Organized by the International Golf Federation (known as the World Amateur Golf Council up until 2003), the Eisenhower Trophy is the World Amateur Team Championship which is played every two years at various locations around the world. In 1958, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower received delegates from 35 national golf associations attending a planning conference in Washington DC, and agreed to having the tournament prize named as the Eisenhower Trophy.

Eisenhower endorsed the concept of a global golf competition saying, “Both officially and personally, I am interested in the plan advanced by the USGA for an amateur team golf championship among nations. I visualize it, as you do, as a potent force for establishing goodwill and friendship between yet another segment of the populations of nations.”

The first edition of this stroke play contest was arranged for later that year on The Old Course at St Andrews, with 115 players representing 29 countries, and Australia won the inaugural event after a play-off against the USA. The scoring format until 2000 was the best three of the 4-man team scores to count for each of the four rounds played. Since then, teams have been reduced to three players, with two scores counting every day.

Also since 2002, the Great Britain & Ireland team no longer competes as a conglomerate. Instead, four individual nations – England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – now enter as separate teams and this has obviously gone some way towards boosting the number of participating countries to more than seventy.

All the biggest margins of victory in The Eisenhower Trophy are recorded in favour of Team USA. They finished 16 strokes ahead of Scotland in 2000 and 27 strokes in front of South Africa in 1980 but the most satisfying victory must have been the 42-stoke win over Australia in 1960 to make up for the play-off loss incurred two years earlier.

The USA has won almost half the biennial meetings that have taken place up until 2020, finishing outside the top three places on only five occasions. Australia and GB&I have each won the trophy four times. On the individual scoring front, several golfers with the best score in a single edition of the tournament have gone on to excel in the professional ranks, including Jack Nicklaus (1960), Hall Sutton (1980), Rickie Fowler (2008) and John Rahm (2014).

Most competitions have been held at one venue (sometimes using two courses) but, starting in 1992, the Eisenhower Trophy has been staged at two locations in close proximity to one another. The most popular continent for staging the event is Europe, where ten courses in ten different countries have been used by the IGF down the years. Worldwide, four countries have each hosted the championship twice: Argentina (1972, 2010); Japan (1962, 2014); Mexico (1966, 2016); and the USA (1960, 1980).

Two venues are missing from our listings: Karuizawa 72 in Japan (2014) and La Dehesa in Chile (1998).