October 12, 2007
Adminstaff Small Business Classic
Hale S. Irwin (born June 3, 1945) is an American
professional golfer. He is one of the few players in
history to have won three U.S. Opens and was one of
the world's leading golfers for much of the 1970s
and 1980s. He is the uncle of Heath Irwin.
Irwin was born in Joplin, Missouri. He graduated
from the University of Colorado in 1967, where he
was a two-time All-Big Eight defensive back, as well
as an academic All-American in football. He won the
individual NCAA Division I Championship in golf in
1967 and turned professional the following year.
Irwin had 20 victories on the PGA Tour beginning
with the 1971 Sea Pines Heritage Classic and
finishing with the 1994 MCI Heritage Golf Classic,
and won prize money of just under six million
dollars. He also won two Piccadilly World Match Play
Championships at Wentworth in the 1970s. His
successes kept him ranked high among his peers - he
was ranked among the top five in McCormack's World
Golf Rankings in every year from 1975 to 1979,
inclusive. He ranked in the top-10 of the Official
World Golf Rankings for a few weeks in 1991.
Irwin played on five Ryder Cup teams: 1975, 1977,
1979, 1981, and 1991.
Irwin's first U.S. Open triumph came at Winged Foot
in 1974, and he added a second in 1979. The next
month, he came to the final round of the The Open
Championship with a two-shot lead, but was thwarted
in his attempt at an historic double by the
incredible recovery play of Severiano Ballesteros.
In 1983, Irwin had another close tilt at the Open,
but lost by a shot, having called a penalty on
himself in an early round for casually taking an
"air shot" over a short putt. He was rarely on
leaderboards from then for most of the rest of the
1980s, but enjoyed an incredible swansong in 1990,
capped by his third U.S. Open victory, which came in
a playoff against Mike Donald which Irwin had only
joined after holing an improbable 45-foot birdie
putt on the 72nd hole.
Irwin qualified to play on the over-50 Champions
Tour (formerly the Senior PGA Tour) in 1995 and has
enjoyed even greater success at this level than he
did on the PGA Tour. He has won 45 Champions Tour
titles and tops the all-time Champions Tour money
list with earnings of over USD $23 million. He was
the winner of the U.S. Senior Open in 1998 and 2000.
He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in
1992.
In 2000, Irwin was ranked as the 19th greatest
golfer of all time by Golf Digest magazine.
