American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  During our last afternoon together in 2001, Byron seemed both eager to help with my Ben Hogan biography and pleased and a little surprised when I told him that Herb Wind had given me a broader idea, the story of an American Triumvirate.

  “I will say this,” he told me as we stood outside in a warm Texas wind before we shook hands and said goodbye. “It always struck me as unfortunate that Ben Hogan never really permitted the world to see who he really was—and by that I mean to say not just the cold and intimidating figure so many people think of. But the nice man I knew growing up, and the friend I grew close to when we traveled the early tour together with our wives. We had some wonderful times. And Ben has been both a friend and an inspiration to this game. Millions have tried to copy his golf swing. Every year seems to bring a new book about his secret. That should tell you something.”

  “And what about Sam?” I had to ask, recalling Arnold’s remark about the Champions Dinner, inwardly bracing for the response.

  But Lord Byron just smiled. “Sam is Sam. People either love or dislike Sam. There’s no in between. Part of it is Sam doesn’t care for strangers. But if he knows and trusts you, he can be the soul of charm. He’s a lot more complex than most people think, and I’ve always believed he’s a little misunderstood. He was very good for the game—the first serious athlete who kept himself in top shape. They all do that on tour these days. But Sam was the first. There’s never been a more gifted natural player.”

  Then he winked at me and added, “That’s why he and I still show up to hit the first shots at Augusta every spring, you know. Sam still tries to outdrive me, though I tell him, ‘Why shouldn’t you, Sam? I’ve been retired from golf for over fifty years!’ ”

  A little over a year after Ben Hogan: An American Life was published, I stopped off in Latrobe during the 2006 U.S. Open to see the new house my boyhood hero Arnold Palmer had built for his new wife, Kit, a gracious lady from California.

  Following the Saturday afternoon telecast from Winged Foot, Arnold and I went to dinner at the country club where he’d grown up and his father, Deacon, had been the professional. We sat at a small table by the window and talked about his grandson Sam’s pending matriculation from Clemson to the Tour, my recent relocation from Maine to my native North Carolina, and how Tiger Woods now owned the PGA Tour and it seemed only a matter of time before he bettered Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major championships.

  Arnold seemed pleased to learn I was happy to be back in my old boyhood stomping ground—where I’d first seen him play at the Greater Greensboro Open—and congratulated me on winning the USGA’s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award for my biography on Ben Hogan. Ironically, Herb Wind had passed away just one week before the start of the Open at Pinehurst in 2005, the event that prompted my relocation home to North Carolina. It felt as if a circle had been completed for me—though, as I admitted to Arnold, thanks to Herb, I still had some unfinished business with Sam, Byron, and Ben.

  I told him about the triumvirate idea and wondered if he felt, as I did, that these three remarkable sons of 1912—so utterly different in every respect—had collectively saved the ailing professional golf tour, elevating it to heights it hadn’t enjoyed since the days of Jones and Hagen, and set the stage, as it were, for the coming of a king.

  Arnold pondered for a moment. “You know,” he finally began, “when I decided to turn professional, as Pap warned me, there wasn’t a great deal of money in the professional game. Only a handful of players made a good living at it. It was still something of a vagabond’s life. Most guys went broke out there. But the three guys we all looked to were Sam, Byron, and Hogan. They’d proved you could make a good living just playing golf and they did things that nobody else had ever done before.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, let’s start with Sam. I met him first. We had a lot of fun playing together. Sam was a serious athlete who made the game look easy and fun to play. People were naturally drawn to that. He was always clowning around, making people smile, which made him all the more popular. I was an athlete, too, and in that respect he became a role model for me. I saw how he took care of himself and extended his career for decades. When talk about starting up a senior tour got serious, Sam was the first guy they called. He’s one reason I supported the senior tour so enthusiastically—now called the Champions Tour, of course. Sam was great for golf.”

  “Byron?”

