World No. 1 Rory McIlroy’s club throwing incident during the second round of the WGC – Cadillac Championship rekindled memories of the late and fellow US Open champion Tommy Bolt.
Bolt, who died in 2008, was affectionately known as ‘Terrible Tempered Tommy’ and given his hot temper that usually resulted in the American tossing clubs.
Bolt won 15 tournaments on the PGA Tour from 1950 to 1965, playing against the likes of Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. After he turned 50, he won 12 more times in seniors competition, including the PGA Seniors Championship in 1969. (The PGA Seniors Tour, now known as the Champions Tour, had yet to be founded.) He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002.
Terrible Tempered Tommy Bolt – winner of the 1958 US Open.
Bolt was 6 feet tall and, in his prime, 165 pounds, with a jutting jaw, a country manner, an impeccable wardrobe and one of golf’s most envied strokes. But for all of his gifts and his triumphs, Bolt was notorious for his hot temper, one that drew warnings, reprimands, fines and suspensions.
The public came to know him as “Terrible Tempered Tommy” and “Thunder” Bolt. Stories mounted, apocryphal sounding but sworn to as true by those who were there, and legend-making in any event.
There was the time he tossed a driver into a canal in Miami, for example, and it sank so deeply a diver could not retrieve it. And the time he asked for a club recommendation during a particularly frustrating round, and his caddie suggested a 2-iron, a much-too-powerful club for the lie, because it was the only iron left in the bag.
In 1957, the PGA adopted the “Tommy Bolt rule” prohibiting the throwing of clubs. The day after it was passed, Bolt tossed a putter because he wanted to be the first one fined for breaking “his” rule.
Bolt later said that much of his ranting and club-throwing had been meant to entertain crowds, who had come to expect it. “It thrills crowds to see a guy suffer,” he told Golf Digest in 2002. “That’s why I threw clubs so often. They love to see golf get the better of someone.”
Bu he also acknowledged that his reputation for fury had hidden his skills and kept him in the shadow of Hogan and, especially, Snead, who was the darling of golf fans in the 1950s.
“I think I can hit a golf shot as well as the next man,” Bolt said in The Saturday Evening Post after winning the United States Open, “but do people come out to watch me hit golf shots, the way they do Ben Hogan and Sam Snead? No. They come out for one reason, and one reason only. They want to see me blow my top. And I’m sorry to say I’ve obliged them.”
* Story Associated Press.
