American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  More important, this so-called Golden Age of golf course construction also saw a major changing of the guard at the highest competitive level. The revolution began, at least symbolically, in June of 1920, at the revival of the Open Championship at Deal, England. The pre-tournament favorite Walter Hagen, one of the few Americans who bothered to cross the water, had never played on a linksland course before, and finished a dismal fifty-third in a field of seventy-seven. But he endeared himself forever to both his fellow competitors and fans everywhere by knocking down one of the game’s most stubborn social barriers.

  A long-standing tradition permitted only members and invited guests inside clubhouses, and professional golfers were treated like a yeoman class of servant. Hagen rented a Daimler limousine, hired a footman, and used the car as his personal locker room, parking within sight of the club’s main dining room, and changing his shoes just yards from the front door. He also arranged for lunch to be served to himself, Jim Barnes, and other competitors, provoking a gale of criticism from offended members but making himself something of a sporting Robin Hood in the eyes of the Fleet Street press, who ate up every delicious morsel provided by “Sir Walter.”

  Hagen’s intention was to send a message that he wasn’t merely a club pro trying to pad his income by winning a major championship, that he was a professional sportsman dedicated to making a living by playing exhibition matches and tournament golf. The Haig was, in his mind and soon everyone else’s, the world’s first entirely professional golfer.

  The test at Deal proved too much for him, but true to form, he made no excuses for his unusually poor showing. “I tried too hard,” he remarked afterward, “just like any duffer.” Commenting on Hagen’s courage in the London Times, Harry Vardon predicted he would soon return and “win several of our Opens.” Indeed, just two years later at Royal St. George’s in Sandwich, the Haig proved Vardon a prophet by claiming the first of his four Claret Jugs—becoming the first American to win the championship. Despite the grumbling of members who believed that opening their exclusive doors to the likes of Hagen was tantamount to the end of civilization as they knew it, clubs across Britain soon began revising their rules and welcoming club pros inside.

  Barely a month later, along the windy shores of Lake Erie, members of the venerable Inverness Club of Toledo, host of the U.S. Open of 1920, felt the winds of social change blowing into their own heretofore cloistered world, and broke with tradition by inviting the contestants into their clubhouse and granting them unrestricted use of all facilities, even the dining room. The impressive field included Jock Hutchison and “Long Jim” Barnes, fresh off a win at the Shawnee Invitational, and was highlighted by the sentimental return of Vardon and Ted Ray, this concluding another exhibition tour. Both the public and the press showered these aging legends with grateful affection.

  In his two qualifying rounds at Inverness, the fifty-year-old Vardon was paired with a polite young man from Atlanta who was studying mechanical engineering at the Georgia School of Technology. Bobby Jones was eighteen. They were the oldest and youngest men in the field. Not until a graying Ben Hogan played alongside a raw Ohio youngster named Jack Nicklaus at Cherry Hills in 1960 would the golf world see another twosome as historic as Harry and Bobby.

  Hagen’s defense of his Open title on a difficult Donald Ross course started promisingly. By the halfway point, however, the issue lay between Hutchison and Barnes, the leaders at 145 and 146 respectively, with a dogged twenty-one-year-old pro named Leo Diegel tied with Barnes. Hagen lurked just two strokes back, drawing immense crowds as he sallied forth, chatting with friends in the gallery and winking at pretty girls—Sir Walter at his charming best. But his hopes were dashed when he went out in the morning and cobbled together a woeful 41 on the outward leg, losing whatever momentum he’d built. The Haig was never really a factor after that.

  As if to punctuate the end of an era, six-time Open champion Harry Vardon put on a gallant effort to capture the coveted American title he’d won two decades before, producing one flawless shot after another and leading by four with seven holes to play.

  The gallery was with the great man every step of the way, which made what happened next all the more poignant. The Greyhound found himself agonizing down the stretch over several putts, his right forearm twitching so violently that he lurched at the ball, and sent it shooting past the hole. Over the three days he had played peerless golf, 36 in qualifying and 65 in the championship itself, displaying the stamina of a man half his age. But when his putting stroke yielded to nerves, so did his confidence. With the championship his to claim, Vardon lost seven strokes over the closing seven holes and finished with a respectable, if heartbreaking, 296. If there was to be any consolation to be had that afternoon, it was that Harry’s dear friend and longtime traveling companion Ted Ray slipped past Hutchison and Diegel to become the oldest man to win a U.S. Open.

