by James Dodson
Located on the southeastern fringes of the city, not far from the interurban bus line where Byron Nelson’s family lived in Six Stop, Glen Garden wasn’t Fort Worth’s best private golf club, but it was very popular with Cowtown’s growing ranks of middle-class golfers and also within walking distance of East Allen Street.
Shortly before his twelfth birthday, Bennie Hogan went over to see what all the excitement was about—just two weeks after a sunny, cheerful kid named Byron Nelson had shown up, wide-eyed and eager to know more about golf.
3
THE GOLDEN AGE
THE LUCKIEST THING THAT happened to American golf, someone once said, was the unexpected coming of Francis Ouimet, the personable former caddie who crossed from the wrong side of the street to win the U.S. Open in 1913. Almost overnight, golf ceased being principally viewed as a rich man’s game and became something within reach of anyone who dared to try and become good at it.
Within a decade, sprinkled by the gold dust of Ouimet’s incomparable triumph, there were an estimated seven million new adherents and more than a thousand new golf clubs and public courses scattered across the nation, reflecting a sudden mass democratization that shifted the balance of power from Britain to America.
In 1916, as Europe disappeared into the fog of the so-called Great War, the Professional Golfers’ Association of America organized itself with the stated mission of promoting the sport’s recreational benefits to people of all means and social standing, staging its first championship. Once the country entered the war in 1917, the fledgling PGA urged its members to conduct public exhibitions free of charge to enhance the game’s popularity and raise money for the Red Cross and other war-related charities. Amateur star Chick Evans logged more than 26,000 miles and visited forty-one cities, raising more than $300,000 for the cause, and a talented if tempestuous teenager named Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones Jr. played a full exhibition circuit with U.S. Women’s amateur champion Alexa Stirling and Perry Adair, Bobby’s boyhood rival. While he waited for induction into the army, Francis Ouimet participated in dozens of Red Cross exhibitions across New England.
Largely as a result of the record amounts of money they helped generate for worthy home causes, professional golfers achieved a surprising new status in the eyes of ordinary Americans, who closely followed the tournament exploits of Jock Hutchison, long-hitting Jim Barnes, and a suave and flamboyant Walter Hagen. The rangy Barnes hailed from Cornish, England; the fidgety and philosophical “Hutch” came from St. Andrews, Scotland. But because they developed their games on American shores, they were embraced by American fans hungry for a pure homebred star. After Barnes captured the first PGA Championship in 1916 and followed with a U.S. Open title in 1921, President Warren Harding personally presented him with the trophy and declared that professional golf was the fastest-growing sport in America.
It was “The Haig” who achieved stardom as a native-born pro, however, grabbing the public’s attention like no other before him. Only a year out of the pro shop, he’d finished a respectable fourth behind Ouimet, Vardon, and Ray at Brookline, then turned up at the venerable Midlothian Club in suburban Chicago—sporting a rakish summer straw boater—and set a new competitive course record with a 68 in the first round of the U.S. Open. Hometown favorite Chick Evans kept it close until the end, urged on by partisan fans who actually applauded when Hagen stubbed his chip on the seventieth hole of the championship. On the next hole, however, he smoothly drained a monstrously long birdie putt, then rolled in another birdie to win by a stroke. Golf was still provincial enough for galleries to root for their hometown favorite, but when Hagen peeled off his straw hat and bowed theatrically when presented with the trophy, brilliantined hair gleaming in the fading sunlight, the crowds gave him a rousing cheer. A national hero was born, and a natural showman as well.
The cognoscenti uniformly dismissed his broad stance and unorthodox swing, which had a noticeable sway and finished with a wholly unrefined leaning stance. He looked, in this regard, more like a baseball hitter than a peerless ball striker like Harry Vardon or Chick Evans. The press found the Haig’s flamboyant style entertaining, but confidently predicted he would be a flash in the pan. He was, after all, always in and out of the brambles and scrambling to make par or having to make outrageous putts just to keep within reach of Barnes and Hutchison or even Chick Evans.