  “Well, for me, Byron was the definition of a gentleman, the greatest ambassador of the game I ever saw. There’s no question his golf swing took the game into the modern era, and his year in 1945 will never be equaled, period. The work he did on TV and with his charity tournament were the models for those who came after him. Byron’s real gift is for people. He loves people and they love him. Don’t believe he’s ever turned anyone down for anything, including an autograph or a speaking engagement. He cares deeply about the traditions and he’s inspired so many great young players in the game. I’d say he really influenced me the most of the three.”

  “How about Ben?”

  Arnold smiled. A commonly held view is that Hogan resented this brash and upstart kid from Pennsylvania whose style left nothing in the bag and the massive galleries he quickly generated—an army on the hoof, so to speak. Tellingly, in my presence at least, Arnold always referred to Sam and Byron by their first names, Hogan by his last.

  “You know, Hogan and I actually liked each other. We had our differences but certainly had great respect for each other. He was a true professional in every respect of the word. I think the essential difference between us is that Hogan didn’t need anyone but Hogan and I was more like Sam and Byron. I needed the fans. Still, you can’t argue with the things he accomplished—the way he meticulously practiced and prepared for a tournament, the ability he developed to summon whatever was necessary to win, not to mention the really fine equipment company he created after he left the game. These were all important improvements, things taken for granted in golf today. And the difficulties he overcame also can’t be overstated. Unless you’ve won a Masters or a U.S. Open or a British Open, you have no idea how difficult that is to do. Hogan earned his glory—and in doing so he made a lot of people pay attention to the game of golf.”

  Before I could ask him another question, Arnold said, “There’s no question in my mind, they paved the way for the rest of us.”

  “You mean the Big Three?” I asked—referring, of course, to the triumvirate of Palmer, Nicklaus, and Player that dominated golf through the 1960s and early ’70s, yet further proof of Herb Wind’s theory about the power of three.

  “No,” Arnold came back. “I mean all of us. You. Me. Anyone who loves golf. Even Tiger Woods. We all owe them a big debt of gratitude.”

  This, coming from the most charismatic and influential figure in modern golf history, really meant something. And it seemed like both a good ending point for a fine evening with my boyhood hero and a great starting point for American Triumvirate.

  1

  YEAR OF WONDERS

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON a cool Indian summer Saturday evening, eager to catch a glimpse of the future, thousands of patrons began filing into venerable Mechanic’s Hall on Huntington Avenue, happy to be among the first to see the wonders of the 1912 Boston Electric Show. “Electric devices unheard of just one year ago are to be exhibited in full operation,” wrote a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, “inventions which make the fable of Aladdin and his magical lamp seem prosy by comparison.”

  Emblematic of the affair, Mechanic’s Hall was ablaze with forty thousand light bulbs, the largest display of incandescent lighting ever mounted; the creation of the Edison Illuminating Company of New Yorks outshone the “Great White Way itself,” the company promised. Owing to the marvels of alternate electrical current, wide-eyed patrons wandered through the vast hall being serenaded by live opera and choir selections amplified by an invention called the microphone (“such a delicate instrument that by its agency the tread o
f a fly is magnified until it sounds like the clomping of a horse over the loose planks of a country bridge”) and saw inventions designed to transform everything “from the farmyard to Main Street, from the shop floor to the housewife’s kitchen.” They viewed a dairy farm where cows were milked by automated machines, for instance, promising to make the drudgery of hand milking obsolete, and an electric forking machine that could unload two hundred bales of hay from a wagon and stack them in a loft in a matter of minutes rather than hours, reducing the need for hired labor.

  There were special motion pictures displaying how the dedicated electrical current would soon transform businesses from accountancy to coal mining; how it would count money in banks and permit a clerk in one location to inquire about a customer’s account balance in a separate building altogether, achieving a response within seconds; how bakers would never need to touch the bread they sold because machines would mechanically mold dough into perfect loaves and bake them by the clock to golden perfection; how lumber mills would use power saws to mill stockpiles of flawless high-grade lumber for the booming furniture and house-building trades in minutes, not hours; how darkened streets would soon be made bright as noon by municipal lighting soon coming to market, “pressing back the cloak of night and greatly reducing the scourge of crime and hoodlum behavior.”

