It’s been an Olympics-centric year hereabouts, what with Great Britain
finishing a surprising fourth in the medal totals at the recently completed
Games in Beijing, with the city of London readying to play host in 2012, and
with efforts now afoot to secure the royal and ancient game a slot on the agenda
for 2016. And then there’s the latest arrival to the British Golf Museum
here in St. Andrews—a peripatetic little trophy known affectionately as the
Hitler Cup.
You see, back in 1936 when Berlin hosted the Summer Olympics,
Adolf Hitler envisioned a propaganda blitzkrieg for Germany. One of the Führer’s
strategies was to showcase his nation as an international golf power—this
despite the fact that Germany had fewer than 50 courses, none of them
particularly distinguished, and only a handful of his countrymen were capable of
breaking 80.
Since golf was not included on the Olympic roster, Hitler
organized a special tournament the week after the Games, inviting two-man teams
from 36 countries to compete for a prize that he personally donated—a brass
salver about 18 inches wide, inlaid with eight
amber disks and engraved with
the words: Golfpreis der Nationen, Gegeben von Führer und Reichskanzler (Golf
Prize of the Nations, Donated by the Führer and Chancellor).
The event was
held in the spa town of Baden-Baden, about 500 miles southwest of Berlin, at a
course that measured barely 4,500 yards with a par of 68. In the end, it came
down to a shootout among seven nations—Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany,
Holland, Hungary and Italy. (It’s unclear why the U.S. was not
involved—presumably Hitler, smarting from the Berlin heroics of Jesse Owens,
found a way to exclude the Yanks.)
The tournament took place over two 36-hole
days, with both players’ scores counting. On the first day, somewhat
astonishingly, the German pair surged to a five-stroke lead over England—282 to
287—with France another five strokes back. After the morning of the second day
Germany was still ahead, now by three strokes over England.
At that point,
high-ranking diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had been watching the action,
contacted his boss and said there would be a German victory. Elated, Hitler
summoned his chauffeur and set out for Baden-Baden to present the trophy
himself.
But the English pair—Tommy Thirsk and Arnold Bentley—had other
ideas. Thirsk, a tenacious Yorkshireman, had posted a course-record 65 in the
morning and he matched it in the afternoon, vaulting his team to a four-stroke
victory over France, as the Germans slumped to third place, 12 strokes behind.
Sensing the grim inevitability of the result, a red-faced von Ribbentrop
raced off by car and intercepted the Hitlermobile. When he heard the news, the
Führer was furious—he made an about face and headed back to Berlin.
Not
surprisingly, the Germans kept no records of the event, and for a while even the
trophy got lost. Originally, it was the property of the English Golf Union,
which had no permanent home. It was presented, for reasons unknown, to the
London-based Golfers Club.
Over the years the Golfers Club suffered hard
times, and eventually the club and its assets were sold to a Glaswegian named
Leonard Sculthorp, who moved the club to Scotland and into a small clubhouse
constructed just outside St. Andrews. But that didn’t work either and in 1996,
Sculthorp quietly folded the club and took all the club trophies to his family
home in Glasgow.
By this time, no one (except Sculthorp) knew what had
happened to the Hitler Cup. Indeed, its whereabouts became the subject of much
speculation in the British press, culminating in an article in the Daily
Telegraph headlined “Golfers’ Trophy that Upset Hitler Turns up in Glasgow.”
Sculthorp, a member of the New Club in St. Andrews, has now made his prized
possession available on loan to the British Golf Museum, that low-slung
sandstone building that sits directly behind the R&A clubhouse.
Thirsk
and Bentley may not have been Olympic gold medalists, but in turning back Hitler
on his home turf, their feat surely was something heroic.