  Nine thousand spectators—a record turnout—saw these two thick-waisted Englishmen perform their hickory-shafted artistry one final time. Then the Greyhound tipped his hat to the adoring gallery and sailed home to England, never to return. Hagen took up a collection from his fellow pros and paid for a beautiful handmade chiming clock to be shipped to the members of Inverness, in gratitude for welcoming them so graciously. And Toledo police noted a curious new phenomenon in relation to a golf tournament: a traffic jam.

  Over the next decade, championship golf would essentially belong to three names, a dynamic if somewhat uneven new triumvirate: Hagen the dashing stylist, the brilliant amateur Bobby Jones, and a strutting cock robin named Gene Sarazen. There were, to be sure, great supporting players like Leo Diegel, Tommy Armour, Johnny Farrell, Joe Turnesa, “Wee” Bobby Cruickshank, “Lighthorse” Harry Cooper, “Wild” Bill Mehlhorn, and mild-mannered Boston pro Denny Shute. At any given moment, any one of them could get a red-hot putter and steal the prize. But as the Twenties roared on, the readers of America’s sports pages couldn’t get enough of Sir Walter, the upstart Sarazen, and the well-mannered amateur who would rewrite all the record books and become immortal in the process.

  The flamboyant Haig—always stepping from a chauffeured limousine, always a little bit late by design—claimed his second Claret Jug at St. George’s, Sandwich, in 1922, then three more—at Hoylake in ’24, back at St. George’s in ’28, at Muirfield in ’29—before the decade drew to a close. In the PGA Championship’s match-play format he was even more formidable, using his bag of mental tricks to seize five PGA titles, including four in a row. In the winter of 1926, when Bobby Jones was playing his finest golf, Hagen agreed to a seventy-two-hole one-on-one exhibition ballyhooed by the press as “the Match of the Century” over two courses in Florida, and easily obliterated the young Atlantan, twelve and eleven, pocketing $6,800 for his trouble. The following year, he was the obvious choice to serve as captain of America’s inaugural Ryder Cup team; he went on, in fact, to captain the squad for a decade, winning four of the first six events and amassing an individual record of 7-2-3 in singles, four-ball, and alternate-shot foursome matches.

  For Bobby Jones, whose rapid maturity made him the world’s greatest amateur sportsman, drubbings like the one he took against the Haig in Florida helped him refine his game, dampen his fiery playing temperament and harden his nerves for combat against the two toughest professional competitors America had ever produced. A great many fans held that golf’s sanctity as a sport was tarnished by pros who played for an unholy marriage of trophies and cash, and he was their standard-bearer.

  Knute Rockne, for one, used the rise of Bobby Jones to rail against the rampant commercialism creeping into all sports. “A true gentleman,” he told his friend Grantland Rice, “never plays for money, directly or indirectly.” And Harvard professor Ralph Barton Perry fumed in the pages of The Atlantic magazine: “Just what is it a man must not sell? It would be agreed that a man must not exhibit his game for gate receipts or impart his skill for hire, or play to win for stakes. The true golfer believes in n
oblesse oblige, not the sordid code of barter.”

  But it was more than just money. Jones—who began the decade by edging ever closer to a major championship only to fall maddeningly short—also represented the golden ideal of American youth, and was admired as much for his sterling character as his playing skills. “Bobby Jones had the face of an angel and the temper of a timber wolf,” says his modern biographer, Sidney Matthew. “The fact that he sometimes lost his temper, early on at least, and threw clubs into trees, was mitigated by his unfailing courtesy to fellow competitors, fans, and tournament sponsors. His natural modesty and social grace covered a lot of sins.”

