Biography

Willie Anderson - World Golf Hall of Fame:Year Inducted 1975             

Almost from the moment he stepped off the SS Pomeranian in New York in March of 1896, Willie Anderson threatened to become the first great golfer America had ever seen. At 17 he finished second in the national championship, at 18 he finished third. A year later he knocked on the door again, challenging the established names of the day before ending up back in fifth. Advert for The Scotsman Digital Archive                        

By then word had spread about this son of North Berwick. In his adopted land they didn't  so much wonder if Anderson would make the breakthrough in the US Open one day, for they had already seen enough to know he would. What they talked aboutinstead was how many of them he would win, how long his period of dominance would last before somebody came along to beat him. For a period, nobody did.                     

Myopia Hunt in Hamilton, Massachusetts is where Anderson took his first step into history. The Open of 1901 came down to a play-off between two Scots - Alex Smith, the eldest of five golfing brothers from Carnoustie, and Anderson, who had just turned 21. Standing on the 14th tee at Myopia, Smith led by five; the winner for sure. In the crowd, where betting in running was commonplace, odds of 50-1 were offered on Anderson, and as good as they knew he was, there were no takers. Smith was a strong character, immune to the dreaded choke, or so they thought. Anderson felt differently. "Gimme a smoke and I'll win it yet" he said, and that is precisely what he did.                       

 Anderson dragged on a cigarette on the 14th tee and then played golf from the heavens all the way home. By the time they headed to the 18th, Smith's head had turned to mince, his five-shot advantage slashed to just one, the intensity of Anderson's game proving too much for him. At the final hole, his composure gone, Smith sliced his second into high grass 40 yards from the green and put his third over a bank at the back. He chipped to four feet then missed the putt. Anderson made a steady par. Nobody thought it possible, but his first US Open had been won.                      

His second came two years later at Baltusrol when he held off David Brown of Musselburgh in another play-off. Brown was a slater with a story of his own. Known as "Deacon", he had won The British Open of 1886 when invited to make up the numbers. He had turned up black with slate dust and was made to have a bath before being lent a pair of the secretary's smart pants and top hat so he could play. In the play-off, Anderson stayed in his own world, hardly uttering a single word to Brown all day, and beat him by two shots.                 

Baltusrol was history in itself in that no golfer had ever won two US Opens before. In 1904, two became three at Glen View in Illinois when Anderson recovered from a slow start to hit the field with a closing round 72. In those days that was extraordinary golf. Anderson won by five shots. Three became four back at Myopia Hunt the year after that, and once again Alex Smith was his victim, smiling his way through a narrow defeat. In a country that was quickly falling in love with golf, Anderson should have been feted far and wide for having won three titles back-to-back and four overall, but he was not. He was respected but never loved. He was a champion but never the people's champion. Other transplanted Scots, most notably Smith, had that distinction.                       

Smith was a charismatic and warm character with a ready wit. He played for fun and he played fast, never letting losing bother him. In any case, teaching was his special forte. Some of the best early pros that America produced had Smith as a tutor. Anderson never went down that road. Though they were friends, Anderson was the total opposite to Smith. His was a strange, solitary life.                 

To this day, nobody has matched Anderson's record of three US Opens in a row and only three other men - Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus - have four titles to their name. Their deeds have been the subject of forensic analysis in books, much of it amounting to hero worship. Jones is immortalised in his home city of Atlanta and in the course he made possible at Augusta. Hogan is honoured widely in Dublin, Texas, the place of his birth, and the same can be said of Nicklaus in his native Ohio and far beyond.                    

None of that applies to Anderson. Not even in North Berwick is he remembered. Apart from in the minds of a few local historians he is a forgotten man. Walk the streets of their town and it is as if Willie Anderson, champion of America, never existed at all.              

TWO YOUNG GOLFERS CLIMBED on board the SS Pomeranian that spring morning of 1896, both of them Scottish and both leaving Glasgow for New York with precisely the same goal in life. At 23, Thomas Warrender was the senior man and a career as a top player was what he longed for in America. History has not recorded what became of him.All we know is that a few months after docking in his adopted land he played in the US Open, shot 97 and 93 and was never seen on a big stage again.                    

Though they almost certainly didn't know each other, Warrender was traveling with a 16-year-old boy out of North Berwick by the name of Willie Anderson. It has been written widely that Frank Slazenger, the sports equipment manufacturer, was involved in assisting Willie Anderson's passage to America, that he recognised talent when he saw it and felt the young man would do well in the States.                  

Anderson had been raised in the town opposite the Abbey church and was sent to Gullane to learn club making under the master craftsman Alex Aitken. But Anderson had no real intention of going all the way to America to make clubs or to keep greens as his father, Tom, had done at home. Simply going there to make up the numbers in their burgeoning pro game was not on the agenda either. We know this because even at that young age, Anderson was a driven soul, a cold, calculating character seemingly with no sense of humour and few real friends, with the Smith brothers, Alex and Willie, and his old school mate Fred McLeod some exceptions. But even they could not profess to know what was going on in Anderson's head all the time. He was, for the most part, introverted and anonymous. A loner, if you like.                          

Anderson's journey to America had been the trip of his nightmares. Whether this changed him as a person we don't know, but it can only have been harrowing for him. When the Pomeranian left Glasgow the ship had 97 passengers; when it arrived in America, 21 of them were dead, all victims of disease. Anderson made his way through the dead bodies when they docked in New York, a cold, biting day awaiting him with snow like America had never seen piled high on the ground.              

