Earlier this year at one of his regular, charity auctions, Cecil Whelan put up a pair of mauve, patent-leather shoes and a golf bag, which were bought by a friend of Ian Woosnam's for £3,000. Inside one of the shoes was the message: "To my good friend Cecil, from Doug Sanders."

The secretary of the Links Golfing Society had kept the shoes for 29 years, since receiving them as a gift on the morning after the play-off for the 1970 British Open at St Andrews. They belonged to the runner-up. And though Walter Hagen, along with countless sports observers, claimed that no one remembers who finishes second, this was a very notable exception.

As things turned out, Jack Nicklaus claimed the second of his three British Open titles.

But few would have bet against the likelihood of a Sanders victory when, on the 71st, he played one of the most difficult sand shots in golf to get up and down for a par from the infamous Road Hole Bunker.

From there, he faced one of the easiest pars in the game, with a drive down a fairway well in excess of 100 yards across, followed by a second shot that required little more than distance control. Sanders drove long and straight, but he then made what proved to be his first, crucial error.

All week, he had been hitting stabbed, pitch-and-run shots to this green. But on this occasion, needing to get down in three more for an Open triumph, he elected to take a full pitch. Some observers were of the view that the ball was struck a little low on the club. Either way, it came to rest a long way past the hole.

Still, everything seemed to be under control when he putted down to three feet. That was when he made his second and fatal error. After bending down to pick up an imagined speck on the line of the putt, he failed to mark the ball and step away from it so as to compose himself. Instead, he elected to finish out the hole . . . and pushed the left-to-right breaking three-footer, right of the target.

By Sanders's own estimation, his downfall was in not backing away. "I made a mistake by not letting Trevino (Lee Trevino, his playing partner) putt first. I made the mistake about thinking which section of the crowd I was going to bow to. It was all my fault. There was only one person to blame - Doug Sanders."

The ultimate irony came in the resultant play-off the following day. Playing a perfect, running shot to the 18th, Sanders birdied it. But Nicklaus, who had stood on the tee with a one-stroke lead, also made three to secure victory. That was when the Bear, in what would be interpreted nowadays as a macho act of intimidation, peeled off his bright-yellow sweater on the 18th tee.

Then, after toying with the notion of hitting a three wood downwind, he eventually smashed a driver which ran through the green and into the rough on the banking at the back. A few more feet and he would have been out of bounds. But he chipped and putted for a closing three, so making the three-footer by Sanders at the 72nd, the most famous missed putt in the modern history of the game.

It was an extremely important victory for Nicklaus, not least because it had been a little more than three years since his previous "major" triumph, in the 1967 US Open. And it was during this period that he radically reinvented himself.

By that stage, Nicklaus had endured several years of insults from disgruntled golf fans who resented the way he had upstaged their hero, Arnold Palmer. But he took it all with typical stoicism, making no response to such hurtful names as "Ohio Fats", preferring to let his superb talent do the talking.

At the beginning of 1969, however, he began to make a positive effort with his public image. He grew his hair longer and had it styled in contemporary fashion. He took care to wear co-ordinated golf gear. And most significantly, he went on a crash diet, losing 20 lbs in a month and proceeded to keep the weight down through careful eating.

Meanwhile, the death of his father in 1970 affected him deeply. All of these factors combined to present a different, more mature Bear. Those close to him could perceive a reshaping of values which would ultimately deliver the most successful decade of his playing career.

Always a gracious loser, he now permitted himself hitherto unseen outbursts of emotion, when an occasion deeply moved him. St Andrews in 1970 was such an occasion.

Like all great golfers, victory at the Home of Golf was a cherished ambition and when his six-foot winning putt dropped into the hole, the Bear flung his putter high into the air in unbridled delight. Indeed, Sanders had to side-step adroitly so as to avoid the descending putter, before he completed a round of 73 with a four-footer.

As a fascinating aside, in the light of what had happened to his rival the previous day, Nicklaus admitted that he almost hit the decisive putt before he was ready. But he admonished himself saying, "Stop you idiot. Make sure the stroke is a good one."

