In the results for junior golfers published regularly in The Daily Telegraph in the early and mid-1960s, one name stood out. It had three syllables and five vowels among its 10 letters, and it sounded Dutch. It was nearly always at or near the top of any of the junior competitions, and just to make it even longer, it was followed by the name of his club, and this was not brief, either. All in all, the name Peter Oosterhuis (pronounced OOO-stir-house) of Dulwich & Sydenham Hill Golf Club was a mouthful to say and earned itself several lines in a single column of results set in a small typeface. It would have been all of a piece if at this time we had also known he was very big for his age, and that fully grown he would be nearly 6½ feet tall.
There was no telling then that this young giant would go on and achieve what he did. He played in the Walker Cup while still a schoolboy, turned professional and won the Harry Vardon Trophy as the leading player on the fledgling European Tour from 1971 to 1974 inclusive. These were the years of his pomp, when he came third in the 1973 Masters, having led after 54 holes, and second in the 1974 Open Championship. He also finished second in the 1982 Open.
Oosterhuis was a tiger playing for Great Britain and Ireland in the Ryder Cup. Competing for his country brought out the devil in him. He would smile at his opponents – be self-effacing and achingly polite – and then slip a stiletto between their third and fourth ribs. He won six and halved one of his nine Ryder Cup singles, beating, among others, Johnny Miller, Gene Littler and Arnold Palmer and halving with Lee Trevino at Muirfield in 1973. Before this match Trevino had apparently said to his teammates: “If I lose to Oosterhuis, I’ll drop my trousers.” The gentlemanly Oosterhuis said, laughing: “I am not sure the threat was ever carried out.”
Having made a successful transition from the U.K. to competing on the PGA Tour in the U.S., the man known universally as Oosty, once his playing career had ended, took a number of good club jobs on the East and West coasts of the U.S. and, briefly, just outside London. After all that, he forged a successful career as a golf analyst on television in Britain and the U.S. At a ceremony at Augusta Country Club on the eve of the 2016 Masters, he became the 49th honorary life member of the European Tour. And there was likely nobody in the room that night or in the world of golf who thought he did not deserve it. Oosty was the same in accepting this honor as he had been throughout his career: soberly dressed, impeccably polite, and liked by all. “Peter was unarguably our finest gentleman golfer,” said Ken Schofield, former executive director of the European Tour. “Today’s equivalent would be Justin Rose.”
Oosterhuis came from good middle-class stock. His father was a commodity broker in London dealing mainly in coffee. Peter and Gillian, his late sister who would go on and work at the European Tour for most of her life, lived comfortably in Dulwich, southeast London. Peter went to Dulwich College, which years before had educated P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.
He took up golf at about the age of 10.
“The family used to go blackberry picking on Dulwich and Sydenham Hill,” Oosterhuis said. “Trouble was, I used to eat all the blackberries I picked, so I was soon dismissed from that and I started to play golf instead. My mother was the golfer in the family. She had a handicap of 9 or 10. I had some lessons from Len Rowe, the pro at the club, and he remarked how I would hit the ball and then take a divot. He hadn’t seen any juniors do that.”
Rob Oosterhuis, one of Peter’s two sons, highlighted how focused on golf his father was. “When he had an issue with his game, he really worked to sort it out. By today’s standards, his approach would seem Neolithic. It’s a cliché, but in the modern pro game players can consult their instructor, a short-game teacher, a physical therapist, trainer, nutritionist, psychologist. Dad might have had the occasional instructor help him out, but for the most part he subscribed to the Hogan and Trevino philosophy of finding the answers in the dirt.”
For all of Oosterhuis’ fine performances, the suspicion is that he didn’t win as much as he should have when he went west. The 1981 Canadian Open is his sole victory on that side of the Atlantic after seven on the European Tour, three in South Africa and several elsewhere. “He was strong, methodical with a steely determination and he could not have won as much as he did without being a heckuva player,” said George O’Grady, the European Tour’s former chief executive. “But he had one bad shot in his locker, and that was the occasional drive over extra cover,” or a block.
Rob Oosterhuis remembers a conversation that he and his father had about this topic. “In an interview … about the best players never to win a major, player after player spoke about the rough breaks, regrets or charges by other players to win, but Dad was clear about his place in history,” Rob said. “He said, while winning would have been great, he was proud of his record and he didn’t feel a sense of loss. I wish everyone could leave everything on the course, field, court or pitch and feel proud, no matter what the results. What a great metaphor for life that would be.
“Perhaps my greatest takeaway from my dad is his constant state of equanimity. I remember him telling me when I was 8 or 9 that one of his primary assets as an athlete was not his ability to hit the ball well or chip and putt but rather his penchant for getting into trouble on the course and never wavering in his emotions. He clearly understood that this attribute was off-putting to his fellow competitors, who at his height, were looking for chinks in the armor on the mental front and could never find them.”
The second half of Oosterhuis’ career centered on his success as a broadcaster on television, first in Britain and then in the U.S. In this he was following in the footsteps of Henry Longhurst and Ben Wright. John Phillips, an executive producer with European Tour Productions, was the TV executive who hired Oosterhuis. “In those days any sportsman who retired, we were ’round there with a contract,” Phillips said. “It was very hit and miss, but it worked with Peter. He was considerate, very methodical and never skimped in his research. In a medium of two dimensions – sound and vision – you can’t be saying what is on the screen. He was very good at giving vignettes about players, pithy remarks that added to the picture.”
The late Renton Laidlaw and Oosterhuis were a partnership on Golf Channel from 1995 to 1997, and they hardly missed a beat. For Laidlaw, by far the more senior of the two, it was a rewarding experience. “I could not have asked for a better person with whom to work,” he said. “He was the absolute gentleman on the air. He could be critical but never cruel. He had no side to him. He was modest. We were a team. I often felt that if I started a sentence, he could finish it. That was how well we knew one another and how well we worked together. He had style both as a player and as a performer on TV.”
There is no happy end to this story. Oosterhuis’ broadcasting career in the U.S. – with CBS stalwarts such as Jim Nantz, the late Ken Venturi, Peter Kostis, Gary McCord and David Feherty – finished in 2015 when he announced that he had the early signs of Alzheimer’s. He and Ruth Ann, his second wife, were living in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the time, and the two of them faced up to this disease with equanimity. Oosterhuis lived for nine more years before dying of natural causes on May 2, one day before what would have been his 76th birthday.
That ceremony at Augusta Country Club in April 2016 proved one thing, however. Few more popular golfers have come out of the United Kingdom. Honorary life membership was no more than Peter Oosterhuis and his alphabet soup of a name deserved.