How I Played the Game

by Byron Nelson

  One of the best compliments I ever had came a few years later when President Eisenhower asked Cliff if I had time to come down to Augusta and play with him, shortly after the election in 1952. Of course, I made time whether I had it or not, and we played several rounds together, one of which made the President very happy. On the second hole, the left side of the fairway slopes downhill toward the green pretty severely. I had driven to the right where it was flat, while Eisenhower drove to the left. It was quite a good drive and when his ball did stop, he had outdriven me a good bit. On the 10th, the same thing happened, and he outdrove me again. I never thought anything about it, but some months later, after he was in the White House, he had a dinner one night for a few of us pros. All of us were in the dining room waiting for him, and he came in and asked us to sit down. Then, before he sat down himself, Ike pointed at me and said, “I want you all to know that I played golf with that man last year and outdrove him twice!”

  Usually he’d ride in a cart at Augusta, and I would drive. But he was like a cricket, he’d jump out of the cart before it stopped, every time. It made me nervous, so I finally said, “Mr. President, I wish you’d wait till I stop the cart before you get out, because it would look terrible in the newspapers if it said, ‘Byron Nelson Breaks President’s Leg.’ ” He laughed and said he would, and he did wait the next time, but after that he never waited again. I didn’t mention it again, though.

  One other time, Louise was at Augusta with me and wanted to meet him, so when she saw us coming to the 18th, she went out and sat down there by the clubhouse. She had practiced and had it all set what she was going to say to him when I introduced her, but when he saw Louise, he surprised us both by rushing right up to her and introducing himself and saying how glad he was to meet her. She did fine, said something or other to him, but she told me later, “I know I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.” That evening, we had an early dinner because we had to leave, and as we got in our car outside the clubhouse, Ike came out to our car. He asked how far we had to drive and told us to be careful. That’s how warm and nice he was.

  Then, in the fall of 1950, Jim Shriver, a salesman for MacGregor’s Northwest territory, called just before he was starting on his fall sales tour. He said he’d like to book me for some exhibitions in his area the next spring. He thought he’d be able to book quite a few and I’d get $300 each, so I said, “That sounds all right, Jim.” Unfortunately, when he got back from his fall tour, he called and said, “Byron, I booked a few, but not enough for you to come out for.” Well, I was disappointed, because the money sure would have come in handy.

  Fortunately, Bing Crosby called me that December and wanted me to come play in his pro-am in January of ’51 with Eddie Lowery, George Fazio, and Bill Ford of the Ford Motor Company. I said I would, and as soon as I hung up, I remembered my conversation with Shriver. I realized that I hadn’t been doing anything to get publicity and my name was fading fast out there. I made up my mind right then that I was going to try hard to make people aware I was still around.

  We flew out to Pebble Beach on Thursday before the tournament started, and I went out and practiced—but only from 100 yards in. My long game was fine, but my short game wasn’t as sharp as it ought to be. By the time the tournament started, my short game had jelled and I was doing quite well. I won with three good rounds, 71-67-71. The weather was very poor that year, with both wind and rain, so one round was washed out completely.

  My strategy worked, though. Two weeks after the Crosby, Jim Shriver called again and said, “I’ve got twenty-six matches booked for this spring. Every town I talked to wants you to come out and play.” Well, that was great, so I went on the road for a month. But just to show the difference between then and now, here’s what I did for that $300. I had to go to a luncheon at the country club or Kiwanis headquarters or whatever, then go to the course, put on a clinic for thirty minutes and play eighteen holes with the local pro, top amateur, or whoever was trying to beat me that day. Finally, I’d stay and have dinner with everyone that evening, give a talk, then jump in my car and drive that night or in the morning to the next town. So I earned every penny of that $300. I played quite well too.

