Clarkwin Cruz/Motivate Media Group
Ever-present OMEGA Dubai Desert Classic photographer David Cannon holds up a copy of his feature in the Sunday edition of Daily News, produced by Golf Digest Middle East at the European Tour event.

By Kent Gray
David Cannon has dedicated the past 37 years of his life to capturing some of golf’s most iconic images for Getty Images. With his trademark Tilley hat and a career-long association with Canon cameras, the 64-year-old Sussex snapper has covered 120 men’s and 71 women’s majors, 19 Ryder Cups and all 16 Solheim Cups.

The life-long Leicester City supporter has also worked at nine FIFA World Cups, the football assignments contributing to another incredible stat; the Englishman has spent the equivalent of 15 years sleeping in hotel rooms, rising early after many of those 5,500 nights so as not to miss the best of the dawn light.

Cannon has witnessed the incredible transformation of Dubai as the futuristic city has grown up around golf. He first visited in 1986 as Emirates Golf Club was transformed from a barren desert landscape complete with wandering camels to the majesty that is today the Majlis layout, the No.1 course in the Middle East. He’s not missed a single edition of the Omega Dubai Desert Classic either and owns the definitive collection of still images from the ‘Major of the Middle East’, Ernie Els’ first win in 1994, Tiger Woods’ iconic shots atop the Burj Al Arab in 2004 and Rory McIlroy’s European Tour breakthrough in 2009 the most memorable among them.  There’s even a book commemorating the first 25 years, published in conjunction with author Rodney J. Bogg.

“Emirates Golf Club is obviously a very special place to me because I’ve seen it since it was a square kilometre of desert with a wire fence around it,” Cannon said.

“I’ve been coming here two, three, four times a year since 1987. Apart from the majors, I think it has been the most important part of my photography life, actually. I love this place.”

The European Tour released a video to commemorate Cannon’s contribution to the oldest tour event outside of continental European overnight. Check it out here:

“I’m extremely honoured, actually, to be involved with Dubai. It’s been a huge part of my life. It’s such a wonder of the world…30 years to go from the desert to what it is now,” he says.

“I just like recording split seconds of life, history.

“If I look back on my career, I think I’m hopefully going to leave a quite unique legacy to the game of golf. Hopefully, I can go on a load more years yet and leave something special.”

As a tribute to one of the ODDC’s enduring characters, we’ve dedicated a double-page spread in each issue of this week’s Daily News, a 24-page newspaper produced by the Golf Digest Middle East team and printed by official OMEGA Dubai Desert Classic publisher and partner Motivate Media Group, to ‘Cannon’s Shots’ of the day. Today we’ve extended the feature to allow the renowned photojournalist to share his favourite images from 34 years visiting Emirates Golf Club. Enjoy the trip down memory lane, shared here on golfdigestme.com.

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Sheikh Mohammed’s vision has been richly rewarded

Emirates Golf Club was a huge part of the vision Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, had for this special part of the world in the early 1980s. The Middle East’s first grass golf course did so much to help the development of Dubai. It has stood the test of time with very few changes to the course as the whole landscape of Dubai has been transformed around it.

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Dramatic transformation of Emirates Golf Club

Aerial view of the course under construction in 1987, a square kilometre of land with three rubber-lined lakes.

Emirates Golf Club in December 2014, shot from roughly the same point with the Marina and other construction underway.

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1990: Eamonn Darcy and a new era for sports photography

This was the first year that I became involved in live transmission of pictures. It was still film in those days with a local runner needed to get to the nearest photo lab to get the rolls of film processed. At Allsport (now Getty Images) we had one of the first digital transmission machines. This changed the world of transmitting colour images from a minimum of 21 minutes per picture to under seven. We had so many pictures used, mainly because the story was so good – a European Tour event in the desert on grass with a totally magnificent course and especially the iconic clubhouse. Pictures sold the story. Eamonn Darcy, with maybe the strangest swing in professional golf ever, beat a stellar field using an Emirates Airlines pilot as his caddie!

