The offer was sealed with a handshake on a March night in 1999.
Ian Webb, chairman of the General Committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and chairman of the committee formed to find a successor to then-secretary Sir Michael Bonallack, stretched out his hand to Peter Dawson. “Well done, Peter,” Webb said in his soft voice tinged with a Northern Ireland accent. “But remember one thing. In accepting this job, you are my epitaph. If you make a balls of this, I go down with you. I don’t want you to forget that.”
Dawson, 77, didn’t make a balls of it. His 16-year reign as secretary and then chief executive of the R&A made him one of the world’s most successful golf administrators. He led an organisation that ordains golf’s rules throughout the world except for the USA and Mexico, and administers the Open Championship.
He supervised the introduction of new rules, oversaw club size alterations, made changes to Open courses, delivered rulings at the Masters, addressed the issue of bifurcation of golf, explained the coefficient of restitution (bounce from a driver face) and dealt with the broom handle putter. In 2016 he became chairman of the Official World Golf Ranking, a position he gave up in April of this year.
Johann Rupert, the billionaire chairman of South Africa’s Sunshine Tour, was asked where he would place Dawson in a list of sports administrators. “At the top,” Rupert replied.
“I don’t ever feel he was negotiating.
It felt like we were trying to find a solution.”
— Johann Rupert
Dawson’s eminence in golf was rewarded in the annual Queen’s Honours List, first in 2015 with the award of an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 2021 his OBE was upgraded to Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE. “A friend said it stands for “Can’t Break Eighty,” Dawson said, grinning.
He was a born negotiator, a conciliator not a confronter, whether it be over the handicap negotiations in a friendly fourball or untangling issues involving the game’s governing bodies.
“I don’t ever feel he was negotiating,” Rupert said. “It felt like we were trying to find a solution. Some people like Mark McCormack you knew from the time he asked you for breakfast until you left that you were negotiating. With Peter it was always, ‘Let’s find a solution that is mutually pleasing and good for the game of golf.’ Always.”
“He has a very good way of pulling information and perspectives out of people,” said Jay Monahan, PGA Tour commissioner. “He doesn’t lead the way with blunt force. He asks the right questions and does so in a way that allows people to fully understand the subject matter.”
Some of this was God-given and some was learned dealing with Britain’s notoriously argumentative trade unions in the 1970s, when Dawson was managing director of a small engineering firm and his firm’s chief negotiator despite being just 24.
“I spent a lot of my early years in union meetings,” he said. “It was the height of trade unionism in the Midlands, and it was tough getting things done. Quite often you couldn’t see across the room for the cigarette smoke. The simplest things you had to have a meeting about. At times like that you look at things from their point of view. You really had to understand where the union negotiators were coming from.”
To understand Dawson you had to look to the woman next to him.
In all Dawson did, he was supported by Juliet, his late wife of 55 years, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and spent her last five years, during which Dawson was chairman of the OWGR, in a wheelchair. They were a strikingly strong partnership until her death in February of this year. Many were struck by the way he cared for her while also fulfilling the requirements of a demanding job.
“There was nothing that mattered more to Peter than her, and doing all he could to be there for her to make her feel comfortable,” Monahan said. “I would never profess to know Peter as well as others in this business, but I knew him as a steely, tough but fair and measured guy whose heart burst through his chest when he was around her. It was a powerful thing.”
Peter and Juliet met at the end of his first year at Corpus Christi college, Cambridge University, in 1967. “She was my senior tutor’s secretary,” Dawson said. “She was at a cricket match, and I pitched up after the all-night poker game had dragged on a little into the morning, unshaven and not very good, and sat down next to her.
“The next day she went back to see her boss and said ‘I’ve met this awfully scruffy undergraduate who tried to chat to me. I don’t know his name.’ They got the freshmen’s photo out and she picked me out from that. Her boss said: ‘Not surprising he’s no good at cricket. He’s our golfer.’ That was it. It went on from there. She was exactly a year older than me and went for the younger man. We got married in September 1969 three months after I had finished at Cambridge, as people tended to do in those days.
“Though she had suffered from ill health for many years she never let that hold her back,” Dawson continued. “I don’t ever remember her not coming on a trip or not going to a function because she was unwell. She went to them all and managed pretty well. She was determined to keep going as long as possible which meant that a lot of the time she was in a wheelchair, and I was the one pushing the wheelchair. I guess a lot of people saw that. It was a dominant feature of life for a few years. Her difficulties only began to affect her in the last year or two I was at the R&A and thereafter. I wouldn’t like to give the impression that it impacted the way I could do the job for most of the time because it didn’t.
