Walter Hagen’s Wanamaker Trophy Cover-Up Fooled Golf for Nearly 100 Years

Walter Hagen lost golf’s greatest trophy, then spent three years persuading the sport that it had never happened. The deception outlived him by nearly a century, undone eventually by one photograph and an unmarked box in Detroit. In October 1930, a porter clearing space in the basement of the L.A. Young & Company factory in Detroit found an unmarked box. Inside was the Wanamaker Trophy , the prize of the PGA Championship, which golf had spent five years assuming had evaporated into the back of a New York taxi . The address was almost too neat. L.A.