Colin Stuart Montgomerie, OBE (born 23 June 1963) is a Scottish professional golfer often referred to by his nickname ‘Monty’. He has had one of the finest careers in European Tour history, having won a record eight Order of Merit titles including a streak of seven consecutively from 1993 to 1999. He is renowned also for both his extraordinary Ryder Cup performances as well as the dubious distinction of being one of the most accomplished players never have to won a major championship after finishing runner-up on five occasions.

Biography
Although Scottish by birth and ethnicity, he was raised in Yorkshire, England, where his father James was Managing Director of Fox’s Biscuits. Colin spent a number of years at the Ilkley Golf Club (Click here to read the article in full)

Donald J. Ross (November 23, 1872–April 26, 1948) was one of the most significant golf course designers in the history of the sport. He was born at Dornoch in Scotland, but spent most of his adult life in the United States.

Ross served an apprenticeship with Old Tom Morris in St Andrews before investing his life savings in a trip to the U.S. in 1899 at the suggestion of a Harvard professor named Robert Wilson, who found him his first job in the America at Oakley Country Club in Watertown, Massachusetts. In 1900 he was appointed as the golf professional at the Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, where he began his course design career and eventually designed four courses. He had a moderately successful playing career, winning three North and South Opens (1903, 1905, 1906) and two Massachusetts Opens (1905, 1911), and finishing fifth in the 1903 U.S. Open and eighth in the 1910 British Open. He later gave up playing and teaching to concentrate on course design, running a substantial practice with several assistants and summer offices in New England. His brother Alec won the 1907 U.S. Open.

Ross’s most famous designs are Pinehurst No. 2, Seminole, Oak Hill and Oakland Hills. He was involved in designing or redesigning around 600 courses. Some of his early work was in Virginia and includes Jefferson Lakeside Country Club. In some cases he didn’t even visit the site, but on the courses where he was most closely involved he displayed great attention to detail. Often he created challenging courses with very little earth moving; according to Jack Nicklaus, “His stamp as an architect was naturalness.” His most widely known trademark is the crowned or “turtleback” green, most famously seen on Pinehurst No. 2, though golf architecture writer Ron Whitten argued in Golf Digest in 2005 that the effect had become exaggerated compared to Ross’s intention because greenkeeping practices at Pinehurst had raised the centre of the greens.

Ross often created holes which invited run-up shots but had severe trouble at the back of the green, typically in the form of fallaway slopes. In the 1930s he revolutionized greenskeeping practices in the Southern United States when he oversaw the transition of the putting surfaces at Pinehurst No. 2 from oiled sand to Bermuda grass.

Ross was a founding member and first president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, which was formed at Pinehurst in 1947. He was admitted to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1977, a rare honour rarely awarded for anything other than playing success.

Ross is most closely compared to the other two leading architects of the early 20th century, Alister MacKenzie and A.W. Tillinghast. Many argue that Ross’s work does not consistently carry the same standard of quality as Mackenzie and Tillinghast’s works. Evidence supporting this arugment includes the fact that a much higher percentage of Ross’s courses have been altered, redesigned, or destroyed than Mackenzie and Tillinghast’s. However, Ross is unmatched in the quantity of work he completed.

Donald Ross designed courses
This is not a comprehensive list. It is sorted by country, state/province, city, and then course.

Tom Morris, Jr. (20 April 1851 – 25 December 1875) otherwise known as “Young Tom Morris” was one of the pioneers of professional golf.

He was born in “The Home of Golf”, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, and died on Christmas Day, 1875 at the age of twenty-four. His father, Old Tom Morris, was the greenskeeper of the St Andrews Links and had won four of the first eight Open Championships.

For many years it was thought on the basis of a baptismal certificate that Morris was born on 10 May, 1851, but in 2006 his birth certificate was discovered at New Register House in Edinburgh, Scotland. The announcement was made by Peter Lewis of the British Golf Museum on behalf of a friend who discovered the certificate while carrying out research for a book on the Morris family.

“Young Tom” won the Open Championship in 1868, 1869, 1870 and 1872. In 1868, he scored the first recorded hole in one of the Open Championships on the 8th hole at Prestwick. In 1869 his father finished second to him, a unique family occurrence in the Championship. Young Tom was allowed to keep the original Championship Belt after his hat-trick of victories, so the famous Claret Jug was purchased for the next tournament in 1872, and his became the first name to be engraved on it.

He toured Scotland and parts of England with fellow golfer David Strath playing exhibition matches.

In a match play in September 1875 between Old and Young Tom and Willie and Mungo Park, Young Tom received a telegram that his pregnant wife, Margaret Drinnen, had suddenly got very sick. Old Tom and Young Tom hurried home but when Young Tom got there his wife and newborn baby were dead. Young Tom never got over this, and he died on Christmas day the same year.

Thomas Mitchell “Tom” Morris, Sr. (16 June 1821 – 24 May 1908), otherwise known as Old Tom Morris, was one of the pioneers of professional golf. He was born in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, the “home of golf” and location of the St Andrews Links and died there as well. His son Tom Morris, Jr. (d. 1875), best-known as “Young Tom Morris”, was also a champion golfer.

