Thread by @ajcdeane

This is the 33rd instalment of #deanehistory. It’s about sport and I promise that you don’t have to like sport to like it. Hat tip: Andrew MacAllister.

This is the story of a highest ever score. A score that will never, ever be beaten.

It is the story of Maurice Flitcroft.

Maurice had been an ice cream man. A shoe polish salesman. A gopher on a building site. A crane operator. But with all due respect to these roles, they were the warm up to his crowning achievement– his appearance in the qualifiers for the 1976 Open, the holiest of golfing holies.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that he had never played. He’d had a go in a field, & on a beach. He’d read a couple of articles. He had half a set of clubs, which is half a set more than me. But entering himself as a professional in the ultimate tournament was going some.

Amateurs had to have an established handicap, but professionals – until the Maurice Flitcroft rule was applied straight after the Open – did not. So he simply called himself a professional.

He was in. Remarkably, nobody seemed to notice that they’d never heard of him before.

And once he was in, he was in. He played the whole course at Royal Birkdale, with his half bag of mail order clubs. He went round… in 121.

This is not a good golf score. It is, in fact, 49 over par. It is the worst score in the history of the Open, by miles.

What a lad.

His fellow professionals did not see the funny side. In fact, many of them went bananas.

Didn't they realise this was the 1st time a good slice of the public had taken any interest in their game – and had a new hero in it?

(Plus, what does the word “Open” mean to you, anyway?)

In similarly grumpy vein, the Royal & Ancient banned him for life. Which seems a bit harsh. He could only improve from that round, after all – how were they to know that this was not the start of a magnificent career?

They also put in place new rules to ensure that “professional” actually means “professional.” Thus we can say with certainty that Maurice’s achievement shall be graven in tablets of stone for all time. The highest ever score, forever more.

The 1976 Open was graced by many first class golfers. A 19 year old Seve Ballesteros hit the scene. Many fine strokes were played. But for many – nay, for most – it is remembered for one thing. A chainsmoking crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness with chutzpah by the lorryload.

Maurice’s memoirs remain tragically unpublished (they include the gem of a claim from him that he would have done a lot better if he hadn’t left his best club in the car) but, Covid allowing, the long-awaited movie is out this year. If we still have cinemas.

I’ll watch it.