The Gulfport Open was a golf

Golf

Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....

 tournament on the PGA Tour

PGA Tour

The PGA Tour is the organizer of the main men's professional golf tours in the United States and North America...

 that played in the 1940s on Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

's oldest golf course

Golf course

A golf course comprises a series of holes, each consisting of a teeing ground, fairway, rough and other hazards, and a green with a flagstick and cup, all designed for the game of golf. A standard round of golf consists of playing 18 holes, thus most golf courses have this number of holes...

, the Great Southern Golf Club of Gulfport

Gulfport, Mississippi

Gulfport is the second largest city in Mississippi after the state capital Jackson. It is the larger of the two principal cities of the Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is included in the Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, Mississippi Combined Statistical Area. As of the...

.

At the 1945 event, Byron Nelson

Byron Nelson

John Byron Nelson, Jr. was an American PGA Tour golfer between 1935 and 1946.Nelson and two other well known golfers of the time, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, were born within seven months of each other in 1912...

 and Sam Snead

Sam Snead

Samuel Jackson Snead was an American professional golfer who was one of the top players in the world for most of four decades. Snead won a record 82 PGA Tour events including seven majors. He failed to win a U.S...

 finished play in regulation tied for the lead. Nineteen holes later in one of golf's most epic playoffs, Nelson conceded a putt to Snead giving him the tournament. Later that year, Nelson would complete a record-setting season by winning eighteen tournaments, 11 of them consecutively.

The Great Southern golf club was designed by Donald Ross in 1908.