Golf Central

On this day, in 1996, 20-year-old Tiger Woods, making only his fifth pro start won the Las Vegas Invitational – his first win on the PGA Tour.
    Jack Nicklaus, the man Tiger is still chasing, said it best that day: “Now that he’s gotten rid of that burden of the first win, there could be no stopping him.”
    Only weeks before, Tiger had announced he was turning pro in Milwaukee to a $40m flurry of endorsement packages, saying “Hello, world” to the assembled press and flashing that now-so famous Tiger grin. But there was no guarantee that Woods would do well enough on the Tour to earn his card, or avoid a trip to PGA Tour Qualifying School. For a majority of golf’s pundits, it all smacked of too much, too soon.
    Las Vegas fixed all of that. Storming back with a 64 in the final round, Tiger showed for the first time his unique ability to scare the bejeezus out of older, wiser heads – and when Davis Love III, then one of the top players in the world, faltered in the stretch, Tiger was there to bounce and beat Love on the first playoff hole.
    Eleven years later, here’s Tiger’s tally today: 61 wins on the PGA Tour, 13 majors, and still clawing at Jack’s back.
    Also, on this day in 1928, Leo Diegel, a Michigan boy who had taken up a dodgy residence in Tijuana, Mexico, knocked off Al Espinosa 6 & 5 to capture the PGA Championship in Baltimore, Md. – stopping Walt Hagen’s run of titles in the event at four.
    On this day in 1927 the first “talkie” movie burst onto the scene when Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer” opened in Warner’s Theatre in New York City, prompting the last 80 years of people shushing others in cinemas worldwide.
    It wasn’t such a great day in 1981 for Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was gunned down with a host of other diplomats and dignitaries by machine gun-toting assassins, sparking US pres Ronnie Reagan to claim that mankind had “lost a champion of peace.” Nor was it such a hot day for hippies, for on this day in 1966 the US government made LSD an illegal drug. The trippy thing is a lot of people still ignore this law.
    So it’s Joyeux Anniversaire!, as they say in Gay Paree, to Hawaiian LPGA-er Pam Kometani (43) and PGA Tour grinder Bob May (39), who lost the 2000 PGA Championship in a playoff to – you guessed it – Tiger Woods. And it’s balloons and cake for dishy Swedish Bond girl Britt Ekland (65); West Indies-baiting South Africa-born former England cricket skipper Tony Greig (61); Middlesbrough’s Aussie ‘keeper Mark Schwarzer (35); hunky period-role Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd (34); and former Fulham football fave Sylvain “Monica” Legwinski, also 34, at Ipswich Town.
    It also would have been the 30th birthday of dashing Frenchy fighter pilot Roland Garros, had he not been shot down in flames over Vouziers, Ardennes the day before 1918, quite literally going down in a blaze of glory. But he still had a nice stadium and a major tennis championship named after him, so it’s not all bad after all. Repos dans la paix.