How I Played the Game

by Byron Nelson

  It was a very emotional moment when the matches were over. The bugle corps played “Taps” as Harry Weetman and I lowered our country’s flags, and everyone had tears in their eyes. We had a beautiful flight home and we were a very happy group, believe me. The PGA officials had a celebration party for us when we arrived, and it was an occasion I will always remember, for a very good reason.

  All through the matches, I had wanted so much to do a good job and help our team win that I moved around more those three days than for any other tournament in my life. I tried hard to see at least part of every match and was very visible at all times. The team must have appreciated that, because unbeknownst to me they got together and had a duplicate made of the actual Ryder Cup trophy and presented it to me when we arrived back in New York. It’s a beautiful piece, and of all the trophies I’ve won, that is one of my most prized possessions.

  One final note about our team. Except for Tony Lema, who was killed in that tragic plane crash in July 1966 after winning the Oklahoma City Open, and Julius Boros, who is now in his seventies and has had some health problems the last several years, all of those fellows are still active in golf, either on the senior tour, in television, or at good club jobs. I feel that’s a good recommendation for golf.

  In 1967, two years after the Ryder Cup, I got to participate in something that was a lot of work, a lot of fun, and made many new friends for me I never expected to have. It was called the Lincoln-Mercury Sports Panel, and it was the brainchild of Gar Laux, the head of Lincoln-Mercury. Gar was very sportsminded. He knew a lot of people in various sports, and got the idea that a good promotion for Lincoln-Mercury would be to form a panel of top people in various sports and use them to generate publicity and goodwill. The head of his promotion department was Bernie Brown, and Bernie took the ball and ran with it. He started out with Arnold Palmer, the great professional bowler Billy Welu, Detroit Tigers outfielder Al Kaline, tennis great Tony Trabert, Jesse Owens, the great track star and the first ever to win four gold medals in the Olympics, hockey star Gordie Howe, Chris Schenkel, and me. What a great lineup.

  Part of our job was to go to the big auto shows, sit on the stage at the Lincoln-Mercury display, and answer questions from people, then hand out our pictures. We would be on for thirty minutes and then take a break to sign pictures backstage, and we did that four hours each day of the weekend. Another thing we did was to help entertain Ford’s top dealers from all over the country. We’d go to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or sometimes Hawaii, and I’d play golf with the folks while Tony gave tennis lessons and clinics. They used Tony and me mainly, but some of the others would come along and socialize with the dealers at the parties they had in the evenings.

  One time we were in Hawaii at Mauna Kea, and Ford had three different groups of a hundred dealers come in for three days apiece. It was nine days’ work total, and though much of it was enjoyable it was also very tiring. But it had its moments. One time, Tony had just finished doing a clinic with some of the tennis players and I was watching him. He saw me and asked, “Byron, you ever play tennis?” I said, “Tony, I never have. Haven’t even hit more than a half-dozen tennis balls in my life.” He replied, “Well, you’ve got pretty good coordination—let me hit some easy ones to you and you hit them back, just for fun.” I had on my rubber-soled teaching shoes so I thought I’d try it. I got a few back to him but missed some entirely, and he said, “Byron, you have to keep your eye on the ball in tennis the same as in golf!” I got a little better then, and out of curiosity I said, “Tony, serve three balls to me just like you would if you were playing in a championship.” He wound up and let go, and I never saw any of those three serves, much less had a chance to hit them back. It made me very glad I’d played golf instead of tennis.

  But the next day we both went out on the course. Tony was a good golfer and liked to play, but I was familiar with the course we were playing, and he’d never seen it before. On the first hole, he was on in two and had about a 25-foot putt. I could tell from the way he was lining up he wasn’t playing very much break, because you couldn’t see it, just looking at it. I said, “Tony, that putt breaks six feet to the right.” He backed off and looked at it, then shook his head and said, “Well, Byron, I know tennis and you know golf, so I’ll believe you.” He played it where I told him and made his birdie, so he did a lot better at golf than I did at tennis.

