Japan’s most successful professional golfer, Masashi ‘Jumbo’ Ozaki, has died at the age of 78.
Nicknamed Jumbo because of his prodigious length off the tee, Ozaki won 94 times on the Japan Tour and topped the country’s order of merit 12 times. He was in the top 10 of golf’s rankings for nearly 200 weeks and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2011.
“While golf has long been popular in Japan, it was Ozaki who brought a new vitality to the game and his emergence spawned an unprecedented growth in the game in the country,” said his profile on the World Golf Hall of Fame website.
Born in Tokushima in 1947, Ozaki started out his sporting career as professional baseball player, and was a pitcher for the Nishitetsu Lions from 1965-67. However, he turned to professional golf at the age of 23 and won the Japan PGA Championship the following year. before switching to golf and winning his first tournament in 1973 at the age of 26.
Ozaki won the Japan Open five times and the Japan PGA Championship six times. Although he did not win a title in the United States, Ozaki achieved three top-10 finishes in the majors – at the Masters (T8, 1973), U.S. Open (T6, 1989) and The Open Championship (T10, 1979).
He played in over 80 PGA Tour events including the 1996 Presidents Cup, and rose to fifth in the world rankings in 1996 at the age of 49. He won his last tournament, the ANA Open, in 2002, aged 55, and up until 2019 still played occasionally on the Japan Golf Tour.
A statement on the Japan Golf Tour Organisation website said Ozaki’s son Tomoharu had announced his father had passed away after being diagnosed with colon cancer about a year ago.
“The golf world has lost a truly great man,” said JGTO chairman Yutaka Morohoshi. “He long steered the men’s professional golf world and overwhelmed others with his unparalleled strength.”