What the experts failed to grasp, however, was that in a nation struggling to come to grips with the most maddening sport, Walter Hagen seemed like one of their own who’d somehow found the key to success, a genial fellow who excelled at the game but at times made it look as hard as they understood it to be. Adding to his Everyman appeal was the fact that he broke through when the last generation of the Scottish pros who’d immigrated to this country were beginning to fade away like Brigadoon at dawn. Hagen represented something never seen before on American ground: a native professional whose star power could match that of any invading Brit, including the great Harry Vardon himself.
With an olive complexion that tanned easily to a rich mahogany hue and slightly inscrutable Asian features, Hagen was a beguiling combination of confidence and grace under fire, supremely assured without giving lasting offense, a dapper charmer who never seemed rushed or flustered by a wayward shot or unlucky break, always on the verge of disaster yet somehow able to summon recovery shots that left fans breathless—especially the beautiful young women who seemed to regularly turn up whenever the Haig was in the hunt.
When the U.S. Open resumed after its two-year wartime hiatus outside Boston at Brae Burn in 1919, twenty-seven-year-old Hagen needed to cover the last nine holes in even par in order to match popular hometown favorite Mike Brady, who had already posted a score of 301. With seven holes left to play, he hooked a tee shot out of bounds and cost himself a valuable stroke. During his slow walk to the next tee, a young sportswriter saw him wink at a friend and casually remark, “Don’t worry, I’ll get another birdie to make up for that little error.” Two holes later, he did—and then he did the sort of thing that would seal his image as the game’s greatest showman and make him the biggest draw in the game.
On the last hole, after hitting a high-risk long iron to the dangerous, two-tiered green, and leaving his ball just eight feet from the cup, he paused and asked for Brady to be summoned from the clubhouse to observe the finish—or witness his own funeral, as many interpreted it afterward. A bit anticlimactically, the short putt lipped out and he was forced to beat Brady the following day in a playoff that went right to the final hole, the Haig winning by a single stroke. Asked by a reporter what he and pal Al Jolson had done the night before, the newly divorced national champion smiled and replied, “Why, enjoyed ourselves till the sun came up. Didn’t want to be late to the tee.”
Nineteen twenty was a watershed year in America, the dawning of an extraordinary decade that would not only produce a radical revolution in manners and morals but shape the values of generations to come through the birth of mass-market consumer culture. Many of the defining features of modern life first appeared in the Roaring Twenties: talking films, radio broadcasting, book clubs, comic strips, fad diets, celebrity gossip magazines, air travel, home mortgages, department stores, beauty pageants, national advertising, and—perhaps above all—spectator sports.
After four long years of war, a Red Scare, and the failure of Woodrow Wilson’s lofty dream of a League of Nations, Americans everywhere wanted simply to make and enjoy a better life. When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect that January—a misguided attempt by Christian temperance forces to curb the nation’s insatiable thirst for alcohol—an estimated forty thousand saloons shut their public doors and opened private ones, devastating the legitimate distillery and brewing industries, giving birth to a thriving industry of speakeasies, crime bosses, and bootleggers.
The presidential election that fall—the first in which women were entitled to vote—resulted in the largest lopsided victory but the poorest voter turnout in more than a ce
ntury. Only 49.3 percent of registered voters bothered to turn out, sending Warren Harding to the White House, a small-town Ohio newspaperman who promised “normalcy” instead of “normality,” a symbolic slip of the tongue that appealed to the country’s new isolationist mood and domestic ambitions. On November 2, 1920, both election day and his fifty-fifth birthday, Harding stressed the point that Americans desired “serenity over surgery,” then went out with his business cronies for a round of golf, inviting the press along, promising more of the same fun to come.
