BOBBY LOCKE was a fabulous character, his life a fable. I met his aged mother and father and had Christmas dinner with them in 1952. He had his 21st birthday in New Zealand in 1938, so he was a lot older than me.
He spent four years flying with the South African Air Force during World War II and these were, I suppose, his prime years as a golfer. It was a similar story with Henry Cotton, Tommy Bolt and a lot of others. Locke returned to golf after the war and his experience in combat stiffened him so that he became such a very fierce, mean character on the course that he didn’t enjoy any popularity with his fellow players. He almost went out of his way to irritate them and, at the end of his life wasn’t much mourned.
Locke & Thomson played 63 rounds of golf together over 9 weeks in South Africa (1951-52)
Also, if we look into the annals of the game, he doesn’t feature as prominently as he should have. Nevertheless, he was a hell of a good player with his own distinct style. He played bare-handed, always played sensibly, and was a good putter, although not with the brilliance of more recent players. For example, Gary Player, who came behind him, holed 10 times as many putts as Locke ever did. As for Arnold Palmer, nobody holed long putts like he did. In Locke’s time, it was thought ridiculous to try and hole a three metre putt as the greens simply weren’t as good, so the aim was to get it near enough to the hole to make the next putt a certainty. Locke always left his first putt dead by the hole, so therefore had a reputation for being a good putter.
Taken from Peter Thomson’s book ‘Lessons I have learnt’
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