The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  No monarch in history suffered quite so horribly from the ignorance of contemporary medicine as Queen Caroline, wife of King George II. Ironically, Caroline was known to have been an incredibly enlightened Queen, medically speaking. Unlike some of her predecessors who claimed to cure through some kind of magic – “the royal touch” – she put her faith in science and had been a very strong supporter of the new and deeply controversial practice of inoculation against smallpox. She even gave it the ultimate seal of royal approval by having her own children inoculated. If it hadn’t been for Caroline’s example, the treatment may not have caught on in England for many more years.

  The public and the press, then as now, had an apparently insatiable appetite for gossip about their royal family. The king’s mood, even his bowel movements, were considered topics of great interest, but royal health was usually surrounded by great secrecy. The king was obliged to maintain what the court favourite John Hervey called “a ridiculous farce of health”, because if any sign of royal illness leaked out, it could, in Hervey’s words, “disquiet the minds of his subjects, hurt public credit, and diminish the regard and duty which they owe him”.

  George II, like his father before him, suffered terribly from piles and eventually had to endure a primitive and very painful operation to have them removed. Both Georges, however, tried to keep their illness a secret from everyone, including their servants. Queen Caroline was similarly expected to show a brave public face, although her health was poor. Worn out by repeated pregnancies, she had grown so fat that she had to be wheeled around in an armchair. She was nevertheless expected to be present and correct at her husband’s side for court occasions even when she felt ill. At one of these events, she was “close to swooning” but the king made her stand until 11 p.m.

  In November 1737, the fifty-four-year-old Caroline collapsed to the floor of her library with a severe pain in her stomach, accompanied by violent vomiting. At first, her doctors explained her illness as “gout in the stomach”, a mysterious complaint they attempted to cure with a dose of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Cordial”, a powerful sedative made from alcohol and a compound of forty different roots and herbs. In fact, Caroline had a strangulated abdominal hernia, caused by the last of her nine pregnancies, a condition she had hidden for many years. As she grew older and her stomach muscles got weaker, a painful hernia, or hole, appeared and a large loop of her bowel was now poking through the wall of her stomach. The Queen’s doctors should have simply pushed the bowel back inside and sewn her up. Instead, they decided to cut it off, thereby destroying her digestive system and all hope of recovery.

  Her surgeon, Dr John Ranby, enjoyed considerable status within his profession and was something of a celebrity. He had published an account of some of the medical oddities he had encountered, including a man whose swollen testicle contained four ounces of water; a boy with an abnormally large spleen weighing four pounds; and a bladder containing sixty gallstones. Ranby was assisted by Dr Bussier, a former doctor of George I, and now nearly ninety. Unfortunately, neither of them had read a contemporary book published by the Royal Society entitled New Discoveries and Improvements in the Most Considerable Branches of Anatomy and Surgery, including the section on “Ruptures of All Kinds Without Cutting”. They didn’t really have a clue what they were doing and assumed that they were dealing with some sort of abscess that would grow unless removed.

  It was reported that Caroline endured the surgery heroically, without the benefit of opium. She even laughed when the doddering old Dr Bussier stood too close to a candle and set fire to his wig. A few days after the operation, as the Queen lay in bed surrounded by courtiers, her bowel practically exploded, showering a torrent of excrement all over the bed and the floor. After an embarrassed silence, one of her ladies-in-waiting said that she hoped the relief would do Her Majesty some good. The Queen replied that she hoped so, too, because that was the last evacuation she would ever have.

  Caroline selflessly begged her husband to remarry. George spoiled the moment by declining her offer, adding that he’d rather stick to his mistresses. Although there was a complete news blackout, the gruesome details of the Queen’s final hours somehow reached the poet Alexander Pope, who was moved to write:

  Here lies wrapt in forty thousand towels

  The only proof that Caroline had bowels

  Later, when it was confirmed that the Queen had died of what was officially classified as “a mortification of ye bowels”, Dr Ranby tried to blame his patient for her predicament claiming that if only she hadn’t tried to hide her condition and he had known about it a couple of days earlier, her life would have been saved. Of course, this was complete nonsense: he would have simply killed her a couple of days earlier.

