ABSTRACT
Sporting stars pursued their skills under a brighter media spotlight between the wars.Their ‘talent’, ‘magic’ and ‘gifts’ were increasingly stressed.The names of leading cricketers, jockeys and boxers were widely known. Newsreel coverage of sport in the 1930s increased their visual recognition, and other sports personalities, most especially from tennis and golf, began to rival them. In 1925 Sir Ernest Holderness, president of the English Golf Union, wrote that because golf was not a ‘national game’ in England as it was in Scotland, the winner of the Open Championship could pass unnoticed at Charing Cross Station whereas in Glasgow ‘every passenger and porter will take an interest in him’.1
By the later 1930s professional golfer Henry Cotton, who ‘challenged American supremacy in the golf world and came out on top’, had become regularly featured in the media, lauded as the ‘famous Open Champion, probably the greatest golfer in the world’.2
