How I Played the Game

by Byron Nelson

  The playoff started on the 15th hole, a long par 5, and it took two very long, very good shots to reach the green in two. Arnie and Jack both hit good drives, but Arnold left his second shot short of the green about thirty yards, chipped short and made five, while Jack put his second shot hole high and just off the green to the right. Jack chipped stone dead and made four to win. It was our first playoff, a great finish for both players, and one of the most exciting ones we’ve had. For some reason, we have had quite a few playoffs in the history of the tournament, more so than the average, but the gallery sure does love it.

  One rather unusual thing happened at the tournament in 1974. Chris and I were doing the telecast, and there had been a rain delay. Because most of the fourth-round leaders wouldn’t be able to finish before we went off the air, we had to televise some players way down the leaderboard who were on the course right then. It wasn’t the best situation for our broadcast, but as it happened, one of those players was Brian “Buddy” Allin, a short, little-known fellow who shot a 65 that round, finished with a 269, and ended up winning the tournament. It was the lowest 72-hole score of the whole fifteen years the tournament was at Preston Trail, though Tom Watson matched it the next year. The entire ABC crew congratulated Buddy for winning—and then thanked him for saving our show, which he most certainly did.

  Our most winning player so far is Tom Watson, who won for the first time in 1975, then went on to win again in ’78, ’79, and ’80. The next year, 1981, Tom tied with Bruce Lietzke at 281 and Bruce won the playoff on the first hole, or Tom would have set a new record of winning our tournament four years in a row. As you might guess, those particular years were a great deal of fun for me, especially since I was no longer doing television by 1978 and could enjoy going out on the course and watching Tom in person, instead of just seeing him on the monitor.

  With such wonderful players and exciting finishes, the tournament continued to grow and enjoy greater support each year from the people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. By 1980, we knew it wasn’t going to be long before we would outgrow Preston Trail. There was the problem of not having any facilities in the clubhouse whatsoever for the ladies, and the trailers we had for the pro wives and their children were quickly becoming too small. But more important, we were running out of space to park cars, which really was a serious situation. The club itself only had room for 250 cars, and there had been so many large homes built around the course that we could no longer use that space. In 1982, the last year we played at Preston Trail, several members of the Salesmanship Club bought a piece of property close to the club so we could park there. They later sold it at a nice profit, which all went to the club’s camp program. That incident is a good example of their tradition of never saying no, because I’m told that when these fellows were asked to go to the bank and sign a note to buy the land, they weren’t told how much it was for. When one of them got to the bank and learned the note was for several million dollars, he called the club president and said, “That note I just signed is for four million dollars. Could I ask what it’s for?”

  Knowing we were running out of room, the committee had already been searching over a year for a place where we could go. They finally contacted Ben Carpenter, the founder and developer of Las Colinas, a fast-growing master-planned community in Irving, just north of Dallas and northeast of Fort Worth. Part of Ben’s development was a place called the Las Colinas Sports Club, a wonderful athletic facility that happened to have a golf course already on it. When the committee began looking at the course, they asked me to go along and see if it would be all right for the tournament. It was, just barely; it had been made just for a resort course and really wasn’t going to work very well for national tournament play with as large a gallery as we expected to have. The front nine was on one side of a busy four-lane residential street, MacArthur Boulevard, and the back nine was on the other side. Neither golfers nor spectators could get to the other side except by way of a pedestrian underpass, which wasn’t really very satisfactory. Still, we decided to go ahead with it, worked out a deal with Mr. Carpenter, and the next year, 1983, we held the tournament there. The course was originally designed by Trent Jones’s son, Bob, so we worked with him on making a few changes such as reducing the size of some of the bunkers and lengthening the course by adding tournament tees.

  We played the tournament on that course for three years, but the tournament was growing so fast that it quickly became apparent we couldn’t continue that way. Mr. Carpenter and the Salesmanship Club then came up with a plan to completely redo the place. What they were going to do was to completely tear up the nine holes on the east side of MacArthur, build a brand-new 18-hole Tournament Players Course there, and add nine holes on the west side of the boulevard. At the same time, Ben had already started to build the resort hotel that had been part of his original plan. When completed, the hotel would be right next to the TPC course, which would work out perfectly for the players as well as for the hotel guests the rest of the year.

  It was quite a project. We called in Ben Crenshaw and a wonderful golf course architect, Jay Morrish, with me in the background as sort of an unofficial consultant. Then, the day the tournament was over in ’85, we had ’dozers and all sorts of equipment ready to move in the next morning. My good friend Steve Barley masterminded the entire job, working with as many as twenty different contractors at once, and not once did any of those contractors get in another company’s way. It all went incredibly smoothly and our brand new TPC course was ready for major tournament play exactly one year later. I’ve never heard of anything being done like that before or since. Still scares me to think about it.

  The course wasn’t bad that first year. The players understood the situation and appreciated the improvements over what we’d had before. Now, besides having a far better course all in one place, they had a beautiful new hotel to stay in, and their wives and children could use the Sports Club next to the hotel during their free time, so everyone was pretty happy. Several years later, the Four Seasons took over management of both the hotel and the club, and they’ve done a beautiful job with it. What’s also nice is that sometimes the Tour’s schedule permits the players to play our tournament one week and the Colonial the next week in Fort Worth, which the players really like.