  “The abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.”

  Sir John Eric Erichsen, Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, in 1873

  Briefest Career in Dentistry

  In 1844, the young American dentist Horace Wells was at a travelling circus in his home town of Connecticut when a saw a demonstration of nitrous oxide – laughing gas – being performed on a member of the audience. He noticed that when the man was returning to his seat, he gashed his shin on a row of chairs but didn’t register any feeling of pain. Wells immediately spotted the potential of nitrous oxide as an aid to tooth extraction.

  Afterwards, he invited the laughing-gas showman, Gardner Colton, to meet him at his surgery the next day to administer nitrous oxide to him while another dentist extracted one of Wells’s teeth. The extraction, Wells was relieved to find, was painless. Wells then began experimenting with nitrous oxide and extracting teeth on his own patients, who also suffered no pain whatsoever. Wells was elated, hailing nitrous oxide as “a new era in dentistry and tooth pulling . . . the greatest discovery ever made”. In fact, Wells’s discovery of anaesthesia was one of the greatest advances in the history of medicine.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his discovery. Although he used the gas successfully on his own patients, the medical profession remained unconvinced. A public demonstration in January 1845 backfired badly when he began his extraction before the gas had taken effect and the patient screamed in pain. The audience booed and Wells was dismissed as a charlatan in the Boston press. Haunted by public ridicule, he began sniffing chloroform and ether. One day, in a chloroform-induced delirium, he ran into the street and doused two passing prostitutes with acid.

  Wells killed himself before his case came to trial; he smuggled a can of chloroform into his cell, opened a main artery in his leg and bled painlessly to death.

  ___________________

  1 King Louis XIII, not a fan of seventeenth-century medicine, once remarked, “I have had the misfortune of all great men – which is to be put into the hands of doctors.”

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  Slower, Lower, Weaker: Great Sporting Losers

  In which a marathon runner coats himself in beeswax; Miss Fick takes out her tennis partner with a forehand smash; some Olympians swim through raw sewage; a Brit finds he’s useless in snow; and a racehorse has a terrible horoscope.

  The Phantom of the Open

  Maurice Flitcroft, a chain-smoking shipyard crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness, didn’t take up golf until his mid-forties, just after acquiring his first colour TV. Inspired by the BBC golf theme at the beginning of coverage of the 1974 World Matchplay Championship, and buoyed by dreams of becoming the next Jack Nicklaus, he sent off for a mail-order half-set of golf clubs. After honing his skills in a local field, Flitcroft set his sights high – a place in the 1976 British Open Championship at St Andrews.

  Although he had never actually played a round of golf in his life, and therefore did not have an official handicap, he gained entry to the Open by registering as the only other option on the form – “professional”.1 Confirmation duly arrived by post that the forty-five-year-old virgin professional golfer had been chosen to pl
ay at Formby Golf Club, near Liverpool, in one of the five qualifying tournaments for the Open on Friday, 2 July 1976.

  In the weeks leading up to his qualifying round, Flitcroft prepared by studying a Peter Allis golf manual borrowed from the local library and practised his swing on the local beach, meanwhile dodging random objects rained on him by a gang of schoolchildren. He was able to practise for only two hours a day, after which the tide came in (and on several occasions nearly drowned him), but it was the one place where he could be guaranteed not to hit anyone accidentally with club or ball.

  On the big day, he got lost on the way to the course and arrived with no time to practise, then put in a performance described by Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail as a “blizzard of triple and quadruple bogeys ruined by a solitary par”. His playing partner Jim Howard had suspicions from the start: “After gripping the club like he was intent on murdering someone, Flitcroft hoisted it straight up, it came down vertically and the ball travelled precisely four feet. We put that one down to nerves, but after he shanked a second one we called the R&A officials.”

