Despite its bevy of legends – Snead, Hogan, Nickalus, etc. – the PGA is short on tournaments named after players.
One of the two exceptions is the HP Byron Nelson Championship (HP, which will be held this weekend at the Four Seasons Resort and Club in Irving, Texas.
Byron Nelson himself is somewhat of an enigma, falling into the same category of the NFL’s Jim Brown or Major League Baseball’s Sandy Koufax.
In just 15 years of professional golf, he won 52 PGA tournaments, still good for sixth all-time. He also won five Majors – taking the Masters and the PGA Championship twice, and the US Open once.
His most famous records are the two that not even the likes of Tiger Woods can touch. In 1945, Nelson won 11 straight tournaments and 18 total. Even scarier than those numbers is the fact that he finished second at seven other tournaments.
Nelson was 33 during his record-breaking 1945 season. He officially retired from golf the following year to become a ranger, owing to his Texas roots. He continued to play a few tournaments here and there – and almost always showed up for The Masters, playing it 29 times and finishing in the Top 25 20 of those years.
He never left the sport completely, serving as first a coach and then a commentator, but he gave up playing full-time in the prime of his career, leaving the game to the likes of Hogan and Snead.
Nelson won the first tournament played in Dallas at what became his namesake in 1968. Back then it was known as the Texas Victory Open and he won the $2,000 prize with an 8-under 276.
The next year saw the name changed to the Dallas Open and Sam Snead took the trophy; it changed again to the Dallas Invitational in 1946, and Ben Hogan was the winner.
After an eight-year hiatus, the tournament returned in 1955 and has been played every year since except two.
Its most famous alumnus is Tom Watson, a former pupil of Watson’s, who won it four times four times in six years, including three straight times between 1978 and 1980. He almost made it four straight, but was defeated by Bruce Lietzke in a playoff.
In 1994, the tournament made history again with the first-ever six-player sudden-death playoff in the history of the PGA.
Nelson was a regular at the tournament after it took his namesake, up until the year of his death, in 2006. Perhaps even more impressive than the list of names who have won the event are the contributions the tournament makes in turn. The Byron Nelson is the leading fundraiser for charity on the PGA Tour, having raised more than $121 million to date.
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