Doug Sanders, ‘Peacock of the Fairways,’ Dies at 86

Needing a par 4 on the 350-yard hole to win, he drove the ball about 75 yards short of the cup, then hit a sand wedge that left him on the green, about 35 feet away. His downhill putt stopped about three feet from the hole. But he missed the par putt for the championship.

“On my second putt I thought there was a pebble in front of me,” he told The Associated Press afterward. “That’s why I stopped midway and went to take a look. It turned out to be a bit of tough grass. Maybe that exercise threw me and made me miss the short one.”

The next day, Nicklaus beat him in their playoff.

Sanders loved nightlife, he hosted show-business celebrities at his Houston home and he owned dozens of slacks, shoes and sweaters. Pharmacists sometimes emptied prescription capsules whose colors attracted him, and as he told Golf Digest, “I’d stick the top half of an empty yellow capsule onto the bottom half of a blue one, then send it to the factory where my shirts and slacks could be colored the same way.”

“I always wanted to wear the finest,” he told The Christian Science Monitor, “because my clothes set the stage for everything I did.”

George Douglas Sanders was born on July 24, 1933, in Cedartown, Ga., where his father was a farmer and truck driver. George picked cotton for a nickel a day at age 7.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/obituaries/doug-sanders-dead.html