American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Whatever else is true of the 1954 Masters, the real winners that remarkable week were the Masters tournament itself and the game’s popularity in America at large. Patton’s play and the hugely anticipated battle royale between Hogan, Snead, and Nelson generated more press coverage around the world than any time since Jones left the game—confirming a growing belief that the Masters had finally achieved major parity with the British and American opens and the PGA Championship, bringing out the best in pro and amateur alike on a course that would soon be familiar to every golf fan on the planet.

  Billy Joe’s smiling mug appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine, and golf writer Charlie Price declared that golf had a new “Give ’em hell people’s hero,” the kind of guy any fan could relate to. In the tournament’s afterglow, golf clubs across the land reported a significant uptick in membership inquiries, while driving ranges and public courses that summer reported record turnouts.

  The end of an era that Bill Campbell had sensed was real. In the same summer, a younger Coke-swigging amateur from western Pennsylvania won the United States Amateur Championship in Detroit and decided to try to make a living in professional golf. He, too, had a go-for-broke style that every golf fan could relate to. In some ways, Billy Joe Patton had merely been the warm-up act for Arnold Daniel Palmer.

  Within two years, the Masters would be televised for the first time; and two years after that Palmer would capture his first green jacket and the hearts of millions of American golfers.

  “If a single golf tournament ever had a more magical week I simply can’t name it,” Herb Wind told me one cool April afternoon in 2001, during what had become an annual post-Masters lunch at his retirement village north of Boston. “I agree with those who say Billy Joe’s Masters represented a turning point in the game of golf. Ben, Sam, and Byron, after all, had set the stage for golf’s greatest period of expansion. But they were just leaving that stage, passing the torch, if you will, to Arnold and Jack Nicklaus and eventually all the rest. Now we have young Tiger Woods.”

  Woods had won his first Masters in 1997, and this was our third spring luncheon, but I wasn’t there to talk about golf’s most exciting newcomer. I was there to collect Wind’s thoughts about Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and the era of golf he perhaps understood better than anyone.

  Not long after I helped Arnold Palmer write his memoirs in 1998, Ben Hogan’s estate invited me to write an authorized biography of the most elusive superstar in the game’s history. Before I officially said yes, I wanted to talk with Herb in depth about Hogan’s career and to see if he shared my growing belief that Hogan, along with Snead and Nelson, had shaped modern golf in a number of ways.

  This wasn’t just my own theory. During my decade at Golf Magazine, and another ten years as golf correspondent for Departures, I’d spent a nice chunk of time interviewing early tour stars like Gene Sarazen, Henry Picard, and Paul Runyan, as well as a host of younger pros including Tommy Bolt, Cary Middlecoff, Jack Burke Jr., Mike Souchak, Bob Rosburg, Dow Finsterwald, Dave Marr, Don January, Ken Venturi, Jack Fleck, Eddie Merrins, amateur legends Bill Campbell and Harvie Ward, and, of course, the incomparable Arnold Palmer. To a man, in some form or another, they pointed to the galvanizing effect that Hogan, Snead, and Nelson had on the game.

  In 1994, I spent two days chatting with Byron Nelson at his Fairway Ranch in Roanoke, Texas, ostensibly to gather insights for the fiftieth anniversary of his remarkable year in 1945, when he captured eleven tournaments in a row and won a total of eighteen in all. Much of our conversation dwelt on Byron’s early career and his relationship with his leading two rivals. Remarkably, they were all born in 1912 and broke through in quick succession to revive public interest in golf in the midst of the darkest days of the Great Depression.

  A few months later, I called on Sam Snead at the Greenbrier and enjoyed two days of golf and conversation with one of the most colorful, beloved, and controversial players of his time. Sam’s seven major titles and eighty-two official victories made him the winningest player in PGA history, but I sensed that, not unlike his old rival Byron, he felt a little forgotten by writers and fans of the modern age. When I pointed out that I had just been hired to help Palmer write his long-awaited memoirs, Sam laughed and said in a low growl, “Well, you tell Arnold if it hadn’t been for me and old Ben and Byron, hell, nobody would’ve ever heard of him!” He graciously invited me to come visit him up at his home in Hot Springs, Virginia, when I finished this project so we could “talk some more.” I assured him I would love nothing better.

