American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by James Dodson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dodson, James.

  American triumvirate / James Dodson.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95739-9

  1. Golfers—United States—Biography. 2. Golf—United States—

  History—20th century. 3. Nelson, Byron, 1912–2006.

  4. Snead, Sam, 1912– 5. Hogan, Ben, 1912–1997. I. Title.

  GV964.A1D64 2012

  796.3520922—dc23

  [B] 2011043446

  Frontispiece: Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, and Sam Snead

  Front -of-jacket images (left to right): Sam Snead. Augusta National/

  Masters Historic Imagery/Getty Images; Byron Nelson. Bettmann/Corbis;

  Ben Hogan. Augusta National/Masters Historic Imagery/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1_r2

  For Bill Campbell, John Derr, and Rayburn Tucker,

  a true American Triumvirate,

  with my deepest gratitude

  No one has tasted the full flower of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.

  —O. HENRY

  When I look back at those days, I was lucky to have had ol’ Ben and Byron to play against. Damn straight they made me a better player, and I hope they feel the same way about me.

  —SAM SNEAD

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: ODE TO BILLY JOE

  1. YEAR OF WONDERS

  2. THE POWER OF THREE

  3. THE GOLDEN AGE

  4. THE CHRISTMAS MATCH

  5. THE UNIVERSITY OF GOLF

  6. SAM VERSUS THE WORLD

  7. BREAKTHROUGH AND HEARTBREAK

  8. REDEMPTION

  9. THE WAR WITHIN

  10. MR. GOLF

  11. AN UNEXPECTED OPEN

  12. THEN THERE WERE TWO

  13. HOLLYWOOD COMEBACK

  14. IMMORTALITY

  15. LAST HURRAHS

  Epilogue: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Billy Joe Patton, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones, and Sam Snead

  Prologue

  ODE TO BILLY JOE

  LET’S BEGIN WITH PERHAPS the most memorable Masters ever played, the last time Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, or Ben Hogan won a major golf championship.

  The year was 1954, and the unlikely star who outshone the three greatest players since Bobby Jones was a genial, wisecracking, thirty-two-year-old lumber broker from the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, an unknown amateur named William Joseph Patton—“Billy Joe” to his friends back home in tiny Morganton.

  Prior to his unlikely summons to Augusta, the most outstanding items on Billy Joe’s résumé were lone victories in the Carolina Amateur and the Carolina Open and a somewhat surprising appointment as an alternate to the 1953 Walker Cup team, which netted him the Masters invitation. He was known for his sharp wit and infectious storytelling, his blazing backswing and go-for-broke style of play that often sent his drives anywhere but the fairway. His buddies back at the Mimosa Hills Country Club were almost as amused as they were impressed by his unexpected new honor. Several made a point, in fact, of asking Billy Joe to at least bring home an autograph by Ben Hogan or Sam Snead.

  Five decades later, not long before he passed away, Billy Joe Patton sat on a pretty terrace at the retirement home where he lived in Morganton, and recalled the most remarkable week of his life.

  “I drove down to Augusta on Monday of Masters week very excited that I would finally get to meet Snead, Hogan, and Nelson. I’d only seen Byron and Ben play in Greensboro and Asheville. I also decided that, with nothing to lose, I would just try to have some fun. The instant I turned up Magnolia Lane, though, my heart was racing like you can’t believe.

  “In those days, players parked right in front of the clubhouse. So I parked and got my clubs out of the trunk and noticed a Cadillac convertible sitting nearby with a fella wearing a banded straw hat sitting there talking to a lady. ‘Oh, my God,’ I said to myself. ‘That’s Sam Snead.’ I tried not to disturb them, but as I passed Sam Snead looked over at me, winked, and tipped his hat.

  “I knew it was going to be a fun week,” Billy Joe recalled fifty-five years after the fact, with a roguish little twinkle in his eyes. “That was the first time I ever saw Sam Snead.”

  But it wouldn’t be the last. With a homemade golf swing that was quicker than a frightened hummingbird, Billy Joe entered the tournament’s annual long-drive contest on Wednesday afternoon and won it with a poke of 338 yards, the first time an amateur had ever done so. Members of the press swarmed around the well-dressed Carolinian with gray-flecked hair and neat rimless eyeglasses, discovering a fellow who was not only having the time of his life but also charming fans with every utterance and unorthodox swing. “Are you planning to hit the ball that hard in the tournament?” one of them demanded. Billy Joe smiled. “Well,” he drawled pleasantly, “I didn’t come this far to lay up, that’s for sure. You didn’t pay to see me play it safe.”

  He followed up this disarming swagger by shooting 70 on a cold and blustery opening day to tie veteran E. J. “Dutch” Harrison for the first-round lead. Only two other players in the field, Lloyd Mangrum and Jack Burke Jr., managed to shoot under par that day. Defending champion Ben Hogan got around the course in 72, former champion Sam Snead in 74. And Byron Nelson, who retired from competitive golf at the end of the 1946 season but never missed an opportunity to compete in the Masters, split the difference between his great rivals with an opening 73.