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Another survivor of the first 30 Dubai Desert Classics – former Tournament Director Mike Stewart

David Cannon

Mike Stewart (right) engaged in a difficult conversation with Seve Ballesteros in 1992 as Mike Tait and Seve’s caddie look on. A penny for your thoughts Seve? No drop… it’s wasteland and just bad luck my old friend.

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Amateur Rory McIlroy played his first OMEGA Dubai Desert Classic when Ernie Els won in 2007

David Cannon

This picture is very special in many ways. I have been lucky enough to photograph Ernie Els from when he was an amateur in 1989 and we have become good friends. The same has happened with Rory, whom I first photographed in 2004 in the Junior Open Championship at Kilmarnock Barassie. To see him look straight at me with his award sitting beside Ernie and Michael Schumacher makes this a very special moment.

I guess we should have known that just two years later Rory would claim his first European Tour title in Dubai on that same green where he had sat with two sporting greats two years previously.

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The 25th OMEGA Dubai Desert Classic Anniversary photograph

I was honoured to be asked to take this photograph in 2014. I cannot recall or in fact imagine a similar picture being arranged let alone taken at any other regular tour event. Only the Open Championship champions dinner at St Andrews every five years, and the Masters past Champions dinner at Augusta each April, manage to get their past winners together. Those are major Championships whereas the ODDC is a regular European Tour event, as storied a history as it now owns. This picture is certainly unique, a testament to Dubai, that all these past champions recognised the importance of the tournament to the region and the European Tour. The only tinge of sadness was that we were missing the incomparable Severiano Ballesteros, though to have Javier his son there was a lovely tribute to the great champion. The logistics of gathering them all at the same time was another story!

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The iconic 8th hole on the Majlis course at Emirates G.C.

The photograph above, taken in 1988 at the official opening of Emirates Golf Club, is almost unrecognisable today as you can see by the image below, shot from the tee in January 2019, 30 years later. There is no doubt this is one of the most photographed holes in golf.

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Tiger Woods Burj Al Arab shoot

In 2004 an idea we had two years earlier came to pass. What would it be like if we could manage to get Tiger Woods to hit a golf ball off the helipad of the recently constructed Burj Al Arab hotel? Pretty epic as it turned out.

Tiger first played the Desert Classic in 2001 and elevated the event around the globe. But this photoshoot in 2004 became the greatest global PR success of the year with over 300 newspaper publications printing photos, let alone a huge worldwide television audience seeing the incredible footage. The world’s most iconic sportsman of that era had announced Dubai to the world through golf and the Desert Classic. It was exposure money, and certainly no amount of travel advertising could buy.

For Getty Images and myself as the photographer, it was a sensational day and one I will never forget, especially as Tiger announced later that afternoon that all he had been trying to do was to land one of his drives into the helicopter!

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Tiger in the Woods… A dream finally captured in 2001 and that fantastic moment of victory in 2008

I had been waiting for the ultimate ‘Tiger in the Woods’ image ever since Woods burst on the scene. In 2001, when he first played in Dubai and in the midst of a great tussle with Thomas Bjorn, Woods drove through the fairway into some trees on the dog-leg 18th hole and I had my chance. Technically this was a tough picture to capture in the shade but I managed it in the last year we used film!

In 2008 Tiger won for the second time holing one of his amazing final green clutch putts to give us a fabulous trademark fist pump! What a player!

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Emirates Golf Club – a course with so many photographers ‘studios’…

David Cannon

Danny Willett on his way to victory in 2016 at one of favourite spots for covering the ODDC, the dogleg on the par-5 13th hole. I always tell people that Emirates Golf Club is the very best of the year for photography. The 3rd, 8th, 10th and13th holes in the morning, with the 5th, 9th, 14th, 16th and 18th in the afternoons, all provide brilliant light conditions and backdrops. It is almost as if the designers were thinking of us all those years ago.

David Cannon