  This was the background for my lunch visit with Herb Wind in 2001, when I wanted to hear what the dean of American golf writers, and coauthor of Ben’s best-selling Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, had to say about his mythic friend, but also about Sam and Byron.

  Herb laughed when I told him what Sam had told me to tell Arnold Palmer, and smiled rather knowingly when I suggested it was a shame that up until then no one had produced major biographies on Sam and Byron like the one I was embarking upon with Ben. The deeper I got into my subject, the more I realized the critical roles Snead and Nelson played in shaping Hogan’s life and golf game—not to mention reviving the game at a time when professional golf could easily have slipped back to little more than a second-rate sport.

  “You’re quite right. Both Byron and Sam, I think, perhaps feel a little forgotten in light of the so-called Hogan mystique.” He paused to taste his chilled cucumber soup in the empty, sun-filled dining room. We were sitting by a large picture window, and through the glass the first brave tulips were poking up their heads to face yet another reluctant New England spring. “There’s no question that Sam feels slighted by history and the golf establishment at large. Most of that stems from his painful record in the Opens. He never won our Open and, in fact, managed to lose several of them in the most agonizing ways possible. Generally speaking, no player is regarded as truly great unless he wins the tournament believed to be the hardest of all to win—our own Open. Sam could easily have won several of them, five or six by his own count, but he always seemed to author a different way to lose it. In doing so, he became convinced, as he once told me, that he was terribly jinxed. That’s why winning that final Masters in 1954 meant so much to him.”

  I asked if Sam’s colorful personality might have contributed to his image problems. Growing up in his adopted home of Greensboro, I’d heard enough darkly amusing stories about the Slammer to know that while his unfiltered backwoods showmanship appealed to millions of fans, some of his less savory comments and antics, rubbed others the wrong way. His off-color humor, for instance, was legendary. At one point, I asked Arnold Palmer about the annual Champions Dinner at Augusta, a tradition Ben Hogan started with money from his own pocket in 1953. Arnold smiled, shook his head, and said, “The dinner is never complete until Sam displays his physical prowess by kicking the top of the door and tells an even worse joke than the year before—at which point Byron politely excuses himself and goes home to bed.”

  At the other end of the spectrum, however, I knew from many conversations with Sam’s closest friends that he was a man of uncommon generosity, quietly assisting groups and individuals who needed a financial boost—belying his popular image as that of a wealthy skinflint who kept his money safely stashed in a tin can buried in his backyard. If you scratched the surface of town life in Hot Springs, one found such stories were quite commonplace, almost always involving a local youngster, family, or organization in financial need. Moreover, I knew from my own experiences around him that, depending on his mood and the circumstances, Samuel Jackson Snead could be as charming and smooth as a Spanish diplomat—or as chilly as the January wind. “The darker side of Sam’s large charisma,” his longtime friend Bill Campbell told me one winter afternoon at his home in West Virginia, “is that Sam is possibly the most unfiltered and honest fellow you’ll ever meet. Sam never left any doubt about how he felt about a person or circumstance. In this way he was pretty sim
ple—and yet, to my way of thinking, he might have been the most interesting and complex of the three.”

  Herb nodded. “Sam was an original, no question about it. That’s what endeared him to so many at a time when the game desperately needed a bona fide star and headline maker. The tour was really struggling when Sam broke through out west and won a flurry of tournaments on the winter tour in 1937. He was a complete unknown, a plainspoken hillbilly from the Blue Ridge Mountains, as they portrayed him—but he gave golf a legitimate star at a moment when the tour could easily have gone under. That same year, Byron won his first Masters and Sam nearly won the Open. People really started to pay attention to them, and interest in professional golf suddenly grew. Two years after that, Byron Nelson won the Open and the year after that, of course, Ben broke through at Pinehurst and won three tournaments in a matter of weeks. Suddenly you had three hot players making headlines.”