  The next fall, Jim wanted to know if I’d do it again in ’52, so I did. I played exactly the same places, twenty-six matches in thirty days. That spring I played some of my best golf ever. My highest score was 68 and my lowest 59. The 59 was at Olympia Country Club in Olympia, Washington. It was a par-72 course, and I shot 31-28. I was playing real well, and was 5 under on the first nine. Then on the 10th, I hit driver and an 8-iron and holed it for a 2. On the 11th, a par 3, I made 2. On the 12th, a good par 4, I had a good drive and 6-iron and holed my putt for a 3. The 13th was a par-5, 520 yards, and I hit driver and 2-wood and holed my putt for eagle, so I used ten shots for four holes.

  When I did these exhibitions, as I came to the 18th green I always stopped and thanked the people before putting out. This time they were really enjoying the show, so I said, “You may not know it, but I have this putt to make for 28, and if I do that I’ll have a 59, which I’ve never shot before in my life.” Then I sank the putt, fortunately, and they really did cheer me.

  While I was playing those Pacific Northwest exhibitions in ’52, The National Amateur was being played at Seattle. Eddie Lowery called me and said there was a young boy named Kenny Venturi who had qualified for the Amateur and Eddie wanted me to take a look at him. Eddie felt Ken showed great promise, which was enough recommendation for me. I went out and watched him play his first match with Mason Rudolph, and Mason beat him. Eddie introduced us after the match was over, and I asked Ken when he was going back to San Francisco. I told him I was going there too, and said for him to have Eddie get in touch with me and we’d have a game. We played at San Francisco Golf Club, where Kenny played a lot. He shot 66 but didn’t play very well—he made a lot of bad swings. But he pitched and putted great and shot a better score than I did. He was expecting me to brag on him (I knew that from my own experience playing with Bobby Cruickshank when I was Kenny’s age), but instead I said, “Kenny, Eddie said he wanted me to work with you and if you’re not busy tomorrow, you come out early, because we’ve got six things we’ve got to work on right away.” He looked at me kind of funny but said, “Okay, I’ll be there.” Kenny proved to be an excellent pupil. He listened very well and paid close attention, which wasn’t easy because we talked about quite a few things.

  Not too long after that, Eddie told me he had a fellow working for him, another amateur golfer, Harvie Ward—a young man who could hit the ball a long way and basically had a very good game. But Eddie told me, “He can’t work the ball left or right.” So I worked with him a few times on it. He could draw or fade after a fashion, but he wasn’t going about it right, and was doing too many things wrong to get the results he wanted. When I showed him how to do it correctly, he caught on real quick and told me, “I didn’t know the game could be so easy.” This was before he won the American and British Amateur Championships. Later, when we were paired together in the Colonial tournament in ’54, he was trying really hard to beat me, but in the last round he faltered on a few holes and we came to 18 even. I put my ball inside of his, and Harvie walked up, looked at me and smiled, and knocked his ball right in. Then I did the same thing, only I smiled after I made my putt.

  Now for a story about a horse of a different color. It was also that summer of ’54 that Waco Turner, an oilman in Ardmore, Oklahoma, called me. He wanted me to come up and play in his tournament there. It was a pretty big money event for those days, plus Waco was offering extra money for birdies and eagles and such. I wasn’t really interested, but then he said he’d give me a beautiful palomino horse just for coming up and playing. I’d always thought palominos were awful pretty, so that got my attention and I agreed to go. As it turned out, I played very poorly, didn’t make hardly any birdies at all, let alone eagles. So I didn’t get much extra money.

  But sure enough, I did get t
hat horse. When the tournament was over, the sheriff of Ardmore rode up to me at the 18th green on this beautiful palomino mare. I got up on her, but I could tell right away she and I weren’t going to get along. Still, my father knew a lot about horses, and I thought he could work with her. When I got back to the ranch he took one look at her and said, “Son, she’ll never have a decent disposition.” She was wall-eyed, and that’s never a good sign in a horse. I kept her for a year, but she wasn’t ever any good. Once, I took her to a plowed-up field and worked her and worked her, but it never helped a bit. Finally, I gave her—with fair warning—to a good friend who lived south of Fort Worth, and a month later he told me, “You were right—we can’t handle her either.” She probably ended up as dog food. What’s that they say about not looking a gift horse in the mouth? Well, I sure should have thought twice about that one. It was the last time I played for Waco Turner, I can tell you.

