Sir Walter would look down in approval

Walter Hagen would have approved of the kerfuffle that will consume Oakland Hills this week as the Ryder Cup hits Detroit. An eccentric, flamboyant golfing legend right down to his plus fours and spats, Hagen was a professional at the club.

He also offers an umbilical link to Ryder Cup theatre in that he acted as playing captain on five occasions, from 1927 through to 1935, and in a non-playing capacity in 1937.

In his pomp, Hagen cut a swathe through the prejudices that dogged professional golfers of that era, very much second-class citizens, banished from clubhouses to sheds where they plied their trade.

Affectionately known as Sir Walter, or The Haig, his off-course excesses merely stoked his iconic status. Hagen wasn't merely a vaudeville distraction but, along with another celebrated American, Bobby Jones, was one of the finest golfers of his generation. He won his first major championship, the US Open in 1914, aged 21, and five years later repeated the feat, when representing Oakland Hills.

At a time when many of his compatriots eschewed crossing the Atlantic, he enthusiastically supported the British Open, and his four victories (1922, '24, '28, '29) was not bettered by an American until Tom Watson's fifth success in 1983. He won the US PGA Championship five times (it was a matchplay tournament until 1958), including four in succession from 1924 to 1927.

He won a record 22 matches in a row in the US PGA championship, an estimated 75 tournaments worldwide, and played some 3,000 exhibitions - at a rate of nearly nine a week - for which he was generally paid $1,000 a time.

Twice married, first to Margaret Johnson (1917) - she bore him a son, Walter Jnr - and then, in 1923, to Edna Strauss, who famously said of her errant husband (they would divorce in 1927): "The only place I can find him is in the sports pages."

Very little fazed Hagen, except perhaps the assertion that he never won a US or British Open tournament when his arch-rival, Jones, was in the field. But he did have the satisfaction of beating him in a tête-à-tête clash in 1926. Hagen, then 33, easily eclipsed the then amateur Jones (23) in a 72-hole matchplay format in Florida, 36 holes to be played on a course Jones favoured in Sarasota, the remaining 36 at a Hagen stronghold in St Petersburg. He easily won the challenge match, 12 and 11, earning $7,800 in the process, a financial reward considered excessive golf at the time.

But it was his flamboyant gesture in buying Jones $1,000 platinum-and-diamond cuff links that typified the man. Hagen mused: "I bought the kid a little something."

A notoriously poor time-keeper, he once kept US President Warren G Harding waiting on him before the 1921 US Open while he was in the locker-room shaving. On a Far East tour prior to the second World War, he courted international scandal by turning up two hours late for a golfing date with Prince Fumitaka Konoye of Japan. Hagen shrugged: "Well, the prince wasn't going anywhere, was he?"

One story that proved somewhat wide of the mark was an allegation he turned to the future King Edward VIII of England while playing an exhibition and asked the then Prince of Wales to "pull the pin, Eddie". Apparently the royal did so unbidden.

Hagen refused to shirk confrontation, famously arriving at the 1920 British Open at Deal with 12 colour-coordinated outfits, billeted himself at the Ritz Hotel, hired a Daimler limousine and a footman and then proceeded to park the car outside the clubhouse - as a professional he was not allowed inside - and have the footman serve him lunch inside the Daimler, complete with fine wines.

Noted for his sartorial elegance - he'd approve of Ian Poulter's dress sense - he would turn up to play in a tuxedo, occasionally playing the first hole in his street shoes before swapping with his caddie.

His later life was afflicted by a double tragedy, the death of a six-year-old boy, Laurence Johnson, who ran out in front of Hagen's car, and later the death of his grandson, who died in a shooting accident.

In 1964, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and five years later, on October 6th, aged 76, he finally conceded defeat to the disease. At his funeral, Edwin A Schroeder, the parish priest of Our Lady of Refuge Roman Catholic Church in Lake Orion, Michigan, straining for an appropriate phrase, suggested: "His biggest game is over. He putted out."