Nine major titles and more than 150 wins worldwide tell one side of Gary Player’s story. A nine-year-old lying awake in an empty house tells the other. According to Player himself, the two are closely linked.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
The golf icon recently spoke on The Golfer’s Journal with Tom Coyne about how adversity shaped his life. The biggest blow came when he lost his mother.
“And I tell this to people: my life has been full of adversity, and I say this without hesitation. That’s why I became a world champion, because of it. And it’s hard at the time, but it’s a necessity. I repeat that: it’s a necessity to have a bad time in life. Adversity,” he said on the show.
Asked about his worst experience, Player went back to the loss of his mother.
“I think my mother died when I was nine. I adored my mother, and she suffered. She took me to school one day, a streetcar into town, walk across town, take bus 68 out of school, and I’d come home with a bus into town, walk across town, streetcar home, get home, and nobody there. Dark house. My father’s in a gold mine. My brother’s at war. My sister did boarding school. My mother’s dead. I’m nine. I lie in bed every night, on and off for two years, wishing I was dead.”
Player did not go into the circumstances of her death during the conversation. But he has spoken about his mother before. Her name was Muriel, and he has said in an earlier interview that she suffered from breast cancer. She was also well educated and insisted her son get a good education.
After losing her, Player had to manage much of his daily life on his own. He has said he cooked his own food, ironed his own clothes, and cried himself to sleep. The two years he mentions are particularly telling. It was during that period that he decided, “No, I’m going to be a champion at something.”
And the rest of his family had their own struggles. His father, Harry, worked in the gold mines and never made more than $200 a month. He was often away, which explains the dark, empty house Player described.
But Harry still found ways to support his son. He took out a bank loan to buy Gary’s first set of clubs and later borrowed again to fund his first overseas trip. Player has since said he owes his father everything.
His brother Ian was away too, having left to fight in World War II as a teenager, at 16 or 17 depending on the account. When Ian returned, he helped instill the physical discipline Gary would carry into his training. He joined the Natal Parks Board in 1952 and went on to spearhead Operation Rhino, credited with saving the white rhino from extinction. He died on November 30, 2014, aged 87.
With that background, Player’s determination to make something of himself becomes easier to understand. He played his first round of golf at 14 and turned professional at 17 in 1953. Small in stature, he trained hard, running hills and doing fingertip push-ups. By 1959, he had won the Open Championship at 23. He went on to collect nine major titles and 24 PGA Tour wins.
Looking back, Player’s story was never just about losing his mother. It was also about a father who made sacrifices for him, a brother who helped him train, and a childhood that forced him to grow up early. He has never shied away from acknowledging how difficult those years were. And he still believes they helped make him the champion he became.