  Bobby’s first notice of the former Eugenio Saraceni came in 1922, at the U.S. Open in suburban Chicago. Born only a month before Jones in 1902, he was a young man who’d grown up caddying at the Apawamis Club in Rye, New York, and gravely disappointed his immigrant father by choosing the uncertain life of an assistant club pro over the family trade of carpentry, and then compounded the sin by Americanizing his name. After three rounds on the comparatively easy Skokie Country Club course, twenty-year-old Jones and veteran Wild Bill Mehlhorn were the co-leaders at 216. All but unnoticed four strokes back was the five-foot-five Gene Sarazen, who’d recently accepted the head professional job at the Highland Country Club in Pittsburgh and confidently assured betting friends that he was the man to bet on in Skokie. Here, in order to finance the championship’s growing purse, with $500 and a gold medal going to the winner, the USGA charged spectators gate admission for the first time—a dollar a head.

  Even as Mehlhorn tapped in to finish with 290, an explosive cheer was heard far out on the course where the unheralded Sarazen had gone out in 33, picking up four strokes on the leaders. His brilliant back nine brought him home in 68, the lowest final-round score recorded up till then in the championship, giving him a 288 total and a two-shot lead over Mehlhorn. He finished a full hour ahead of the popular amateur, and retreated to the locker room to sweat it out, worried that his 288 simply wouldn’t hold up. “How could I win?” Gene fretted to veteran Leo Diegel, displaying a rare moment of uncertainty. “I’m just a kid, just been a pro three years, and everything I learned about golf I learned caddying. Out there are the best in the world.”

  Marching ahead of a swarming army of fans—three thousand more than turned out at Inverness the year before—Jones needed a 71 to win; he shot 73 and finished an agonizing stroke short. America’s newest national champion was also its youngest ever. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Sarazen was described as “A fresh kid … laughing at anything that happens, one of the most lovable youngsters in the world.”

  A month later, the champion himself struck a more humble note in Golf Illustrated: “In the press there have been comments to the effect that my success should prove to be an inspiration to other caddie boys. All I can say is that if my winning of the National Open championship acts as an incentive to any other boy to develop his game of golf, then I will feel that I have accomplished something really worthwhile. As J. H. Taylor, the great English professional, told me the other night, I have a great responsibility and I hope that my youth and inexperience will not be drawbacks in my upholding the highest traditions of the game of golf and the prestige of being an American Open champion.”

  But when the PGA Championship got under way at Pittsburgh’s Oakmont Country Club on Monday morning, August 14, 1922, the new national champ was nowhere to be seen.

  Following his victory at Skokie, Sarazen had embarked on a lucrative but hastily arranged exhibition tour that carried him around the Northeast and Midwest. He happened to be having dinner in Dayton, Ohio, that Sunday evening when a fan casually inquired how he expected to do on difficult Oakmont, noting that the PGA was scheduled to begin the following morning in Pittsburgh. “I’d completely forgotten about it,” Sarazen later admitted, explaining how he’d caught the last train to Pittsburgh only because it got fortuitously delayed—and had arrived at the championship in a taxi cab, thirty minutes late for his first scheduled match. Owing to his brand-new stature, and the event’s need for good publicity, officials relaxed the rules and let him play anyway.

  Among the subsequent surprises were the early departures of two-time PGA champ Jim Barnes and former U.S. Open winner Johnny Farrell, a childhood friend of Sarazen’s. Another was that a first-time contestant—Charlie Rowe, Oakmont’s head professional—showed up sporting a driver with a steel shaft. Several players lodged protests with PGA president George Sargent, claiming it provided an undue advantage; somewhat reluctantly, he concluded that no “official” rule barred use of a steel-shafted club. But perhaps the biggest surprise was Sarazen’s performance. After nosing out Jock Hutchison three-and-one in the quarterfinals, he fired a 32 in his opening semifinal nine—breaking the course record—to get past Bobby Cruickshank. In the thirty-six-hole title match he faced Emmet French—ironically his clubhouse roommate for the week—and beat him with relative ease, four-and-three.

  Newspapers hailed the arrival of a major new star, a charismatic player who loved the limelight as much as did his boyhood hero, Walter Hagen—who’d controversially skipped defending his title at Oakmont in favor of a private exhibition that paid $2,000 more than the PGA’s thousand-dollar top prize. Within hours of Sarazen’s victory, advance agents for both men were busy cooking up a seventy-two-hole challenge match they ambitiously labeled “The Championship of the World,” trumping “The Match of the Century” between Hagen and Jones. Sarazen won that as well, mounting a furious comeback to pocket the $3,000 prize money.

