Roll It Back Productions

Twenty-one Open Championships between 1894 and 1914. Three guys won sixteen of them. Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J.H. Taylor were three working-class kids born within twelve months of each other, from three different corners of the British Isles. For two decades they owned professional golf, traveled together as a roadshow, and quietly built the entire business of the modern sport from scratch....

Before Harry Vardon won six Open Championships, he was a barefoot kid on a tiny island in the English Channel, hitting marbles with a homemade club. He never had a formal golf lesson. Neither did Ted Ray, Tom Vardon, or any of the other boys from Grouville who would go on to reshape the sport. In this episode, we tell the story of the Jersey School — not a school at all, but a group of working-cla...

This is the story they don't tell you during the Masters broadcast. Marion Hollins won the 1921 U.S. Women's Amateur, played polo on men's teams, raced cars, and marched with suffragettes. She hired Alister MacKenzie and built Cypress Point, where she created the famous 16th hole by hitting a ball across 200 yards of Pacific Ocean when every man in the room said it was impossible. She...

For four hundred years, golfers started every hole by packing wet sand into a mound. Then George Grant, a Black dentist and Harvard professor, invented the wooden golf tee in 1899. He gave them away to friends and never made a cent. Twenty years later, Dr. William Lowell commercialized essentially the same design, painted it red, got Walter Hagen to endorse it, and the sand boxes disappeared forev...

Allan Robertson was the first professional golfer, the best player of his era, and a ball maker whose family had been hand-stitching featheries for two hundred years. When a cheaper ball made from rubber tree sap showed up in 1848, Robertson bought up as many as he could find and burned them. That decision cost him his closest partnership, his apprentice Tom Morris, and kicked off the chain of eve...

In 1870, a nineteen-year-old walked onto a Scottish links course and played a round of golf that wouldn't be matched for decades. Four consecutive Open Championships. The first recorded hole-in-one in tournament history. A level of dominance so complete that he won golf's only major trophy permanently, forcing the sport to create the Claret Jug as a replacement. His name was Tommy Morris....

In 1933, a 23-year-old orphan from Omaha, Nebraska did something no one has done since....he won the United States Open as an amateur. His name was Johnny Goodman. This is his story. From the meatpacking stockyards of South Omaha to the cover of TIME Magazine, Johnny Goodman's journey is one of the greatest untold stories in golf history. He beat Bobby Jones at 19. Won the U.S. Open at 23. Won...