A century old, Jack Burke Jr. won two major golf championships in a single season.

A century old, Jack Burke Jr. won two major golf championships in a single season.

Jack Burke Jr. passed away on Friday in Houston. During the postwar years, he was a prominent player on the P.G.A. tour.

After winning two major baseball championships in a single season, he became a desired instructor for some of the game’s greatest stars.

A representative from the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, an organization that inducted him in 1978, confirmed the death.

In 1956, Burke achieved a remarkable year as he won the Masters as well as P.G.A. titles and became the organization’s golfer of the season.

His victory at the Masters surprised virtually everyone. He was the oldest surviving master and P.G.A. champion at the age of 100.

Only a few weeks prior, at the age of 33, Burke, who had not achieved a victory since the Inverness Open in Ohio in 1953, made public his contemplation of retirement.

Moreover, he had not garnered much attention heading into the final round at Augusta National Golf Club, trailing the Masters leader Ken Venturi by eight strokes.

In 1952, Burke won four of his last four tournaments within the Professional Golfers’ Association of the United States tour, for a total of sixteen victories.

Venturi, who was 24 years old and attempting to be the first novice to win the Masters, had the attention of all.

But as Venturi struggled, Burke climbed the leaderboard and triumphed by a stroke, surpassing eight competitors in the process.

“The lightning-fast downhill putt I executed on the seventeenth hole was exacerbated by the 40-mile-per-hour wind that blew sand onto the green,” Burke told Golf Digest in 2004.

“Upon touching that putt, my immediate thought was, ‘Oh no, I failed to make it halfway there.'”

The wind captured the object, carrying it down the slope until it came to rest in the center of the hole. It was a career-changing break—a miraculous occurrence.”

In June of that year, Burke defeated Ted Kroll to win the P.G.A. championship in match-play format at the Blue Hill Country Club in Canton, Massachusetts.

The match-play format is predicated on holes won in a against-one contest rather than the total number of strokes recorded on a scorecard.

As one of the most promising gamers of his generation, Burke, who was 17 years old when he turned professional and 23 when he joined the tour, was the progeny of a Galveston golf club professional.

On Friday in Houston, Jack Burke Jr. passed away. He was the oldest live Masters champion and staged the greatest rally in Augusta National history to win one of his two majors. At age one hundred, he was.

Burke, an inductee into the World of Golf Hall of Fame, possessed comparable teaching prowess and PGA Championship triumphs.

He constructed the legendary Champions Golf Club in Houston and imparted both instruction and practical knowledge.

“Why did God give us ten commandments and golf only thirty-four?” he pondered over dinner at his Houston home in 2000. This was just one of countless instances where his incisive wit was consistently grounded in common sense.

Steve Timms, the chief executive officer and president of the City of Houston Golf Association, confirmed his demise after consulting with Robin Burke, Burke’s spouse.

With conditions so blustery that only two competitors managed to break par, Burke defeated Venturi by one stroke with a 1-under 71. Venturi had shot 80.

PGA Player of the Year in 1956, Burke won two major championships, the most renowned of which was his astounding comeback at the Masters, in which he fell eight strokes behind Ken Venturi in the final round.

In early 1952, he won four consecutive events, three of which he decided by six strokes or more, adding to his sixteen PGA Tour victories.

Sitting on five consecutive Ryder Cup teams, he recorded seven victories in eight contests. In 1957, when Burke had been playing captain and Great Britain won for the very first time in World War II, the sole loss occurred.

Although his final victory on the PGA Tour occurred in 1963, Burke’s career remained active. He taught in addition to being a player, and he was an authentic Texan.

“My father instructing golf enabled me to devote my entire life to the profession.” Therefore, instructing these additional subjects did not present an obstacle.

He was raised in Houston after being born in Fort Worth; his father, Jack Burke, was a golf pro at River Oaks Country Club.

Burke was a Marine during World War II, and he instructed combat skills at Miramar, close to San Diego when his father passed away.

“They asked me to help with teaching grappling because, as a golfer, I’m familiar with timing and balancing, and both are very important,” Burke disclosed to the USGA in 2017.

Burke became a professional educator in New Jersey following the end of World War II before landing an assistantship under Claude Harmon at Winged Foot. The result was a professional position at the Metropolis Country Club in New York.