Peter Senior has had a most remarkable golf career and his win as a 51 year-old in the Australian PGA Championship on Monday came as no real surprise to me.

I first saw him hitting shots on the practice fairway at the Glenelg Golf Club in Adelaide where we were playing an Australian schoolboys' championship in the summer of 1974.

He was 13 years old with a mop of white curls and he was ripping six irons with a quality of strike far above anybody else in the field.

I was staggered at what he could do with an action that was quite unorthodox and everyone who saw him play commented on how he would hit the driver remarkable distances with almost both feet in the air.

He turned professional as a 19 year old, won his first event, the South Australian Open at Glenelg in 1979, and went to Europe the next year. He didn't do so well over there early on and by the end of 1984 he was beset by a most horrendous case of the chipping yips.

The simplest of chips would be bumped along the ground with a putter if it was humanly possible but when he was forced to pull out the wedges he could do anything and none of it was pretty.

Once from off the back of the old fourth green at Royal Queensland he knifed a simple ten-yard chip thirty yards back across the entire length of the green and down the fairway and that after a perfect three-iron tee shot just fell a few yards too long. This was soul-destroying and career ending stuff for someone so young.

Without a solution, he would have been driven from the game but he found he could cover his affliction by gripping the chipping clubs with his hands reversed and he not only solved the problem but he became a terrific short game player.

He won many tournaments in Europe and Australia and only ever ventured to America for a few months in 1985 and after that for single events where he may have earned invitations.

By his mid-40s his game was on the edge of being uncompetitive on the main tour and rather than head for the commentary box or into the field to design golf courses he sent for Gary Edwin, the somewhat controversial Queensland-based coach.

They set about reorganising some fundamentals of his game and at 50 he headed straight to Europe and their Senior Tour. He didn't win any of the four or five events he played, even though he could have won them all, but he did win the Qualifying School in America at the end of the year where they ever so generously hand out five cards from a field of around 100 hopefuls.

In 2010, he played well all season in America and he was placed in the top five in consecutive weeks at The Senior Open championship at Carnoustie and then the US Senior Open in Washington.

He easily won the Senior Australian Open at Royal Perth, beating Sandy Lyle by two shots. After his opening 65, the rest of the field seemed always to be playing for second place.

A shot behind Senior, and just one outside of the PGA playoff with Geoff Ogilvy, was the equally remarkable Peter Fowler.

With none of Senior's flair, Fowler has spent a career grinding harder than anybody and he too has suffered a terrible time with the yips.

Senior's defects manifested themselves with the chipping clubs but Fowler got them in the mid-1990s with the driver and those yips could have been just as career destroying. With no clue where the longest club was going, he headed back to his home in Auckland to find a way to feed his family.

No-one in New Zealand was ever going to adequately support a fledgling teaching career even though he is a brilliant instructor of the short game. He went to the only place he knew, the practice range, to try and find a game capable of earning money.

Against the odds, he did play well again earning back a player's card in Europe and, like Senior, he took a comfortable refuge on the over-50's tour in 2009. He knows only constant work and adjustment and, like Senior, his swing is better now than it ever was.

Only six weeks ago in Spain a young travelling Australian teacher Craig Bishop told him to spend less time worrying about the position of the club and just go and play. He showed him a video of the swing, pointed out a few things that he was doing particularly well and sent him on his way. ‘Stop worrying about the bad stuff because there isn't much bad stuff left in your swing' was the message.

This PGA Championship, with most of its final day played on the 90th birthday of the 1960 British Open champion Kel Nagle, will be long remembered for two players who turned back the clock and played some of their proudest golf.

Ogilvy will be disappointed he couldn't add the championship to his Open win in Sydney, but you can be sure that playing in the same class as one of the best players in the world gave Senior and Fowler much satisfaction.