by Byron Nelson
In the second round, Cliff Roberts and the great writer Grantland Rice were in my gallery. On the 15th hole, you drove into a valley and had a blind shot to the green. I got up there in good position for birdie, hit my putt perfect, but the ball swung in and out of the hole. I was walking toward it thinking I’d made it, and couldn’t believe it didn’t go in. I was told later that Rice said to Cliff right then, “He’ll never win.” When Cliff said, “Why? He’s playing beautifully.” Grantland said, “Yes, but the ball’s not rolling right for him. He’s not getting any breaks at all.” As it turned out, he was right, but not because the ball wasn’t rolling right.
In the third round, on the par-5 13th hole, I hit a good tee shot and a good second, but I laid up on it a little because if you hit it too far you’d be on a downslope. As soon as I hit it, naturally, the caddie went quickly toward it. Remember now, they didn’t have the fairways roped off then for most of the tournaments—the only ones I recall for sure were the ’45 PGA and the Masters. The spectators would walk right along with you till you got to your ball, and the marshals would then put a rope up to hold the fans back just enough to give you room to swing, really. Sometimes, if the crowd moved too fast, the marshals couldn’t get there ahead of them, and that’s exactly what happened this time. My caddie got there and ducked under the rope the marshals were holding, but the rope was too close to my ball; my caddie didn’t see it, and he accidentally kicked it about a foot. Since I was leading the tournament at the time, Ike Grainger, one of the top USGA officials, was there as my referee, and we talked about the situation and what it meant. We were both pretty sure it meant a penalty stroke, but Ike said he preferred to talk to the committee before he made a ruling, though he said I had the right to have the decision right then. I said it was okay to wait, which was my mistake, and in my mind that was what cost me the tournament, not the delay itself. Because then I was trying to play with all that on my mind. I was pretty sure I would receive a penalty stroke, but not having it settled right then, I played two over par from there in, and then had the penalty stroke added on besides.
I didn’t make up any ground the last round, though I had a good chance or two. On the 17th, a long par 3, I hit my 3-wood just beautifully, but it went over the green and ended up on the fringe—actually, in a lady’s hat she had put on the ground next to her. Back then, they allowed people fairly close to the green itself, much closer than they do now. They ruled that I could pick up the ball so the woman could remove her hat, then replace it with no penalty, but the lost time and distraction of all this made me lose my concentration again. I chipped from there and it rimmed the hole, spun out three and a half feet, and I missed the putt. I was a little upset by that, and my tee shot on 18 went down the left side of the fairway, where it landed and bounced further left and into the rough, which was really tall and thick. It was only about a foot into the rough, but it was so thick that I had to use an 8-iron to get out. Then I got to the green and missed a twelve-footer for par, so I ended with two bogeys to tie with Lloyd Mangrum and Vic Ghezzi.
One other unusual thing happened there—we three were in and already tied, but on the 72nd hole, Ben Hogan and Herman Barron were on the green with medium-long putts for birdie to win. Both of them three-putted, but if they’d even two-putted, there would have been a five-way tie.
Now we were in the playoff, and on the 4th hole, the first par 3 on the course, Vic and Lloyd both had thirty-footers. They both made theirs while I missed my own ten-footer. I made up that stroke, but we all played very steady golf and ended up tied again at 72. In the second playoff, on the par-5 9th hole, Mangrum hit his drive out of bounds on the left. He got disgusted with himself, hit again, then put a fairway wood on the green and made an 80-foot putt. He ended up with a 71 to Vic’s and my 72’s. I’d have to say it was the best I played to lose a tournament my whole life. My concentration was probably not as good as it should have been, because I’d made up my mind ahead of time that if I won I would announce my retirement then and there, so that may have been too much on my mind.
