He’s a Grand Image of His Grandfather

You pick up the paper and you read the headline and you want to rub your eyes. “Tommy Armour Wins Golf Open,” it says.

Wait a minute! What’s going on here? What year is this?!

Tommy Armour wins golf open?! Gimme a break! What are we, caught in a time warp?!

Was Wiffy Cox second? How about Willie Goggin, how did he do? Was Ky Laffoon in the field? Sarazen? The Haig? Where was Denny Shute? Wild Bill Mehlhorn? Did Bobby Cruickshank make the cut?

Tell me, was Al Capone on hand? F. Scott Fitzgerald? The Great Gatsby? Flappers? George M. Cohan in the crowd?

You see, it’s a headline out of time and place. It’s like seeing a headline “Babe Ruth Homers Beat L.A. Dodgers.” Or, “Red Grange Runs Wild Against San Francisco 49ers.”

The name, Tommy Armour belongs to a different era. When an Armour is playing golf, Ruth should be at bat at Yankee Stadium, Grange in a backfield some place, Lindbergh on his way to Paris and Dempsey training for Tunney. It’s the Golden Age of Sport. Tilden is winning Wimbledon and the Four Horsemen are barnstorming through the Midwest.

Tommy Armour was one of the great names of that gaudy time. He was one of the great golfers of all time. He won a U.S. Open (1927), a PGA (1930), a British Open (1931), and the Canadian Open three times. He drank bathtub gin, danced the Charleston, fought in World War I and was known in the tabloid headlines as “The Silver Scot.”

So, is the Thomas Dickson Armour who won the Phoenix Open last month an impostor? A guy using a famous name the way prizefighters used to fight under the name of Young Corbett or Young Jack Dempsey?

No, this young man is as entitled to this famous name as the original. He is Thomas Dickson Armour III. The genes and the chromosomes are the same. So, some say, is the mid-iron game. Tommy’s grandson is carrying on the family business. And making a go of it.

This Armour wasn’t raised in the braes and burns or heather of the Highlands of Scotland. He was raised in the sand hills and neon copse of Las Vegas. His famous grandfather never saw him hold a club, sink a putt, never taught him a shot or the famous Armour grip. His dad was a career Air Force surgeon. His maternal grandmother was the original Tommy Armour’s first wife but, after they divorced and he remarried, the families grew apart. Young Tommy met his famous grandfather only once.

It’s kind of a pity because Tommy Armour I was one of the great golf teachers of all time. He used to sit under an umbrella down at Boca Raton and teach kings and commoners alike with the same sardonic impartiality.

Tommy Armour III was not motivated to play golf by any family tradition. He just found out he was good at it. His Dad, Tommy Armour Jr., was a scratch golfer but only a recreational one. Armours just seemed to gravitate toward golf courses the way salmon swam water ladders.

Not that Tommy III just woke up one morning with the ability to shoot a whole bunch of 65s. Golf doesn’t work that way.

Tommy spent seven years trying to tee it up with the big boys. He got his Q (qualifying) school card the first time in 1981, but he wasn’t ready. He lost it for non-performance. It took him seven years of trying to get it back.

He played in Europe in the meantime, honing his game against Order of Merit golfers in the UK and on the continent. When he got to Q school in 1987, he was ready. This time, he kept his card, winning $175,461 in 1988 and $185,018 last year. “Never mind the Phoenix Open,” he smiles. “That’s not pressure. The Q school, now that’s pressure!”

Golf is a game in which the opponent is yourself. And for a while, Tommy was overmatched. “I used to get down on myself,” he explained as he wound down a practice session for the Nissan Los Angeles Open at Riviera the other day. “I had to learn that a bad shot was not a bad round, that you had to put it out of your head. The only important shot was the one you were about to make. You can’t control the past, only the future.”

It is the history of our times that the descendants of famous men seldom scale ancestral heights. But Tommy Armour has never felt constrained to play wearing a mask or under an assumed name. “Maybe if I were the son of a famous player, I would feel the weight of it. But, actually, the name has helped me.”

He has helped the name, too. With a win at Phoenix and a second ($97,200) at San Diego, this Armour has won more than $250,000 this year, probably more in a month than his illustrious ancestor earned in his career.

Armour III turns part of it over to the Salvation Army “for their work with the homeless,” a charity in which he and his wife Helen, are most involved.

Is there a British Open, U.S. Open, PGA in the offing for this Armour? Will the Armours be a dynasty such as the Tudors or Hapsburgs or Hohenzollerns? “How about if I just try to win the L.A. Open first? Or even make the cut?” laughs Tommy Armour III.

Fair enough. But, if he keeps winning, he will stop being known as “the great Tommy Armour’s grandson.” The other one will be known as “the great Tommy Armour’s grandfather.”