English Edition

Jim English, one of Colorado’s greatest amateur golfers, holds court.

By Kate Meyers

Jim English thinks of life in terms of golf seasons. And at age 82, he’s had an amazing run of them. Dressed in khakis and a maroon V-neck over a white golf polo, his blue eyes twinkling, the retired insurance agent deflects praise about his impressive golf career. But the numbers speak for themselves: victories in no fewer than 90 events, including 14 state opens and amateurs; membership in the Colorado, Iowa and Nebraska golf halls of fame; qualifier in nine U.S. Opens; winner of the 1955 and 1964 Broadmoor Invitationals; and low amateur at the 1959 U.S. Open.

Ask English about these accomplishments, and he’ll tell you they came about by accident—specifically a detached retina he suffered while playing basketball as a teenager in Omaha, Neb.

“I got gouged in the right eye and had to give up contact sports,” he remembers. He turned to golf, although his 20/200 vision proved challenging. “I had to pace off all distances and learned to use the length of the flagstick and people’s shadows to judge putts,” he recalls of his days playing at Omaha’s Happy Hollow Club and the Omaha Field Club (as the Field Club of Omaha was then known).

His game blossomed in 1944 after he enlisted as a 17-year-old in the Army Air Corps’ aviation cadet program. Wanting to be a fighter pilot, he instead was assigned to become a physical training instructor at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Miss. He frontloaded his schedule so his daily sessions would all be over by noon, leaving him the rest of the day to play golf, often with officers and future PGA Tour star Julius Boros. 

While Boros would go on to earn a living on the links, winning three majors and 18 PGA Tour events, English returned to civilian life to pursue degrees in business and finance at Creighton University, where he captained the golf team and won the 1947 Nebraska Amateur championship. He simultaneously held the course record at the Omaha Field Club, Highland Country Club and Happy Hollow Club.

Happy Hollow became the site of English’s proudest golf moment when he won the 1950 Trans-Mississippi Match Play Tournament. He had the 36-hole event won after 26 holes, besting a Kansan who would become legendary in Colorado golf—he won’t say who out of respect for his dear friend—11 and 10. “He eagled the fist hole, a par five, and I birdied it, and I’m 1-down,” English recalls. “From then on everything went well for me and nothing went well for him. I think I was 8-under par for the 28 holes.”

Blessed with such talent, English contemplated turning professional around this time, but he’d recently married and already started a family that eventually would grow to include six daughters and five sons. Byron Nelson helped him make his decision. “In those days the pros got $500 to play in an exhibition during the week, and Byron needed to buy cows for his ranch,” English explains. The two competed four times in such matches, with English winning twice and tying Nelson once. “Byron told me that I could win money on tour, but he wasn’t sure I could win tournaments. He said that since I had a degree, I should stick with it and enjoy competing as an amateur. It was great advice.”  

Taking Nelson’s counsel, English spent 45 years in the insurance business, moving from Omaha to Red Oak, Iowa, and to Topeka, Kan., until hay fever and asthma prompted him to relocate in 1957 to the higher altitude of Denver. At every stop along the way, he became the state’s top amateur. In Colorado, he won the club championship at Columbine Country Club a record 13 times. Another example of his dominance: the 1961 State Stroke Play at Valley Country Club in which he outpaced the nearest finisher by 11 strokes. He earned five Colorado State Amateur championships, took home four Colorado Senior State championships and became the first amateur to win the Colorado Open Championship.

“They say Gary Longfellow was the only amateur to win it, but that was after the event moved to Hiwan (Golf Club) in 1964,” English explains. “In the late ’50s and early ’60s, the event was split between Lakewood Country Club and Green Gables country clubs. It attracted amateurs and professionals, and both Ralph Moore of The Denver Post and Dave Nelson of the Rocky Mountain News referred to the event as the Colorado Open, but there wasn’t the kind of publicity that the event got at Hiwan.” 

