American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  As Walter Travis had predicted, Jones learned how to play the shots, and he mastered other factors as well. After he narrowly lost to Sarazen at Skokie in 1922, O. B. Keeler suggested he consider altering his diet. Between rounds, Jones had a predilection for heavy lunches topped off with sherbet or pie à la mode. Keeler—himself a well-fed man who hosted lavish suppers for his opera-loving friends back home in Atlanta—proposed that this caloric indulgence might well account for his tendency to lose his concentration and make poor decisions late in a match. After a childhood in which his digestive system prevented him from enjoying ordinary treats, good food and excellent whiskey were always important to Bobby Jones. Yet something was clearly denying him the breakthrough in golf he hungered for.

  On a much deeper and far more private level, the courtly Atlantan wondered if he simply wasn’t fated to ever win a major championship of any kind. “Very lately I have come to a sort of Presbyterian attitude toward tournament golf,” he confided in Down the Fairway, the lovely coming-of-age memoir that Keeler helped him write, published when he was just twenty-five. “I can’t get away from the idea of predestination.”

  After Skokie, he agreed to avoid the buffet table and stick to a diet of tea and buttered toast during the break between rounds. Yet even then he was actually mulling over the idea of retiring from competitive golf, which he found so grueling that he frequently lost weight regardless of what he ate. Years later, he would famously say there are two kinds of games of golf, the kind played for recreation and simple competitive enjoyment with friends—and the other kind played for tournament glory. He actually preferred the former. That autumn he entered Harvard College to study English literature, and his agile mind, if not full of sonnets, was certainly reeling with Shakespearean doubt about his own golfing future when he arrived at the Inwood Country Club on Long Island in June 1923 for the twenty-seventh U.S. Open.

  The Inwood course was long and narrow, full of lurking disaster. Feeling the pressure as never before, Jones was feeling worse than ever about his competitive career despite a late-arriving telegram from his grandfather, who heretofore had been as supportive of his grandson’s golf dreams as he’d been about his son’s baseball aspirations. But he now urged his namesake to “Keep the ball in the fairway and make all the putts go down.” Frisky Atlantic winds played havoc with his practice rounds, neither of them breaking 80. His qualifying rounds of 77 and 79 only darkened his mood and deepened his gloom. Keeler tried to bolster his spirits but privately conveyed to friends that he sensed a disaster in the making.

  As play opened, however, Jones found himself in unusual command of his game. He finished the round with 71, one of just two sub-par rounds Inwood yielded during the championship. Following a 73 in the afternoon, he found himself comfortably lodged in second place, two back of Jock Hutchison and one ahead of Bobby Cruickshank, the infectiously cheerful Scot who’d survived a Great War POW camp and immigrated to America to make his fortune in golf. After the third round, as the others stumbled, Jones held a commanding three-stroke lead and appeared to have his first national championship safely in hand. In the afternoon, despite a lapse that cost him a double-bogey on the difficult par-three seventh, he arrived at the seventieth hole of the championship dead level par, needing only three pars to win. His confidence was surging.

  What happened next reveals not only why the U.S. Open to this day remains the hardest major championship to win but also how heavy a toll it exacts on those who would claim it. Overwhelmed by nerves, Jones went bogey, bogey, double-bogey, the worst finish of his storied career. Having blown the door wide open for Cruickshank, he disappeared into the clubhouse to await the verdict. “Even the people closest to Jones,” writes Ron Rapoport in The Immortal Bobby, “those who had been with him for years and seen his blackest moods, were shocked by his appearance as he came off the course.” Grantland Rice, who came to feel like his adopted uncle, wrote that the young man looked as if he’d been mortally wounded. Keeler, struggling to put a good face on the collapse, told him he felt the score would likely hold up—though he didn’t really believe it himself. “Well, I didn’t finish like a champion,” Jones snapped in response. “I finished like a yellow dog.” Then he skulked to his room to wait in miserable solitude.

  Back on the course, Bobby Cruickshank arrived at the thirteenth tee three strokes up with six to play, but then succumbing to the pressure gave four strokes back to par and, looking shell-shocked himself, came to the long and treacherous eighteenth hole needing a birdie to tie. From two hundred yards out, with the wind in his face, he fired one of the finest clutch shots in U.S. Open history and drained the six-footer to draw even with the inconsolable Jones. The following afternoon, before a crowd of more than ten thousand, the two men battled nip and tuck, swapping the lead back and forth, to arrive all square at the tee of the eighteenth hole. Both men hit poor tee shots, and Cruickshank chose to lay up in front of the lagoon that protected the eighteenth green.

