My Lucky Number's One," sang Lene Lovich all those years ago.

One, though, is generally good news. You think of a hole-in-one, the sport’s holiest grail. Or coming first in the monthly medal. Or Luke Donald’s world ranking.

Yet as the world’s finest tee off in Sandwich, a glance through the history books should persuade them that winning the sport’s oldest major in a year that ends with the singular digit might not be the smartest move.

Perhaps the R&A should station a soothsayer by the Royal St George’s locker room. “Enter ye here at gravest peril, oh seekers of Claret Jugs and suchlikes,” this wizened, bearded and bestaffed fellow might intone. “For it has been writ that he who winneth in a year that endeth one shall be pretty much pooped from thence.”

Not that it was always thus. James Braid won the Open in 1901 and Harry Vardon in 1911, and it didn’t seem to do their careers any harm. Arnold Palmer was the 1961 champion, while Lee Trevino took the title 10 years later, and they didn’t play on as if cursed. But since then there has been a distinctly worrying pattern. The winners of the Championship in 1981, 1991 and 2001 all accepted their trophies, banked their cheques, then saw their games disintegrate.

In chronological order, the not-so-great triumvirate were Bill Rogers, Ian Baker-Finch and David Duval, all hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with their successes. Having scaled one of golf’s highest mountains, they simply fell off the other side.

Rogers had the softest landing, but in a way he is the strangest of the lot. Players who have supped with the golfing Gods generally do everything they can to stay at the top table, their declines an increasingly desperate search for the games they once had. Rogers took a rather different tack.

The Texan was 29 when he won at Royal St George’s in the middle of a run that brought seven tournament wins on four continents in nine months. He had just finished second to David Graham at the US Open at Merion. He was PGA Tour player of the year for 1981.

Rogers went into the final round at Sandwich with a five-shot lead. He stuttered a little with a double bogey at the seventh, but still won by four shots ahead of Bernhard Langer. With the big one in the bag, and now a global competitor rather than just a good US player, he embarked on a whirlwind schedule of events, cashing in on his name and status. It took its toll. In 1982 he still contended -- he tied for third at the US Open -- but the gas was going out of his game. So too his desire. He won a low-key event in New Orleans in 1983, but his priorities were changing as his family grew. “I was thinking I’d rather be doing anything else than playing professional golf,” he said. In 1988 he became a club pro in San Antonio, which is pretty much what he has done since.

Baker-Finch’s fall was more brutal. The Australian appeared to have it all when he won at Birkdale in 1991 -- looks, self-belief, a swing to die for and a trophy that was a ticket to tee it up just about anywhere for the next 10 years.

Within four years, he was a competitive wreck, his confidence shot. On the practice ground he was as good as ever, in a tournament he was in tatters. Baker-Finch tinkered with his swing, and lost it. There were days when he could scarcely draw back the club from the ball out of terror for what would happen next.

At the 1995 Open at St Andrews, he famously hooked his tee shot out of bounds on the left, an almost unimaginably bad shot. In 1997 he shot 92 in the first round at Troon, withdrew from the tournament and effectively walked away. “He was a lovely guy,” said a fellow pro, “but he got so bad you didn’t want to talk to him in case you caught whatever he had.”

Baker-Finch has built a career in television as a commentator, and has made a tentative return to tournament play on the US Champions Tour, his best finish being a tie for third in April’s Liberty Mutual event.

Which brings us to Duval, that mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in shades. Duval famously removed the sunglasses after his three-shot win at Lytham in 2001, but the bright, articulate soul he revealed that day was soon back in an even darker place. The theory was that winning the major he had craved would teach Duval how to win many more. What he appeared to learn was that winning majors wasn’t such a big deal after all.

He split with his long-term girlfriend the year after his Lytham win. That seemed to plunge him into a personal slump. He emerged from it when he met the woman who has since become his wife, but by then he appeared to have decided that family life was far more important than golf.

Duval was an improbable second at the US Open in 2009, but it was a spike in a very flat graph. These days, he makes enough money to live well, but he makes few real waves in golf.

And Lene Lovich? She’s still out there apparently, still knocking out that tune at the age of 62. Which, for a punk chanteuse, doesn’t sound like a lucky number at all.