  Herb sipped his cucumber soup again and added, “There’s something else I find fascinating, and no one has really written about this effect. If you look at the long history of golf, any time there were two or three great rivals in the game, the game flourished. In early Scotland you had the famous challenge money matches of the Morrises, young and old Tom, and Allan Robertson and later the Dunns from North Berwick. Then came Britain’s Great Triumvirate of Vardon, Taylor, and Braid. They created golf’s first popular golf boom and exported the passion for the game to our shores. We soon had our own homegrown stars and great rivals in the form of Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, and Gene Sarazen. Golf grew in boundless leaps during these periods—and so, I might add, did the technology. That seemed to advance significantly any time there was a trio of stars.”

  “So how,” I asked bluntly, “do Sam, Byron, and Ben rank in terms of trios of rivals?”

  He looked up at me, glanced out the window at the emerging tulips, pursed his lips, and gently shook his graying head, his spoon hovering midair. Every year, I knew from his caregiver, Herb’s brilliant mind was a little more fragile. But his eyes had a sympathetic, alert look in them, and his mind seemed to be happily roaming the fairways of his glorious reporting days. It would be the last lunch we ever had together.

  “Perhaps I’m not the most neutral of observers on this subject, but I always felt there were never three better players who came along at the same moment—and did so much to propel the game forward. Any one of the three would have made that time remarkable. But the fact that Sam, Byron, and Ben all three appeared at the same moment and effectively changed how golf was perceived in this country—not to mention launched it into the modern era in terms of equipment and the many things they innovated—sets them apart, at least in my judgment, as the finest trio of any time.”

  Before I could agree with him, my host added, with visible emotion, “You know they were all three born the same year—1912. What a remarkable year. Fenway Park opened and the Titanic sunk. The fact that two of the three came out of the same caddie yard down in Texas is extraordinary. Equally important, I think, is the fact that their individual personalities, playing styles, and personal values couldn’t have been more different. That’s why each generated his own large group of die-hard followers. They shaped the game and influenced every generation of players that followed them. They introduced practices and ideas that are commonplace today.”

  “I keep thinking somebody should write about them,” I heard myself say, something I’d been thinking about for months. “A book, I mean, about the effect their trio had on golf.”

  “Theirs is an extraordinary story that deserves to be told,” he said, then looked at me and smiled again. “I think of them, in fact, as our great triumvirate—the American Triumvirate.”

  When I mentioned Herb’s comments to Byron a few days later in Roanoke, he merely smiled. His second wife, Peggy, had made us a delicious lunch and lit a crackling fire in their den. After lunch, he showed me some beautiful woodworking projects he was working on out in his shop—one of them being a small chest for Tom Watson’s daughter, Meg—and now we’d settled in his den to continue our conversation about the early days of the tour. The afternoon had turned gray and cold and Peggy had placed a beautiful plaid blanket on her husband’s legs.

  “That’s very kind of Herb to say,” said Byron. “Looking back, it was an amazing time in golf. But I sometimes feel like it happened to someone other than me. I really think Sam and Ben deserve the lion’s share of the attention because they won more tournaments than I did.”

  “But only because you retired so early,” I suggested.

  The official PGA Tour record book spoke for itself. Sam Snead is credited with eighty-two tournament victories, a number that includes seven major championships. Ben Hogan’s official number is nine majors and sixty wins, spanning a career that reached its celebrated apogee atop golf’s Mount Olympus in 1953. Byron Nelson’s total of fifty-two wins and five major championships takes on deeper significance when you take a closer look at his historic final year: he won eighteen out of thirty tournaments, collected seven second-place finishes and produced a scoring average of 68.33 that stood as a record for more than half a century. A common but false assumption is that Byron, who was deemed unfit for active military service due to a congenital blood disorder, pulled off the feat while much of his competition was away in the service. In fact, Sam played in twenty-seven events in 1945 and Ben played in eighteen. Both stars played in more than twenty-seven events in 1946 while Byron—preparing to officially retire and start his cattle ranch—scaled back to twenty-one. Between the resumption of the tour in 1944 and his final appearance in late 1946, Byron won an astonishing thirty-five of his last seventy-six tournaments.

