Meet Mungo Park, great-grandson of the 1st winner of the British Open

HOYLAKE, England — Dustin Raymond is an avid collector of golf memorabilia and he was searching online for buried treasures when he stumbled across an auction of vintage golf photographs from the 1800s.

He flipped through them and could detect that the majority of them were reproductions but a handful were originals.

“Holy cow!” he said he thought to himself. “That’s an original of Willie Park.”

He clicked “buy it now” for the collection of about 100 photos. When they arrived, he remembers thinking, “These don’t belong with me.”

He posted some of the rare photos on the Golf Historian Society Web site, and one of the members suggested he get in contact with Mungo Park, the great grandson of Willie Park Sr., winner of the inaugural British Open in 1860 among his four titles, and named for his great-grand uncle Mungo Park, the winner of the Claret Jug in 1874. It turned out the photo that Raymond bought was rare, indeed, but it was of Mungo Park Sr., not Willie Park Sr.

“There are about six photographs we know of, of him, including that one, which has never been seen before,” Park said.

He could recognize the handwriting of a cousin on the back of the photos. Having them back in the family’s possession meant so much to Park that he asked Raymond what he could do to repay him for his kindness. Raymond simply wanted to meet him at the 151^st Open and have a beer. On Thursday, Park drove five hours stopping to charge his electric car along the way, but he and Raymond, two men connected only by a photo that was approximately 150 years old, met during the first round at Royal Liverpool Golf Club. Yours truly snapped some new photos and sat with Park in the horseshoe grandstand surrounding the 18^th hole.

Park has one of the great names in golf – Mungo is better than even Tiger Woods, right? For nearly eight years, he’s been working on a golf book on Musselburgh and the Park family’s place in the Scottish town’s reputation in the game, which Mungo contends should be better known as the true ‘Cradle of Golf.’ It’s where Mungo Senior won the first Open to be held at Musselburgh, shooting a record 159 to beat Young Tom Morris. That turned out to be his only Open victory. (Willie Park Jr. won two more titles — 1887 at Prestwick and 1889 at Musselburgh.) Mungo wrote in 2011 in an issue of Through the Green, the journal of the British Golf Collectors…