Golf Central

On this day in 1925, the Oscar-winning actor Jack Lemmon was born in an elevator in a Newton, Massachusetts hospital, and went on to a lifetime of success in Hollywood and frustration at Pebble Beach.

Lemmon's name will forever be linked to the PGA Tour's annual celebrity-fest on the Monterey Peninsula just like Bing Crosby, the tournament's first host, whose legendary parties gave the tournament (now the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am) its nickname of "The Clambake." And Lemmon was beloved by golf fans who could see themselves in the star's hapless game: The actor was an avid but fairly awful golfer ...

But his struggles at Pebble Beach never deterred his enthusiasm. Lemmon once said of the Clambake: "This is the best tournament in the world. I've played them all and this is the best." The fact that Lemmon usually celebrated his birthday around tournament time added to the party atmosphere.

And he played it often: Lemmon tried unsuccessfully for 33 years the make the cut at Pebble Beach with his pro partners and always failed. Almost cruelly, in 1998 Lemmon and Peter Jacobsen were on the verge of making the cut, but rain cancelled the pro-am portion of the event.

Lemmon, who won his Best Actor Oscar in 1973 for Save The Tiger and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1955 for Mister Roberts, died at age 76 in Los Angeles. Quite charitably listed as a 17-handicapper, Lemmon never made the cut at the Clambake but always kept the galleries happy. Jacobsen recalled Lemmon's love for Pebble: "We'd go out there and we'd be out in the worst weather you could imagine - you know, all the terrible elements. And he was in heaven. Just as he is now."

It was an early trip to heaven on this day in 1587 for Mary, Queen of Scots, who was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle for her part in the plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I of England, her cousin. But it was a much better day for queens on this day in 1952, when Princess Elizabeth, proclaimed herself Queen Elizabeth II at St James's Palace in London ...

And on a truly bizarre note, it was on this morning in 1855 that "The Devil's Footprints" mysteriously appeared in south Devon ... the dead-straight hoof-like tracks in the light snow stretched for more than 100 miles from Exmouth to Teignmouth. Nobody knows to this day what caused the footprints, although suggestions have included hopping mice, kangaroos, and bizarre meteorological phenomena. Mass hysteria, or contagion, has also been blamed ...

And in 1904, at the Battle of Port Arthur, a surprise torpedo attack by Japanese destroyers against the Russian fleet in Manchuria kick-started the Russo-Japanese War. So the Japanese were old hands at the sneak-attack by the time of Pearl Harbour; the only difference was in 1905 the Japanese won that war, which ended in the Treaty of Portsmouth. ...

That said, it's qu ni sheng er kuai le, as they say in Mandarin Chinese, to the shaggy-haired singer of Mötley Crüe, Vince Neil (47); to the chain-smoking Bulgarian football great Hristo Stoichkov (42); to the pint-sized American actor Gary Coleman (40); and to the former Indian Test cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin (45), the graceful batsman whose ban from cricket in 2000 for match-fixing stopped him on 99 test caps.

It also would have been a birthday for "The Sweater Girl" actress Lana Turner (b. 1921), the beauty whose busty pin-ups made her a favourite of GIs in World War II but whose private life was full of tragedy and scandal, had the final scene not flickered out on her in 1995 ... 'Til tomorrow ...