by Byron Nelson
One thing that helped her feel better happened late that fall. The city of Denton wanted to honor us for all the good publicity we had brought to Texas and especially Denton, so they surprised us one day by presenting us with a pair of beautiful horses on the courthouse steps. They were half Tennesee Walkers, so they made good riding horses for our 54-acre place there in Denton and eventually for the ranch in Roanoke. But Louise definitely got the better part of the deal. Her horse, Linda, was not only beautifully gaited; she had a wonderful disposition. You could do just about anything with her. My horse, Rex, a gelding, never was anything like Linda; he was quite fractious at times and we eventually had to sell him. But Linda was a joy to us for a long time, and it was certainly a wonderful honor from the folks in Denton.
It was now December. I had begun my career with the goal of winning every important tournament in the United States at least once. I already had the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA, the North and South, the Western, and the Tam O’Shanter. The only one left was the L.A. Open, which once again had eluded me in 1945. I ended the year feeling very satisfied in some respects, but I still had at least one goal left in golf—and still had to save up enough money to buy that ranch I’d been dreaming of.
Speaking of money for the ranch. . . . in 1945, I made more than I ever had before, but because so much of it was in war bonds, it’s been reported in the press for years and years that I won much more than it actually turned out to be. You see, Fred Corcoran, who was running the tour at the time, wanted golf to do as much as possible toward the war effort, and we were all glad to help. So he got the various tournament committees to have the prize money in war bonds. In case anyone doesn’t know, they were similar to our savings bonds and CD’s today. You bought, say, a $1000 bond for $750, and if you held on to it for ten years, it would actually be worth $1000. Most of the tournaments paid totally in war bonds, a few paid in a combination of cash and bonds, and once in a while one would pay totally in cash.
Well, none of us were making the kind of money where we could hold on to those bonds for ten years, so we cashed them in immediately, which meant at about 75% of their face value. When you look at the official records and see where I won $1,333.33, for instance, that meant it was actually $1000 in cash. According to the press, I won somewhere between $60,000 and $66,000 in ’45, but according to my black book where I kept records of each tournament played and what I really won, my winnings were closer to $47,600. In fact, my IRS records for that year show that I made $52,511.32 from golf, but that includes such things as exhibitions and pro-ams and sometimes a portion of the gate receipts, which once in a while you would get if you were in a playoff. It’s very confusing for anyone trying to get all those figures to make sense, because the PGA didn’t keep the best records then, and sometimes even the press reported things inaccurately. But that’s about the best I can do at straightening it out as far as my own golf winnings are concerned. I know for sure that Louise and I didn’t hold on to any of those war bonds—we couldn’t afford that luxury!
EIGHT
Golf for the
Fun of It
EVEN THOUGH I’D HAD A WONDERFUL YEAR IN 1945, I still had that goal of winning every important tournament in America at least once. But that Los Angeles Open had gotten away from me every year. I felt I’d just plain thrown it away a couple of times. All golfers have certain areas of the country where they play better—especially on the greens—than others. I negotiated the greens beautifully in Chicago, where I won six tournaments, and San Francisco, where I won three. So I was always comfortable playing in both those cities. But I never could get the hang of the greens in Los Angeles. They were poa annua then, and everyone told me the greens always broke toward the ocean, but half the time I couldn’t figure out which way the ocean was. We had caddies, but they were just kids, most of them, and in that day and time, nearly all the players depended on themselves to judge distances and read greens.
So the Los Angeles Open was still on my list to win, and I set myself to win it that next January, just a couple of weeks after I’d won the Fort Worth Open at Glen Garden. I was still hitting my irons very well, and I remembered that the 10th hole at Riviera was a very demanding one. It was more than a dogleg, it just went dead right at the landing area. You had to drive on the left side of the fairway, because the green sloped to the left and you had to approach it from the left to have any chance to make par. So I was very sure to drive to the left, and I believe I even made a couple of birdies. Fortunately, I played very steady on the other 17 holes as well, shot 284, and won by 5 strokes. That was very satisfying, to win a tournament that had escaped me so many times. I was bent on playing well, of course, and I was leading going to the last round anyway, but I finished five shots ahead of Sam Snead, thanks to a birdie on the 18th hole. That birdie gave me a great deal of satisfaction, being in front of quite a large gallery and coming at the end of a tournament that had eluded me so many times. Maybe it meant more to me because southern California was where I’d done so poorly when I first turned pro, and I was determined to make up for it. In any case, it was an excellent tournament for me, and another goal checked off on my list.
At the San Francisco Open the next week, my score was one shot better—283—than at L.A., but I got a little more distance between me and the field, partly because of the course conditions. It was terribly wet and cold all through the tournament. The ball did not roll at all; in fact, the players were allowed to lift, clean, and drop the ball if it plugged in the fairway. I hit some of the best iron shots of my career in that tournament, and beat Ben Hogan by nine. What I liked best about it was the tenth hole, a very demanding par four. I hit driver and 1-iron all four rounds and made two birdies and two pars, and won by 9 shots. Under those conditions, that was pretty good. The other satisfying thing was that the tournament was held at the Lakeside Course of the Olympic Club, which is my favorite course outside of Riverhill in Kerrville, Texas.