One thing I’d like to say here is that Lloyd Mangrum was the most underrated player of my time. He won twenty-one tournaments, including the ’46 Open. He was a fine player, but he had a kind of unusual, funny sarcasm that he used, and if you didn’t know him and understand it, it made him sound kind of tough. Some years ago, Susan Marr was doing some radio during the tournament at Westchester, and she asked me to go on the air with her. She said, “I’ve been asking people all day who are the seven pros who’ve won twenty-one or more tournaments, and nobody’s been able to name them all. Can you?” I said, “I’ll try.” I’d been doing a little studying for my own broadcast work and got through all of them, including Lloyd, and she said I was the only one who’d remembered Mangrum. I won the prize, which was a “Thank you.”
Here’s a funny story about Lloyd that most people don’t know. He was born in Grapevine, Texas, near where I live now in Roanoke, and he was delivered by the father of my good friend Dr. Dudley Wysong. One time, “Dr. Dud” and his mother were visiting us and discussing that fact, and Mrs. Wysong said, “His daddy ain’t paid for it till yet!” The next time I saw Lloyd, I told him what she’d said and he almost died laughing. He thought maybe he should go ahead and send her a check for $25, which was what it cost for a delivery in those days.
The next week in Toledo, back in my old stomping grounds, McSpaden and I played together again—for the last time, really—at the Inverness Invitational Four-Ball. We played pretty well, finished second at plus 14 to Hogan and Demaret, and collected $850 apiece.
I took a week off, then played the Columbus Invitational at Columbus Country Club in Ohio and won it, adding another $2500 to our bank account, which came in very handy. Next week, at the tournament in Kansas City, I tied for third (Frank Stranahan came in first) and won $1,433.34.
Here’s a very curious story that I hope someday we find the answer to. As I recall, in the summer of ’46 I was playing in a tournament in Kansas City at Hillcrest Country Club. There was an electrical storm going on but we kept playing because the rules said we had to. I was standing on the ninth tee with Horton Smith and Jug McSpaden, when we saw lightning hit back of the ninth green and kill several spectators. I was checking on this story recently with my good friend Bill Inglish though, and he said there was no account in the papers of any such thing happening. So I called Tom Watson, who asked his father, Ray Watson, about it. Ray remembered it distinctly, because he was sitting on the clubhouse porch across from the first tee, which was right next to the ninth green, and Ray saw the lightning hit. Only trouble was, Ray said it happened in 1938, and so does the written history of Hillcrest Country Club. This got my curiosity going, so I called McSpaden, who remembered it the same way I did and also said it was much later than ’38, because he was at Winchester in Boston then and never got to play in Kansas City that year. I wasn’t in Kansas City in ’38 either, according to Bill Inglish’s records.
However, it wasn’t until 1948 that the USGA made the rule about being able to stop play as soon as any of the players see lightning. Up to that point, even though lightning was visible, you couldn’t stop playing until the tournament officials said you could, which wasn’t very satisfactory. Still, it’s a mystery to me why there’s no record anywhere of that other lightning strike, when both McSpaden and I have such a clear memory of it. But wherever we were, if our memories are right, Horton Smith birdied that ninth hole, which really impressed me. Guess he wanted to get out of there as fast as he could.
Louise and I had been on the road now for six out of the last seven weeks, and we were both homesick. As soon as I finished playing in Kansas City, we drove all the way home, had one full day there, then drove all the way to Chicago the Wednesday before the Chicago Victory Open tournament started. With all that driving, it was amazing I played as well as I did, but I managed to win. It was played on Medinah #3, which everyone knows is a very tough course. I drove exceptionally wel
l, shot 279, and won by 2 shots. What I remember best about it, though, was that in the first round I was paired with Tommy Armour, the famous Scottish pro. Tommy and I were having breakfast, and he was known to have too much to drink now and then and he was a little hungover that morning. So before he ate anything, he fixed himself a Bromo-seltzer and drank that. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone do that before breakfast, and I never forgot it.
The Tam O’Shanter that year was called the All-American for some reason, and I genuinely didn’t want to play in it. For one thing, I’d already won there four times, and for another, that year they had begun a promotion deal where the winner was almost duty bound to play at least fifty exhibitions the next year, at $1000 apiece. Well, the money was nice, of course, but that type of thing can be hard on your game. Lloyd Mangrum did it one year, and never played as well afterwards. Anyway, I tied for seventh, winning $1,233.34, so I didn’t have to worry about it.
