by Byron Nelson
I’ve always been glad Miller became such a good player, though I don’t think I had anything to do with it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to take credit for his swing. But Miller’s a very nice man, loves to play golf, and his wife Karen is a wonderful lady. I feel very fortunate to count them as my friends.
I gave a few lessons at Texarkana, and I’ll never forget the first lesson I gave. I think I got a dollar for it. It was a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Josh Morris. He was in the insurance business, and she was a very kindly, soft-spoken lady, and it was Mrs. Morris I was to give my first official lesson to. I told her that I was new at teaching, that I would work with her all she wanted, and I’d try to be as helpful to her as I could.
She was very kind and she thought I did okay. That encouraged me, and I always had a soft spot in my heart for her, and I gave her quite a few lessons. Then some other ladies started coming to me, and I got to where I was giving more and more lessons. Of course, back then people didn’t have a lot of money for lessons. And you didn’t give just thirty-minute lessons, you just kept on working with them until they got tired and quit, because there weren’t all that many lessons to give back then.
Mrs. Morris never did make a very good player, so I guess I didn’t really help her with her game. But I did sometimes work with Mrs. Pharr. She would take a lesson once in a while, but I think she did it just to kind of encourage me, because she was a fine player and really didn’t need much in the way of lessons. I did teach both of her daughters some, though.
At that time, there was so little play that you could always play fivesomes or even more. I had no problem getting a game, and I usually didn’t have too much to do in the afternoons so I could play quite a lot. Wednesday was “doctors’ day,” of course, but you could get a game Thursday, and then Saturday and Sunday, too.
Playing with these members, I never did gamble, but every once in a while, I would hit a pretty good shot, and these members would brag on me. It got to where I could shoot par or less—par was 73—most all the time after I’d gotten used to the golf course and had practiced a little bit.
By now, I was playing with steel shafts. In fact, I hadn’t played with hickory shafts since 1930, because the new steel was so much better. I had a few clubs with hickory shafts in them, but I never did play with them again. I even had a putter with a hickory shaft, which you even see a few of today, modern ones, but by 1933, most everyone was playing with the steel, which had come out in 1931. It caught on very quickly.
There weren’t very many club manufacturers back then. The main ones in the golf club business at the time were Spalding, Wilson, and MacGregor. There was another one, Kroydon, and those were the clubs I was playing then. I switched around quite a bit between Kroydon and Wilson.
In the summer of 1933 I had an interesting match with a fellow named “Titanic” Thompson. He was a very nice person, a handsome man, and he could play almost as well right-handed as left. He was a gambler, the kind of fellow who would bet on just about anything. Some friends in Fort Worth contacted me and said they wanted me to play a money match against him where they would be betting on me. I didn’t care for betting-type matches, but they really wanted me to come to Fort Worth and do it, so I figured out when I could go home next and told them. We played at Ridglea, but I had nothing to do with the betting, all I did was play. They gave Titanic three strokes, which I wouldn’t have done, but since I didn’t have any money on it, I didn’t have anything to say about it. Anyway, I shot 69 and he shot 71, so he beat me one stroke. You see, I knew Titanic was a better player than most people gave him credit for. He had the ability to do whatever he had to to win, and he always knew the percentages. But he was never quite good enough to play on the tour, and really, he only played where he knew or felt that he had the advantage, like most good gamblers. Several years before that, when I played in the Southwestern Amateur in 1930 at Nichols Hills, Titanic bet he could throw a grapefruit over the Skirven Hotel, and someone was silly enough to take the bet. The hotel was about six stories high, but there was a building right next to it the same height, so Titanic got up on top of that building and sure enough, he threw his grapefruit right over the hotel. So I was wise to Titanic before that match with him ever took place.
I met a fellow named Harvey Penick while I was at Texarkana. He was from Austin, and already was getting a reputation as a good teacher. I’d see him each year at the Texas Open in San Antonio, and he’d be at some of the other tournaments around every once in a while. He and I had quite a few discussions about the swing, and I always found it good to talk with Harvey about golf. He was a quiet, easy, shy sort of a man, a very good man to know and to help anyone understand the golf swing. He’s credited me with sending him a lot of students, but I simply passed the word along that he was a good teacher, and quite a few of the younger players were smart enough to go look him up.
