Golf Central

On this day in 1861, in Hoylake, Merseyside, a future golf champion who would dominate British amateur golf the way Bobby Jones did in America was born.

John Ball Jr. was a bit of a latecomer to golf but after winning the British Amateur title in 1888, he became first Englishman to win The Open Championship, in 1890, after a succession of 14 Scotsmen, mostly from St Andrews and Musselburgh, had combined to win the 29 previous Opens.

The same year, Ball also captured the British Amateur title, and was the only man to hold both titles concurrently until Jones won the Grand Slam in 1930.

After that, the "Ball was Rolling", as the red-top Sun might have headlined had it been around in those days ... Ball went on to win the British Amateurs in 1892, '94, '99, 1907, '10, and '12. In the words of Donald Steele, the great golf historian, "No golfer ever came to be more of a legend in his own lifetime."

In his prime, the Merseysider was known for several quirks: Ball had a violent, slashing swing gripped mostly in his palms, and for refusing to carry a niblick, the equivalent of today's 8- or 9-iron, referring to the club as just "another bloody spade".

Quiet and shy, Ball nearly won the 100th British Amateur match of his career in 1927 aged 66, but came up just short of the milestone. He died in 1940 on his farm in north Wales, where he retired after his last British Amateur appearance. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1977 ...

It was also on this day in 1933, that little Paul Runyan won the Pasadena Open for his ninth win on the PGA Tour on the year. Runyan, nicknamed "Little Poison" because of his small stature and great short game, is one of only seven players to win nine or more times in a single year on the tour ...

On the historical front, on this day in 1814, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium, officially ending the oddly-named War of 1812. And in 1865, a gang of like-minded racist idiots, all veterans of the Confederate Army, formed a "private social club" in Pulaski, Tennessee that they called the Ku Klux Klan ...

And on this day in 1888, the great Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his left ear while having what is now thought to have been a seizure. Two years later, van Gogh took his own life at age 37. ...

On the lighter side, it was on this day in 1914 that amidst the carnage of the early year of the First World War, British and German troops laid down their weapons for "The Christmas Truce" in the region of Ypres, Belgium, sharing gifts, playing football and singing carols together - and inspiring a really bad Paul McCartney video for his Christmas tune Pipes of Peace ...

On December 24, 1974, the former UK minister John Stonehouse was found alive and perfectly well in Australia after faking his own suicide in Miami to cover up his failing business enterprises, and in 1997, the son of Cabinet minister Jack Straw was busted in a Daily Mirror sting by selling cannabis to a reporter in disguise. Straw's son William bounced back nicely, however, eventually becoming president of Oxford University's student union ...

So it's bouon anniversaithe!, as they say in Jerriais, to brainy and sexy number cruncher Carol Vorderman of Countdown fame (47); and to Caroline Aherne (44), the writer and actress of the Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family.

It's also musical birthdays to Lemmy (Ian Fraser Kilmister, 62), frontman of speed-metal behemoths Motörhead; folk-country star Bonnie "Prince" Billy (aka Will Oldham, 37); and swivel-hipped Puerto Rican heartthrob Ricky Martin, who is still Livin' La Vida Loca at age 36.

It also would have been a birthday for for the stunning green-eyed brunette starlet of the '40s and '50s Ava Gardner, former wife of Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, who went to the Big Wing Upstairs for Stunning Green-Eyed Brunette Starlets in 1990.