Frank Thomas

Notable Sports Figures
Lumpkin, Angela. Women’s Tennis: A Historical Documentary
of the Players and Their Game. New York:
Whitston Publishing Company, 1981.
Notable Black American Women, Book II. Detroit: Gale
Group, 1996.
Young, A. S. Negro Firsts in Sports. Chicago: Johnson
Publishing Company, Inc., 1963.
Periodicals
Liberti, Rita. “‘We Were Ladies, We Just Played Basketball
Like Boys’: African American Womanhood and
Competitive Basketball at Bennett College, 1928-
1942.” Journal of Sport History (Fall, 1999): 567.
Tom Watson
1949-
American golfer
Sketch by Eve M. B. Hermann
Tom Watson won eight major golf tournaments, including
five British Opens, and challenged Jack
Nicklaus for golf supremacy in the late 1970s. Regarded
as a failure under pressure in his early years, Watson silenced
critics by winning all major tournaments but the
PGA at least once. He was twice a Masters champion
and took the U.S. Open once.
“Beginning in 1977, Watson won six PGA Tour Player
of the Year awards, and he led the money list five times,”
Web Golf Village wrote. “Yet it was his head-to-head victories
against Nicklaus, ten years his senior, that cemented
him as a player for the ages.” After joining the Senior
PGA Tour, Watson atoned in part for his one Grand Slam
void, the PGA, by winning the Seniors’ version in 2001.
Quiet But Determined
Watson, nicknamed “Huckleberry Dillinger” while
growing up in Kansas City, was a capable all-around athlete.
His sporadic success at Stanford University hardly
foreshadowed a Hall of Fame career. His peers, however,
admired Watson’s work ethic when he turned pro. Part of
Watson’s growth progress included painful defeats, such
as the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck,
New York. Watson led by a stroke entering the
final round, but shot 79 and fell to fifth. The following
year, at Medinah, Illinois, Watson led the U.S. Open after
two rounds, but fizzled again. Legend Byron Nelson advised
Watson and later became his coach.
In 1975, Watson achieved his watershed victory, a
British Open playoff triumph that quelled doubts and
Tom Watson
Watson
paved the way for five British titles. (Watson is one of
the few Americans to have received honorary membership
to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, a
frequent British Open site.) Watson made birdie on the
last hole with a 20-foot putt that pulled him even with
Jack Newton, then defeated Newton by one stroke in an
18-hole playoff the following day.
“Young Tom Watson finally became a champion, a
new person and one hellacious player,” Dan Jenkins
wrote in Sports Illustrated. “After a lot of slightly
baroque things had happened on the becalmed, deroughed
and tranquilized beast of Carnoustie, it all came
down to a Sunday match between the 25-year-old Watson,
who admits he possibly thinks too much, and an
equally young Australian, Jack Newton, who admits he
drinks too much.”
“Holding together was not something Watson had
done so well in the past,” Jenkins wrote. Watson’s litmus
test was on No, 17, but this time he held his own, making
a necessary five-foot putt for par. “Tom rammed it
home as if it were a gimme. That would have been the
perfect spot for Watson to do what he had so often done
in the past—to miss, and start blowing another one.”
Nicklaus, and “The Shot”
Despite that British Open victory, Watson’s reputation
for hitting the wrong shot at the wrong time resurfaced.
“I choked plenty before I finally won,” Watson
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