Maurice Flitcroft

Maurice Gerald Flitcroft (23 November 1929 – 24 March 2007) was a British golfer.

Flitcroft received widespread attention after, being an inexperienced amateur, shooting a score of 121 in the qualifying competition for the 1976 Open Championship, the worst score recorded at the Open Championship by a self-professed "professional golfer". Subsequently, he gained significant media coverage as "the world's worst golfer".

Early life Flitcroft was born in Manchester on 23 November 1929. As a child, during World War II, he was evacuated to Kendal in Cumbria, where he lodged with a Mrs. Langhorn and was a pupil at Kendal Grammar School. In early adulthood, Flitcroft joined the Merchant Navy. Following his marriage to Jean, he settled in Barrow-in-Furness, where he worked as a crane operator at the Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard.

Golf career According to his unpublished memoirs, Flitcroft took up golf after watching the 1974 Piccadilly World Match Play Championship. Flitcroft had golfing ambitions well above his ability and came to notoriety in 1976 when, posing as a professional golfer, he managed to obtain a place to play in the qualifying round of The Open Championship despite his previous experience amounting only to some casual play on fields near his home. He was inspired to enter the tournament by Walter Danecki, a postal worker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who entered the 1965 Open Championship after telling The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (also known as The R&A) that he was a pro and set a two-round score of 221 during qualifying. Some of the professionals playing with him were so angry that they successfully demanded a refund of their entry fees. Australian golfer Mike Cahill, who was playing directly behind Flitcroft, stated, "I just snapped at the 12th [hole] and accosted him," he later said. "I yelled at him that this wasn't a circus and told him to get off the course." The R&A gave him a lifetime ban from all their competitions, (as in pay cheque), Gerrard Hoppy, and James Beau Jolley. Buddy Whitten, Blythefield's head pro, stated that, "It started as a lark, but most people can't break 90 so they relate more to Maurice than they would to a touring pro." Flitcroft and his wife were invited to play the tournament in 1988, with business-class tickets for the flights provided by British Airways. The movie received positive reviews, with review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes having 86% of 134 critic reviews as positive with an average rating of 7.10/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Led by a stellar performance from Mark Rylance, The Phantom of the Open turns a stranger-than-fiction true story into crowd-pleasing entertainment." Metacritic assigned the film a score of 65 out of 100 based on the ratings of 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews”. The Guardians Simran Hans rated the film 4/5, praising Rylance's decision to play Flitcroft's character straight and complimenting the accompanying musical score.

Personal life Flitcroft was married to Jean, who died in 2002. They had two sons, one of whom caddied for him.

Death Flitcroft died of a lung infection on 24 March 2007 at the age of 77. In its obituary of Flitcroft, The Daily Telegraph commented: