Jim Ferrier

Amateur career Ferrier was playing to a handicap of scratch (zero) by his mid-teens, when he left school to be able to play more golf; he was club champion for the first time at Manly at age 15. From age 16, Ferrier represented New South Wales seven times in Australian Men's Interstate Teams Matches, in 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1939 and he compiled an overall head-to-head record of 7 wins and 3 losses in those events. He also played for New South Wales in the 1932 Kirk-Windeyer Cup, winning all his matches.

He was runner-up in the 1931 Australian Open at the age of 16, taking a six on the 72nd hole to lose by one stroke to five-time champion Ivo Whitton.

In 1940, Ferrier went to the United States as a golf journalist, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald. Ferrier was not allowed to qualify for the U.S. Amateur, due to an Australian golf manual published earlier in the year that he was contracted to receive royalties from. At the time, amateur golf eligibility rules differed between Australia and the USA.

As an amateur, Ferrier played several Tour events in 1940, including the Masters Tournament, to which he had been invited based on his amateur record in Australia. In January 1941, Ferrier lost to George Dawson in the 36-hole final of the Miami Biltmore Hotel Amateur Championship.

Professional career In March 1941, Ferrier turned professional. He joined the PGA Tour as a club professional, based at the Elmhurst Country Club in Elmhurst, Illinois, near Chicago, joining the Professional Golfers Association of America. While stationed in the artillery at Camp Roberts, California, he gained his first tour victory at the Oakland Open in December 1944, a week after a runner-up finish to Byron Nelson in San Francisco.

In 1946, following discharge from the Army, Ferrier embarked on full-time PGA Tour play. That year, he made golf history by becoming the first player to score a hole-in-one twice in one PGA Tour tournament. He performed the very rare feat at the Victory Bond San Francisco Open held at the Olympic Club, in the first and fourth rounds; despite this, Ferrier finished well behind champion Byron Nelson.

Ferrier's most significant career win came at the PGA Championship in 1947, one of golf's four major championships. He was the first Australian to win a major, and at the time this gave him a lifetime exemption to PGA Tour events. The previous year, he was the medalist in the stroke play qualifier and set the scoring record.

Ferrier returned to Australia on a trip in 1948, and lost an 18-hole playoff in the Australian Open to Ossie Pickworth, who won his third straight title. Pickworth, three years younger, had also grown up at the Manly Golf Club, had caddied for Ferrier there, and had worked at the club as an assistant professional.

At the 1950 Masters, Ferrier led Jimmy Demaret by three shots with six holes to play, but finished two strokes back as the runner-up to Demaret. He scored 16 of his 18 PGA titles between 1947 and 1952, with a peak of five wins in 1951; that was second on Tour to Cary Middlecoff (6). He was second leading money winner on the Tour that year, behind only Lloyd Mangrum. Ferrier's other significant victories included consecutive Canadian Open titles in 1950 and 1951.

Ferrier greatly scaled back his PGA Tour competition from 1954, and took a financially lucrative club professional's job with the Lakeside Country Club in suburban Los Angeles, for eight years. This created some friction on Tour, since he (and certain other non-competitive aging past champions) was blocking younger players from entering, with fields at limited sizes. An eventual change of PGA Tour regulations came from that, requiring veteran players to maintain a certain playing standard to continue to have access to tournaments. The present-day Champions Tour had not yet been created, although Ferrier did play some events on that Tour in the early 1980s, but struggled.

Ferrier became a member at the same city's Wilshire Country Club. Ferrier appeared on the television game show You Bet Your Life hosted by Groucho Marx, of Marx Brothers fame. He was paired with Marilyn Pierce, a dog trainer and former model.

Ferrier died in Burbank, California, in 1986 at the age of 71.

Legacy Ferrier did not begin playing the American PGA Tour full-time until 1946, the year he turned 31 years old. But over the next eight seasons, he compiled a very impressive record for outstanding, consistent play. From 1946 to 1953 inclusive, Ferrier finished in the top-25 of Tour events a total of 202 times. Over eight-year periods across the Tour's history, this total has been topped only by Doug Ford, with 223, from 1952–1959. Ferrier's single-season high was 34 top-25 finishes in 1950; this figure has been topped only by the 37 from Lloyd Mangrum in 1948, and by Harold McSpaden, with 35 in 1945; it was matched by Dow Finsterwald with 34 in 1956, with all data through the 1988 season. In terms of top-10 finishes, his 29 from 1950 has been surpassed only by 31 from McSpaden in 1945, and 30 from Byron Nelson, also in 1945.

Ferrier was ranked #22, through the 1988 season, by the Tour's wide-ranging statistical project, which tabulated in detail the performance statistics for the Tour's top 500 players, through the 1988 season.