  What pleases me most about the tournament is not that I have my name on it or that we draw such a good field or even that the PGA Tour says ours is the best-marshaled event all year, but that all of the proceeds go to charity. We raise more than a tenth of all the charity money on the tour, and in 1992, we netted over three million dollars for the Salesmanship Club programs, which now include our camp for both boys and girls in Hawkins, Texas, and an education center in Dallas where troubled children go to school and they and their families get counseling. The club is now planning its own Community School, and if it works as well as the camp and counseling programs do, we will be able to help even more people.

  I believe the main reason we’ve always gotten such good support for the tournament is because people realize that every cent of the profits goes to these children and their families and no one takes any money out for themselves. I don’t get a penny, never have, nor does the club president or the tournament chairman. I’ve always been fortunate to be connected with people who are substantial, who know how to get things done and who do them honestly and properly. And the Salesmanship Club is the best example I’ve ever seen of these kinds of qualities.

  Not only has the Salesmanship Club been wonderful for me to be associated with, but the people with GTE, our title sponsor, and the folks at the Four Seasons Resort and Sports Club have too, as well as the good folks at USAA who now own the entire place. In fact, in 1992, General Robert F. McDermott, who heads USAA, really put the icing on the cake as far as I was concerned. But I have to back up a bit to tell the whole story.

  From 1980 on, the Salesmanship Club people had wanted to have a life-size bronze made of me to have installed at the course. At that time, thoug
h, when they told me what it was going to cost, I told them it was too expensive and I felt the money could be better spent on the children the tournament was designed to help. I thought that would be the end of it, but after USAA took over the hotel, club, and golf courses, the idea came up again. Early in the fall of ’91, Mike Massad, chairman of the club’s executive committee, made a presentation to General McDermott and a group of USAA and Four Seasons people, hoping to find someone to finance both the bronze and a wall to list the names of the tournament champions, which together would enhance the whole facility. After a long discussion, Mike said they had not been able to find anyone to do it. The general hadn’t said anything to this point, just listened. Finally, he looked at me and said some very complimentary things, then announced, “I’ll go back to our headquarters in San Antonio and see if we can’t do it.”

  Well, he not only could, but did, and the statue was unveiled at my eightieth birthday party in February 1992, and installed in front of the wall of champions the next week. It really overwhelms and almost embarrasses me, but it truly is one of the greatest things that’s ever happened in all my life. The sculptor, Robert Summers from Glen Rose, Texas, who also did the statue of John Wayne that stands in the Orange County airport in Los Angeles, did a wonderful job, right down to the wing-tip shoes I’m wearing and my name on my driver. It’s over nine feet tall so it’s a little bigger than me, but it really looks more like me than I do.

  How can anyone say thank you enough for the things that have happened to me? I’ve never felt I was any different from or any better than anyone else just because I used to play a little golf fifty years ago, but people treat me that way, and all I can do is be grateful and enjoy it and try hard to deserve it. And that’s what I do.

  TEN

  Golfers I’ve

  Known Over

  the Years

  IN NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS IN THE GAME, I’VE PLAYED WITH and watched quite a few golfers. From the best on the tour to the 40-handicappers, I’ve seen some amazing things and some just plain strange ones. Here are a few stories about some of my favorites.

  Tommy Armour. Tommy was a Scottish pro who came to the United States and became a wonderful player, especially with his irons. He won the U.S. Open in 1927 and the British in 1931 despite the fact that he had very poor vision in one eye because of an injury he got during World War I. Tommy was about twenty years older than me, and we first met in Boca Raton on June 1, 1939, when I signed with MacGregor and he was head man on their staff, playing his Silver Scot clubs. After I’d signed, I went to Tommy’s shop and picked out a set of his irons, which I used to win the U.S. Open two weeks later. I used those same irons for a long time, until MacGregor made me get a new set.

  I played with Tommy a few times myself, and something that always impressed me about him was the size and strength of his hands. He could take an iron and hold it with his arm outstretched and the club held between only his forefinger and middle finger. Try it sometime if you think it sounds easy.

  Tommy had the greatest gift of gab of anyone I ever knew. He was simply a wonderful storyteller who could take the most uninteresting hole or shot or round of golf and make it sound fascinating, and because of the way he could talk, he became a wonderful teacher. He’d sit down at Boca Raton under the shade of an umbrella with a toddy on the table next to him, and he’d teach until he just ran out of energy to talk.

  Besides playing and teaching golf, Armour liked to bet a little bit, especially when he felt he knew what he was doing. In 1942, when Hogan and I tied for the Masters, he bet on me against Hogan because by this time I had also developed a reputation as a good long-iron player, and he liked that. In the playoff, when I started so poorly and was three over after the first four holes, the man he’d made the bet with came to him and said, “Looks like Byron’s having a bad day—I’ll settle with you fifty cents on the dollar,” but Tommy looked at him and said, “The game has just started.” Fortunately I did win, which made Armour think I was greater than I really was.

