Golf Central

On this day in 1939, in Dallas, Texas, a future winner of six major titles and one of golf's greatest rags-to-riches stories, was born: Lee Buck Trevino.

Growing up poor in a Mexican-American family, Trevino started picking cotton at the age of five. Golf never entered his horizon until he got a job at age eight as a caddy at a local gollf course, and between caddying and working as a shoeshine boy, Trevino earned $30 a week.

But after work, Trevino honed his own game, using clubs that had been lost and left behind by paying members. By hitting 300 balls a day in his spare time, he was good enough to start hustling other golfers for money before, at age 17, the directionless youth joined the US Marines. Four years later, Trevino started working as a club pro in El Paso, Texas, and by 1967, at age 28, his game was finally ready for the PGA Tour. And what an arrival he made ...

In just his second season, Trevino won the US Open at Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y., joining an elite group of golfers whose first pro victory came in a major.

Trevino was on his way, going on to win another US Open, two British Opens and two PGA Championships. He never won at Augusta - he never liked the stuffy atmosphere of the Masters, perhaps due to his humble beginnings. But he carried on to win 27 times of the PGA Tour and 29 more on the senior circuit.

For the record, Trevino cashed in $9.8 million in his senior career after winning $3.4 million on the PGA circuit. What a rise for the former cotton picker who made $30 a week ...

He also developed a reputation as a jovial prankster, once chucking a rubber snake at a shocked Jack Nicklaus at the start of their 1971 playoff for the US Open title. "I played the tour in 1967 and told jokes and nobody laughed. Then I won the Open the next year, told the same jokes, and everybody laughed like hell ... I showed that a guy from across the tracks, a minority kid with no education from a very poor background, can make it." ...

It was also on this day, in 1973, that Trevino's old nemesis Nicklaus because the first player to cross the threshhold of $2 million in career earnings. And 20 years later, the USPGA made the disastrous decision to appoint Lanny Wadkins as the captain for the 1995 US Ryder Cup team ...

On December 1, 1982, just in time to hit the record store shelves for Christmas, a 24-year-old moonwalking Michael Jackson released his second solo album Thriller - which only became the biggest selling album of all time, with more than 104 million sold - on his way to becoming "The King of Pop" and one of entertainment's all-time weirdos ...

And on this day in 1943, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt joined hands in Tehran, making a joint declaration of solidarity against the Axis powers. In 1990, it was a linking of a different kind, as the last bit of rock wall separating the two halves of the Channel Tunnel were cut away, forever joining France and Britain by road and rail ...

So it's a freilekhn gebortstog!, as they say in Yiddish, to Allen Stewart Königsberg, otherwise known as the witty and paranoid film director Woody Allen (72), who was born in New York City today in 1935. And choruses of Happy Birthday go out to musicians Billy Paul (73), soul singer whose Me and Mrs Jones was No. 1 in '72; to Irish songsmith Gilbert O'Sullivan (61), known for sappy hits Alone Again (Naturally) and Clair; and John Densmore (63), who laid down all the drum tracks for the Doors.

It also would have been a birthday for balladeer Matt Monro, Born Free in London today in 1930, had he not joined the Great Crooners Upstairs in 1985.