  I had a little better luck at bowling. Once we were doing a show with Billy Welu, and I watched Billy give a clinic. Suddenly Billy said to me, “Byron, have you ever bowled any?” I told him, “There used to be a bowling alley in the basement of the Texarkana Country Club, Billy, and I guess I bowled about a half-dozen games.” So he said, “Come on out here!” I stepped up, threw one ball and made a strike. Then I said, “Thank you very much, Billy, that’s enough for me!” People today don’t know much about Billy Welu. He bowled twenty-seven 300 games, which was absolutely amazing, especially considering how young he died.

  To get back to my television career, Chris and I did around fifteen tournaments a year, and I usually got there well ahead of time. The only way I felt I could do a good job as a commentator was to go out on the course and study it, so I would know each hole and where the trouble was. I actually walked the course as if I were playing it myself, paying special attention to the holes we were showing on the telecast. I would then determine in my own mind what it would take to win each tournament. I didn’t always make this mental prediction for regular tournaments, but I always did it for the majors, and one time, I got in trouble for it.

  It was just before the 1967 U.S. Open at Baltusrol. Jim McKay and I were taping a preview of the tournament to be shown two weeks before the Open started. It included a history of the tournament and the course, and was done to increase interest for the audience we hoped to have. I had gone out on the golf course, scorecard in hand, and spent two hours walking hole after hole, figuring what I thought a good player would shoot on that course. When we started the filming, McKay did the introduction and talked about the course some, then turned to me and said, “Byron, how does the course look to you?” I told him, “The course is in great shape. They’ve had a drought in the area so the rough is not very bad and the greens are perfect. The whole course is in excellent condition.” Then Jim asked me, “What do you think they’re going to shoot?” And I replied, “I’ve walked the entire course and totalled up all four rounds the way I think a good player should play this course, and I think they’ll shoot 275.” We were right there on the porch of the Baltusrol clubhouse, with several members of the club and some USGA people nearby. Well, as soon as we were done, the club president and tournament chairman approached me and used a lot of strong words and said, “Don’t you know this is Baltusrol? No one’s ever burned the course up like you just said they would!” and I said, “Yes, I played Baltusrol when I was an assistant pro in Ridgewood, New Jersey. I know the course pretty well.” They were very upset about it, because Baltusrol has the reputation of being a tough course generally; when the Open was held there in 1954, Ed Furgol won with 284. Well, I didn’t say anything else about it, but Jack Nicklaus saved my skin when he holed a 30-footer for birdie on the 72nd hole and won with 275. Those same two gentlemen who had jumped all over me later wrote me a very nice letter apologizing for coming on so strong about what I’d said, which I did appreciate.

  One interesting match I played took place twenty-two years after I retired, on Monday, August 12, 1968. Harold McSpaden and I played Palmer and Nicklaus in Kansas City at McSpaden’s course, Dub’s Dread, which was rated then as one of the toughest courses in the world. It was an exhibition, and it was set up this way: Because McSpaden’s and my ages added together totaled 116 and Palmer’s and Nicklaus’s totaled 66, we got a fifty-yard advantage on every hole. I told Jug they’d still outdrive us but he didn’t think so, and sure enough he was right. I was driving very well and they didn’t outdrive us on but one hole. The problem was their putting was so much better than ours. We
were scared to death playing against them and hadn’t been competing any or playing in front of a gallery in so long. Not only that, but there was so much more of a gallery than we’d expected, and the course wasn’t roped off or anything, so it was too much for us and we lost, 3 and 2. But I did have one thing to brag about—the 17th hole was a long par 3, and I decided to play it even though the match was over. I took out my driver and put my ball on the green from the back tees, so that made me feel good and helped take the sting away.