  Perhaps the most popular aspect of the revolution on the doorstep, the show’s organizers promised, would be the liberation of the ordinary housewife thanks to special electric appliances that would wash and sanitize dishes, eliminating the need for madam or a domestic to ever touch a single china plate that wasn’t sparkling clean. Ovens would bake cakes and roasts according to an electric clock that would make expert cooking a snap at home. An exciting new commercial “electric refrigerator”—the world’s first, being introduced that year by the General Electric Corporation—promised to make spoiled fruits, vegetables, and meats a thing of the past.

  “This magical showcase at Mechanic’s Hall fittingly serves as a capstone to a year that has seen one astonishment after another, all aimed at providing more leisure time for Americans to enjoy the bounty of their lives,” declared The Boston Evening Traveler. “Many will look back and perhaps agree there has never been a year quite like it.”

  To be sure, it had been a year of human wonders.

  Despite jitters about rising Anglo-German tensions over some obscure place called the Balkans in a faraway corner of Europe, most Americans were enjoying an unprecedented sense of prosperity and well-being, the afterglow of a Gilded Age that produced untold wealth for a few but also labor reforms that dramatically expanded the reach and power of a newly emerging middle class. Earlier that year in Detroit, Henry Ford revealed plans for the first moving assembly line, a concept that would revolutionize the manufacture of reasonably priced consumer goods and herald the arrival of a reliable automobile that almost any American with a good job could afford to own. Banks responded by offering new credit terms to qualified customers based on easy time-payment plans.

  In January, New Mexico became the forty-seventh state; less than a month later, Arizona joined the union, too. The world’s first “flying boat” took flight, Frederick Law made the first successful parachute jump from the Statue of Liberty, and a few weeks later another daredevil upped the ante by leaping from an airplane. For the first time ever that year, the 100 mph air speed barrier was broken and a transcontinental passenger flight was completed.

  Daily newspapers, experiencing a surge in circulation, couldn’t cover the emerging wonders of human achievement fast enough, including Amundsen’s successful race to the South Pole and Scott’s unfortunate demise, the establishment of China as a republic, and the exciting launch of the Titanic, said to be the most lavish and technically advanced ocean liner in history, all but unsinkable according to widely distributed reports.

  With more time and disposable income on their hands, Americans read with interest about Mrs. Taft planting the first cherry trees along the Potomac in Washington, the formation of the Girl Scouts in Savannah, Georgia, and Columbia University’s creation of something called the Pulitzer Prize. A record number of public libraries and more than one hundred movie theaters opened in 1912 alone, bringing the magic of the first Keystone Kops movie to small towns across the nation. That summer children were either playing a new craze called “marbles” or enjoying a fruit-flavored summer candy called “Life Savers” that was guaranteed not to melt in summer heat.

  Professional sports were another lifesaver, particularly baseball. At least a half dozen records fell that year—for triples and stolen bases, attendance and consecutive wins. After multiple suspensions for fighting with fans and opponents, Ty Cobb publicly hinted at an early retirement from the game. After 511 wins, Cy Young actually did retire. Several state-of-the-art ballparks opened that year, including Tiger Stadium in Detroit and Boston’s Fenway Park, where a sold-out crowd of 27,000 fans got to see the hometown Red Sox beat the New York Highlanders (soon to be the Yankees) 7–6 in a marathon season opener that lasted eleven innings.

  Ironically, Fenway Park was knocked off the front pages of Boston’s newspapers by news that the Titanic, on its maiden voyage, had struck an iceberg and sunk off the coast of Newfoundland, killing 1,500 passengers and crew.

