Doug Sanders
| Doug Sanders | |
|---|---|
| Personal information | |
| Full name | George Douglas Sanders |
| Nickname | "Peacock of the Fairways" |
| Born |
July 24, 1933 Cedartown, Georgia |
| Nationality |
 United States
|
| Residence | Houston, Texas |
| Career | |
| College | University of Florida |
| Turned professional | 1956 |
| Former tour(s) |
PGA Tour Champions Tour |
| Professional wins | 24 |
| Number of wins by tour | |
| PGA Tour | 20 |
| PGA Tour Champions | 1 |
| Other | 3 |
| Best results in major championships |
|
| Masters Tournament | T4: 1966 |
| U.S. Open | T2: 1961 |
| The Open Championship | T2/2nd: 1966, 1970 |
| PGA Championship | T2: 1959 |
| U.S. Amateur | R64: 1956 |
| British Amateur | R256: 1956 |
George Douglas Sanders (born July 24, 1933) is a retired American professional golfer; he won 20 events on the PGA Tour and had four runner-up finishes at major championships.
Born into a poor family in Cedartown, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, Sanders was the fourth of five children and picked cotton as a teenager. The family home was near a nine-hole course and he was a self-taught golfer.
Sanders accepted an athletic scholarship to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he played for the Gators golf team in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) competition in 1955. In his single year as a Gator golfer, Sanders and the team won a Southeastern Conference (SEC) championship and earned a sixth-place finish at the NCAA championship tournament—the Gators' best national championship finish until that time. Sanders won the 1956 Canadian Open as an amateur—the only amateur ever to do so—and turned professional shortly thereafter.
Sanders had thirteen top-ten finishes in major championships, including four second-place finishes: 1959 PGA Championship, 1961 U.S. Open, 1966 and 1970 British Opens. In 1966, he became one of the few players in history to finish in the top ten of all four major championships in a single season, despite winning none of them. He earned unfortunate notoriety for taking four shots from just 74 yards as the leader playing the final hole of the 1970 British Open at St Andrews, missing a sidehill 3-foot (0.9 m) putt to win, then lost the resulting 18-hole playoff by a single stroke the next day to Jack Nicklaus. His final victory on tour came in June 1972 at the Kemper Open, one stroke ahead of runner-up Lee Trevino.
...
Wikipedia