That same evening, the first commercially licensed radio station—KDKA in Pittsburgh—broadcast the election results. Just weeks before, Westinghouse had put the first mass-produced radios on sale in urban department stores for ten dollars. Within five years, a third of American households would have one, fueling an explosion of information, news, and the new phenomenon of leisure time entertainment. Mamie Smith, formerly a black gospel singer, sold a million copies of “Crazy Blues” within six months, prompting sales of phonographs to soar, which in turn caused sales of pianos to severely slump for the first time ever.
Walter Hagen’s pal Al Jolson was at once America’s first Jewish entertainer and a tireless promoter of equal access for black jazz and blues artists. Credited with making that music respectable to white people, he was the toast of Broadway in 1922, selling out his fifth Winter Garden concert the same summer F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term “Jazz Age” to characterize the anything-goes era of flappers, bootleg whiskey, and the general decline of public morality. Hollywood began cranking out about seven hundred movies a year, weekly attendance growing from about fifty million in 1920 to ninety million, or three fourths of the nation’s population, in 1929—reportedly more than went to church.
By 1925, Americans were having fifty million telephone conversations a day, and Henry Ford—named the greatest historical figure of all time after Napoleon and Jesus Christ, according to a poll of college students—was turning out a car every ten seconds, which workers—making roughly twice as much as previous generations could—were able to purchase on installment plans offered by banks for the first time. Aiming to further capitalize on the home-building boom that was creating something called “the suburbs,” commercial lending institutions also introduced home mortgages. Fueled by easy credit and an unflagging faith in capitalism, grand hotels and resorts were conceived and completed in record time. In New York City alone, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center all jumped from the architect table to reality in a matter of a few years. Meanwhile, the state of Florida—largely written off as a swampy, uninhabitable wilderness just a decade before—was enjoying a land boom that attracted real estate speculators and empire builders from all over the world.
Warren Harding died after 882 days in office, and the taciturn Vermonter Cal Coolidge was awakened in the middle of the night by his father on the family farm in Plymouth Notch to take the oath of office. Despite the scandals that plagued the current administration, Coolidge continued the laissez-faire policies that permitted Wall Street to soar and allowed crossword puzzles, Ouija boards, and a Chinese craze called mah-jongg to surge into every household across the country. Ivory Soap sponsored the first national radio broadcast, and the Chicago Tribune routinely covered the faux-heroic antics of gangster Al Capone, who supposedly tipped hatcheck girls $100 and underwrote a soup kitchen in his old neighborhood with a check for twelve grand.
This new embrace of consumerism and liberation from the Victorian past also brought unprecedented social turmoil—violent strikes, gangland murders, race lynchings, a strong resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan—and was underscored by a pervasive spiritual emptiness depicted in best-selling books by Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But one leading economist saw no end to the gold rush, or the good times. “The business of America is business,” President Coolidge evangelized. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” he emphasized. “And the man who works there worships there.”
Perhaps more than anything else, the birth of sports as mass entertainment symbolized the mythic hopes and personal aspirations of this evolving nation. In an ever-mobile society that felt increasingly bureaucratic, uprooted, and isolated by its own liberated values and free spirit, especially against the backdrop of movie villains and real-life crime bosses, the success of hometown sports heroes touched a sentimental chord in millions of ordinary Americans, and thus took on disproportionate meaning in everyday life. Not surprisingly, this became the age of overnight sports heroes.
“Ballyhoo artists—promoters, press agents, and public relations experts—ranked second only to sportswriters in influencing the public,” wrote Michael Bohn in Heroes and Ballyhoo, his fine account of the decade’s sports obsessions. “Without a thought of accuracy or balanced reporting, they flogged their athlete or event with undiluted fervor.”
Football, for example, went nowhere until Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne’s phenomenal success produced five undefeated seasons and six national championships in the span of just thirteen years. Rockne and his seemingly invincible “Four Horsemen” prompted the construction of football stadiums at colleges like Stanford, Ohio State, Michigan, and Illinois—where, it just so happened, a freshman named Harold Edward “Red” Grange reluctantly put on a jersey and became the most gifted, publicized breakaway runner of his time. Before he left Illinois, pro football was only of minor interest to American sports fans. After graduating and signing with the Chicago Bears, he made a small fortune appearing in motion pictures, making commercial endorsements, and collecting personal appearance fees. He also put professional football on the map to stay.
