Do we like David Graham?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and well respected, but the record is thin on causes, so it stops short of the top.
David Graham is a Melbourne-born golfer who left school young to turn pro. A profile of his early years describes a hard grind: practising until dark, taping up sore hands and going again the next day. He headed to the US at 23 and had to build his career there from scratch.
His peak was two majors. At the 1979 US PGA at Oakland Hills he double-bogeyed the last to give away the title, then won a playoff against Ben Crenshaw. He later said “It just never happens, but that day it happened to me.” Two years on he won the 1981 US Open at Merion with a closing 67.
The one real stoush came in 1996, when he was removed as the International captain for the Presidents Cup after a player revolt. Sports Illustrated reported that a list of the top international players voted to remove him. It was a row about leadership, not an allegation of wrongdoing, and the outlets I could read gave no suggestion of anything worse.
On the harm test, nothing turned up. I found no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no pattern of working with people who push that stuff. To be fair, he is a golfer who has mostly spoken about golf, so the record is quiet rather than loudly good.
On the good side, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2015, and the Memorial Tournament named him a 2026 honoree. Jack Nicklaus called him “a really good man”. I found no big charity work attached to his name, so that part stays honest but modest. He still talks about Merion warmly: “I get goose bumps when I go to Merion.”
Nothing new on him lately beyond that tribute. He is a decent bloke by every account we could read, with a gap where the causes would be. Support, with a small asterisk for how little we know of his views off the course.