  After 121 shots and an argument with an official about slow play, Flitcroft’s Open dream was in tatters, but he had made his mark. His forty-nine over par was the worst score recorded in the tournament’s 141-year history. This was only a rough estimate – his marker had lost count on a couple of holes. After calculating that he would need to shoot twenty-three the next day to qualify, he decided to bow out gracefully and go home. Flitcroft was upbeat, blaming his poor performance on lumbago and fibrositis, and the fact that he had left his driver in the car. The club, he insisted, would have ensured a very different outcome. “I was an expert with the four-wood – deadly accurate.”

  Flitcroft’s round dominated the sports pages and he was interviewed endlessly. A journalist tracked down his mother; when asked what she thought about her son’s record-breaking performance, she replied, “Does that mean he’s won?” When gently informed that her son was the worst golfer in Open history, she said, “Well, he’s got to start somewhere, hasn’t he?”2

  The Royal & Ancient decided to tighten its entry rules, but it didn’t stop Flitcroft trying again the following year. After prolonged and heated correspondence with the R&A, during which he challenged their secretary Keith Mackenzie to a match at the Old Course to settle the argument about his golfing talents or lack thereof, Flitcroft was banned for life from R&A tournaments.

  Refusing to acknowledge defeat, Flitcroft somehow passed under the radar again and blagged his way into the qualifying round in 1978 under an assumed identity as Gene Paceki, but was rumbled after a couple of holes and forcibly ejected from the course.

  In 1980, he was ready to compete again in the qualifying round at Gullane Golf Club, near Edinburgh, but on arriving the day before, Flitcroft got lost and pitched his tent in the dark on an open stretch of land. The next morning, when he popped out in his Y-fronts to do his stretches, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by Open officials with walkie-talkies. He had pitched his tent on the golf course.

  He tried again in 1983 masquerading as Gerald Hoppy, this time cunningly disguised with dyed hair and a false moustache. He did better, getting through nine holes, until the tell-tale little signs – running off numerous triple bogeys – gave him away and he was evicted.

  Back in Barrow-in-Furness, his employers, who had been following his adventure at the Open in the newspapers with surprise since he was supposed to be off sick with a heavy cold, sacked him. Flitcroft immediately saw the silver lining – more time to practise. Every day he sneaked into the cricket field of a local school, tearing up divots and enraging the school janitor. He was fined £50 in the Barrow Magistrates’ Court for playing on school property. By now, Flitcroft was writing to car manufacturers to ask for sponsorship, but Ford, Rover, Volkswagen, Talbot, Renault and Peugeot all politely declined to have their brand associated with the world’s worst golfer.

  In 1990, he entered the Open qualifier at Ormskirk as an American golf professional called James Beau Jolley (a pun on Beaujolais). He hit a double bogey at the first hole and a bogey at the second. Flitcroft’s progress at the third was rudely interrupted by a golf buggy which screeched to a halt in front of him. He remonstrated with the driver for ruining his chances of “looking at a par”, not realizing that it was another R&A official. It was the usual dénouement, with Flitcroft being chased from the course.

  Although his persistent attempts to gatecrash the British Open golf championship produced a sense of humour failure among members of the golfing establishment, Flitcroft became a minor celebrity and received fan-mail for many years. On reaching retirement age, he devoted his life to his beloved golf but was eventually banned from all his local clubs for playing courses without paying. He died in March 2007 but the legacy lives on. The Blythefield Country Club in Michigan, Ohio, has a tournament named in his honour.

  Least Successful Attempt to Play a Water Hazard

  In 1938, Californian golf pro Ray Ainsley was in with a chance of winning the US Open at Cherry Hills until he dunked his approach shot into a stream fronting the par-four sixteenth hole. The ball was completely submerged but, despite the fast-moving current, Ainsley was determined not to take a penalty drop shot and gambled on trying to chip the ball out of the water.

