William Lawson Little, Jr. was born on June 23, 1910 at Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island, United States, the son of William Lawson Little, a colonel in the United States Army Medical Corps, and Evelyn Baldwin Ryall. He spent his early life at a succession of army bases in the United States, the Philippines, and China.
Little graduated from Stanford University in 1934. At the university he was a student of golf instructor Ernest Jones.
Little became adept at golf as a young man, practicing and occasionally caddying for his father when he was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, in 1918-1919. He shot his first nine holes in Manila, scoring an impressive 53 strokes. He entered a number of junior tournaments in California but did not win any of them. He won his first amateur championship, the North California tournament, in 1928. In 1929 he won the United States Open Championship at Muirfield, defeating Walter Hagen. He won the Pacific Coast interchampionships in 1931 and 1933. In 1934 he defeated David Goldman to win the United States Amateur Championship at the Brookline Country Club in Massachusetts. Also in 1934 he won the British amateur championship by defeating James Wallace. Those two victories qualified him for the American Walker Cup team. Little repeated his sweep of amateur titles in 1935 by winning the United States and British championships, defeating Walter Emery and William Tweddle, respectively.
In 1936 he became a professional golfer. In that year he also set a new course record at St. Andrews, the site of the Canadian Open, where he shot a 271, which was 8 strokes under the old course record. The most exciting point of Little's professional golf career was in 1940, when he qualified for the United States Open by shooting 134 on thirty-six holes at Chicago's Olympia Fields Golf Club. That was the lowest score of the 1, 100 qualifiers for the open. During Open play, Little tied with Gene Sarazen, both scoring 287 strokes at the end of the regulation seventy-two holes. In the tie-breaking round, Little won, 70-73.
During World War II, Little twice ran second to Ben Hogan at the Asheville, North Carolina, Land of the Big Sky Open. In 1946 and 1947 he qualified for the British Open. Little's last major tournament win was in 1948 at the St. Petersburg (Florida) Open, held at the Lakewood Country Club. Little ascribed his success to always thinking out his play on each hole before addressing the ball. However, his powerful hitting and long drives down the fairway contributed to his wins and earned him the nickname Cannonball. He died in Pebble Beach, California.
Little was one of the most dominant amateur players in the history of the sport. He was the only player to have won both championship titles in the same year twice in succession. In all, Little won thirty-one consecutive amateur tournaments. In 1935, sportswriters considered him the outstanding athlete of the year, and he was awarded the James E. Sullivan Memorial Award for amateur athletes. Little was honored by the Professional Golfers Association in 1951 and 1952 by being named national tournament cochairman. He was inducted into the Professional Golfers Association Hall of Fame in 1961.
Bernard Darwin described Little as "intimidating. Not very tall, but enormously broad and enormously strong, capable of a daunting pugnacity of expression, he was as a bull in the long game, and yet no dove could be gentler near the hole. "
In 1936, Little married Dorothy Hurd.
