by Byron Nelson
That fall, we returned to Texarkana and Louise’s folks’ place. We’d been married over four years now, and we were beginning to wonder why we hadn’t had any children. So Louise went to her doctor and was tested, and the doctor said there wasn’t any reason he could find why she couldn’t get pregnant. My turn was next, and that was when they discovered the high fever I’d had with the typhoid had made me sterile. Louise was very disappointed, naturally, and I was, too, but she took it very well, didn’t brood about it, though it made her sad for quite a while. Some time later, she wanted to adopt a child, but I wasn’t in favor of it. We had to travel so much, and it wasn’t like it is on the tour now, with nurseries and special arrangements for babies. You almost never saw a tour player’s children at any tournament, unless it was being played in his city. It was just too much trouble, driving from city to city as we did then, to have children along and try to bring them up that way.
The other problem was I’d seen so many adopted children who just didn’t turn out right, for one reason or another. I was very reluctant to take that sort of a chance, and after a while, Louise gave up the idea and turned her energies instead to her nieces and nephews. I guess that in all our fifty years of marriage, that was the one regret she had. This may sound strange, but I never particularly regretted not having any children, except for Louise’s sake, because I always wanted to please her and make her happy. She was a wonderful wife in every way, and I know she would have been a wonderful mother, too. As it turned out, when we moved back to Texas and settled in Roanoke in ’46, we spent so much time with Louise’s nieces and nephews that we almost felt we’d helped raise quite a few of them. That helped Louise tremendously, and I enjoyed it, too.
In 1938, though, we spent the fall in Texarkana, with me practicing quite a bit and Louise enjoying being with her family. We lived at her parents’ home, since they had a spare bedroom. It was good to be free of the responsibility of running a club for a while, because it gave me more time to concentrate on my game. Really, those times in Texarkana were about the only vacations we had while I was on the tour.
I didn’t do anything spectacular in California those first weeks on tour in ’39. Probably the most interesting thing I did was play in a pro-am at Hillcrest in Los Angeles with Chico Marx. He was very animated and funny, though he didn’t say much. When he signed the scorecard, he wrote, “I enjoyed it—bet you didn’t.” But I did tie for seventh in L.A., finished eighth in Oakland, and lost the first round in the San Francisco Match Play tournament. Then I tied for second in the Crosby Pro-Am, and was third in the Texas Open at San Antonio. In that Texas Open McSpaden and I played a practice round against Runyan and Ben Hogan, and McSpaden shot a 59. I helped four shots, making our best ball 55. Not everyone knows that the Texas Open is one of the oldest on the tour. Only the Western, the PGA, and the U.S. Open have been going on longer.
The next tournament in ’39 was the Phoenix Open, and that was when I finally woke up. I won by twelve strokes. Mind you, that was a 54-hole tournament, so I had to be playing good to be leading that much after three rounds. I shot 64 in the Pro-Am, then 68-65-65. All that work for $700. Believe it or not, it snowed so much in Phoenix Friday and Saturday that we couldn’t play either day, and had to play thirty-six on Sunday just to have a tournament at all. The two 65’s I shot that Sunday were the record for one day for quite a few years.
I let up a little bit after Phoenix, and didn’t play particularly well for the next couple of months. One thing of interest, though, was the Thomasville tournament in Georgia. The course was Glen Arven, and it had the oddest finishing hole I ever saw. It was a par 5, and horseshoe or U-shaped, so the green was no more than a hundred yards from the tee. The area within the “U” was considered out of bounds, and that wasn’t so unusual, but they had a local rule that said you couldn’t even cut across that out of bounds area. If you hit your drive to the right spot to try and go over the “U,” they could rule your ball O.B., even if it landed on the green. Kept us all honest, I guess.
It’s also interesting to realize that there was often quite a bit of difference in the purses among various tournaments, much more so than there is now. Most had a purse of $5000, and occasionally one would offer $10,000, but there were still quite a few of $3000 or less. And even the $10,000-purse events didn’t pay everyone who made the cut—mostly only the top twenty places or so. We still played in every one we could get to, though. Obviously, we weren’t playing just for the money sometimes, more for the fun of it and the chance to keep working on our games.
Back then, you learned to play winning golf by playing on the tour. None of us had college degrees or any other kind of jobs other than club jobs, and we hadn’t had all the training that the young men and women have today on their tours. We had what I guess you might call on-the-job training. It was tough at times, but life was good, too.
In St. Petersburg that spring, I played with Frank Walsh, whose brother became president of the PGA some years later. Frank was a pretty good player himself, but had some odd ideas. For one, he always believed that good players carried their clubs in their left hand. Jimmy Demaret was the only one I knew of who did, and he was a pretty good hacker, but I never really noticed anyone else doing that consistently. Guess I had my mind more on my own game.
My next big target that year was the North and South Tournament at Pinehurst #2. I hadn’t yet played as well there as I felt I should have, and I was hoping to do better this time. I played very steady, nothing really very unusual, shot 280 and won by two strokes. They say when you’re playing well, you get a lot of breaks—or another way of putting it, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But on the seventeenth hole in the last round, I really did have a bit of luck—both good and bad.