I took off again the next two weeks and then played in the PGA at Portland. I won three matches and made it to the quarterfinals against Porky Oliver. We were tied going to the 18th hole, a long par 5 that had a lot of left-to-right slope on the green. I was thirty feet from the hole and Ed was forty. He had to borrow five feet or more for his putt to break, and he made it, while I missed mine. So much for the defending champion.
I went home again after that, and the first thing that happened was we moved to the ranch on August 26. It took only two carloads to get all our things from Denton to the house in Roanoke. We had no furniture of our own, because we had rented already furnished homes the entire time I played on the tour. Fortunately, Louise’s sister Delle had some things of hers in storage because her husband was still in the service and Delle was living at home in Texarkana. We used her stove and refrigerator and a few pieces of furniture till we could get started with our own, and when everything was settled, we found we had $2500 to live on, which we figured we could make last six months.
This was also when I prepared to formally announce my retirement. I did it a few days before I played in something called the “World’s Championship” at the Tam O’Shanter course in Chicago. I had mentioned a couple of times already that I was thinking of gradually retiring, but hadn’t said anything definite yet. I told the press then that I was formally retiring from tournament golf, that after 1946, I would make only a few token appearances, mainly at Augusta and at the Texas PGA.
Now comes a strange thing. After I made my announcement, I played in a “World’s Championship” with Snead, Mangrum, and Barron. It was just two rounds, and I finished second two shots behind Snead, but apparently it was a winner-take-all event, because Snead won $10,000, and the rest of us didn’t get anything but our expenses. But the most amazing thing is that I don’t recall one single thing about playing in it whatsoever. I guess the fact that I didn’t win a dime kind of made me want to forget the whole thing.
At this point, taking a break from everything, Jug and I went on a wonderful hunting trip with Seattle businessman Ralph Whaley, one of the most remarkable men I ever met in my life. We had gotten acquainted with Ralph the year before when I had that 259 in Seattle, and during the tournament he’d invited McSpaden and I and our wives to his house for dinner. Ralph was 6′4″, a strong-looking man with a wonderful engineering background. He had helped build Hoover Dam, but mainly he was an outdoorsman and a hunter. He’d bagged various wildlife specimens for the Smithsonian, and in his home there, he had a room fixed up exactly like a cabin where he’d spent a lot of time in the Rockies when he was doing a lot of hunting and trapping. He also was a wonderful shot; he did a lot of exhibition shooting for Winchester and he got so good at it that it got boring, so he started hunting with a bow and arrow instead.
As you might guess, he wasn’t bashful at all and started telling us about some of his hunting trips and so forth. He said he was very good with a tomahawk, that he could throw one a long way and stick it in a tree or cut a man’s head off if he needed to. To prove it, he took us into this “cabin” room, and hanging on the wall was a tomahawk. Ralph took that down and threw it clear across the room. It landed deep into a wooden post between two big picture windows that looked out over the Broadmoor golf course. Next, because it wasn’t dark yet, he took his bow and arrows and we walked outside, where he shot several arrows into the air. We couldn’t see any of them after they went off, but he told us exactly where each one would land in the fairway, and he was exactly right. Later, he told us about playing a round of golf against a couple of very prominent pros where he played their best ball. But on each hole, instead of hitting a wood or iron, he would shoot an arrow to the green, then chip or putt from wherever it landed. He played in fifty-seven “shots,” so it was no contest.
We were quite impressed with Ralph, and that’s why we ended up going hunting with him. He’d already arranged an exhibition in Moscow, Idaho, for which we got no money, but the people putting on the exhibition paid for all the stuff we needed for a hunting trip to this secluded area of Idaho. The amazing thing about Ralph was that when you listened to him talk, you thought he was exaggerating, but when you got out into the woods with him, you found he could actually do everything he said and more.
