George Archer: The Bay Area's Masters Champion
George Archer (1939–2005) was born in San Francisco, raised in San Mateo, and built like no golfer of his era — 6'5½", a kid who dreamed of basketball before caddying at the Peninsula Golf & Country Club pulled him toward golf (Wikipedia).
Harding Park first
Archer turned professional in 1964, and his first PGA Tour victory came at home: the 1965 Lucky International Open at Harding Park, where he beat Bob Charles in a playoff (Wikipedia). The Lucky International — Harding's Tour stop of the era — is a fixture of San Francisco golf history, and Archer's name sits on the City Championship honor roll as well.
Augusta, 1969
At the 1969 Masters, Archer finished at seven-under 281 to win by one over Billy Casper, Tom Weiskopf and George Knudson (Wikipedia). It completed something larger: in the decade from Rosburg's 1959 PGA, players raised on Bay Area golf had now won all four professional majors. Archer won 13 Tour titles in all, with a reputation as one of the finest putters the Tour has ever seen.
The secret
What no gallery knew: Archer could barely read or write. His wife discovered the extent of it only after they married; he concealed it through a three-decade public career, and it became public only after his death in 2005, when his family founded the George Archer Memorial Foundation for Literacy (Golf Digest). The "Gilroy Cowboy" — he spent his last 25 years in Gilroy — died at 65 of Burkitt's lymphoma (Gilroy Dispatch).