All the while I was still thinking quite a bit about the possibility of going to California and playing out there during the winter of ’33. Of course, I hadn’t said anything to anybody about it, because I hadn’t done very well in California the year before.
During this time, I’d met J.K. Wadley, who’d taken an interest in me. He was an oilman and a lumberman at that time—mainly oil. He encouraged me with my golf; he knew quite a lot about the game, and thought I had a good rhythm to my swing. One of the first times we played together, he told me I had one of the best grips he’d ever seen. So I told him about the time I’d played with Bobby Cruickshank, and he really enjoyed that story.
Mr. Wadley hadn’t taken up golf until his forties, but he’d become very enthused about it. He wanted to learn all he could about the game, and he already had a substantial amount of income, so one year he hired “Long Jim” Barnes, the 1916 PGA champion, to teach him. The way it came about was Mr. Wadley found out Barnes was going on a barnstorming tour. It was a series of exhibitions all around, wherever he could find someone to pay him to come, though what he got paid, I have no idea. Anyway, Mr. Wadley contacted him and contracted with him for Mr. Wadley to go along and watch the exhibitions, and Barnes would teach him everything he knew about golf.
Mr. Wadley learned a lot about golf this way and studied some more on his own, so he really was helpful to me. He’d say, “This is the way I used to do it,” or “This is the way Jim Barnes did it,” or “This is the way some of the older players did it.” Of course, most of that was different from the way I was trying to do it, but he did encourage me and thought I had a lot of potential. He always liked me because I didn’t drink or smoke or swear, and he thought I was a pretty nice young man.
He was going to finance me on the tour that winter in exchange for half my winnings, so I really went to work on my game, practicing and playing every chance I had. By the time fall arrived, I really was beginning to play quite well, though I knew I had a lot to learn yet and a lot of work to do. But in that day and time, you had to go on the tour and play on the tour to learn. Today you play through high school and college and get a lot of competition there, and then you can even go on the mini-tours, so you learn a lot before you actually qualify to go on the main tour. But in that day and time, we got our education and learned about competing on the tour itself.
By then, Louise and I were talking about when we might get married, and without telling me, she had talked to her father some about loaning me money to go to California. When Louise told Mr. Shofner what Mr. Wadley’s offer was, her father said he’d loan me a little bit and we wouldn’t have to split anything, that if Louise had that much confidence in me, that was good enough for him. I remember Louise telling me her father wanted to see me, and since I didn’t know she’d talked to him about my going to California, it scared me a little at first.
But we had a very nice conversation. Mr. Shofner told me, “If Louise has confidence in you, I do, too.” He arranged to loan me some money to get to California and get started. Well, I made a little bit, but I had to send back for a little bit more. I
’d played in the Los Angeles Open, and then at Brookside Park in Pasadena, then in a pro-am at Hillcrest, and in a tournament in Lakewood, but I was still struggling, and still having to borrow a little bit of money.
I headed back to Phoenix, then to San Antonio for the Texas Open, which was one of the oldest tournaments on the entire PGA tour. After that, there was one more tournament, in Galveston, the only tour event ever played there.
When I got to San Antonio, I figured up how much money I had in my pocket. I knew how much it was costing me per day, and I figured, “Well, I’ve got enough money to play here and in Galveston, and then I’ll go back to Texarkana and go to work.” I would have no money left at all to repay Mr. Shofner, and by now I owed him $660. That was a lot of money for me or anybody else then.
At the Texas Open, I was introduced to the gallery on the first tee by a man named L.G. Wilson, who was a golf salesman but no kin to the Wilson company. He was full of hot air, and really built me up, calling me “a promising young player”—I thought he never was going to get through introducing me. The more he talked, the more nervous I got.
