The transformation of the [British] Open from a colonial relic into a modern sports event of global significance was largely the achievement of one man—Arnold Palmer. He was the “Pied Piper” who whistled up the other leading American players to cross the Atlantic, and he twice showed his countrymen how to win the world’s oldest golf championship. Paul Trow recalls a phenomenal performance at Troon exactly half a century ago.

When Arnold Palmer made his [British] Open debut in 1960 at St Andrews, amid considerable fanfare as this was the centenary edition of the world’s oldest golf championship, the “off message” Australian Kel Nagle beat him by a stroke. The 1962 Open at Troon, a dour, forbidding links hard by the Firth of Clyde on the western coast of Scotland, witnessed something of a role-reversal, with Palmer finishing first (for his sixth Major win) and the “on message” Nagle second.

This time, though, it wasn’t remotely close, and the real threat to Palmer’s supremacy turned out to be not the giant dunes, dense bushes and tangled whin grasses that menacingly frame every fairway at Troon, nor the constant whine of jet planes landing less than two miles away at Prestwick International Airport. Rather it was an unruly gallery that swarmed across the course in ever-increasing numbers on the final day when 36 holes were played.

Palmer, who earlier in the year had won The Masters and come up just short in the U.S. Open at Oakmont following a playoff with Jack Nicklaus, led Nagle by five going into the final round, and finished with a six-stroke victory. To underline the extent of the King’s superiority that week, Nagle finished a further seven shots ahead of the third-placed golfers, colorful American Phil Rodgers and combative Welshman Brian Huggett.

It was Palmer’s second straight win in the game’s oldest championship, following his success at Royal Birkdale the previous year, and his popularity with the spectators that week was such that the R&A were forced to introduce stricter crowd control measures at subsequent Opens. The roping-off of fairways and the fencing of course boundaries began a year later at Royal Lytham & St Annes, mainly because of the volume and physicality of support that Palmer had attracted at Troon.

It had been a long time since British golf fans got so worked up about their Open. Occasionally during the relatively recent past there had been exciting individual invaders from the U.S.—most notably Ben Hogan, who won in 1953, and Sam Snead, the 1946 winner. But the field at Troon in 1962 was the best in terms of foreign players since the days when Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, Walter Hagen and their contemporaries routinely made The Open an annual pilgrimage. “Truly the world championship of golf,” spouted one British newspaper with undisguised pride, and relief.

A good many of the visiting players felt, however, that they were competing on uneven terms. How, they asked, can you ever make a decent score with the wind tearing across the links and the fairways impossibly hard?

To this day, Troon, which became Royal Troon in 1978, the year of its centenary, is a strange course by American standards. The first six holes, which run alongside the Firth of Clyde, are flat and bordered by long, tough grass. But then the course, lengthened to 7,045 yards for the 1962 Open, turns inland over hilly dunes. The fairways were narrow, blotted with deep bunkers that look like moon craters and burned brown that year by a rare Scottish drought. On some parts of the course, indeed, it was possible to get a better lie in the rough than on the fairway. But in other places the rough was full of prickly bushes and spiny broom.

Many of the shots that had to be hit through or around these dangers were totally blind—for example, the second shot on the 9th was over a hump to an unseen green nestling on the edge of a trailer camp and the drive on the 10th had to be aimed over enormous dunes and between the towering poles supporting the approach lights to one of the airport’s runways. Then there was the distraction of the noise from the commuter trains on the 11th.

Gary Player had said earlier in the week that the last nine holes were “the most difficult in the world when the wind is blowing.” Later in the week the wind didn’t blow, but Player still couldn’t handle them. “There’s so much luck involved,” the 1961 U.S. Open champion Gene Littler, who ultimately missed the cut, observed one morning before starting a round. “You can watch two perfect drives go right down the middle of the fairway, and one will bounce into the rough, while the other will kick straight ahead and roll 50 yards.”

This sounds unfair, but the traditional British view is that a golf course should test a man’s fortune as well as his fortitude, and that over 72 holes the bad bounces and the good ones will even out amongst the players. Certainly, anyone who lets a bad bounce get them down is done for.

But seemingly well-struck approach shots that ended up in trouble bothered the visitors even more than the stray bounces. As can be the case on many British courses, the greens at Troon were hard and American pros, who were used to hitting their iron shots dead to the pin and watching them dig in and spin back to within a few feet, had trouble in adapting to the British technique of hitting short and letting the ball roll to the hole. In addition, it was almost impossible for American pros to impart their beloved backspin to the smaller ball that British golfers played as standard at the time (only 1.62 inches in diameter compared to the 1.68-inch version in the U.S.), even off the tight, sparse Troon fairways.

Just before he was due to tee off for the first qualifying round on the Monday, Palmer sneezed. He thought nothing of it at the time, but a short while later he felt sharp twinges in his hip and acute pains down his left leg. His stomach also was upset. The pains in his back and leg persisted as he played, and he went around the windswept links in an unimpressive 76.

Following a massage that night and the next morning from his wife, Winnie, Palmer kept himself wrapped in long underwear and returned to form with a 67 in the final qualifying round on the shorter, less demanding Lochgreen course. “It hurts,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s anything more than a little cold in my back.”

Winnie said: “I keep rubbing his back every day and it seems to feel better, but the pain comes back each time he sneezes. I think there’s some pollen in the air that keeps making him sneeze.”

