Despite his two major championships, he is probably most well known as the victim of
Gene Sarazen's famous
double eagle in the 1935 Augusta National Invitational (now known as the
Masters Tournament). The shot left the two players tied at the end of regulation and Sarazen went on to victory in a 36-hole playoff. This was Wood's fourth runner-up and third playoff loss in a major in just two years. In the
1933 British Open at
St Andrews,
Denny Shute had defeated Wood in another 36-hole playoff. In the spring of 1934, Wood was the runner up by a single shot to
Horton Smith at the
first Masters and later that year he was defeated on the 38th hole by
Paul Runyan in the
PGA Championship, then a
match play event. At the
1939 U.S. Open he birdied the 72nd hole and was again in a playoff, but this time
Byron Nelson was the winner, making Wood the first player to lose all four
major championships in extra holes.
Greg Norman is the only other player to suffer this fate. At age 39 in 1941, Wood finally beat his "jinx" in noteworthy fashion. He won the eighth
1941 Masters Tournament in April, its first wire-to-wire champion with rounds of 66-71-71-72=280 for a three-shot victory over runner-up
Byron Nelson. Two months later, he won the 45th
U.S. Open, held at
Colonial Country Club in
Fort Worth, Texas. His score of 284 (+4) was three strokes ahead of
Denny Shute, another on-course nemesis. This was the first time the winner of the Masters had won the U.S. Open in the same year for the first half of the
grand slam. Subsequent winners of the first two majors were
Ben Hogan (1951, 1953),
Arnold Palmer (1960),
Jack Nicklaus (1972),
Tiger Woods (2002), and
Jordan Spieth (2015). ==Death==