In the winter of 1930, a red flag could have been raised when a young man played twenty-seven holes of golf on the eve of his wedding, then played twenty-seven holes the day after tying the knot and another eighteen holes the next day. But twenty-six-year-old Harry Cooper had a legitimate reason. He was a golf professional participating in the richest golf event ever held.
The event was the Aqua Caliente Open and the total purse was twenty-five thousand dollars with ten thousand going to the winner. It was being played at a resort course near Tijuana, Mexico just across the border from San Diego. Rain played havoc with the tournament’s planned start date and forced a delay of six days.
The delay through a wrench into Harry Cooper’s plan for matrimony which had been scheduled several days after the tournament would have concluded had the rain not intervened. The organizers of the tournament were sympathetic to Cooper’s plight and accommodated him so he could play in the event and keep his wedding plans.
The tournament was to be held over four days with eighteen holes being played each day. Cooper was allowed to play twenty-seven holes on day one. He skipped day two and traveled the 140 miles to Los Angeles to marry the strikingly beautiful twenty-year-old Emily Buchanan.
Cooper returned to the tournament on day three and played twenty-seven holes and then eighteen holes on the last day. He finished the event in thirteenth place and took home two hundred dollars.
Throughout his career, Cooper would win thirty-six tournaments but he was given the nickname “Hard Luck” for his near misses in the Masters and United States Opens. He was lucky in love. His marriage to Emma lasted for seventy years until his death at age ninety-six in 2000.
Gene Sarazen won the Aqua Caliente Open by four strokes to take the ten-thousand-dollar first prize. But he only took home eight thousand. Surviving on the tour was tough back in those days even for a player of the stature of Sarazen. Before the tournament, he had made an agreement with fellow pros Johnny Farrell and Leo Diegel; if one of them won, the winner would give the other two one thousand dollars.