Liege Lord Of Golf

They held another investiture in the British Isles last week. This one was for Tony, the First Tony of Jacklin, whose colors for the occasion were lavender and lilac. If not quite regal, they were the appropriate adornment. Muted hues of purple, the color of passion, they served as perfect coordinates to the smashing golf of their wearer.

By his victory in the British Open in the first week of his 25th year, Tony Jacklin became much more than a lavender and lilac "flash boy," the brash and anxious son of a lorry driver from Scunthorpe. He answered the hopes and dreams of a country that is all things passionate in its love of golf and that had waited 18 long and sorrow-filled years for one of its own to, as they say, buck up and repel the usurpers of its championship. The British had been grooming him certainly, preparing the title for him, and on Saturday at Royal Lytham and St. Annes on the brink of the Irish Sea finally it was his. Tony of the House of Jacklin. Liege Lord and Guardian of Golf. Yes, a prince. And that makes two of those in a row for England.

When he shot an immaculate 68-70-70-72—280 at Royal Lytham near Blackpool, Jacklin defeated par by four strokes and his closest rival among a select group of the finest golfers in the world by two. He also gave a solid thumping to those fates and furies that have had it in for Britons, and he became the first of his countrymen to win the 109-year-old championship since marvelous Max Faulkner, in his plus fours, turned back the foreigners in 1951.

Adding to the significance and glory of the occasion was the way Jacklin won—by resisting pressure. He achieved his victory on the third day, not the last, by scrambling guttily through what are perhaps the most severe and hazardous finishing holes this side of the moon without getting himself swallowed up by sand, blown down by wind or run over by a train. When he emerged, dashing Tony had command of the tournament, and indeed of all British golf, for a long time to come.

As anyone knows who has suffered claustrophobia on their fairways, English courses are born, not made. The 14th through 18th holes at Royal Lytham and St. Annes are a series of winding, dipping, scratching, curling and thoroughly baffling par-4s set—buried would be a better word—amid a wasteland of dense brush and mounds of gorse and scrub. They test a player's brain as much as his swing, and last week, if he could block out the wheezing snorts and honks of the railroad trains that kept screeching through the course every other bogey or so, he might find some way to negotiate this final stretch safely. Like, say, by picking up.

On Friday, having just tied the two early leaders, Bob Charles and Christy O'Connor, Jacklin stood on the 14th tee and surveyed the homestretch. Up ahead Billy Casper was dropping four strokes, U.S. Open champion Orville Moody was dropping five, and both were dropping out of the tournament. Behind, Charles and O'Connor were soon to lose three apiece. "If I must, I must," Jacklin said. "For England"—or something like that.

Jacklin began mildly with a par, and he had a fine birdie (at 16) in the middle of the torture. But on 15, again on 17 and finally on 18—while intermittently hacking and slicing his way through the wild scrub and high heather—he came out of serious danger with a trio of courageous bunker shots to salvage, of all things, a bogey, a bogey and a par. Atta way to charge, Tony.

Depending on one's point of view, this furious assault on the championship was a comedy of limited design or a piece of pop art, but it certainly provided Jacklin with the two-stroke lead he was never to relinquish.

The Open (which in Britain is the only name permitted for the tournament because, really now, chaps, what other Open is there?) was being contested for the fifth time at Royal Lytham and St. Annes. In 1926 Bobby Jones won the first of his three English titles there when he hit a miracle shot 175 yards from a blind position out of sand to set up a par on the 17th hole and beat Al Watrous. A plaque is in the bunker from which Jones played (you do not get a free drop if your ball stops near it) and his mashie is in the clubhouse. The most recent Royal Lytham championship, in 1963, has become notable partly because a lefthander, Charles, won and partly because Jack Nicklaus fumbled it away, his problem including one strange enemy: silence. Nicklaus came to the 18th tee on the final day with what he thought was a one-stroke lead. Actually, the quiet reserve of the British galleries failed to alert him to the fact that Charles and Phil Rodgers had both birdied 16. Nicklaus, playing too safely, bogeyed 18. He was off the course 15 minutes before he realized the pending playoff would not include him.

In seasons since, the British Open and its crowds have become more Americanized. As Nicklaus himself said last week after a spectacular shot, "Did you see that? One guy almost clapped."