Early Years and Amateur Career
Venturi was born in San Francisco, California. He learned to play golf at an early age, and developed his game at Harding Park Golf Course and other public courses in the area. In the early 1950s, Venturi was a pupil of Byron Nelson, and was also influenced by playing partner Ben Hogan. He won the California State Amateur Championship in 1951 and 1956, serving in the Army in Korea in the interim. Venturi first gained national attention in 1956 while still an amateur; he finished second in that year's Masters, one shot behind Jack Burke, Jr., after leading from the first round. Venturi shot a final-round 80 in very windy conditions, and relinquished a four-shot lead, which prevented him from winning outright and thus becoming the first amateur to do so in the history of The Masters. Years later it would be compared to Greg Norman's back nine collapse in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Ken Venturi
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years, amateur and/or career:
“Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children dont need parents full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently its your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (18991977)
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (18931993)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows whats good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)