“I think her greatest attribute was she had very high standards and really knew right from wrong and didn’t tolerate wrong too easily,” he continued. “She was very kind to people, very caring, very interested in how they were getting on, always engaging with people not about herself but about them so she was selfless. Just a wonderful person to have lived with and a privilege to have done so.”
She also completed him in a way that was vital to the job.
“Dad is not shy but at heart he is not overtly outgoing,” Claire Faulkner, Dawson’s daughter, said. “He is very happy in his own company as well as in other people’s. With the R&A role he had to become good socially, but I wouldn’t have said that was his natural ground. My mother was better socially.”
“Having witnessed the two of them, I have an impression of them that never leaves you. It is the ultimate reminder of the commitments you make in marriage and the commitments you make to another human being.”
— Jay Monahan
Bruce Streather, a retired London solicitor and winner of the 2001 President’s Putter, has known Dawson for nearly 60 years. He is godfather to Dawson’s son James. “What people forget is the consort of the person who is suffering also has a burden in life,” Streather said. “He didn’t shirk that responsibility.
“On the times I went to stay with them I liked to take them out to a restaurant,” Streather continued. “This involved him getting a wheelchair out, he’d put her in the chair, wheel her to the car, pick her out of the wheelchair, put her in the car, fold the wheelchair and put it on a seat. He’d then pick her out of the car, put her in the wheelchair, wheel her to the table where she sat in the wheelchair for the meal. Then the reverse on the way back to the house. That was just going out to supper. You can imagine what daily life was like, and I never heard him complain. That is the sort of bloke he is.”
“Having witnessed the two of them, I have an impression of them that never leaves you,” Monahan said. “It is the ultimate reminder of the commitments you make in marriage and the commitments you make to another human being. They both did it in such a dignified and loving way. These things are hard to find. We’re all human beings and Peter is a great human being.”
* * *
For 16 years Dawson worked from the second-floor office in the R&A’s St. Andrews headquarters, where binoculars were mounted on a tripod on its balcony and a fire burned in a grate.
“The first time I went to see him it was a grey November day,” said Ty Votaw, a former executive vice-president of the PGA Tour. “His office is big, it had a fire in the fireplace, and I looked out over the first fairway and 18th green and said to Peter: ‘Why would you ever want to go home from this place?’”
From the start, Dawson said, he was struck by the goodwill in golf.
“In industry quite often they want to bite your legs off,” he said, “but in golf they wanted me to do well. The motivation in the job was not to let golf people down. Everything I did at the R&A was a team effort. It wasn’t, ‘Dawson did this, Dawson did that.’ Yes, I was in a leadership role, but a lot of people were involved.”
Tasked with getting golf into the Olympics for the first time since 1900, he converted the World Amateur Golf Council into the International Golf Federation, and hired Antony Scanlon, who had been an official with the International Olympic Committee, as its executive director, with an office in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Dawson and Votaw worked closely to see that the project succeeded.
“The time I spent from March 2008 to the closing ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 were probably the most enjoyable and formidable years of my life because of the quality of Peter as a person,” Votaw said. “It was very collaborative even though he was CEO of the R&A and I was just a senior executive at the PGA Tour. We weren’t peers in terms of where he was in his organisation and where I was in mine, but in terms of the process we engaged in, we were. He treated me like a peer. We were partners. He was as interested in my insights and observations about things as he was about getting the job done.”
Martin Slumbers would succeed him at the R&A in 2015 before Dawson took over as chairman of the OWGR, putting Dawson squarely in the sights of LIV Golf and its application to be included in the ranking system. He emphasized that he was speaking personally and not in any official capacity when he noted, “The OWGR has a terrific record of being inclusive. It has expanded the number of tours it includes from five to 25. It goes out of its way to help tours become OWGR eligible.
“I was very disappointed that we could not do so with LIV,” he said. “It is self-evident that players on the LIV tour are good enough to be ranked because they were before. But OWGR has a duty to ensure that all of the thousands of players in the system are ranked equitably. Some aspects of the LIV format made that impossible. In my opinion OWGR made the only decision it could at the time. I know that LIV has now reapplied to be included in the OWGR system. I want all golf initiatives to do well and I can’t see that LIV has been a success by any measure. Yes, it has given great wealth to a very few people but in terms of engagement its format of team golf isn’t resonating anywhere near enough with the fan base.