Morris was an apprentice to Allan Robertson, generally regarded as the first professional golfer. He worked as a greenkeeper, clubmaker and course designer, as well as playing tournament golf. He came second in the first Open Championship in 1860, and won the following year. He followed this up with further victories in 1862, 1864 and 1867. He still holds records as the oldest winner of The Open Championship at 46. Also he was part of the only father/son couple being winner and runner-up.

Tom Morris Senior, photographed in the 1890sMorris played a role in designing courses across the British Isles, including Muirfield, Prestwick, Carnoustie, Warkworth in Northumberland, same year (1891) as Muirfield, Askernish links in South Uist and Rosapenna links in Ireland.

There is currently a road in St Andrews, Fife named after him. The 18th hole at St Andrews golf course is named after the golfer in memory of his commitment to the course, and to golf in general.

Tom Morris was also the father of modern Greens-Keeping. He introduced the concept of top-dressing greens and introduced many novel ideas on turf and course management, including actively managing hazards (in the past, bunkers and the like were largely left to their own devices, becoming truly “hazardous”). In course design he standardized the golf course length at 18 holes (St. Andrews had at one time been 23 holes), and introduced the concept of each nine holes returning to the club house. He also introduced the modern idea of placing hazards so that the golf ball could be routed around them. Before his times hazards were thought of as obstacles that either had to be carried or were there to punish a wayward ball.

Old Tom Morris held the record for largest margin of victory in a major championship (13 strokes) in the 1862 Open Championship, which stood until Tiger Woods won the 2000 U.S. Open by 15 strokes.

Caminito Tom Morris, a street in Windemere, a La Jolla, California, gated housing community, is named after him.

Sam Torrance (born 24 August 1953) is a Scottish golfer who was one of the leading players on the European Tour from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s and was the winning non-playing captain of the European Ryder Cup team in 2002.

Torrance turned professional at sixteen and joined the European Tour at seventeen. He achieved his first professional win in 1972 and his first European Tour win in 1976. He won twenty-one times on the European Tour; only fellow Scot Colin Montgomerie has accumulated more European Tour titles without winning one of golf’s four major championships. His best finish on the European Tour Order of Merit was second, which he achieved in 1984 and 1995. In total he finished in the top ten on the list ten times. In 2003 Torrance became eligible to play in senior tournaments and he picked up his first win on the European Seniors Tour in 2004. He topped the European Seniors Tour’s Order of Merit in both 2005 and 2006.

Torrance played for Europe in the Ryder Cup eight times. In 1985 he sank the winning putt which deprived the Americans of the trophy for the first time in twenty-eight years. Seventeen years later he was the non-playing captain on the European team which won the 2002 Cup at The Belfry. This made him the second European Captain to sink the winning putt and Captain a winning team at separate Ryder Cups, after Seve Ballesteros in 1987 (as a player) and 1997 (as Captain).

Torrance married English actress Suzanne Danielle in 1988. He was awarded an MBE in 1996 for services to golf and an OBE in the 2003 New Year Honours List for his captaincy of Europe’s Ryder Cup team.

European Tour wins (21)
1976 (2) Piccadilly Medal, Martini International
1981 (1) Carroll’s Irish Open
1982 (2) Benson & Hedges Spanish Open, Portuguese Open
1983 (2) Scandinavian Enterprise Open, Portuguese Open
1984 (3) Tunisian Open, Benson & Hedges International Open, Sanyo Open
1985 (1) Johnnie Walker Monte Carlo Open
1987 (1) Lancia Italian Open
1990 (1) Mercedes German Masters
1991 (1) Jersey European Airways Open
1993 (3) Kronenbourg Open, Heineken Open, Honda Open
1995 (3) Italian Open, Murphy’s Irish Open, Collingtree British Masters
1998 (1) Peugeot Open de France

Other wins (11)
1972 Radici Open (Italy), Under-25 Match Play Championship
1975 Zambian Open
1978 Scottish Professional Championship
1979 Colombian Open
1980 Australian PGA Championship, Scottish Professional Championship
1983 C* Scottish PGA Championship (Challenge Tour)
1985 Scottish Professional Championship
1991 Scottish Professional Championship
1993 Scottish Professional Championship
2006 Hassan II Golf Trophy

European Seniors Tour wins (9)
2004 (1) Travis Perkins Senior Masters
2005 (3) Irvine Whitlock Seniors Classic, De Vere PGA Seniors Championship, Bendinat London Seniors Masters
2006 (4) Sharp Italian Seniors Open, AIB Irish Seniors Open, PGA Seniors Championship, Scottish Seniors Open
2007 (1) Bendinat London Seniors Masters

Team appearances
Ryder Cup (representing Europe): 1981, 1983, 1985 (winners), 1987 (winners), 1989 (tied and retained trophy), 1991, 1993, 1995 (winners), 2002 (non-playing captain of winning team)
Alfred Dunhill Cup (representing Scotland): 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995 (winning team), 1999
World Cup (representing Scotland): 1976, 1978, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995
Four Tours World Championship: 1985, 1991 (winning captain)
Hennessy Cognac Cup: 1976 (winners), 1978 (winners), 1980 (winners), 1982 (winners), 1984
Double Diamond: 1973 (winners), 1976, 1977
UBS Cup: 2001, 2002, 2003