Masashi Ozaki, who had a brief professional baseball career in Japan before converting his powerful, free-swinging approach to golf and becoming the country’s most successful champion and a Hall of Famer with 113 victories, died on Dec. 23. He was 78.
He was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer about a year ago, his son, Tomoharu Ozaki, said in a statement posted on the Japan Golf Tour’s website. He gave no other details.
Nicknamed Jumbo because of his long-hitting golf swing, attacking style of play and charismatic personality — as a guitar-playing singer, he had three songs on the Japanese charts in the 1980s — Ozaki was sometimes compared in his home country to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus as a popularizer of golf.