On Tuesday night, as the qualifying rounds ended, there began seven blessed hours of rain that slightly softened Troon, and suppressed the pollen. Wednesday dawned warm and clear, the kind of day to give fresh heart to a man with an aching back.

It was obvious, as Palmer shot a first-round 71 that day and followed it up on Thursday with a 69 to lead Nagle by two strokes—with the rest nowhere, by the way—that he had met the physical challenge of his ailments and overcome them.

Yet at the halfway stage, he was still frustrated by his performance on the greens (echoes of the U.S. Open at Oakmont the previous month where his propensity for three-putting without question cost him the title). Winnie then performed her second good deed of the week when she told her husband she thought he was moving his head as he putted. He worked on the tip overnight and the result was nine one-putts in a course-record-breaking third round of 67 on the Friday morning.

But this tour de force of a Friday morning round didn’t start as planned. Nagle birdied the first two holes to pull level and on the 4th Palmer drove into a deep fairway bunker to fall one behind. Palmer tugged sternly at his white sweater, walked briskly to the 5th, a 210-yard par-3, and arrowed a fine long-iron shot 12 feet from the cup. After curling in that birdie putt, he birdied the 6th too and still led by one stroke through 10.

Measuring 485 yards, the par-5 11th required a carry of around 200 yards over a sea of gorse and heather from an elevated tee to an angled fairway that was scarcely 30 yards wide and full of dispiriting humps and valleys. On each side of the fairway was an abundance of whin, and along the entire right side lay a four-foot stone wall separating the course from the railway line. “The most dangerous hole I have ever seen,” Palmer concluded.

For his three rounds to that point, including his first qualifying round, Palmer had conservatively used a 1-iron for accuracy off the tee here and had been rewarded with two eagles and a birdie. At this point, though, he chose to gamble. He drove with a spoon (3-wood) and found the left center of the fairway. He followed it with a 2-iron that was on the pin all the way and appeared to run right up alongside the hole. Nagle at this moment hit one of his few really poor shots of the week, slicing a spoon into an apparently unplayable lie in the long grass next to the wall.

The fortunes of golf are such, however, that when Palmer arrived at his ball he found it had overrun the green and hidden itself in some long grass on the far side. Nagle, on the other hand, discovered he could extricate his ball. He played an excellent recovery shot to the green and salvaged what had at first seemed an impossible par.

Palmer was forced to play his chip cautiously out of the long grass, took two putts to get down and gained nothing for his attacking approach. Going down the 12th fairway, he released an enormous sigh and said: “The two best shots of my life, and the ball is covered with grass.” But he didn’t allow the disappointment to discourage him and he got down in two from a deep bunker in par at the 12th, then birdied 13, 15, 16 and 17 to finish with a five-shot lead over Nagle.

By the 11th hole in the final round that afternoon, Palmer had galloped 10 strokes clear and one of the wildest galleries in golf history was joyously stampeding with him. The day was the start of a Glasgow holiday and more than 15,000 Scots were swarming over the course, many having thriftily worked their way along the Firth beach and onto the course without paying for admission. “Please stay still—please,” Palmer begged the fans on one hole. “Please be quiet,” requested Nagle on another as Palmer lined up a putt.

Palmer had to fight his way through this mob on each fairway to reach his ball and it took a phalanx of policemen to usher him through to the 18th green, where the throng had already broken a clubhouse window. When Palmer finally made it, he staggered and stumbled in mock exhaustion, restoring some good humor to a crowd that had seemed on the verge of riot. He sank his birdie putt to finish with a six-stroke margin of victory over Nagle, the biggest in the championship since 1929.

“I’ve never played four rounds of golf like these in my whole life,” said Palmer. “Also, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any crowds like this one today. We had to wrestle with them the whole way.”

Certainly, Palmer’s four rounds—71-69-67-69 for a total of 276 (the R&A didn’t declare a par for Open courses in those days)—were among the best of his career and were predominantly achieved due to a mastery of the 1-iron tee shot into the heart of hogsback fairways as firm as an aircraft carrier’s deck. He also tied Hogan’s (then) low score in a major, in the 1948 U.S. Open at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, California.

Of the other prominent competitors: 50-year-old Snead, who only played in the Open five times, tied for sixth with Peter Thomson; Nicklaus tied for 34th, having carded a 10 at the 11th in the final round; and Player, uncharacteristically, missed the cut, although he won the PGA Championship the very next week at Aronimink.

At the time, Palmer was as popular as any golfer who had ever played the game, before or since, but, strangely, he never finished higher than seventh in The Open after this, and he won just one more Major—the 1964 Masters.

But in 1962, if a foreigner had to take away their Open title once again, the British public were more than delighted it should be Palmer.

The respect and admiration he received in the local press after this processional triumph was universal. Yet 50 years on, through the prism of two generations of time, it still seems best expressed by the words of Pat Ward-Thomas, the golf correspondent of the Guardian newspaper… “If one adds to [his] technical ability an active enquiring mind, that rare blend of immense self-confidence and true modesty, the ability to acquire concentration through a relaxed approach, and a truly formidable desire to win that is never outwardly aggressive, here is a remarkable man. For all the sum of his achievements in titles and money, Palmer remains a delightful, friendly human being who commands respect and affection.”