On this day in 1951…
The U.S. and GB&I Ryder Cup teams took a break from competition at Pinehurst No. 2 to attend the No. 1-ranked Tennessee Vols vs. North Carolina Tar Heels football game in Chapel Hill.
Sam Snead’s American side led 3-1 after Friday’s opening foursomes session. Snead and Lloyd Mangrum dominated Scots Jimmy Adams and John Panton, winning 5 and 4. Ben Hogan and Jimmy Demaret matched that result against Fred Daly and Ken Bousfield, while Jack Burke Jr. and Clayton Haefner secured the first point in the leadoff match.
Saturday’s golf was canceled entirely for the football game, which Tennessee won 27-0. (The Vols would later claim the program’s first national championship that season, though it’s been disputed since they lost to Maryland in their bowl game.)
Snead skipped the football festivities, heading to Florence, South Carolina for a paid exhibition instead. Renowned London Sunday Times reporter Henry Longhurst joined nine of the 10 GB&I players in the press box at Kenan Memorial Stadium. The British contingent had initially protested the decision to cancel Saturday’s golf.
“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 football disruptions weren’t done yet. The following Saturday, play at the North and South Open was also scrapped to accommodate Duke’s home football game against Wake Forest in Durham.
The 1951 Ryder Cup drew about 6,000 spectators daily and 30 journalists. It’s worth noting that resort guests continued playing on Pinehurst Nos. 1, 3 and nine holes of No. 4 throughout the competition.
When the Ryder Cup resumed on Sunday, what followed was arguably the greatest comeback in match history. Skip Alexander, who had been severely injured in a plane crash just 14 months earlier, demolished Panton 8 and 7 in their 36-hole singles match. Panton was widely considered Europe’s best player that year.
The situation arose when U.S. team member Dutch Harrison fell ill in the cold weather. Snead approached Alexander, whose mangled hands had been permanently fixed into a golf grip by his surgeon, and asked simply, “Can you play?”
Alexander responded, “Yes, I can play.” Though he later admitted that if he were Snead, he’d have matched Hogan against Panton instead.
“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 in Ryder Cup play. The Americans won six of eight singles matches that Sunday, with Ed Oliver the only U.S. player to drop a match, and took their fifth straight Ryder Cup, 9.5-2.5. They’d win the next two matches as well, with that seven-match winning streak tied for the longest in event history.
