-40%
"PGA Championship" Doug Sanders Hand Signed 3X5 Card Todd Mueller COA
$ 7.38
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Description
Up for auction"PGA Championship" Doug Sanders Hand Signed 3X5 Card.
This item is certified authentic by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-2478
George Douglas Sanders
(July 24, 1933 – April 12, 2020) was an American
professional golfer
who 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.
[4]
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 was the last amateur to win on the PGA Tour until
Scott Verplank
in 1985. 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 took 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
.
Sanders is remembered for an exceptionally short, flat golf swing — a consequence, it appears, of a painful neck condition that radically restricted his movements.
He was a member of the U.S.
Ryder Cup
team in
1967
, which won in
Houston
.