On this day in 1951…
The U.S. and GB&I Ryder Cup teams took a one-day break from the competition at Pinehurst No. 2 to attend the No. 1-ranked Tennessee Vols at North Carolina Tar Heels football game in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The Sam Snead-captained American side led 3-1 after that Friday’s opening session of foursomes. Snead teamed with Lloyd Mangrum to beat Scots Jimmy Adams and John Panton, 5 and 4. Ben Hogan and Jimmy Demaret won by the same result over Fred Daly and Ken Bousfield while Jack Burke Jr. and Clayton Haefner earned the other full point in the leadoff match.
No golf was played on Saturday because of the football game, which Tennessee won, 27-0. (The Vols would later that season claim the program’s first national championship, though it’s been disputed by some since they lost to Maryland in their bowl game.)
Snead was among those who skipped the game, instead traveling to Florence, South Carolina for a paid exhibition. Famed London Sunday Times reporter Henry Longhurst was among the U.K. journalists who joined nine of the 10 G&BI players, who initially protested the decision to cancel golf on Saturday, in the press box at Kenan Memorial Stadium.
“I simply don’t understand what is going on,” Longhurst wrote. “All I know is that I am doing OK as long as I holler, ‘To Hell with Tennessee.’”
Wrote another sportswriter, Desmond Hackett of the London Daily Express: “They tried to tell me that this was a tough-guy game, a piece of legalized mayhem that made bullfighting look sissy. No sir. Any professional rugby club in England could eliminate the heavily armored characters who ambled in and out of this game. The England men do not need the insurance policy of crash helmets and more padding than a horsehair couch. They wear extremely brief shorts and cotton shirts and in this rig I feel sure they could beat the long pants off these American huskies. That is merely my opinion, an opinion which I freely express because I shall be able to duck out of town.”
The following Saturday, play at the North and South Open was also scrapped, this time to accommodate Duke’s home football game against Wake Forest in Durham.
In total, about 6,000 spectators per day and 30 journalists attended the 1951 Ryder Cup, according to Pinehurst. And it happened while resort guests played on at Nos. 1, 3 and nine holes of No. 4.
When the Ryder Cup resumed on Sunday, taking place would be arguably the greatest comeback in match history as Skip Alexander, who had been severely injured in a plane crash about 14 months prior, won his 36-hole singles match, 8 and 7, over Panton, considered Europe’s best player that year.
U.S. teammate Dutch Harrison had gotten sick in the cold, and Snead went to Alexander, whose mangled hands had been permanently fixed into a golf grip by his surgeon, and asked, “Can you play?” Alexander responded, “Yes, I can play.” Though Alexander admitted that if he were Snead, he’d have matched Hogan up against Panton.
“I was all bandaged up; my hands were bleeding,” Alexander said. “I played John Panton, the Vardon Trophy winner, Order of Merit winner, leading money winner and everything. I’d never walked 36 holes before that, and it was a 36-hole match. So, I took off, and every time I played a hole, I wondered if I could play the next. But it worked out all right.”
At the time, Alexander’s victory marked the largest winning margin ever. The Americans would win six of the eight singles matches, with Ed Oliver the only U.S. player to drop a match that Sunday, and take their fifth straight Ryder Cup, 9.5-2.5. They’d go on to win each of the next two matches, too, with that seven-match winning streak tied for the longest in event history.