Later at the presentation ceremony, the Bear behaved impeccably, as was his way: "I said at the beginning of the week, and it is more than true now, that there is no other place in the world I would rather win an Open Championship than here.

"It was only Doug's misfortune, of course, on the last green on Saturday, that gave me a second chance. If he had holed that putt, it could have stopped right there. It's some while since I won a championship and I can't tell you what it means or what it is like, standing on the 18th green. I have never been so excited in my life. I shall be coming back next year."

In a tribute to the runner-up, who was approaching his 37th birthday at the time, Pat-Ward Thomas wrote in the Guardian: "There cannot have been a more gallant loser than Sanders, nor one more gracious, humorous and generous, at a moment of overwhelming disappointment for him.

"To come back at Nicklaus, who was playing commanding golf, after five exhausting days, when the strain and tension upon him must have been enormous, was a performance of great character, particularly because we knew that he should have won the previous evening.

"That one of the finest players of the generation, and Sanders is that for all his bizarre garb, unusual style and recent inability to distinguish himself, should not be able to play a hole of 358 yards in four to win an Open, is not exciting; it is pitiful.

"This was a perfect instance of the cruel subtlety of the Old Course that has deceived golfers for centuries. Failure will haunt him a long time, and everyone was sad on his behalf."

He concluded: "At Muirfield in 1966, he was runner-up with Dave Thomas to Nicklaus, one stroke behind. He is deserving of a championship, in every sense of technical accomplishment and competitive quality, and one hopes that his career in the United States will take a more prosperous turn in future, and that he will be true to his promise and return to these shores."

THERE was to be no championship triumph for Sanders, though he made many a return visit to these shores. One such visit brought him to Grange GC two years ago, when he was presented with the Legend of Golf award.

They say that the first step towards overcoming a disaster is to confront it bravely. Which is precisely what Sanders did shortly before that Irish visit. Having long since learned to live with the pain of 1970, he returned to the Old Course while on a golfing holiday in Scotland.

How did he play the 18th? "I had a birdie," he replied with a smile. "Sank a 12-footer. And when I was there, I set up a pile of those three-footers - and sank them all!"

Yet for all that, he has never attempted to hide the disappointment of that fateful day in mid-July. "Oh yes, it was costly," he said. "It probably cost me $10 million per foot, but it was also costly in more ways than you could ever dream. You see I had waited for that moment. I was ready. I had done all the other things except to win a major.

"I had already been the runner-up in the (US) PGA (behind Bob Rosburg in 1959) and in the US Open (to Gene Littler in 1961) and in the British Open. And I had lost the Masters by two strokes (to Nicklaus) also in 1966. So, by the time 1970 came around, everything was set.

"Had the putt gone down, I could have signed contracts that day for millions of dollars, because I had something to market. If I had won at St Andrews, Doug Sanders would always have been known as the guy who beat Jack Nicklaus in the British Open. But I missed it.

"It means I can never be in the Hall of Fame, because I have never won a major. Orville Moody can be in it, though his only tournament victory happened to be the 1969 US Open. You have to win a major to get into the Hall of Fame.

"I could possibly have been captain of the Ryder Cup team, like Tom Kite, who won the US Open in 1992. Guys like him are remembered for the fact that they won a major. And of course that's wonderful. I'm not knocking it."

Then he added: "There were so many things I could have done. So yes, it hurts."

As leading observers pointed out at the time and players such as Greg Norman would testify, there is nothing more painful for a golfer than failure at the last gasp. Yet Sanders stubbornly refused to be crushed by his pain.

Nor did he ever think of inventing a noise from the gallery, such as the click of a camera, as an excuse for missing that fateful putt. Rather did he bare his soul to the world and let us all make of it what we would.

Of course there have been many who have dismissed Sanders as a pathetic loser. But thankfully they seem to be greatly outnumbered by the golfing realists who prefer to remember the BBC television commentary. As the ball slipped past the right edge of the 72nd hole, Henry Longhurst uttered the immortal words: "There but for the grace of God . . . "