Lee Buck Trevino is an American retired professional golfer. He won six major championships and 29 PGA Tour events. He is one of only four players to twice win the U.S. Open, The Open Championship and the PGA Championship. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1981.
About Lee Trevino in brief
Lee Buck Trevino is an American retired professional golfer. He won six major championships and 29 PGA Tour events over the course of his career. He is one of only four players to twice win the U. S. Open, The Open Championship and the PGA Championship. Trevinos is an icon for Mexican Americans, and is often referred to as ‘The Merry Mex’ and ‘Supermex’ He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1981. He was born in Garland, Texas, into a family of Mexican ancestry. He left school at age 14 to go to work as a caddie and shoe shiner in El Paso, Texas. He made extra money by gambling for stakes in head-to-head matches. He played successfully in Armed Forces golf events in Asia, where one rival was Orville Moody, who would follow him to the Pga Tour in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, when he was Jack Nicklaus’s chief rival, he had a string of victories during a 20-day span in the summer of 1971. He defeated Nicklaus in an 18-hole playoff to win the 1971 U.S. Open. Two weeks later, he won the Canadian Open and the following week he became the first player to defend those three titles in the same year. He also won the Muirfield Open Championship in Scotland in 1972. In 1973, he was awarded the Hickok Belt as the top professional athlete of the year by Sports Illustrated magazine.
The Masters was the only major that eluded him, and he never won the US Open or The Open at Augusta National. He has been called one of the greatest golfers of all time by many golfing greats, including Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Gary Player and Gene Loy. He died in a car crash in 2007. He had a son, Joe, with his wife, Maria, and a daughter, Angelina, with whom he has two step-grandchildren. He never knew his father, Joseph, who left when his son was small. He served four years as a machine gunner and was discharged in December 1960 as a corporal with the 3rd Marine Division. He spent part of his time playing golf with Marine Corps officers. After his discharge, he went to work in the cotton fields. In 1968, his second year on the circuit,Trevino won the U S. Open at Oak Hill Country Club, in Rochester, New York, four strokes ahead of runner-up Nicklaus, the defending champion. In 1967, he earned USD 6,000 for finishing fifth, which earned him Tour privileges for the rest of the 1967 season. He won USD 26,472 as a rookie, 45th on the PTA money list, and was named Rookie of the Year by Golf Digest.
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