When Johnny Ball returned from the Boer War with a scar on his cheek from the time he got shot while rescuing a friend trapped under a fallen horse in the midst of battle, his hometown of Hoylake turned out in massive numbers to greet their hero.
The people of Hoylake knew their favourite son well, knew that he was shy and modest and would be embarrassed by the fuss, but they were there for him anyway. They were always there. They were there when, in 1890, he returned as the first amateur, the first Englishman and, after 30 years of dominance, the first non-Scot to win The Open – or any major championship – at Prestwick.
“Tell your editor I can’t think of anything that readers would find interesting,” he told one newsman after breaking the Scottish monopoly. It was nonsense, but that was Johnny Ball. A humble champion who swerved the acclaim. Search the archives for quotes and you’ll come up painfully short. He played golf, he won tournaments, he farmed land. What he did very little of was talk.
The great golf writer, Bernard Darwin, wrote of him: “I have derived greater aesthetic and emotional pleasure from watching Mr Ball than from any other spectacle in any game.”
You might hear a lot of Ball in the coming week when The Open returns to a place he, more than anybody, helped put on the golfing map. No player in history has won as many amateur majors as Ball, nobody bar Bobby Jones has ever won a British Amateur and an Open in the same year. His legacy is everywhere.
In the beginning, his father’s hotel doubled as Royal Liverpool’s clubhouse. Perched on land that is now part of the course itself, young Johnny had a perfect view of the club’s development. He was there when Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris paid a visit for an exhibition. He learned from Jack Morris, Old Tom’s nephew and Hoylake’s first professional. He was hooked on the game as a kid.
With a graceful swing and a calm mind he went from a handicap of 36 to scratch in two years. He played in his first Open at the age of 16. In 1888 he won his first Amateur Championship title at Prestwick. In 1890 he won his second in his own place, Hoylake.
That was a storied time – 1890. He went to Prestwick to play in The Open against the big Scottish hitters – Willie Fernie, the 1882 champion, David Brown who won in 1886, Willie Park Jnr who won in 1887 and 1889. In the three-decade history of The Open, only 14 players had won and all of them were Scots. The closest anybody ever got to breaking that run was when Ball himself finished fifth as a teenager. Since then? Horace Hutchison from London finished in a share of 10th in 1887. Apart from that, it was just a sea of saltires.
There was a formidable field in 1890 and Ball beat the lot of them. He was a sensation, an amateur history-maker who routed the pros, but was deeply uncomfortable in his new-found reputation as the slayer of the Scots. He was the pioneer, the forerunner to his countrymen Harry Vardon and JH Taylor who lit up golf in his wake.
For English golf, it all began with Ball. He won his third British amateur at Royal St George’s in 1892 and won two more in 1894 and 1899, both tight matches, both tests of his mettle, the kind of thing that he loved more than anything. People said this kind of success couldn’t be done, but he did it.
He loved proving people wrong. On a dense and foggy day on the Wirral somebody in the club said it was impossible to play golf in such conditions. Ball begged to differ. He said that not only would he go around the championship course without losing a ball (which was painted black), he’d do it in fewer than 90 strokes in no more than two and a quarter hours. And he did it comfortably.
It wasn’t bravado, it was just the meeting of a test. The mental side of the game was always what fascinated him. When he did open his mouth to speak about golf often-times it was to criticise the introduction of the new equipment of the day, the era of the niblick, the equivalent of the modern-day 8 or 9-iron.
Ball always thought that there was no need for it and never carried one. He felt that any player worthy of the name should be able to adjust his grip on the weapons he had to play any shot that he needed to play. He was a traditionalist with imagination and skill.
And an unpredictability, too. He had a nice life in Hoylake at the turn of the century. Revered in the golf world, honest toil on the farm away from the golf course – all he ever wanted. To the surprise of everyone close to him, he volunteered for the Boer War in 1889. He was 38 when he became a trooper in the Denbighshire Yeomanry, parking his golf for three years.
His bravery should have been rewarded but he wasn’t interested in receiving honours when so many men around him had died. Instead, when it was time, he returned home, resumed golf and won a sixth British Amateur at St Andrews and a seventh at Hoylake. He was 45 by then. He’d turned 50 when he won his eighth at Westwood Ho! in Devon
That was In 1912. On his way home from Devon on the train, Ball suspected that a crowd was forming at Hoylake station to welcome him home, so he got off a stop early, walked down the beach and slipped into the family hotel without a soul noticing him.
When people asked where he got his low-key personality and his aversion to attention a story would be told about his father, John Snr.
He was playing Hoylake with three friends when he announced halfway round that he needed a short break to show face at a wedding. His playing partners asked whose wedding it was, “mine”, was the reply. Once the service was done, Ball went back to the 10th tee to finish his round, then rejoined his bride at the Royal Hotel.
Hoylake has seen many stories. In 1897, Harold Hilton won there as an amateur and remains the only Englishman to win The Open on his home course. In 1907 Arnaud Massy won while his wife was having a baby daughter who was given a middle-name of Hoylake. In 1913 JH Taylor won his fifth and final Open.
The place will be forever linked with Bobby Jones and his Grand Slam year of 1930 and Peter Thomson for making it three Opens in a row in 1956. Tiger Woods won there in a heatwave, Rory McIlory won there last time round.
Epic yarns, but Ball tops them. Boer War veteran, reluctant talker, champion golfer, one of the greatest amateur players of them all. Immortal.