The bad part was my tee shot buried in the face of the right-hand bunker on a fairly steep upslope with the pin cut on the right side. The good part was I holed out for a 2, and that birdie ended up being half of my two-stroke winning margin.
The reason I say I was fortunate was that I didn’t putt very well through the entire tournament. In fact, after it was over, R.A. Stranahan, the president of Champion Spark Plug in Toledo, Ohio, and the father of Frank Stranahan, who later became a fine golfer, came to me in the locker room and said, “You made a liar out of me.” Surprised, I said, “How did I do that?” And he replied, “I said no one could putt poorly and win this tournament.” So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have to putt on the seventeenth. Mr. Stranahan was around golf a lot, involved in various golf organizations, and an avid golfer himself. To give him credit, he was right—it was very unusual for someone to putt poorly and still manage to win.
The North and South was a very important win for me, since it was considered a major at the time, and I felt very good about being able to win despite very average putting. I was very happy to have achieved another goal of mine, and the folks at Reading were, too.
In defense of my putting, though, the greens we played from city to city were so inconsistent that we mostly concentrated on getting our approach shots close enough to the pin that we wouldn’t have to worry about putting much. Very few of the pros worked a whole lot on their putting. Made more sense to work on your irons or your chipping.
I played all right the next two weeks, finishing tenth at Greensboro and seventh at the Masters, then skipped Asheville, the Met Open, and the Goodall Round Robin. Not because I had to be at the club, but because I had been given another wonderful opportunity to advance in my career as a club professional.
Cloyd Haas, president of the Haas-Jordan Company in Toledo and a member at Inverness, had gone to George Jacobus, my good friend at Ridgewood, and told him Inverness was looking for a new pro. George told him about me, and also suggested he speak with Ben Hogan up the road at Hershey Country Club. Mr. Haas did exactly that, and I guess he liked the way I combed my hair better or something. Anyway, he invited me to come up to Inverness, which I did the next week, and I signed a contract with Ra
lph Carpenter, president of the club and of Dana Corporation, to come to Inverness in April 1940.
I would be paid $3600 in salary—basically about $600 a month for the time I’d be there, plus I got all the profits from the shop. The club paid the caddiemaster, Huey Rogers, and either all or part of assistant pro Herman Lang’s salary. Even then, though I was playing well and winning money most of the time, I wasn’t thinking about making a living on the tour. I knew I needed that club job to survive.
My Inverness contract was again an improvement over what I was making at Reading, but also a lot more responsibility, larger membership, and a well-known championship course. As you can imagine, I was flying pretty high. I also signed an endorsement contract with MacGregor in June 1939. Tommy Armour was the pro at Boca Raton, and his clubs were the main ones MacGregor was making then. We pros were all at Boca at the time for a meeting, and afterwards I went to Tommy’s pro shop and picked out a set of his irons, called “Silver Scots.” Two weeks later, I won the Open with those irons and kept them quite a while—at least till I had MacGregor make some with my own name on them.
The Open that year was held at Philadelphia Country Club, which at that time had two courses: Bala Cynwyd in town, and the Spring Mill Course out in the country, where the tournament was to be held. I felt I was playing rather well, hitting my irons great, and in the practice rounds, I scored close to par. It was normally a par-71 course, but the USGA wanted to make it more difficult, and changed two of the short par fives into par fours, which made it a par 69—about the only time such a “short” course has been an Open site. One of the redesigned holes was the eighth, and the other was the twelfth. This was in the days before clubs would spend money to change a course just for a specific tournament.
You might be interested to know that despite a par of 69, those par fours were far from easy. They were 480, 454, 453, 449, 447, 425, and 421 yards, so you know we were using those long irons a lot.
I was very nervous in the first round and played poorly for the first seven holes. The eighth was a long par 4, slightly uphill. I hit a good drive and a 2-iron on the green and almost birdied it. On the 9th I hit a long iron to within eight feet of the pin and made it, which encouraged me. I really did hit my irons well, though I never holed a chip or pitch the entire time. In the four regulation and two playoff rounds, I hit the pin six times with my irons, from 1-iron to 8-iron.
We played thirty-six holes the last day, and I was paired with Olin Dutra, who’d won in ’34 at Merion. We were both well in contention. My friend from Texarkana, J.K. Wadley, was following us, and also knew Olin. After our first eighteen, he offered to buy us lunch. Dutra ordered roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes and all the trimmings. I said, “I’ll have the same,” and Mr. Wadley said, “No, you won’t.” He ordered for me—a chicken sandwich on toast with no mayonnaise, some vegetables, iced tea, and half a piece of apple pie.
That afternoon, it was hot and muggy. Dutra played badly, and I shot a 1-under-par 68, which got me in a tie with Denny Shute and Craig Wood. That taught me a good lesson, not to eat too heavy a meal before going out to play, and I’ve abided by it ever since.