  Every once in a while in golf you run up against an odd ruling situation. In October of 1954, I was playing in the Texas PGA at Oso Beach Country Club in Corpus Christi, Texas. I had shot 63 the first round, but in the second for some reason I was just helpless and ballooned up to an 81. That just happens sometimes, as every golfer knows. Still, I had a good third and fourth round and had a chance to win when I ran into this peculiar situation. It was the 18th hole, and a fellow named Jack Hardin had to make a four to beat me. He hit his drive way to the right, over by the equipment barn, and everyone said it was off club property, which meant it would have been out of bounds. But there were no OB stakes, so the committee ruled his ball wasn’t out of bounds. Jack managed to scramble for his par and beat me one stroke. I didn’t have any bad feelings about it, though later the committee said they should have had stakes there, because without them no one can determine whether your ball is out or not.

  I was the captain of the Texas Cup matches several times, and one time I remember very well was in ’54. That’s the year when Don January and Billy Maxwell, who were in college and still amateurs, were 11 under par for the first ten holes against me and Fred Hawkins at Dallas Country Club. I shot 66 and Fred helped me some, but with January and Maxwell playing like they were playing, we both felt like we weren’t doing very well at all. They had two eagles, and it seemed like they were birdieing or eagling every hole.

  In January 1955, Eddie and I were partners again in the Crosby Pro-Am. In those days you played at Monterey the first round, and this time we had a good score, 64. We played Cypress the second round, and because we’d started so well, we were right in the thick of the tournament. We came to the 17th hole, where the wind was blowing very strong off the ocean, quartering from the right. Eddie had pulled his drive way left, and mine ended up back of a group of trees, about 175 yards short of the green. I was too close to the trees to go over them, so I was looking at my ball, trying to figure out what to do. Then Eddie missed his second shot and was in the trees on the left and short of the green, so there was no way he could make par. With that strong wind blowing, I decided I could hit my ball against it, hook it, and let it draw back over the ocean to the green. As I took my stance, Eddie could see where I was aiming, and he started yelling and running toward me, but I couldn’t hear him because of the wind. I went ahead and hit, and my ball sailed out over the ocean pretty as you please and landed about 15 feet from the hole. Eddie never congratulated me or anything, he just jumped all over me and swore at me and said I was crazy for taking such a chance. He must have decided I couldn’t be trusted, because in the third round, which we played at Pebble Beach, Eddie was sensational. He used every one of his eight strokes despite the fact that there was terrible rain all day, and we shot 63 and won.

  That must have given him a lot of confidence, because shortly after the Crosby, Eddie called and said he was going to go over and play in the British Open at St. Andrews. He wanted me to play too, and wanted Louise and me to go with him and his new wife, Margaret—it was their delayed honeymoon. (Eddie’s first wife, Louise, had died of cancer several years before, and he had recently remarried.) I said, “Well, that sounds okay, Eddie, but you need to talk to Louise.” Louise got on the phone then and she told Eddie, “We’ll go on one condition—that after the Open we do some sightseeing, maybe even go to Paris.” So we went.

  We flew over and back on a TWA sleeper plane. At that time I was bothered by claustrophobia some, plus we ran into a bad electrical storm with hail and the whole works. Also, I wasn’t a good flier then because of that experience in South America way back in ’37, so I was really miserable. I couldn’t stay in bed, I just lay there and shook. I was so scared I finally got up and sat and watched the pilot the whole rest of the way. The trip took fourteen hours, and though there really were no problems as far as the plane and the pilot went, it was just a terrible trip for me. Fortunately, when we came back home the weather was fine, and we returned in the daytime, which made it even better.