Anderson's early years in the States were unsettling. He hopped from club to club, from New Jersey to Wisconsin, from Massachusetts to New York, unable to bed-down in any one place for very long. As one writer put it, "he led the life of a gypsy". In 14 years he was professional at 10 different clubs the length and breadth of the country, and by moving around, Anderson's legend grew nationwide. Nobody had seen anything quite like The Silent Scot before. He was a solidly built man with muscular shoulders, shovels for hands and steel for nerves. And he had a temper.                 

At the 1901 US Open he ranted when told that golfers were not invited into the clubhouse to eat and were instead stuffed into the kitchen, like second-class citizens. "No, we're no goin' tae eat in the kitchen", he thundered. The players were eventually allowed to eat in a specially erected tent and in one swoop he had marked himself out as a man not be messed with, which was exactly as he was. On the course, though, no such emotion was ever displayed. He was methodical and precise; the first great champion and the first great grinder, too.                

McLeod, now also a Scot in America, grew up with him in North Berwick and once said that he had the best temperament of any golfer he had ever seen. McLeod was speaking from a position of some authority. He came to know Jones and Hogan in his time and he ranked Anderson as their equal. "When you played golf with him, you played golf," McLeod would say. "He would even tell you on the first tee: "We're the best of friends, but friendship ceases right here". When you played him if he was 1 up he wanted to be 2 up and if he was 2 up he wanted 3. If he beat you he was the nicest fellow in the world."                

Anderson's greatness was not just determined by his US Opens. Back then, the Western Open was regarded almost as highly at the Masters is now, the field every year packed with the country's top professionals. It was a major in everything but name and Anderson won four of those, too. In 1902, the gap-year between his Open triumphs, he shot 299 for 72 holes, a score that crushed all known records at the time.                            

Herbert Tweedie, a writer of the age, eulogised Anderson in print. "A splendid exposition of golf to be remembered, to be thought of, to be conjured over and finally to be put on the record shelf," he wrote. That was Anderson in his prime.                 

He won his last US Open in 1905 and his final Western in 1909. In 1910 he left his home in northern Florida and headed for a new job at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, where the Open would be played that June, but time was catching up on Willie Anderson. He shot 303 for the tournament and finished 11th, just out of the money.               

At that point of his life, Anderson's living was coming mostly from exhibition matches, good money being paid out to a man of his standing. In October 1910 he played three 36-hole games in five days in Pittsburgh and went home to Philadelphia complaining of headaches. He had scheduled another round of exhibitions for early November but those were appointments that Anderson would never keep.                

On October 25, two days after the last of his money matches in Pittsburgh, Anderson was dead. He was 31-years old. It is an eerie coincidence that, almost 90 years later, the life of another multiple US Open winner, Payne Stewart, would also come to a tragically premature end. Like Anderson, Stewart lost his life on October 25. It was reported in some quarters that Anderson died of arteriosclerosis, a fatal hardening of the arteries, and in other places it was said he suffered a brain tumour. On his death certificate, epilepsy is given as the official cause of death but there is another theory. "The suspicion exists that it (his death) might have been from something less socially acceptable," wrote golf historian Charles Price in the 1980s, "one theory having been that it was acute alcoholism". For nearly a hundred years it has been written that Willie Anderson drank himself into the grave.            

TO SAY THAT ANDERSON ENJOYED his liquor was probably putting it mildly but he was not alone in that. Professional golfers of his era were demon drinkers. When the Scottish player Fred Herd won the 1898 US Open, the tournament organisers would not present him with the championship trophy until he handed over a deposit in cash. They had concerns at the time that Herd would hock the cup for drinking money. "Well, there was this about Willie," said Tom Mercer, a fellow pro from the early 1900s. "If he didn't like a person, he couldn't pretend that he did. He was not what you would call a glad-hander. Yet he went the route with the rest, and probably his convivial habits had much to do with undermining his health and hastened his end." To say he was a hopeless drunk is stretching it, though that is the reputation he has and it may explain why generation after generation in North Berwick have failed to honour him.             

Mystery followed Anderson in death as it did throughout his 31 years on earth. Willie, it seems, was married once and fathered a child, a little girl about whom nobody knew anything. In the death notices no mention of a family was ever made, and when the PGA of America decided to induct him into their Hall of Fame they could find no surviving relatives to accept a plaque on his behalf. Instead, it was given to one of his many clubs, Onwentsia, and it now hangs on the wall of their grill-room. Years later, the World Golf Hall of Fame paid tribute to him, but again no-one connected to him could be found to accept the award. Gene Sarazen, the legendary player and a former caddie at one of Anderson's other clubs, Apawamis, received it on his behalf.               

The day after he died, Anderson was taken to Ivy Hill cemetery in Philadelphia for burial where, three years later, his father, Tom, would join him. Two years after that, following an undistinguished career as a pro golfer, Willie's youngest brother, Tom Jnr, would also be brought to Ivy Hill after being killed in a car crash at 29.            

Beside the grave of the Anderson men there is a statue, a large structure erected by the Eastern Professional Golfers Association that has a likeness for a golfer completing his follow-through. People stop and look sometimes. There, they can read a little about the life and times of a four-time US Open winner. The tragedy is that nowhere in his hometown can you do the same. All those victories, all those accolades, have been air-brushed out of history                  

Professional Majors:

U.S. Open: 1901, 1903, 1904, 1905

Other Significant Victories:  

                     
1899: Southern California Open
1902: Western Open1904: Western Open
1908: Western Open1909: Western Open.    

References'                
http://sport.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=422&id=674642005 
http://golf.about.com/od/golfersmen/p/willie_anderson.htm
http://www.wgv.com/hof/member.php?member=1017 
http://www.hickoksports.com/biograph/andrsnwi.shtml