“I really don’t understand why the PIF [Public Investment Fund] and Saudi Arabia are persisting with it,” Dawson continued. “They are doing wonderful things for the women’s game with the PIF Global Series and they have terrific plans inside Saudi for expanding golf for their own people and for tourism. These initiatives deserve our applause but LIV seems to be the odd man out.”
* * *
“I have my dark moments. They tend to be fleeting as I am walking around. They don’t last long. But you just have to get on with it. I am coping.”
— Peter Dawson
Eight months after Juliet’s death, Dawson still grieves her. “I have my dark moments,” he said, frowning slightly and looking out of a window. “They tend to be fleeting as I am walking around. They don’t last long. But you just have to get on with it. I am coping.”
Children’s author Judith Kerr said of losing a partner, “I don’t need anyone to do things with. I have plenty of people for that. What I miss is having someone to do nothing with.” Upon hearing this, Dawson grunted and said: “Oh, yes, that’s good. That’s very good.”
You tend to believe him, for Dawson’s stentorian voice and stately demeanour, heard annually at the Open Championship prizegiving, was somehow larger than life. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he would intone, “with a score of 279, the winner of the gold medal and champion golfer of the year is…”
“No one ever did champion golfer of the year better than Peter,” said Seth Waugh, former chief executive officer of the PGA of America. “His voice is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Peter. It’s the voice of God.” Dawson is still stopped in the streets of St Andrews by people wanting a selfie video with him saying those words.
“I never knew what my cadence was going to be at the end,” he said. “Was it ‘the champion golfer of the year is …Tiger Woods,’ or was it, ‘the champion golfer of the year is … TIGER WOODS.’ I never knew which it was going to be until I said it. It just came upon me.”
Semi-retired, Dawson has moved into a large house in St. Andrews near the university, where a copy of The Times newspaper sits on a table in the kitchen, two mobile phones are nearby, and he busied himself recently at a coffeemaker, brewing a drink for a visitor.
His office is on the top floor and on a landing outside it is a photo of Tiger Woods’ famous chip-in on the 16th hole in the last round of the 2005 Masters. “Tiger is fist pumping. Steve Williams next to him is fist pumping. The crowd in the background is cheering, hands in the air. I’m standing with my hand in my pocket by the look of it,” Dawson said, smiling. Woods wrote on the photograph. “To Peter, How about a little excitement? Your friend always, Tiger Woods.”
Dawson was a very good amateur, playing county golf with a scratch handicap, though now it has risen to 6.2. He is a powerful driver and good iron player, albeit with putting woes.
“I have played with him in competition, in a three-club wind,” Waugh said. “He has an elegant swing and plays all the shots. He employs a classic blade putter which he struggled with mightily on the short ones. I thought to myself, ‘Here is the man who singlehandedly championed the effort to take away the anchored putter and no one I have ever played with could use it more.’
“That might just say all you need to know about Peter Dawson,” Waugh added. “No one is bigger than the game. No one believes in that ideal or lived it more than him.”
In addition to playing golf, Dawson is a director of the Old Course Hotel and has taken up fishing. He travels down to England to see Claire, his son James and his four grandchildren, in a Japanese-made hybrid car that he drives with considerable elan. He shops and cooks for himself. “I hate shopping, but it’s got to be done. I am hopeless at cooking but quite good at Marks & Spencer dishes. I have to learn.” He helps his grandchildren with their schoolwork on Zoom.
“My children won’t do anything I tell them to but will do what he says because they regard him as a higher power. That’s what they call him, the Higher Power.”
— Claire Faulkner
And he has retained his thoughtful, unhurried approach.
“Dad doesn’t (impulsively) dive into stuff,” James Dawson said. “He has serious brain power, a raw intelligence and is quite analytical. He always told us that you could do three things at Cambridge – study hard, play hard or play sport – and do two of these well. He did the latter two.”
“Dad is very measured,” Claire said. “He will think through what the pros and cons are. One of my proudest moments with him is what he did in getting women into the R&A, championing that cause. He kept very private about it until it happened. He couldn’t have made it happen by himself, but he could have made it much more difficult.
“My children won’t do anything I tell them to but will do what he says because they regard him as a higher power,” Claire continued. “That’s what they call him, the Higher Power.”
From running golf to coaching his grandchildren, Peter Dawson has done it all. Some man, some life.