  Besides doing the men’s tournaments on TV, Chris and I also got to do the commentary on some of the women’s championships. I always enjoyed watching the ladies play because as a group they had better basic fundamental swings than the men did. One tournament I remember particularly well was the USGA Women’s Open in 1967 on the Cascades course at Hot Springs, Virginia. It was won by a French amateur, Catherine Lacoste, and it was the only time I ever saw the ladies upset about a tournament. They weren’t upset with Catherine at all, but the fact that she was an amateur and not an American, they felt, would set women’s professional golf in this country way back. Some of them talked to me about it, but I told them they shouldn’t worry about it because they had played very well. Maybe I should have reminded them of how close Kenny Venturi had come to winning the Masters when he was an amateur just a few years earlier. That hadn’t upset the men pros—in fact, it generated more interest than ever in professional golf and golf at all levels.

  In 1969, we covered the tournament when Donna Caponi won the Women’s Open at Scenic Hills Country Club in Pensacola, then again when she repeated the next year at Muskogee Country Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Everyone liked Donna because she was so friendly and wonderful with the gallery. A funny thing happened in Pensacola, something that very much impressed me about Chris Schenkel. In those days we sat out in the open, at the top of a metal scaffolding tower sometimes two or three stories tall. Most of the time, all we had over our heads to keep off the sun and rain was a canvas tarpaulin. Well, that year, 1969, a terrible rainstorm came up. There was no lightning so the ladies were still playing. Chris and I were very busy. I was keeping score, figuring out if the player on the screen was four over, eight over, or whatever, and Chris was doing all his work, so we had all these sheets of paper spread out on the table in front of us. What we didn’t realize was that all this rain was collecting on the tarp over our heads, and it was getting fuller and fuller and sinking lower and lower.

  All of a sudden it gave way completely, and a couple of barrels of water poured all over us. It ran off our faces and soaked all our clothes. Worse yet, the papers on the table in front of us with all our scores and so forth were deluged. But Chris never missed a lick, and after a couple of minutes I got back on track too, so we went ahead like nothing had happened.

  We didn’t know it then, of course, but Bob Jones himself had seen the telecast. When we went to the Masters the next spring, Bob said to us, “I never laughed so much in my life, seeing you sitting there with water all over your faces and everything, but you just kept on talking like nothing had happened. I felt sorry for you but I couldn’t help laughing.” By then we thought it was pretty funny too, though it sure wasn’t at the time.

  That same year, 1970, I was working with Jim McKay at Pensacola on the men’s tournament when there suddenly came up another rainstorm, with terrible lightning like we’d never seen before. Believe it or not, there were no provisions made for us to get down from the tower, which was all metal, and Jim got so terribly upset he told me, “I’m getting off this tower, I’m going straight to the clubhouse!” He took off right then, and during the next commercial break the rest of us did, too. We ended up doing the remainder of the telecast in the clubhouse. We could look out the window at that tower, and the wires on it were just frying. It was the worst experience of bad weather we had during my nearly twenty years in television.

  It was interesting how the tournament officials sometimes handled these sorts of things, too. During the U.S. Open at Medinah in 1975 when Lou Graham won, Ben Crenshaw was finishing up his third round and was walking to the 17th hole. But just as he got to the green, lightning flashed nearby, and it scared him so he just flat ran off the course. We were doing the telecast, which is why I remember this so well. After he left the course, we learned that a couple of USGA officials were saying Ben would have to be disqualified. But as they started out the door to talk to him, several bolts of lightning hit next to the clubhouse and they scurried right back inside. That convinced them to call a delay, so Ben didn’t get disqualified, fortunately. Thank goodness the lightning detection systems they have now are so much better, and improving all the time. It’s a great game, but it’s just not worth risking your life for a round of golf.

  In addition to whatever the weather brought our way, those early days of televised golf meant a lot of equipment problems, especially when the weather was wet. Our cables were just lying on the ground then, and rainwater would get in the cable connections and short them out. We’d be talking but there’d be no picture, or there’d be picture but no sound. It was frustrating, but now you have practically none of that because the equipment is so much better.