  Roone Arledge. Chris Schenkel and I were playing with Roone, our producer at ABC, at Prestwick during the British Open one year. Unfortunately, I had to quit after six holes because I had something I had to do. On the very next hole Roone made a hole-in-one, and he was quite upset that I didn’t get to see it. I may have had to leave early due to the fact that we were playing so slowly, because in those days, Roone was an unusually deliberate player.

  Another time—in fact, during the first part of the British Open at Carnoustie in 1975—Roone asked Chris and me to play with him at St. Andrews early of a morning. What made Roone so slow was that while he walked quickly enough, he would get to his ball, take a practice swing, pull up his glove, take another swing, then another tug at his glove, and do that two or three times on every shot of any length at all.

  Chris and I are both very fast players, and we were getting further and further behind the group in front of us, but Roone didn’t really seem to notice. I guess because of who we were, the marshal didn’t say anything for a while about the way we were holding up play, but finally on the 14th hole, here he came on his bicycle. He walked up to Roone, pulled out his Big Ben watch, held it up where we could all see it, and said, “I say, sir, you should be on the eighteenth green by now.” Roone was embarrassed, and so were we. He did speed up some, but then when we were finished he wanted us to play with him again the next day. Chris and I looked at each other, and finally replied, “Only if you’ll play fast enough so we don’t get in trouble.”

  Herman Barron. He was pro at Fenway Country Club in Westchester County, Long Island, and he had a funny little short, flat swing that wasn’t very effective. Harold McSpaden and I played quite a bit of golf with him, and we got to kidding with him about that swing. Then we started working with him some till he finally got a little more upright and became a good player. He won the Tam O’Shanter one year and a couple of other tournaments, and the three of us became lifelong friends. One year the pros had a 108-hole tournament there at Fenway, and the sixth hole, a long par three, came right by the clubhouse porch, where a lot of people were watching the play. Herman used a wood off the tee and his ball ended up short and to the right. He stepped up and pitched it into the hole, and the noise went through the whole clubhouse. “Hermie did it!” they yelled. I got quite a kick out of it because doing that at your own club was a lot of fun. Another thing about Herman was that he was an excellent card player, especially gin rummy and bridge. He was so good, actually, that he had to quit playing with the members because he was about to get in trouble for taking too much of their money.

  Bill Campbell. One of the best amateurs I ever saw play, and he’s been good for years. Bill is a good friend of Sam Snead’s because they come from the same area of West Virginia, and Bill has a long, fluid swing—not like Sam’s, but it makes you think of Sam because of the rhythm Bill’s swing has. Because of his wonderful way of conducting himself, Bill has become known as a true amateur, and that’s a great compliment. He was U.S. Amateur Champion in 1964 and won the U.S. Senior Amateur championship in both ’79 and ’80. A few years ago, he was also selected to be Captain of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, which is a great honor. A few years ago during a USGA Museum Committee meeting at the Chicago Golf Club, they unveiled a painting of Bill in his uniform as honorary Captain. It was very well done, and a proud moment for Bill, but he was very humble about it all. He doesn’t consider himself important because of his accomplishments in golf, he just has so much respect and love for the game, and a very humble spirit about it. I’ve always admired that about him.

  Joanne Carner. Joanne always hit very long for a woman—especially in her earlier years—which is part of the reason why she won the women’s amateur five times and the Open twice. In fact, a few years back I played in an exhibition with her in Kansas City with Tom Watson and Fuzzy Zoeller. They had her drive from the members’ tees, and besides outdriving me consistently, she drove almost up with Tom an
d Fuzzy all day as well. She surely thrilled the gallery that day.

  Fred Cobb. Fred was the golf coach at North Texas State in Denton, and I worked with his teams up there for several years until shortly after Fred’s death in 1953. Fred was very likable and would do anything for his team, which was a big part of why they worked so hard for him. To me, Fred was the one who really started good college golf in Texas. His work at North Texas State was remarkable for a man who had no funds, no scholarships to offer, and not even much of a golf course to play on. But not only did he teach his boys how to play the game, he taught them to be gentlemen. He’d be out watching them through his binoculars when they didn’t know he was even on the course, and if he saw anyone throw a club or knew they were using bad language, he’d let them know right now that such behavior wasn’t acceptable. He had quite a few fine players during his time there, including Don January, who has done so well on the senior tour. He loved those boys and they loved him. After he died, the golf program there never came close to what it was back in the late forties and early fifties.

  Charlie Coe. Besides Ken Venturi, Charlie is the only other amateur who in my opinion should have won the Masters. He was so thin it looked like a strong wind could blow him away, but he could really hit the ball. During the Masters in ’61, everyone who watched the play on the last nine saw him put his approach shots closer than Player’s on nearly every hole, but he just never made a single putt. Charlie won the amateur championship in 1958 and several other big amateur tournaments. He’s still a member at Augusta and is greatly respected whenever folks talk about fine amateur players.