This was at Breckenridge Park, where the tournament was still played until just a few years ago. At that time, they had these rubber mats you hit from on every tee, and you didn’t dare hit under it or behind it, because you could break your club, or even your hands. So I was being really careful not to hit behind it, and I came over the top of it instead. In fact, if there’d been one less coat of paint on the ball, I’d have missed it entirely. The ball just dribbled off the tee about forty or fifty yards. After that big buildup Wilson had given me, I was really embarrassed.
I did hit a good second shot with my brassie—now they call it the 2-wood. I put it about 125 yards from the green, got it close, and made the putt for a 4. And the thought just popped into my mind, “Well, you silly goose, if you can miss one that bad and make a par, if you ever hit it right, you might make a birdie!”
So sure enough, from then on I played real fine—shot 66 the first round and led the tournament. I got excited and nervous and everything else; it was the first time I’d ever led a tournament in my life. Then I kind of faltered around all the way through the rest of the tournament, even though I didn’t play all that badly, and finished second. Wiffy Cox, the pro at Congressional in Washington, D.C. and a fine player, considerably older than me, won it. I was paired with him the final round.
But I won $450, and boy, I thought I was rich. So I figured, well, if I can go to Galveston and play pretty good in Galveston, I can get back home with a little money in my pocket, and pay Mr. Shofner back.
So I went to Galveston and finished second there, too, but there wasn’t as much money—I only won a little over $300. Craig Wood won that tournament. Then I jumped in the car and headed for Texarkana. I don’t think the wheels hardly hit the ground the whole way from Galveston to Texarkana. It was right around the first of March, 1933.
As soon as I arrived, I walked straight in to Mr. Shofner’s grocery store and said, “Mr. Shofner, I owe you six hundred and sixty dollars,” and I paid him in cash. Then I said, “How much interest do I owe you?” and he said, “You don’t owe me any interest. I’m just glad you finished off your trip real good. I’m proud of you.”
So that left me a hundred dollars. I went to Arnold’s Jewelry Store (Mr. Arnold was a member at the club, so I knew him pretty well), and bought a hundred-dollar diamond ring, which was a pretty decent little ring in those days. I gave it to Louise and we became officially engaged. Then I was broke again—no money at all!
By now it was the spring of 1934. I kept working on my game, getting a little more recognition, giving quite a few lessons, and things were looking up, so Louise and I decided to get married. Actually, I seem to remember Mr. Shofner saying to Louise, “You and Byron are spending too much time together. I think you should go ahead and get married.” We thought it was a fine idea, though of course I had no money saved up.
But that didn’t stop us from going ahead with our wedding plans. We decided to get married on June 24, and I guess my first training in learning to be a good husband came a few weeks later, when I was in Mr. Arnold’s store again. I noticed a set of blue-and-white dishes in a wooden barrel, and asked Mr. Arnold how much they were. He told me they were on sale, and it seemed like a pretty good deal to me.
So, being young and ignorant in such things, I went ahead and bought the whole set—144 pieces. I was real proud of myself for finding such a bargain, and drove straight to Louise’s to tell her. I was in for a surprise. Louise didn’t seem to be happy about it at all. Her eyebrows went up, and she said, “I want to see them, right now.” You have to understand that in that day and time, you didn’t return something you’d bought like you can now. That just wasn’t done very often, especially if it was sale merchandise. So if she didn’t approve, I was in double trouble.
But back to the store we went, and fortunately, Louise did like the dishes, very much, so I was relieved, and felt I’d learned a good lesson at the same time. In fact, we kept those dishes for thirty-five or forty years, and she finally gave them to her niece, Sandy. In all that time, I think we broke only two of the 144 dishes.
Though my mind was more on my marriage than golf right then, I did have my first hole-in-one at that time. It was on the eleventh hole at the club, and it happened just two days before we were to be married. That golf course will also always be dear to me for another reason. Later that summer I was playing golf with Mrs. Pharr. It was 1934, about the middle of the summer, and the fairways were good and hard, so we were getting a nice amount of roll. The 16th hole then was 560 yards, and I hit a good drive downwind about 300 yards, then took my brassie, now called a 2-wood, and knocked the ball in the hole in two for my one and only double eagle. In fact, the next week I was playing with a foursome of men, knocked my second shot very close and made an eagle. That didn’t happen very often to me either, so it was fun and seemed to impress the fellows I was playing with.
