Golf Central

On this day in 1957, an all-round genial bloke and battler on the golf course who was long known as the best player never to win a major championship was born, in Goldsboro, North Carolina: Mark Francis O'Meara.

Growing up in Southern California and turning pro in 1980, O'Meara had forged a career as a frequent winner on the PGA Tour. From the mid 1980s to the late '90s, O'Meara was a consistent threat to win: Starting with a victory at the Greater Milwaukee Open in 1984, O'Meara chalked up 14 PGA Tour titles by 1998, and was the king of his era at Pebble Beach, where he won four times.

Despite all that, O'Meara celebrated his 41st birthday in 1998 with hair graying at the temples and no major championships. But what a year 1998 was to be: ...

O'Meara shed that "best player to not win a major" mantle in style: taking the 1998 Masters ahead of his new young friend Tiger Woods, the defending champion. Three months later, O'Meara struck again, capturing the Open Championship in a playoff at Royal Birkdale (home of this year's Open). In doing so, O'Meara managed to earn $1.7 million of his more than $14 million in career earnings in that single calendar year, and vaulted himself into the No. 2 position in the Official World Golf Rankings.

Along the way, O'Meara has also appeared on five US Ryder Cup teams and two Presidents Cup squads. He notched his last professional win, after battling injuries early in this decade, at the 2004 Dubai Desert Classic on the European Tour.

The secret to O'Meara's amazing 1998? He said: ''I finally realised I didn't have to play perfect golf to win a major. In the past, I put too much pressure on myself.'' Sounds easy. If that's the key, anyone can do it, right? ...

It was also on this day, in 1945, that the US Golf Association announced that it would not play any of its major championships that year, despite the fact that mounting Allied victories hinted at the fact that World War II would be over by year's end. And in a sign of respect, the PGA of America began offering free golf lessons to servicemen returning home from combat in Europe and the Pacific ...

And on this day in 1968, country legend Johnny Cash showed he had an impeccable sense of timing, reviving a flagging career by recording a live concert from Folsom Prison in California. The resulting release Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison is ranked at No. 88 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 most important albums of all time ...

That said, it's biba kumplianos!, as they say in Chamorros, to Edinburgh's own Stephen Hendry MBE (39), one of the greatest snooker players of modern times. Can it be so long ago that "The Golden Boy" became the youngest World Champion of snooker at age 21? Aye, it can ... and although Hendry hasn't won a world title since '99 he is still the world's eighth-ranked player ...

And it's a host of acting birthdays, to a cast led by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (47), who played Elaine on Seinfeld; to Baywatch babes Traci Bingham (40) and Nicole Eggert (36); and to Canterbury's own Orlando Bloom (31), of Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean fame.

It also would have been a birthday for deadpan American actor Robert Stack (b. 1919), longtime host of Unsolved Mysteries and who played crimefighter Eliot Ness from 1959-63, had he not learned he was not one of The Untouchables in 2003.'Til tomorrow ...