I was scheduled to play at Richmond just outside San Francisco the next week, but by now I was starting to think about retiring. I really felt I had played all I wanted to play. I’d achieved all my goals and then some, and the traveling was getting pretty old. I wanted to settle down and do something different with my life. I’d been doing nothing but golf since I was twenty, and it’s a hard life in many ways, even though it has its exciting and glamorous aspects—especially if you’re playing well. But fourteen years was enough.
During December of ’45, Louise and I had talked some about my quitting golf someday, and she said that would be fine with her. I knew she was as tired of the travel and so forth as I was. But we had to talk seriously, because this was a complicated decision. I had a contract with MacGregor, we hadn’t found the ranch yet that we wanted to buy—there were a lot of things to consider. But at least we had quite a bit in the bank, and we needed to stop and think about what we wanted to do and how we would do it.
So I withdrew from the Richmond tournament and telephoned Louise. She and Eva McSpaden had already caught a train to Phoenix for the next tournament, and Jug and I were to meet them there after we played San Francisco and Richmond. The girls were staying at the Westward Ho Hotel, and when I reached Louise and told her I had withdrawn from the tournament at Richmond, she was really worried. She asked me three or four times if I was all right. When I finally convinced her I was, I told her I was catching a train and would pick her up in Phoenix and that I wanted us to go home and do some serious talking about the tour. I asked her not to say anything about it, even to Eva.
We started talking as soon as we both were on the train in Phoenix and began figuring things out. The first thing to think about was my contract with MacGregor. It was a pretty good one, and in all fairness to the company, when I decided to quit I would have to renegotiate it, which would naturally mean less income we could count on. We finally decided I would have to go back and play on the tour until all the problems were worked out. So as soon as I got home, I called Henry Co
wan at MacGregor and told him I wanted to talk to him. I went up to Cincinnati and told him I was going to retire and needed to renegotiate. He was upset that I was leaving the tour, but we worked out an agreement where I would take the same amount of money for the three-year period of the contract and spread it out over ten years. Then I went back out to play.
One very funny thing happened after I withdrew from the Richmond tournament. I didn’t find out about it until nearly forty-five years later, but Prescott Sullivan, a fine sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner, had written a column about me after I’d left San Francisco after winning there in ’46. He talked about how the other players were pleased that I wasn’t playing at Richmond because I’d been winning all the money on the tour, it seemed like, and they were tired of it. In fact, Willie Goggin, who’d brought this up before, had again tried to get the tour to change the prize distribution. The article ended by saying that I was “knee-deep in greenbacks” down there in Texas. My good friends Bud and Janet Waltz of Haas-Jordan showed me the article just a couple of years ago, and I don’t know if I ever laughed so hard in my life as when I read that.
Knee-deep in greenbacks or not, I skipped not only Richmond, but Phoenix and Tucson too. So my first tournament after that was at San Antonio on the Willow Springs course. We had terrible weather—it snowed and hailed. I was third, which wasn’t bad considering all that was going on in my head. One big distraction was that we had found the ranch we wanted to buy. It was 630 acres in Roanoke, a small town 22 miles north of Fort Worth. There was already a bid on it, but this was to be a cash sale, and our agent didn’t think the buyer could come up with that much money that fast. He said we would know in a month.
So, all excited about buying this ranch, off I went to New Orleans, where I pulled myself together and won by five strokes. We played City Park again, a fine municipal facility that I always liked. I always played well there, and especially liked the long par threes, since I was a good long-iron player. I was a little behind Hogan starting the last round, and birdied the first six holes, as I remember it, to pull ahead of him, so that felt good. Now I was really counting the extra acres and cattle that I could get with my winnings if we were able to buy that ranch.
Next was Pensacola, but with everything on my mind and being all keyed up about the ranch and all, I played terrible. I shot 286, tied for thirteenth, and won $152.50. That wouldn’t buy much ranch. But this was the first of March. My real estate agent back in Texas, Mr. Ray, was supposed to have called me by this time and I hadn’t heard from him at all, so it was upsetting me. Louise and I got packed and she was sitting in the car, waiting for me to drive us to St. Petersburg, when I decided to call Mr. Ray right then and there. When I got him, he told me he was just getting ready to call me. He’d just found out that the deal hadn’t gone through, so I had the opportunity to buy it. I told him, “I have to leave right now for St. Petersburg, but I’ll call you as soon as I get there.” I was really excited.
All the way on that six-hour drive, Louise and I talked it through. Louise was willing to go along with the idea of the ranch, but she insisted—and I agreed—that we shouldn’t dip into any of our investments to buy it. We had to do it strictly with our cash savings, and the purchase price was $55,000, which we were still somewhat short of. We figured if I did well enough through the rest of the year, we’d have just enough to buy the ranch, plus a little to live on and buy cattle with and so forth. When we got to our hotel room in St. Petersburg, my mind was made up. I didn’t even unpack, just got on the phone immediately and told Mr. Ray I’d send him the check for the escrow money right then.