  With everything on the line, Jones quickly pulled a two-iron and struck his best approach shot ever, clearing the water and stopping six feet from the cup. The gallery exploded. Stewart Maiden, Bobby’s aging East Lake pro, the sedatest of men by nature, nearly threw his new straw hat in the air. As the gallery broke and ran to surround the green, Francis Ouimet, Jones’s roommate all week, protectively took his arm to escort him to his ball. Years later, Jones would write that he had no memory of this moment. Cruickshank’s third found the bunker, and his recovery from it was poor; Jones two-putted for the victory. When the two competitors shook hands, Jones’s eyes wobbled with shock and emotion. “My, what a golfer that boy is,” Cruickshank told a swarm of reporters moments later. “He’s the greatest champion of them all. To be defeated by him is glory enough.”

  These were extraordinarily generous and prescient words. Beginning at Inwood in 1923, Bobby Jones made the U.S. Open his own private affair. Over six of the next eight years, he either won it outright—twice—or finished in a tie for first that necessitated a playoff, two of which he lost, two of which he won. His total of four titles matched the record set in the early years of the century by a largely unknown Willie Anderson. In all, he won twenty-three of the fifty-two tournaments he entered during his fourteen-year playing career, and thirteen of twenty-one major championships he competed in between 1923 to 1930. “The first seven years brought Bobby nothing but anger and frustration,” says his modern biographer Sidney Matthew. “Once he mastered his temper and learned how to win, the remaining seven brought him immortality.”

  Though some have accurately pointed out that the financial success of his leading rivals Hagen and Sarazen lured many of the top amateurs of his day into the pro ranks, Jones’s record in these events was still breathtaking. “In seven cracks at our Amateur beginning in 1924 and through 1930,” Herb Wind pointed out, “Jones was eliminated once in the third round, defeated once in the final, and was victorious the five other times in the final.” Sportswriter Paul Gallico summed it up best when he observed that golf in the 1920s seemed to have been “invented for Bobby Jones.”

  The endless bathtub-gin party that was the Jazz Age came to a stunning halt on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, when the stock market collapsed under its own unregulated weight and $30 billion of American wealth vanished overnight, sending the country spinning into the dark and uncertain days of the Great Depression. As if to punctuate the end of golf’s Golden Age, Walter Hagen won his final major earlier that summer, the 1929 Open Championship at Muirfield. Bobby Jones capped things off majestically less than a year later by capturing the amateur and open championships of both America and Britain, returning home to a hero’s welcome and a pair of ticker tape parades that celebrated what O. B. Keeler would eventually name the Grand Slam. Days later, the finest symbol of amateur sports announced his retirement from competitive golf and went home to Atlanta to resume his law practice, commence the task of creating the Augusta National Golf Club, and make a dozen instructional films for Warner
Brothers. Ironically, he netted anywhere from $300,000 to half a million from film work and public appearance fees during his first year away from the game—more than either Babe Ruth or Walter Hagen during their first year of stardom.

  Gene Sarazen, Jones’s exact contemporary, distracted by movie roles and big exhibition paydays of his own, narrowly lost the 1928 U.S. Open to his rival, the Haig, but continued to win tournaments at an impressive clip, though he wouldn’t capture his next major championship until the Open Championship of 1932, at the low point of the Depression. The notion of an American triumvirate in golf more or less retired with Bobby Jones.

  Despite a brief bull market rally in late 1930—symbolized by that year’s hit song “Happy Days Are Here Again,” a movie anthem intended to herald the impending repeal of Prohibition—banks were suddenly closing and country clubs losing members at a shocking rate. Within fourteen months, over two dozen major East Coast clubs shut their doors and a third of the public courses in America were turning into grassy fields. As unemployed men began to turn up on street corners selling apples to feed their families, the Golden Age—not just in golf—began to wither and die.

  After losing the infamous “long count” rematch to Gene Tunney that made him a sentimental favorite to millions, Jack Dempsey fought a hundred more bouts purely for the money and watched the sport he resurrected from back alleys sink back into ill repute due to underworld infiltration; Dempsey went to New York and opened a restaurant across from Madison Square Garden that became the preferred watering hole of press agents and sportswriters. Red Grange abandoned football entirely in 1930 and started an insurance agency in Florida, hoping for a more stable life. Bill Tilden—who’d inveighed against athletes turning professional—began playing tennis for cash and turned pro himself. The great Knute Rockne, who despite his protestations against playing for money allowed his players to wager on their own games and made money himself writing pulp sports novels and using his fame to peddle Studebakers, perished in a plane crash in 1930 while flying to Los Angeles to discuss a football-themed movie with Universal Pictures. President Hoover proclaimed his death a national disaster.