  In 1966, we were doing the British Open live via satellite for the first time. This was quite an advance in television broadcasting, because prior to this, we would film the day’s play, fly the film back to the U.S., and show it a day late. With the satellite, we still filmed the day’s play, then added our live commentary and so forth later when the American audience would be watching. Naturally, the difference in time zones, six hours at least, meant we were doing the live portion at some pretty odd times. McKay and I would be out there at the course in the middle of the night, up in the tower and very cold, talking to a camera but with no one else there besides us, the crew, one sentry, and a guard dog. Jack Nicklaus won the tournament, and because he played rather slowly, they had to cut and edit it very tightly before we went on the air. The result was we showed Jack driving and then immediately playing his 3-iron to a par 5. There wasn’t time to show him walking or anything but playing his shots, which was rather unusual.

  One thing I felt was very important in order to do televised golf well was having a producer and director who knew how to play the game. Once in a while we would have someone who didn’t, and boy, could you tell it. He’d use the wrong terminology, saying “chip” for a long pitch, or calling a 150-yard shot “long,” and he usually didn’t know the players’ names very well. Fortunately, this didn’t happen very often and never for the majors, but when it did, it sure made things interesting.

  In 1971, the year after we got dumped on at Pensacola, we were to broadcast the Women’s Open at Kahkwa Country Club in Erie, Pennsylvania, where a very strange thing happened. When I got there, I went to the pro shop as I always did at these tournaments. I introduced myself to the pro and was telling him how glad I was to be there and so forth when he said to me, “Byron, I’m glad to see you again.” I didn’t recognize him so I said, “When did you see me?” He said, “You played an exhibition here several years ago.” I looked at him and said, “I sure don’t remember it.” He went into his office a minute and came out with a scorecard in his hand. My signature was on it, and apparently I had not only played there, but had set what was then a course record of 66. It was the oddest thing, because usually my memory is pretty good, but I didn’t remember a single thing about having played there. Even when I went on out to study the course before the tournament started, none of it looked familiar to me at all. In fact, I didn’t remember ever having been in Erie before except with Louise on our first anniversary in 1934, when we stopped briefly beside the road there and waded out into Lake Erie. I still have the photo of that—but as for playing that golf course then or any other time, my mind is a complete blank. Very strange. So many people are amazed at my memory, and I like to think it’s pretty good most of the time, but when something like that happens it really makes you wonder about yourself.

  A
s for that ladies’ tournament at Kahkwa, you know, we men sometimes think the ladies don’t hit the ball very far. But I remember one hole on the back nine, about the 15th or 16th, where a little road went across the fairway 235 yards from the tee the ladies were playing. Joanne Gunderson Carner hit the ball a long ways, and she carried over that road twice during the tournament. Kathy Whitworth, the winningest golfer on any tour, was second to Joanne that year. On the other hand, while some people didn’t think women could hit the ball very far, others thought the women’s touch and feel on the greens would be better than the men’s, which led to some big-money putting contests between the two sexes. I remember Sam Snead was involved in a few of them. Invariably the men won, but they’d been competing on their tour and against larger fields much longer than the ladies. Since then, the women have really improved, especially in their ability to read the greens.

  When we televised women’s tournaments, I also walked the course so I would know what I was talking about, but I didn’t ever try to predict scores, at least not in public. I’d have in my mind an idea of what I felt the winning score would be, but I wasn’t real close most of the time. What fooled me was that the women’s short game was not as good as it is now, nor as good as you’d expect it to be. Their long game was excellent and they got in very little trouble except around the greens, but of course that part of their game is also much improved today.

  While Chris and I enjoyed doing the women’s championships, I’d have to say that of all the broadcasting I did, the most exciting golf I saw was in 1971 when Lee Trevino won the Open at Merion, won the Canadian Open in Montreal the very next week, then flew to England and won the British Open at Royal Birkdale. He won three majors in nineteen days and Chris and I got to see all of it. That really was an amazing accomplishment.