  When we got to St. Andrews, Eddie had set up a practice round with Leonard Crawley, who had been a wonderful player and then became a good golf writer. I’d met Leonard before and Eddie thought he knew more about St. Andrews than anyone. As it turned out, Leonard didn’t play, but he did walk the course with us and told us where to go on every hole, what you had to know about the many blind shots, and where the best place to approach the green was.

  Now, I had heard and read all my life how hard and fast the greens were at St. Andrews, but even though it rained the first part of the week, I negotiated those greens all right and qualified with 143. Unfortunately, Eddie didn’t make it. Then it turned hot—81–82 degrees, which was very hot to those folks—and people were getting sunburned and almost having heatstroke. But the worst part was that the grass started growing real fast, which made the greens very slow, and I never could get that through my head. I averaged 37 putts per round and finished twelfth. I played great from tee to green, hit more greens than anybody, but hitting greens doesn’t mean that much on St. Andrews. Peter Thomson won by 5. That was my second and last showing in the British Open.

  Now comes the good part. Unbeknownst to Louise and me, Eddie had entered both of us in the French Open the next week when we were going to be in Paris. He’d done it during the British Open after talking to a good friend of his, Jacques L’Eglise, who was president of the French Federation of Golf and was there at St. Andrews. Eddie didn’t have the nerve to tell us what he’d done until the day the tournament ended, and with good reason. Louise was very upset with him, but he promised that we really would do some sightseeing after the French Open—and he did finally keep his word. So we flew to Paris the next day and checked in at the Ritz, where we had a two-bedroom suite. Eddie was paying a lot of our expenses, so I made a deal with him that since I had to play in the tournament, whatever I won we’d put on the hotel bill.

  When I went to register at the French Federation of Golf, it was on a street called Rue Byron, which made me feel lucky. As it turned out, Eddie didn’t qualify, but I played very well. I broke 70 every round until the first nine of the fourth round, when I shot 38. Eddie was gone that morning; he’d had some business meetings and he got back just as I had turned nine. I wasn’t playing well at all and was only a shot or so in the lead, with Weetman and Bradshaw chasing me. I was whining about how bad I was playing, and Eddie jumped all over me and called me all sorts of names. He made me so mad that if we hadn’t been such good friends I’d almost have wanted to hit him. But what he said must have helped, because I shot 32 on the last nine and won—the first time an American had won the French Open since Walter Hagen in 1922. My prize money was 10,000 francs, but it wasn’t even enough to pay our hotel bill!

  Then we finally got to do some sightseeing. Of course, Eddie and Margaret were on their honeymoon, and they wanted to go out every evening. One night we went to the Folies Bergere, where the show was full of half-naked women, and the next night we went to another place where it was the same thing, though the food was good. But after that, Louise said, “Byron, I’
ve seen all the naked women I want to see.” I agreed with her, so that was the end of our nightclubbing. All in all, though, it was a very good trip, and that really was the last time I played golf to amount to anything much.

  We got back home and settled down a little bit—as much as my life ever settled down, I guess—till that fall. For most of ’54 and ’55 Kenny Venturi had been in the army, but he got out that October of ’55. As soon as he came home, Eddie took him out to Palm Springs to play. When he saw what Kenny was doing, Eddie called me and said Kenny was scoring pretty well but his swing was all off. Eddie wanted me to come out to Palm Springs and work with him, so I agreed. First, we went out and played a round at Thunderbird. Kenny played terrible, scored in the mid-high 70’s. So we started practicing that day and worked hard the next three or four days, and the last round we played before I came back, he shot 65. One of Kenny’s greatest strengths as a player was that he had the ability to make sudden, fast changes in his game when it was necessary. I felt pretty confident when I left that his game was back where it should be, which gave me an idea.

  That year, the former Masters champions had the right to invite one player of their choice, pro or amateur, and I knew Kenny hadn’t been able to play at Augusta in ’55 because he was in the service. So I began canvassing the former Masters winners about Kenny, and they agreed that he ought to be invited to the Masters the next year, so I was happy about that.