I was very fortunate to get into that playoff. Snead, who was worried about Shute playing behind him, made a poor club selection on eighteen. He thought he needed a birdie to win when he only needed a par, but he ended up with an 8, so he missed both winning and getting into the playoff.
In the first playoff, Shute struggled to a 76, while Craig and I tied at 68. On the last hole, Craig was leading me by a stroke and tried to reach the green at 18 in two, but hooked his second shot badly, and hit a man in the gallery right in the head. The man had been standing in the rough to the left, and the ball dropped and stayed there in the rough, about thirty yards short of the green. The fellow was knocked out, and they carried him across the green right in front of us while Craig waited to play his third shot. Of course, his ball would have been in even worse trouble if it hadn’t gotten stopped, but that didn’t make Craig feel any better. He hit a pitch shot then that left him with a six-footer for birdie, while my ball was eight feet away. I would putt first.
As I stood over my ball, suddenly the thought popped into my head of all the times when we were playing as caddies at Glen Garden and we’d say, “This putt is for the U.S. Open.” Now I was really playing that dream out, and it steadied me enough that I sank my putt. But Craig left his just one inch short, so we were tied.
That meant another 18-hole playoff in those days, and the committee asked us before we played that afternoon whether we would be willing to go to sudden death if we tied again. We both said, “No, we’ll go a full eighteen.” They weren’t real happy to hear that, because the folks working on the tournament had to get back to their jobs, and of course the members wanted their course back. But we both felt the same way, that we didn’t want to win based on just one or two holes. So they agreed.
On the second playoff, I hit a bad second shot at the first hole and ended up in the deep right bunker, but I got up and down all right. On the second, a long par three, we had to use drivers, and had to carry the green. I pushed mine into some deep rough, while Wood’s tee shot landed on the green. I got out with my sand wedge and saved par, and Wood two-putted. The next hole I birdied while Craig parred, and on the fourth, I hit a good drive, then holed a 1-iron for an eagle, while Craig made another four.
When I was lining up to play my second shot, I wasn’t thinking at all about holing out. But I’d been striking my irons so well, had just birdied the third hole, and I felt I could hit this one close and make birdie again. Sure enough, the ball went straight up to the green and straight into the hole like a rat. There were a lot of folks in the gallery, and they whooped and hollered quite a bit, though they were still quieter than the fans are now. You know, when you’re on the golf course and hear the spectators cheering, you learn quickly that the applause for an eagle is different from a birdie, and of course it’s even louder for a hole in one. No matter where you are, you can tell by the applause just how good the shot was. What you don’t want to hear the gallery do when you’re playing is give a big groan—because that means you just missed a short putt.
Anyway, as I walked off the green, I remember thinking very vividly, “Boy, I’m three strokes ahead now!” But I knew it was no time to turn negative or quit being aggressive. I knew I had to continue playing well. As it happened, I then bogeyed a couple of holes but so did Craig, and that three-stroke lead proved to be my winning margin, 70 to 73.
Harold McSpaden—who was really the best friend I had on the tour—walked along with me through both of the playoff rounds, helping me get through the gallery and just being there. Naturally, he didn’t say anything, but his presence and support sure were a big help to me.
Mr. Giles, my boss and friend from Reading, was there with quite a few of the members, so you might say I almost had my own gallery. George Jacobus was there too, and was nearly beside himself with excitement. He said to me afterwards, “You remember, Byron, we talked about this, and I said, ‘You’re going to be the National Champion one of these days.’ ” I was kind of in a trance for a few days before I fully realized I was indeed the U.S. Open champion and had accomplished another dream.
After I got back home, the members of all three clubs—Berkleigh, Galen Hall, and Reading—gave Louise and me a wonderful party. They presented Louise with a large silver bowl that had her name engraved on it. Then they gave me a handsome, solid gold watch by Hamilton, engraved on the back “Byron Nelson, Winner U.S. Open 1939–40, Members of Reading Country Club.” I still have both of them. They also gave me a Model 70 Winchester 30.06, a mighty fine rifle. That was arranged by Alex Kagen, a member at Berkleigh, who owned a sporting goods store and had once asked me if I hunted. When I told him all I had was a shotgun, he came up with the idea for the Winchester. I used it every time I went hunting, and kept it until just recently, when I sold it to my good friend, Steve Barley.
So t
here I was, the U.S. Open champion, with a contract I’d signed two weeks before to go to Inverness, just like when I signed the contract to go to Reading one week before I won the Masters. Some people would say I needed an agent to help me capitalize on my wins, but hardly anybody had one in those days. Hagen was the only one I knew of who did—a fellow named Bob Harlow, the golf writer who started Golf World magazine.
Shortly after the Open, Ben and Valerie Hogan came to visit and stayed a week. We practiced a lot and played some. I had to work, of course, but Ben played a couple of times with Mr. Giles, and he really enjoyed getting a chance to play with Ben, who was playing much better by then.