At the 1959 U.S. Open held at New York’s Winged Foot Golf Club, English became more than a local legend when he was low amateur in a field that included Jack Nicklaus and reigning U.S. Amateur champ Charlie Coe, whom Nicklaus would defeat a few months later at the U.S. Amateur at The Broadmoor. Finishing 17 shots behind eventual winner Billy Casper, English remembers spending three of his four tournament nights going to Broadway shows (Robert Preston in Music Man, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady).

The most pivotal hole, he recalls, was the 16th on that final round: “It’s a long par four that doglegs left with high trees all the way. I caught a wild drive up and over the trees and landed on one of the greens on the East Course, which, in those days, was not considered out-of-bounds. I hit a great four wood that rose over the trees and landed on the edge of the green, and then I chipped in for a 3, a most unlikely birdie. I should have had a 5, and those two shots ended up being the margin I finished ahead of Charlie.” 

Perhaps because they occurred so infrequently, English also remembers the losses.

“One of them rankles me to this day,” he says. “Well, actually two.”

In 1965 he had a four- or five-shot lead going into the final round of the Colorado State Stroke Play Tournament.

“That was the year of the flood in Colorado, and I spent the morning helping some friends dig swollen books out of bookcases. By the time I got to the course my hands were almost arthritic and Hale (Irwin) overtook me.” Then there was the State Amateur Match Play two years later, “I had the ball inside Larry McAtee on 26 of the 36 holes and lost the match 1-down. I must have three-putted five or six times.”

English recalls rounds with Nelson, Bobby Jones, Sam Snead and Gene Sarazen, as well as a single hole (number 9) at Cherry Hills with Dwight Eisenhower. A favorite story in his bag involves Arnold Palmer at the 1957 Kansas City Open:

“At that time you played the first and second round with the same person, then they re-paired by score. Because of similar scores, I got re-paired in the third and fourth round with Arnold Palmer and a veteran pro named Ted Kroll. So off we go. In those days Palmer hit everything with the draw. If you put a flagstick way to the right it was very difficult for him to get close. He liked the way I hit irons. I hit them very, very straight. He said, ‘I’m fighting this draw.’ And I watched him a little bit and then I looked at his clubs and I said, ‘You want a little advice on something?’ And he said, ‘Oh, heck yes…’ I told him, ‘You’ve got the wrong shaft on your irons.’

He had Wilson clubs, and he was playing a Rocket stiff shaft… So after we played, we went down to the practice tee. He hit my irons, and he was hitting them straighter, and I said, ‘Your shaft is giving too much.’ And he said, ‘My god…,’ and we went inside and we hear Palmer as he gets on the phone … I’ll never forget. The guy in charge of golf for Wilson was named Joe Wolfe, and he reaches him and we could just hear him around the corner, and he said, ‘God dammit, Wolfe, I got an amateur out here who knows more about your effin clubs than you guys.’ He was just giving him hell, and Joe promised him he’d have a new set of clubs at the next stop. The next spring, 1958, he wins his first Masters.”

Sitting in his Southeast Denver apartment 50 years later, English still laughs when he imitates the cursing Palmer. These days, he says he still follows the PGA Tour, and although the money made by even average tour players is staggering, he has no regrets about following Byron Nelson’s advice. He knows that during the 1950s and 1960s, only the best professional golfers would have been able to provide for 11 children (who, by the way, have given him 23 grandchildren and five great grandchildren).

He takes great pride in the fact that all five of his sons attended college on golf scholarships: two at the University of Colorado, and one each at the Air Force Academy, Stanford and Marquette. He gets quiet, though, when he pulls out a charm bracelet with several of his amateur medals, including the one from Winged Foot. He had it made for his wife, Margaret, who died of stomach cancer in 1972.

“Finest woman you’d ever want to meet in your life,” he reflects. He returns the bracelet to its drawer and places a white, rumpled golf hat atop his ring of white hair. “Golf really is the game of a lifetime,” he says quietly. “I’m just an old geezer golfer right now, but I’ve got five sons that play—and what a treat it still is to play with them.”

Contributing Editor Kate Meyers writes regularly for InStyle and Golf For Women.

More: Farewell to a Gentleman: Jim English, 1926-2016

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