  Moreover, between 1945 and 1953, at least one member of this American Triumvirate won a tournament or finished in the top three more than 60 percent of the time. The record for the most wins in a season was, of course, owned by Byron, with eighteen, but the second and third names on the record list belonged to Ben (thirteen in 1946) and Sam (eleven in 1950). Not even Tiger Woods has ever come close to these marks.

  Finally, recordkeeping was at best sketchy and at worst nonexistent back then, and in fact all three won dozens more tournaments than they were officially given credit for by the modern Tour. Sam’s partisans, for instance, insist he won more than 135 tournaments: he himself claimed the PGA Tour should have at a minimum recognized 115 wins. Likewise, Byron captured at least two dozen two- or three-day events that aren’t included in his total, and Ben told friends he won eighty-five tournaments of some sort or another. So a rough count suggests some 276 victories between the three of them.

  Byron Nelson was in his prime, just thirty-four, when he walked away from the game, not unlike his friend and hero Bobby Jones. So one can only imagine what his “official” number would have been had he competed another dozen years. Something else to consider is which of the three men—at his peak—was actually the best player. Fans of Byron point out he had five major championships under his belt when he retired in 1946—two Masters titles, two PGAs, and one U.S. Open. Entering that season, Sam had laid claim to only one major title, the 1942 PGA, but went on to win the British Open at St. Andrews. Ben won his first major championship that summer, too, the first of his two PGA Championships. “If Byron had wanted to keep playing,” Bob Rosburg once told me, “I have no doubt the record everyone would be chasing today would have belonged to him.”

  True to his gentle, self-effacing nature and deep Christian convictions that regarded earthly achievements as secondary to matters of personal faith, Byron shrugged off these points as I politely raised them in his cozy den.

  “You know,” he said in his flat Texas drawl, “I know this may sound kind of strange to some folks, but I always considered the things I did after my playing days ended really more significant. I became a good rancher and very active in my church life. I had time to help a few young players who were coming along about that time. Eventually I became a broadcaster and became involved with the golf tourn
ament over in Dallas. I know folks remember me for that eleven in a row, but to tell the truth, nothing meant more to me than helping people.”

  Unlike Sam or Ben, who enjoyed sweetheart deals with leading golf clubs and resorts that required little more than the use of their names, Byron remained an active head club professional most of his career, making his professional feats even more impressive. The young players he worked with included Frank Stranahan, Ken Venturi, Harvie Ward, Dave Marr, Johnny Miller, Corey Pavin, and Ben Crenshaw. His work and close friendship with Tom Watson preceded Watson’s breakthrough and evolution into a major champion.

  “There’s no question that Byron unlocked the mystery of the modern golf swing,” Venturi told me over the phone a few days before I ventured out to see Byron in Roanoke for the final time. “As far as I’m concerned, he really is the father of the modern golf swing. His golf instruction books—like Ben’s—shaped thousands of young golf swings, including my own, and they’re still doing it today. But more importantly, Byron is the finest gentleman and perhaps the greatest ambassador golf has ever had. He represents everything that is good about the game and the people who love it. In that respect, he touched untold millions.”

  Indeed, his knowledge of the swing—and mastery of it—prompted the USGA to nickname its own testing robot “Iron Byron.” Perhaps the straightest driver of the ball ever, he is credited with developing the techniques that moved golf from the hickory shaft to the steel shaft era. “Byron’s divots are so straight,” Dave Marr once remarked, “they look like dollar bills.”

  The first player to become a full-time TV commentator, he led the way for Venturi, Miller, and several others. Then he focused his energies on the tournament in nearby Dallas that became the first PGA event to be permanently named in honor of a player, the Byron Nelson Classic, helping the Salesmanship Club of that city establish the model of charitable giving that’s standard on tour today. His tenure as an honorary starter at the Masters lasted twenty years, almost a decade longer than anyone else.