  In 1912, golf in this country was barely two decades old, played by roughly two million Americans on about fifteen hundred courses of widely varying quality in all forty-eight states. For the vast majority, it was simply a recreational pursuit with unmistakably patrician overtones, conveyed to these shores by a wave of immigrant Scottish professionals who accurately perceived that a comfortable living could be made promoting the game of their ancestors. Until fairly recently, Americans had been more comfortable as spectators than as participants at sporting events. But the surprising popularity of golf, particularly among the middle and merchant classes, suggested that a cultural sea change might be under way. In addition to the private clubs where it first took root, virtually every municipality of any size now offered a rudimentary golf course, most of which were crowded on any given weekend in fair weather months with men and women eager to learn about the game.

  More telling, perhaps, at least eight different companies were now manufacturing hickory-shafted golf clubs, and a half a dozen more producing a newly introduced rubber-cored golf ball. Meanwhile, such seasonal resorts at places like Poland Spring in the highlands of Maine, Saratoga in New York, and Pinehurst down in the Carolina Sandhills—which was in the process of adding its third golf course under the guidance of Scotsman Donald Ross—helped establish the game as both a wholesome activity for the new leisure class and a serious competitive sport for any swell who had the gumption to try to excel at it.

  All of this was the result of one man’s international celebrity.

  A dozen years earlier, in February of 1900, when Harry Vardon came strolling down a ship’s gangway to begin his heavily publicized exhibition tour of America, he was greeted like a visiting head of state by a crush of reporters and photographers eager to learn everything they could about England’s most acclaimed sportsman, an elegant, gracious man who’d been nicknamed “The Greyhound” because he typically bounded ahead of competitors in tournaments and rarely yielded ground. His only rival, every British schoolboy knew, was John Henry Taylor, a quiet, dignified man from the windswept links at North Devon Golf Club, more popularly known as Westward Ho! J.H., as he was called by his friend Harry and other intimates, had won the British Open Championship twice, in 1894 and again the following year.

  Vardon, the son of a manual laborer from the Isle of Jersey, began his working life as a gardener but quickly evolved into a club professional, employed at Ganton Golf Club in Lincolnshire. He was twenty-nine years old when he arrived in America, having already claimed three Open Championships with a slightly upright golf swing that was so deceptively smooth and refined that his irons and fairway woods rarely left more than a modest scuff on the turf. Opponents claimed Harry’s tee sho
ts were so maddeningly precise in tournament play they often wound up in the same spot where he had hardly left a mark from the day before.

  His ostensible reason for visiting America was to play in the fledgling United States Open and conduct an extensive tour of public exhibitions to promote the Vardon Flier, a so-called gutty golf ball manufactured by the A. G. Spalding Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts. Mr. Spalding had a private course on his estate, and had agreed to pay Vardon a princely fee of $2,000 for ten months of exhibitions, on top of any appearance fees he could generate during the tour. Back home, J. H. Taylor had also confided to friends his intention to give chase to his friend the Greyhound and all comers at the National Championship of America, conducted that year at Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois.

  Whoever actually won the affair—accomplished thus far only by five Scottish immigrants, each gainfully employed as a club professional in America—would undoubtedly result in an avalanche of favorable press for the ball he used, for golf was not only increasingly shaped by both the men who played and those who knew that money could be made catering to the growing number of adherents.

  For nearly half a century, the venerable gutta-percha ball had reigned supreme, dating from a famous dispute between golf’s two most celebrated founding fathers. In the 1840s, Allan Robertson, a short, friendly Scot, was the first true professional and widely regarded as the finest player of his time; the son of a senior caddie at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, he operated a thriving business making clubs and traditional feathery balls just off Links Road in St. Andrews. Although a new feathery ball could be driven great distances, the ball—made from a top-hat-ful of goose feathers compressed into a stitched leather orb—was fragile and subject to either losing its shape or breaking apart after only slight use. The balls were also expensive to produce, costing about half a crown apiece, thus attractive to the better-heeled classes.