Much the same thing—the charisma of a single player igniting a frenzy of idolatry—occurred in baseball. In 1921, after signing the largest contract in the sport’s history, and moving from the Red Sox to the Yankees, Babe Ruth swatted fifty-nine home runs, more than any other team in the league. So the next year, the Yankees broke ground on a $6 million stadium that would seat 62,000 fans, based purely on the Bambino’s drawing power. Ruth’s popularity and winning personality made him a regular feature in Grantland Rice’s nationally syndicated “Spotlight” newspaper column, read by millions every day over their Corn Flakes, a new Kellogg’s breakfast cereal.
In prizefighting, Jack Dempsey, who’d won forty-seven of his sixty-nine fights by knockouts, lost his title to Gene Tunney in 1926, only to come back a year later in a “grudge match” that drew more than 150,000 spectators to Soldier Field in Chicago. Won by Tunney in a controversial decision, the bout netted organizers the largest sports payday ever—$3 million.
In this frenzied Golden Age of sports—or the “Decade of Deception,” as H. L. Mencken labeled it—each and every sport seemed to have a colorful presiding champion. In tennis, tall, lean Bill Tilden won seven Davis Cup titles and dominated play throughout the 1920s, recasting the sport as a power game rather than a country club pastime. Swimmer Johnny Weissmuller won five gold medals and set sixty-seven world records between 1921 and 1929, establishing himself as the logical choice for the starring role in sixteen Tarzan movies that would soon begin filming in Hollywood. Even horses got in on the hero worship. The fiery stallion Man O’War won twenty of twenty-one starts and retired early to stud having earned a record quarter of a million dollars at the track, setting attendance records wherever the “Greatest Horse of All Time” turned up.
Perhaps no single sport, however, reflected the country’s social aspirations more than golf. If Ouimet’s Brookline triumph more or less democratized the game, the coming of Jazz Age prosperity—heralded by the completion in 1918 of the Pine Valley Golf Club in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey as a new decade dawned—accelerated the construction of nearly a thousand public and private golf courses, including many of the nation’s premier layouts. Almost overnight, the concept of the “country club”—a strictly American innovation—came into the lexicon. “Membership in an exclusive club,” Herbert Warren W
ind noted, “was the salient badge of distinction in the Twenties.”
In Chicago, a thousand Shriners pooled their money to build the majestic Medinah Country Club at the unprecedented cost of $1.5 million only to see it get trumped by the even grander Olympia Fields on the city’s working-class South Side—the first club to offer seventy-two holes to its members, plus a Tudor-style ballroom that would comfortably seat eight hundred.
Down in Pinehurst, meanwhile, Scotsman Donald Ross completed fifty-four holes for his employer, Leonard Tufts, then went on to build another three hundred or so layouts. After helping shape Pine Valley, Ross’s friendly rival A. W. Tillinghast created several hundred distinctive courses of his own, including the spectacular layouts at Winged Foot, Baltusrol, and the San Francisco Golf Club. Another transplanted Philadelphian, George C. Thomas, brought forth such classics as the Los Angeles Country Club, Bel-Air, and Riviera. William Flynn produced timeless venues at Cherry Hills outside Denver, the Philadelphia Country Club, and the new Cascades golf course at the Homestead in Virginia, where a former caddie named Sam Snead would soon find his first clubhouse employment.
In California, Bobby Jones was introduced to the sublime courses that Marion Hollins, the 1921 Women’s Amateur champion, had convinced Dr. Alister Mackenzie to create at Cypress Point and Pasatiempo. Jones lost his quest for a fifth U.S. Amateur title to Johnny Goodman at Pebble Beach but found the designer he wanted to collaborate with on the dream course he was hoping to build on the grounds of a defunct plant nursery in Augusta, Georgia.