I definitely wasn't anything special when I first started but I think I adapted quite quickly into racing and it became a bit better slowly. All of cadets, the first four years of karting, I only won one proper race, one! Which was the British Open Championship at PFI and I started 21st and I won.
At the British Open, I had my opportunities, but the ball just didn't want to go in the hole on the back nine.
To be able to hold all four majors - the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, PGA - all concurrently I think is the Grand Slam. But a lot of people have a different opinions on that. People think you have to win it in the same calendar year.
Wind is part of the British Open. It is an examination and it took me a long time to pass the examination. Eighty per cent of the fellows out there have not passed the test.
I can say I won a Senior British Open at Turnberry. I think that's the best thing about it, the whole week, was playing this course. It's a challenging, very tough course, under extreme weather. But you know, it's nice to win any event.
When the British Open is in Scotland, there's something special about it. And when it's at St. Andrews, it's even greater.
Any golfer worth his salt has to cross the sea and try to win the British Open.
I've always felt like I was going to win a British Open at St. Andrews. That place is suited for me.
When Ballesteros triumphed at the British Open in 1979, for his first major win, he hit so few fairways off the tee that he was often mistaken for a gallery marshall.
What did I want with prestige? The British Open paid the winner $600 in American money. A man would have to be two hundred years old at that rate to retire from golf.
I like the course, the history - everything about St. Andrews.
If you're going to be a player people will remember, you have to win the Open at St. Andrews.
As a kid, I remember John Daly bombing it around St. Andrews in 1995 to win the British Open, and people say we are similar in a lot of ways.
To me, the [British] Open is the tournament I would come to if I had to leave a month before and swim over.
Obviously it's my second senior event, and I'm tired obviously coming back from the British Open, from surgery, which was priority No. 1, did that successfully, and each week since the British Open I've felt in pretty good control of my golf game.
I'm a guy who loves my family, and we're probably only going to have a couple of more babies. I have the rest of my life to play the British Open.
The U.S. won the majors 29-11 in the 1980s. That's when Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were carrying the ball, and when Seve Ballesteros was becoming a Brit in the minds of English and Scottish journalists.
The most satisfying accomplishment for me was winning the British Open in 1996. But the most rewarding times were the times on the mini tours.
Vijay Singh won a playoff in 2004 at Whistling Straits after a final-round 76, which was the highest last round by the winner of any major since 1938, when Reg Whitcombe won the British Open with a 78 in a storm that blew down the exhibition tent at Sandwich.
I'd happily cover the British Open every year until St. Andrews slides into the sea or Scotland runs out of beer, whichever happens first.
I came back and in '63, I was at the British Open, trying to win my first British Open. And I had what I thought was a two-shot lead with two holes to play at Lytham. I remember it like it was yesterday. Anybody with a proper brain would have played the ball short of the hole. I didn't have a proper brain at the time. But you have to make that mistake to learn it.
Whenever I dream of playing a perfect round of golf, which I rarely do more than a dozen times a day, I picture myself on one of my favorite British Open-style links, and in particular the great courses of the west of Ireland, whose holes flow through naturally bunkered dunesland never far from the sight or sound of surf.
I went over before the British Open and played Valderrama thinking that I might make the team, might be a captain's pick. I made the effort to go over there.
My unbeaten record and the 10 British Open wins have not been equalled.
