If John Ball's total of eight Amateur Championships and Bobby Jones's remarkable Grand Slam will never be matched, then surely neither will the phenomenal exploits of Byron Nelson in 1945. He won 18 of the 30 US tour events he entered, was second in another seven and was never worse than ninth. Included in this annus mirabilis was a streak of 11 consecutive tournament victories. He smashed pretty well all the circuit's scoring records. For example, he had a stroke average of 68.33 shots and was a cumulative 320 under par for the season. He earned the equivalent of $63,335 in War Bonds, a staggering 14.5 per cent of the total prize money on offer. That would translate to around $8.7 million on the 1993 US PGA Tour. Nobody has won that much in an entire career.

Nelson's fabulous run through the 1940s created a tour record of 113 consecutive tournaments in the money (without missing a cut) and another record of 19 successive rounds in the 1960s. It was golf of that calibre that established Nelson's reputation as a superlative ball-striker, a fact which has been confirmed by the USGA, naming its repetitive ball-testing machine 'Iron Byron'. Such an unbelievably high standard of sustained performance also explains why Nelson's five major championships - two Masters, two US PGAs and one US Open- are comparatively ignored, even though they were dramatic affairs. He beat Ben Hogan in a playoff for one of his Masters titles and had to endure a two round playoff for the 1939 US Open after failing to shake off Craig Wood at the first attempt. Had the Second World War not intervened, many more majors would surely have fallen to 'Lord Byron', yet, ironically, he was only free to do what he did in 1945 because he was exempted from National Service as a hemophiliac. Like Hogan, Nelson was introduced to golf as a caddie at Fort Worth in Texas, so from their earliest days on a golf course they had been keen rivals, and friends. It requires an exceptional talent to have lived one's career with the potentially daunting shadow of Hogan's accomplishments hovering over your every achievement, but Nelson has done that with not only his reputation but also his records intact, and likely to remain so forever.

In a age where sporting records can be quickly eclipsed, Nelson's achievements seem safe forever.