We hunted elk and I killed one. These elk were on the mountain across from us, and I sighted on this big bull and pulled the trigger. I didn’t think I’d hit him, but Ralph said, “You got him—I saw his legs buckle.” The bull then took two or three steps and all of a sudden raised up on his hind legs and fell backwards so hard his antlers stuck in the ground. I had his head mounted and shipped to Louise’s father, and Dad Shofner hung it on a big post in his grocery store for many years.
My final tournament that year was the Fort Worth Open, which I’d won the year before at Glen Garden. I was somewhat obligated to be there since I was defending champion, but I didn’t do well at all and finished seventh. It was the last money I won that year, $550, and brought my total to $22,270.
What a relief it was to have it all over with. I packed up my clubs, sent them to MacGregor, and told them to keep them till I asked for them, which wasn’t going to be for a long time. That way, if someone asked me to play even a casual round of golf, I could just tell them I didn’t have my clubs, and that would get me off the hook.
Now I could get serious about my ranch. Besides the studying I was doing, I had to do quite a bit of repair work. The fences on the place were in pretty sad shape, so all that winter I worked on rebuilding them. If you’ve ever done fence work, you know it’s hard, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed everything I did at the ranch—except raising hogs.
I had figured I could make some money on porkers, and I’d read enough about it and gotten enough advice to feel like I could do it. So as soon as I got some of the fences fixed, I bought thirty-eight piglets and fed and watered them till they weighed 220 pounds, the proper weight you had to get before you took them to town to sell. I loaded up those hogs and took them to Fort Worth. Well, it so happened that the price on pork wasn’t too good right then, and I made exactly one dollar per animal—$38.00 for thirty-eight hogs. Those were the last hogs I ever raised.
Once I’d left the tour, I really expected that people would more or less forget about me, but that didn’t prove to be the case. Oh, I knew at least a few of my records would stand for a good long while, but I was very much surprised and gratified, really, to find that people still wanted me to be involved in golf. I knew I wasn’t going to make enough money off my ranch to really live on, and I had planned to continue doing exhibitions and making appearances, so it was fortunate for me that folks still did want me to be part of golf.
For the next few years, I began to spend my time doing a whole variety of things. I did a series of instructional articles for Popular Mechanics magazine which dovetailed nicely with my Winning Golf book. And after the Masters in ’47, I also began to do quite a few exhibitions. As much as I wanted to get away from tournament golf, I did want to remain involved with the game, an
d to give something back to the sport that had done so much for me. Leaving the tour made it possible for me to do that.
For instance, I’d already been doing a little work with Fred Cobb, the golf coach at North Texas State in Denton, and now I could do more. I worked with the team up there quite a bit over the next few years, and they brought along some pretty good players like Don January, Ross Collins, and Billy Maxwell. Cobb was the best thing that ever happened to golf up there. He had the ability to get the best out of every player he had. Unfortunately, he died at a relatively young age in 1953, and the golf program there has never reached that level since.
I also began to do an occasional appearance or exhibition for MacGregor, and I can honestly say I enjoyed it. Playing exhibitions without the pressure of the media and thousands of fans, but with everyone relaxed and enjoying themselves, was quite a different thing, and a lot of fun as long as there wasn’t too much of it.
About six weeks before the ’47 Masters I received my invitation to play. I’d had enough time off from golf that I was looking forward to it. I called MacGregor, had them send my clubs back, and started practicing. As part of my routine, I would go play at Brookhollow in Dallas with my good friends Jim Chambers and Felix McKnight. I worked at the ranch till noon, then drove over and played. They used to laugh at me because I’d complain about being so sore and I played just terrible at first. They said, “You think you can be digging postholes all morning and come over here and not be sore trying to play golf?” We played at Brookhollow so much that the club finally made me an honorary member, which was a great privilege.
But I got tuned up well enough for the Masters, at least so I wouldn’t embarrass myself, and off Louise and I went. We stayed at the Richmond Hotel, and I can still remember the hot biscuits and country ham you could get there every morning. I didn’t have the ham a lot because it was too salty, but it sure was good.