ROCESTER, England — “I was never finished,” Richard Bland says, with about as much conviction as the pin-seeking bunker shot that won him the U.S. Senior Open earlier this month in a record-tying back-to-back major triumph.
The gritty Englishman who middled for years, lost his European Tour card three times and went 477 events before winning the British Masters in 2021 knew, somewhere deep inside, that a ‘few bad years’ would not break him, even if others were suggesting so. Advertisement “Life just got in the way,” Bland recalls, looking back to a period from 2017 where his form fell off a cliff before a surprising surge, sparked partly by a move to LIV helped create a popular, but unlikely feel-good story. When Bland bounced into 2017 on the back of a high-earning year loaded with top-10 finishes and only a handful of finishes outside of the top 30, he thought a win was around the corner.
Granted, there were no headline-grabbing performances, just the kind of consistent golf that acts as a building block for better things, but still, he says: “Of course, I felt a win was coming.” Then, brother Heath fell ill, first with an induced coma for five weeks around Christmas after catching a virus that caused his heart to stop two times, and thereafter, the debilitating diagnosis of bowel cancer. His horrific health problems have persisted.
Only a few days before Bland, 51, won the Senior PGA Championship on his debut in May, his brother was diagnosed with lung ca.