  During the heady days of the 1920s, a U.S. Open title was believed to be worth about $25,000 in resulting endorsement deals and exhibition fees, a PGA title slightly less. Weeks after winning at Oakmont, however, Sarazen, the first player ever to hold both titles simultaneously, cashed in by signing deals to open a correspondence golf school in New York and to represent and design golf clubs for the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. He was also paid to endorse everything from shotgun shells for trapshooting to automobile tires and razor blades, the first golfer to exploit these opportunities so thoroughly. He then accepted the highest salary ever offered a professional—estimated at $5,000 a year—from a swanky resort located north of New York City in Westchester County. Sarazen was having the time of his life, “riding sky-high,” as he once put it, “in the classiest sport in the land.”

  Momentarily overshadowed by Sarazen’s and Hagen’s celebrity was the steady rise of Bobby Jones. Despite a poor break that cost him the Open in Skokie, followed a month later by a bitter loss to Yale undergraduate Jess Sweetser at the U.S. Amateur at Brookline, Jones was generally considered the most promising player in the game. His swing, after all, was a picture of efficient simplicity. He’d acquired it, starting about age of six, by mimicking Carnoustie-born Stewart Maiden’s, head pro at his club, East Lake in Atlanta. A frail and shy boy, he’d suffered from digestive problems early on but quickly came to share his father’s passion for all sports, particularly golf and baseball. The senior Bob Jones had starred at Mercer College and been offered a contract with the Brooklyn Superbas (later the Dodgers), which his father refused to let him accept. Young Bobby soon graduated from the creeks of East Lake, where he chased frogs and killed snakes, to the fairways where, by 1916, just fourteen years old, he developed into the hottest player on the Southern club circuit—with a temper to match. Besides throwing clubs, he could cuss up a storm whenever a shot failed to go his way. Years later, he explained, he’d learned how from his family’s longtime yardman.

  Back when Jones appeared at the Merion Cricket Club just outside Philadelphia for the U.S. Amateur in 1916, he didn’t seem the slightest bit intimidated by the well-known names in the field. Matched against Eben Byers, another young club thrower, in the first round, he managed to prevail three-and-one, wryly theorizing later that he won only because Byers “ran out of clubs first.” He also won his next match, but then lost to the defending champion, Bob Gardner, on the thirty-first green of
a thirty-six-hole match. He was, however, the talk of the championship, and even made a strong impression on Walter Travis, amateur golf’s grand old man. Upon being asked what improvements young Jones might make, Travis gave his interviewer a surprised look and a curt reply. “Improvement? He can never improve his shots, if that’s what you mean. But he will learn a good deal more about playing them.”

  For all his lavish natural gifts, Jones wasn’t a typical spoiled scion of the upper class. Off the course he was the soul of courtesy to everyone he met, an exemplary and well-read young sportsman whom the press found it a sheer pleasure to converse with, a Southern Baptist gentleman who was already developing a taste for classical opera and the reflections of Cicero. His outbursts of incandescent anger were directed at himself for making foolish mistakes or losing his focus. A gallery official addressing the gallery using a megaphone unbuttoned him at the U.S. Amateur at Oakmont in 1919. A pesky bee landing on the ball during his swing shattered his concentration and ruined his chances against Francis Ouimet in the semis of 1920.

  By then—under the steadying influence of both his father and O. B. Keeler, the Atlanta Journal sportswriter and bon vivant who immediately recognized Jones’s potential and took him under his wing—he was beginning to emerge as a spectacular talent. A famous incident at St. Andrews, however, marked his true coming of age. During the third round of the 1921 Open Championship, after going out in a woeful 46, he played five strokes on the short par-three eleventh, exploded with rage and picked up. The next day he was so ashamed of “quitting on the game and myself” that he vowed never to compete again unless he could maintain the highest standard of sporting comportment. This would prove to be a decision of historic importance.