one of the top-ranked golfers on the tour with five victories, three of which were consecutive. Kirkwood remains co-holder of the record for the widest winning stroke margin in PGA Tour history, set at the 1924 Corpus Christi Open in Texas.[1] That year he also teamed up with Walter Hagen to begin travelling around the globe putting on golf and trick-shot exhibitions, newsreels of which were sent back home to be shown in cinemas around the U.S.

Kirkwood's best performance in a major championship was a third-place finish in the PGA Championship in 1930, a semifinalist in the match play competition. He finished fourth in the British Open on three separate occasions. In 1933, he won the Canadian Open. He was apparently the first-ever golfer to tee off from the howdah atop a domesticated elephant, which he first did (and was photographed doing) at Royal Calcutta Golf Club in Calcutta in 1937, and soon after in other clubs in India, and later in Africa.

Over his lifetime in golf, Kirkwood is credited with scoring twenty-nine holes-in-one, two of which came in the same round. In his later years, he retired to the mountain resort community of Stowe, Vermont in New England, where he was the local teaching pro at the Stowe Country Club. The club has held the Joe Kirkwood Memorial Golf Tournament annually since 1967. Notably, Kirkwood's skills remained at a high level for most of his life and at age fifty-one, in 1948 he and his son Joe Kirkwood, Jr. both made the cut at the U.S. Open, the first father and son to do so and a record tied only in 2004. When his son won the 1951 Blue Ribbon Open in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they became the third father-son winners in the history of the PGA Tour, which by 2010 still has only seven such pairs of winners. One of Kirkwood's most remarkable feats was playing a round of golf at 10-under-par 62, "breaking his age" at the age of sixty-three.

Kirkwood died at age 73 in 1970 in Burlington, Vermont. He was elected to the American Golf Hall of Fame at Foxburg, Pennsylvania. His autobiography, as told to Barbara Fey, was published posthumously in 1973 under the title Links of Life. In his honour, the annual winner of the Australian PGA Championship receives the Kirkwood Cup. He is buried in the West Branch Cemetery in Stowe.

Professional wins

PGA Tour wins (13)

Other wins

this list may be incomplete

Results in major championships

Tournament 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929
U.S. Open T33 T13 T12 T22 T45 DNP CUT T41 T19
The Open Championship T6 T20 4 DNP T14 T24 T4 DNP DNP
PGA Championship DNP DNP QF DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP R32
Tournament 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939
Masters Tournament NYF NYF NYF NYF DNP DNP T29 DNP DNP DNP
U.S. Open CUT DNP T23 T9 T12 DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP
The Open Championship DNP T26 DNP T14 T4 DNP DNP CUT DNP DNP
PGA Championship SF R32 R32 DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP
Tournament 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948
Masters Tournament DNP DNP DNP NT NT NT DNP DNP WD
U.S. Open DNP DNP NT NT NT NT T57 T23 T21
The Open Championship NT NT NT NT NT NT T8 DNP DNP
PGA Championship DNP DNP R16 NT DNP DNP DNP DNP DNP

NYF = Tournament not yet founded
NT = No tournament
DNP = Did not play
WD = Withdrew
CUT = missed the half-way cut
R32, R16, QF, SF = Round in which player lost in PGA Championship match play
"T" indicates a tie for a place
Yellow background for top-10

Summary

Tournament Wins 2nd 3rd Top-5 Top-10 Top-25 Events Cuts made
Masters Tournament 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1
U.S. Open 0 0 0 0 1 9 15 13
The Open Championship 0 0 0 3 5 9 11 10
PGA Championship 0 0 1 2 3 6 6 6
Totals 0 0 1 5 9 24 34 30

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kelley, Brent. "Largest Margin of Victory on the PGA Tour". About.com. Retrieved 16 January 2015.
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