  According to a newspaper report, he attacked the ball “like a wild man” for a full thirty minutes. As the ball drifted, Ainsley slashed and slashed and slashed again. At one point, the scorekeeper was laughing so hard he fell to the ground. By that time, Ainsley had taken nine swings at the waterlogged ball. Several times the ball made it to the bank, only to roll back in the water. Spectators were yelling, “There it is! There it is!” when the ball appeared above water. But it wouldn’t stick.

  By the time Ainsley finally hit the ball out of the creek on his seventeenth stroke, he was seventy-five yards downstream – and further away from the green – from his original position. He eventually got down in nineteen, setting a record for the highest ever score on a single hole in professional golf. Not surprisingly, Ainsley missed the cut, although, he quipped, he did kill a lot of fish.

  “Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever.”

  Lord Byron, poet, 1814

  Most Expensive Caddie Error

  At the age of forty-three, it looked as though Welsh golfer Ian Woosnam’s best years were behind him. It had been ten years since his last major win in the US Masters and seven years since his last grand slam top-ten finish. But then, dramatically, he promised an astonishing comeback at the 2001 Open at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s.

  Going into the final eighteen holes, Woosnam was tied for the lead alongside Alex Cejka, David Duval and Bernhard Langer.

  The Welshman might have guessed it wasn’t going to be his day when he and his caddy Miles Byrne made a mistake over their tee-time and they barely made it to the first with a couple of minutes to spare. Woosnam was clearly flustered, but he soon found his groove. By now just one shot off the lead, he nearly hit a hole in one at the par-three opening hole and tapped in for a splendid birdie, regaining a share of top spot. Spectators cheered wildly, the momentum now clearly with the home favourite. As the diminutive Welshman strode to the second tee, he could be forgiven for thinking that his first Open was there for the taking. And that was when the wheels came off.

  Players are only permitted to carry fourteen clubs. As the pair were standing on the second tee, Byrne realized that, in the rush, an extra test driver had found its way into Woosnam’s bag. “You’re going to go ballistic about this . . . I left that spare driver in the bag. We’ve got fifteen clubs,” Byrne whispered to his man. Woosnam, notorious for his short fuse, snatched the rogue club from the bag and tossed it into a bush. As millions of TV viewers around the world looked on, the Welshman was clearly seen to mouth, “The one fucking thing you had to do!”

  His Open was doomed. Handed
a two-shot penalty, his game went to pieces, although he rallied and eventually carded a one-over-par seventy-two – just four shots behind winner David Duval. It cost Woosnam a potential £220,000 and a place in Europe’s Ryder Cup team.

  He wasn’t the only one affected by Byrne’s error. Woosnam’s playing partner, the German Alex Cejka, went to pieces, almost bursting into tears on the tee. He dropped five shots through the first five holes, ending the tournament in thirteenth place.

  Even so, Woosnam was magnanimous in defeat. “It was the biggest mistake he [Byrne] will make in his life. He won’t do it again. He’s a good caddie. He will have a severe bollocking when I get in but I’m not going to sack him.” Woosnam was as good as his word and stood by his man . . . for a couple of weeks anyway. Two weeks later they were at the Scandinavian Masters. Woosnam’s caddie was required for the final round but, after a heavy night out, Byrne overslept. With his caddie still in bed with a sore head, Woosnam had to break into his locker to get to his golf shoes. This time there was no way back for Byrne – he was sacked.

  “All I want to say is that Ian Woosnam treated me well throughout everything. He’s an absolute gentleman,” the caddie noted later. He was last seen working on a building site in Ireland.3

  Worst Choke in Open Golf

  In the final round of the 1928 US Open at Olympia Fields, Roland Hancock, an unknown twenty-one-year-old pro from South Carolina, was poised to complete one of the biggest shocks in golfing history. Finding himself in the unlikely position of leading the field with just two to play, he could afford to bogey both holes and still win.