Southpaws have a very poor record in the golf majors only Bob Charles has ever won one
Jon Henderson
When Phil Mickelson stands on the first tee at Augusta next week he should forget the statistics, which say, as a left-handed player, he’s got as much chance of winning the Masters as a weekend hacker.
No left-hander has ever won the Masters. In fact, the New Zealander Bob Charles is the only southpaw to have come first in any major with his play-off victory over Phil Rodgers in the 1963 Open championship at Royal Lytham. “The left-handed golfer is an abnormality, an irregularity, an anomaly,” says the American sportswriter Brad Herzog. “There have been more NBA [basketball] stars under six feet, more NFL [gridiron football] stars under 200 pounds, more NHL [ice hockey] stars with all of their teeth.”
Although the gap between the number of people who are left-handed and those who play the game that way round is closing, for some reason it is doing so only slowly. In the United States, where up to 15% of the population are left-handed, still only 8% of the 26,4-million golfers hit the ball from “the wrong side”. Callaway, the leading manufacturer of left-handed clubs in North America, reports that less than 4% of the estimated $800-million the company does in annual business is from the sale of left-handed clubs.
On the European tour, only three left-handers have ever won tournaments: Charles, Peter Dawson, who in 1977 became the first left-hander to play in the Ryder Cup, and the Australian Richard Green, whose victory in the 1997 Dubai Classic was the first on the tour by a port-sider for 23 years. Green and Nick O’Hern, another Australian, are the only left- handers on this year’s tour.
It seems the obstacle that the shortage of left-handed equipment once placed on playing the way round you wanted remarkably, the great Ben Hogan, a natural left-hander, was made to play right-handed for this reason has had a lingering effect even though this equipment is now far more widely available. The ambidextrous equipment needed for most other sports means left-handers have not been similarly held back elsewhere, witness the relatively high numbers of them in tennis and cricket.
Alex Hay, the golfing guru who commentates for BBC Television, remembers his days working as an apprentice for Ben Sayers, the club makers based in North Berwick. He joined the company in 1950 when club heads were carved from blocks of persimmon wood. “The club makers frowned when they were told to make up a left-handed set,” he says. “They were reluctant partly because they never looked correct. Everything was working upside- bloody-down. When you put it in the vice, it was the wrong way round. “And when you were a young pro setting up your shop, you were safe to stock up with a few sets of right-handers, but you only got the left ones to order because you didn’t want to have to sit and look at them all day. “Nowadays there are no excuses. Clubs are precision-made out of moulded metal and are far more available in the shops. This has helped tremendously towards overcoming the curse of being left-handed,” says Hay.
The problems presented by Augusta National are traditionally reckoned to be greater for even the most adept left-handers because of the way the course is set up. “The strongest way of moving a ball through the air is a right-to-left curve, which is what Tiger Woods is working on at the moment for Augusta,” says Hay. “The weakest way of moving a ball is to fade it, which is the left-to-right curve. “Now Phil Mickelson is going to stand in there the other way round and his strongest shot draws the wrong way, in other words he’s going to have to fade into a lot of these greens because it is a course that suits the ball moving right to left.”
But Hay adds that the faded shot does have some things on its side at Augusta: “It flies higher and drops softer, so while some may suggest it’s a disadvantage to be a left-hander there, there is a case for saying that you profit from fading it on to those fast greens. So, you never know, a left-hander might pull it off.”
And don’t watch just Mickelson, Hay advises, “watch the young Canadian Mike Weir, too. I think he’s outstanding.” Either could have those hackers believing that one day it could be them.
ENDS