  Going in, these three were the unchallenged favorites at golf’s most prized invitational event, more or less in that order. Each, after all, had won the Masters twice. Between them they owned twenty-one major championships, nine Vardon trophies for the year’s lowest scoring average, eleven Player of the Year honors, fourteen Ryder Cup appearances and no fewer than thirteen PGA Tour records. But on the heels of his extraordinary year in 1953, when he won five of the eight events he entered and captured the Masters, U.S. Open, and British Open, Ben Hogan had announced his plans to dial back his appearances and join his longtime friend and rival Byron Nelson in retirement.

  Many felt Slammin’ Sammy Snead wouldn’t be far behind. Though he still displayed the silkiest natural swing ever seen in championship golf, within a month he would turn forty-two, an old man by tour standards. For the record, Byron had already reached that mark, and Hogan would hit it later that year in August.

  “There was an unmistakable feeling that an era was ending that year at Augusta,” says Bill Campbell, the other outstanding amateur in the field that week, a thoughtful West Virginian playing in his fourth Masters. Something of a protégé of Snead’s, he would go on to anchor eight Walker Cup teams and eventually serve as president of the United States Golf Association. “Everyone knew why Sam and Ben and even Byron were there. Each one wanted one more major title, ideally the Masters, because they each owned two titles and together they had m
ore or less put the Masters on the map. Everyone was watching to see who would take the rubber match, so to speak. But that’s what makes what Billy Joe accomplished all the more wonderful. He stole the show from the three greatest players who ever played at one time, on the greatest stage in golf.”

  On day two, when the weather turned colder and gustier, Harrison carded a 79 and Hogan slipped back a stroke to 73, leaving Billy Joe alone atop the leaderboard at the halfway mark with 144. Cary Middelcoff, who was five strokes off the lead, took a glance at the board with the easygoing amateur in first and sourly grumbled, “If that guy wins the Masters, it will set golf back fifty years.” One veteran wire service reporter aptly dubbed the colorful amateur the “Falstaff from the Foothills.”

  The fans couldn’t have disagreed more. As he strolled Augusta National’s lushly groomed fairways, at times twirling a club and whistling out loud, Billy Joe waved to friends from back home in the gallery and exchanged warm greetings with any stranger who cheered him on, and shook every hand offered from behind the ropes. “Always wink at the crowds,” he advised a young player making a similar debut decades later. “That way everybody thinks you’re winking at them.”

  Ben Hogan wasn’t the least bit pleased to be paired with the talk of the tournament for his third round. Since his miraculous return from a terrible car accident that nearly took his life in late 1949, he had won six major championships and achieved mythic stature in American sports. Long considered the coldest and most methodical player who ever played, and quite possibly the finest shotmaker of all time, he was a legend whose personal omerta was a code of silence that suffered no fools and certainly not a gabby amateur, and everything Billy Joe did that day irritated the poker-faced Hogan, starting with the fact that he, like millions of Americans, seemed to play golf purely for the fun of it. For Ben Hogan, golf wasn’t merely a source of livelihood and fame; it was his sole means of survival. Fun never entered the equation.

  The amateur’s first big sin was outdriving his playing partner on the opening holes. Then, as they were walking together to the fourth tee, one of his High Country pals playfully called out, “Hey, Billy Joe, who’s that little guy in the funny white cap?”

  The comment probably wasn’t meant to be malicious or insulting, most likely just an attempt to help keep his friend loose and free-swinging. But as Billy Joe predictably began spraying his drives right and left, the “Wee Ice Man”—as admiring Scots in 1953 at the British Open had nicknamed Hogan—refused to pay the amateur any attention, and his expression grew even more glacial after Billy Joe executed several near-impossible recovery shots from deep trouble to save par, prompting Hogan to mutter as he trudged off the ninth green, “I can’t stand this.”

  True to form, however, Hogan buckled down and finished with a 69, while Billy Joe ambled into the house wearing the same catfish smile, lucky to have carded a 75, but still the new darling. “Billy Joe had put on a wonderful display,” Bill Campbell remembers, “but the feeling around the tournament was that it was time for the amateurs to step aside and let the legends take over and settle the matter. That would most likely be Sam or Ben.”

  Snead’s third-round 70 could easily have been three shots better, but he was still in the thick of it. Nelson, on the other hand, followed an untidy second-round 76 with a 74 that pretty well took him out of contention for a third title. He would, however, rally in the final round and finish tied for twelfth, not bad, Herbert Warren Wind later noted, for a man who’d retired nearly a decade before.

  As Ben Hogan strode down the fairway of the fourth hole in the final round, bound tightly in adhesive leg bandages from groin to ankle and wrapped in his own secure world of absolute mental isolation, a thunderous roar came off the sixth hole ahead, causing him to do something he rarely did in the heat of competition. Spotting a wire service reporter, he walked over to ask what had just happened. The reporter held up one finger.

  “Billy Joe just made an ace on six,” he said. Hogan showed no emotion.

  At the sixth tee, a second sustained roar echoed through the pines. Billy Joe, Hogan learned, had just birdied the eighth hole. And after his drive on seven found the heart of the fairway, he heard another roar come from the direction of the clubhouse. That turned out to be Billy Joe’s birdie at nine.