With that load off my mind, I played a little better at St. Petersburg, finishing fifth and winning $650. Now my winnings meant more than a ranch “someday”—they meant “very soon.” I played in the Miami Four Ball next partnered with McSpaden, but we weren’t as lucky as we had been in ’45. We did make it to the semifinals, though, and won $300, which was better than getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick.
After that, I took a few weeks off to come home and begin to get some loose ends tied up. Earlier in the year, Otis Dypwick, a sportswriter from Minneapolis, had contacted me about writing an instruction book to be called Winning Golf, and I’d agreed to do it, so now it was the middle of March and warm enough in Texas to take the pictures we would need. We did them out at Colonial, and after they were done, I worked with Otis on the copy to go with each picture. One funny thing—in quite a few of the pictures, my hands look darker than you would expect, especially for that time of the year. It’s because I’d been painting fences just before we did the pictures, and we didn’t have products like they do today for taking paint off your hands, so I still had quite a bit of that red paint on my hands. But red hands or not, I’ve always been proud of that book. I call it “the primer of golf,” because it’s quite simple and easy to understand.
Another thing I needed to do was to find out whether my parents were willing to move to the ranch, because I knew I would need a lot of help, and my father was a good hard worker. When I talked to them, my father was willing to move, but my mother wasn’t too eager about it. But she agreed to do it and it worked out fine. There was a smaller house next to the ranch house where they could live, along with my brother Charles. Ellen, my sister, had married and moved out by that time.
Finally, I had to start learning how to be a rancher. I wasn’t about to jump into buying cattle or much of anything for the ranch until I really had some idea of how to go about it. I set myself to studying and working on it the whole rest of that year. I read everything I could get my hands on, and talked to anyone I could find who had some knowledge on the subject.
But in the meantime, it was back to work on the golf course. My next tournament was the Masters, where I finished seventh. I wasn’t very happy with that performance, but my heart just really wasn’t in it anymore. I had achieved my goals as far as the Masters and the other majors were concerned, though I still hoped to win the Open again.
For several months then, I would go out and play a tournament, then go back home and study up on ranching. A month after the Masters, I played at Houston and won by two shots, adding another $2000 to our savings. That tournament was interesting in that it was the only one I can recall of all the times we played together through the years that Hogan, Snead, and I finished in the top three spots. I was first, Hogan second, and Snead third. You’d think, as well as we all played then, that something like that would have happened more often, but it didn’t. There really were quite a few fine players around then, and they didn’t just let us walk all over them much. I think part of the reason I played so well was that, except for Houston, I had won every important Texas tournament, and some not-so-important ones as well. I’d won at Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, Beaumont, even Harlingen, but never Houston. So that was sort of a minor goal for me, and now I had achieved it, which made me feel good.
The following week I played in the first Colonial National Invitational in Fort Worth and finished in a tie for ninth place. That whole year, I would have a spurt of being able to get fired up for a tournament or two, and then run out of steam. The excitement and tension of 1945 had taken more out of me than I had actually realized. But I never did play well at Colonial—my best finish was a tie for third with Harvie Ward some years later, and I really was making just a guest appearance to help the tournament get going and receive some publicity. It’s a fine course, but I just never was able to play it very well, though it’s difficult to say whether I might have done better had the Colonial gotten started before I’d made up my mind to leave the tour.
It was about this time that Louise and I closed the deal on the ranch. Because the owner had cattle to sell and equipment to get rid of and so forth, we wouldn’t be moving in till the end of August, so it was back on the tour for a few more weeks.
Next was the Western Open in St. Louis. I didn’t play well, shot 280, and only won $516.67. Then I went to Winged Foot in
Connecticut for the Goodall Round Robin, but before the tournament started, I played a 36-hole exhibition called the “International Challenge Match,” against Richard Burton, the British Open champion. My good friend Eddie Lowery was the referee, and I beat Burton 7 and 6 and won $1500. Then, in the tournament itself, I finished third at plus 22, and won $1150. Not a bad week, all things considered.
I didn’t play at Philadelphia, because I wanted to save my energy for the U.S. Open at Canterbury in Cleveland, which came right afterwards. Also, by this time I was making quite a few appearances promoting Winning Golf, which had just been published, and that took quite a lot of time. You might be interested to know that I got 25 cents for each book, which sold for $2.50. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was on the best-seller list for several weeks and sold 130,000 copies, and that 25-cent royalty enabled me to buy my first fifty head of Hereford cattle when I did finally get to start ranching.
Canterbury was a good course, and as usual for the national championship, it was tough. The rough was long, the fairways narrow, and I knew inside that this was going to be my last shot at really trying to win it again. I was playing well, hitting my irons as well or better than ever before, including the Open in ’39. In the first round, on the front nine I never missed a fairway or had a putt more than ten feet for birdie, but I two-putted every one and had nine straight pars.