Louise and I had no money for a church wedding, so we were married in the living room of Louise’s parents’ home. No one in my family was able to come, with money being so tight then. But they had all met Louise, and they definitely approved of the match. Louise’s sister Delle was maid of honor, and I had “Coach” Warren Woodson to stand up with me. He was a good friend and football coach at Texarkana Junior College at the time, and his wife Muriel played golf. They were club members, and we remained good friends with them both for all our lives.
Our honeymoon, if you can call it that, was a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a nice resort about 120 miles north. But both of us were so nervous from the wedding and all that we got upset stomachs, only stayed one night, and came back home. We found a kitchenette apartment that was roomy enough, but its only drawback was there was no cross-ventilation—no air conditioning either, of course—and in the summer, it was mighty hot. Lots of times we went to her folks and slept outside on the front porch. Louise went back to work as a beauty operator, and did that for several months. She was good at it, and she liked it very much.
That winter, right after Christmas, Louise went with me to California for her first experience on the tour. Jack Grout traveled with us by car, and I remember his golf clubs wouldn’t stand up in the back seat and kept falling on one or the other of us. By the time we’d reached L.A., Louise had had enough, and said, “Either the clubs go, or I go.” So Jack had to find another way home, but he was very understanding about it. Jack had a wonderfully long, fluid, smooth swing and good rhythm, but he was too nice a guy, not a tough enough competitor, so he never did very well on the tour.
Traveling at night in my little roadster, Louise’s feet and legs would get cold. Women didn’t wear slacks hardly at all then, and always dressed nice, especially for traveling. But cars had no heaters in that day and time, so we’d heat bricks in the oven before we left home in Texarkana and wrap them in paper. Then she’d put her feet on them and wrap a lap robe around her, w
hich helped a lot. We would stop the next night at her Grandmother Reese’s in West Texas, heat the bricks again, and keep going. We were mighty glad when we got a car with a heater, I can tell you.
We stayed at the same place I’d stayed the year before, the Sir Launfels Apartments in Los Angeles. Also staying there were Al and Emery Zimmerman, brothers and pros themselves, and we invited them to dinner one night. After they’d tasted Louise’s good cooking, Al said to Louise, “We’ve got a deal for you, Louise. We’ll buy all the groceries if you’ll cook for us.” Louise liked to cook, and the idea of saving money appealed to her, so she agreed, and we’ve remained friends with the Zimmermans ever since. Another interesting thing about that apartment building—the owner was a nice lady with a cute daughter named Jean, whom golfer Dick Metz met and later married; they’ve been together ever since. So it was a pretty good place for us pros.
Fortunately, I did a little better on the tour that winter than I had the year before, although we barely made expenses. The high point of that winter, though, was how I played against Lawson Little in the San Francisco Match Play Open in January. Of course, I was still learning to play then, not prominent at all and not known very well. The tournament was held at the Presidio Golf Club, where Little’s father was the commanding officer. At that time, Little had just won both the American and British Amateurs two years in a row, and had twenty-seven consecutive victories in match play.
I think I was paired with Little in the first round because I was the least-known player who had qualified. Since he was a local boy and it was his home club, I guess they figured I was the easiest player for him to play against.
Well, some of the other pros—in fact, I guess just about all of them—were steamed, because they had all had to qualify for one of the thirty-two spots in the tournament, and Lawson Little didn’t. Back then, tournaments were often run by local committees, not necessarily by the PGA, so the rules might be different depending on where you were playing. As you might guess, I was pretty nervous about playing him, but the other pros encouraged me, and Leo Diegel told me before our match, “Kid, Little hates to be outdriven, so you just go out on that first tee and shake him up. You can do it.”