  The greatest player of the age and the amiable amateur were now tied for the lead in the eighteenth edition of the Masters.

  As Hogan stood on the eleventh tee, Billy Joe hit his drive on the famous par-five thirteenth, a low slice that stopped in the pine trees bordering the fairway. From this spot, most experienced players intent on winning a major championship would chose wisdom over valor and lay up short of Rae’s Creek, allowing themselves a short pitch to the green and a decent shot at birdie.

  Billy Joe, however, hearing the summons of the gods in his ears, gambled on a different path to glory. All week long his fans had been issuing glandular rebel yells and patting him on the back, urging him to go for every risky shot on this notoriously unforgiving golf course. One bit of fanciful Augusta lore holds that as he was trying to decide between going for the green or laying up, a big-time gambler—who stood to lose a fortune if one of the favorites got upset by some good-time hacker—took Billy Joe’s elbow and informed him that his mama had been rushed to the hospital back home, hoping this news might derail his freight train.

  No one knows for sure if that really happened, but Billy Joe chose to go for the green and knocked his second shot into the creek. After retrieving his ball from the water, choosing to play the chip in his bare feet, he slipped and dumped his ball in the water for a second time in ten minutes. The huge gallery went deathly quiet, witnessing every amateur’s nightmare being played out before them. Unsmiling for the first time that week, Billy Joe wound up with a double-bogey seven on the hole.

  Back on hole eleven, meanwhile, unaware of Billy Joe’s troubles ahead, Hogan made a rare tactical error by attacking a flag tucked in the lower front portion of the green; his approach shot trickled into the pond, producing a Greek chorus of groans from the vast galleries assembled on three pivotal holes in what Herb Wind would soon christen “Amen Corner.”

  Hogan took six there, but Billy Joe’s adrenaline and poor choices resulted in a costly bogey on fifteen. As he was tapping in for his seven at fifteen, three holes ahead Sam Snead finished his round with a workmanlike 72 that put him in the house at 289—and, for the moment at least, in sole possession of the lead. His partisans were going crazy up on the hilltop by the clubhouse. Just under an hour later, however, Hogan limped home with an unhappy 75 that tied him. At this stage of his life and career, the last thing Ben wanted to endure was a playoff—especially against his greatest remaining rival. On the other hand, he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to battle an amateur with a wild swing and a free spirit for his third Masters title.

  By that point, Billy Joe Patton was standing under the famous oak tree by the clubhouse, enjoying a cold beverage and signing autographs and soaking up the congratulations of every Masters patron who passed by. A few minutes before, having just missed an eighteen-foot putt for birdie that would have put him in the playoff for the 1954 title, Billy Joe had dropped his head in disappointment—but quickly raised it again and beamed at the crowd, as if he still heard the angels singing.

  “They all wanted to shake his hand,” remembered CBS broadcaster and fellow North Carolinian John Derr. “Billy Joe was suddenly every ordinary golfer’s hero—a guy who’d nearly beaten the two finest players of the age on what was becoming the single most admired setting in golf.”

  The next day’s playoff shaped up like a golf junkie’s dream come true, the two reigning titans of the game in a head-to-head rubber match for glory with all the intimacy of a country club match-play final.

  As events unfolded, however, they both played careful and fairly uninspired golf through twelve holes, but Snead made his move by making a birdie at thirteen. Showing visible signs of fatigue, Hogan three-putted o
n sixteen for a bogey four. During their match, it would be remembered, he reached every green in regulation whereas Snead hit only fourteen. But he needed thirty-six putts against his opponent’s thirty-three, and therein lay the winning margin. Ben shot 71, Sam a stroke better.

  At the presentation ceremony, as they posed with Bob Jones for a photograph with the real star of the week—the tournament’s low amateur—Snead grinned and said, “Hey, Billy Joe, you damn near got the whole turkey.”

  “Well, Sam, I gave it my best.” Billy Joe was still in a daze, he admitted later, because he’d learned his performance meant he would be invited back next year.

  Snead turned to Hogan. “It’s nice of you to let me have another one,” he drawled as Bob Jones helped him slip on his champion’s green jacket, then added playfully, “Hey, brother, I thought someone said you were going to retire. Did you forget?”

  Hogan smiled, always gracious in defeat. “Only how to putt, Sam,” he replied.

  The comment was telling. Neither man would win another major championship.

  From this moment, an officially “retired” Ben Hogan’s public appearances became much rarer events, highlighted by a pair of near-wins in the next two Masters and a trio of breathtakingly contested U.S. Opens in ’55, ’56, and ’60. He would win only one more tournament—his fourth Colonial National Invitational in 1959. At this point his vaunted skills would sharply taper away and his tournament entries would dwindle until they ceased altogether in 1971.

  The seemingly ageless Sam Snead, on the other hand, enjoyed something of a playing renaissance, winning fourteen more tour events and another six times on the senior tour. Similar to Hogan, he made bold runs at four more major championships only to come up just shy. Before he was finished, however, he would win five World Senior titles and continue to tour and give exhibitions until he became the pro emeritus at his beloved Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, the first man to win a PGA event in six different decades.