  The message of this tarnished age of sport wasn’t lost on three impressionable caddies from the heartland.

  “I suppose I was about age twelve around the time I went out to Glen Garden,” Byron Nelson recalled to a visiting reporter in 1994. “I began to read a great deal about the sports stars of the Twenties—particularly golfers, Hagen and Sarazen and, of course, Bobby Jones. The things they were doing were pretty inspiring to a kid like me. They seemed to say you could go somewhere if you had the game and the opportunity. I went and got myself a copy of Harry Vardon’s book on how to play golf and read it cover to cover several times. I think I still have it.”

  “I used to see the top players of that time come through Hot Springs to play at the Homestead,” Sam Snead remembered. “And I used to tell myself that I could probably beat those fellas in a few years. You may think I’m joking, but I’m not. I started to believe it bad about then. Hagen, Sarazen and Jones were the very best, and I told myself, by God, I could be as good as them someday soon.”

  Late in life, Ben Hogan confided to his lunch companions at the Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth that when he walked out to the Glen Garden Golf Club in 1924, and confirmed that boys his age were getting paid sixty-five cents a day for simply lugging some rich man’s golf bag, he saw his life opening up before him—every step carrying him toward something better and further away from his father’s desperate act, and the event that would shape his life.

  4

  THE CHRISTMAS MATCH

  THE GLEN GARDEN COUNTRY CLUB was neither Fort Worth’s first nor finest golf club. That distinction belonged to the Rivercrest Country Club, formed in the city’s western suburbs in 1910 when a hundred prominent local members organized to purchase 625 acres and create a golf club. By 1920, Rivercrest was one of the premier clubs in Texas. Glen Garden, three years its junior, was three miles past the city limits on Cowtown’s southeastern flank, built on 111 acres of hard-turf prairie land formerly owned by the OK Cattle Company, about one mile from where the family of Byron Nelson settled in a small frame house on Timberline Road. Glen Garden’s original clubhouse—a rustic Craftsman-style ranch structure with a large porch supported by beams and stonework—opened in 1914 with 350 members, including many of Fort Worth’s newest and most enthusiastic golfers. It quickly became known as a player’s club, and it particularly appealed to young businessmen, civil servants and lawyers.

  By the time twelve-year-old Ben Hogan wandered up to see what caddying was all about, members had recently voted to expand their nine-hole, sand-green layout. Gangly Byron Nelson had already been on the grounds for two weeks, trying to hustle up a bag. “Competition was pretty stiff,” he recalled. “There were all sorts of boys out there for the same thing. Before Mr. Akey, the caddie master, would permit you to carry a bag, you had to learn about caddying, how to carry the bag and keep the clubs clean and keep your eye on the ball, that sort of thing. He called it caddie school and stressed that a caddie’s job was to help a player but know when to stay out of the way. He told us we should watch good players to learn how to play, and maybe even read a book on the rules of the game. Some of the boys didn’t think that was necessary but I took that lesson to heart.”

  Byron presented himself half a dozen times before Mr. Akey permitted him to have a bag of his own, and his first client was a visiting Rotarian from Dallas one Saturday after school resumed in September. “I was pretty nervous that first time out,” he remembered. “My golfer was named Mr. Shute. On the first tee he told me that if I helped him avoid losing a ball, why, he’d give me an additional quarter. That would have been seventy-five cents—a lot of money to me. But on the first hole, wouldn’t you know, he sliced one into the deep grass and I couldn’t find that ball to save my life. He still gave me the fifty cents, though. So that was good.”

  Byron’s general ease around people and eagerness to abide by the club’s strict prohibitions against caddies cursing and smoking made him quickly stand out from the others and brought him to favorable attention from both the club’s somewhat avuncular caddie master and the club’s tyrannical manager, James Kidd, a stern Scotsman who went by the nickname “Captain Kidd.” Weeks after he arrived—an indication of how quickly he made a positive impression—Byron was allowed to borrow a member’s clubs and play the course for the first time. He shot 118 and soon acquired the first club of his own set, a hickory-shafted mashie iron (equivalent to a five-iron today). Unlike undersized and silent Ben Hogan, who accurately deduced he would have to battle his way into the Glen Garden’s pecking order by being tougher than the other boys, Byron was largely spared much of the caddie yard’s traditional hazing rite known as the “Kangaroo Court.”

  “It was like a fraternity initiation,” said Byron. “They would form two lines and you had to run between them while each one gave you a good hard lick with a belt. Sometimes they’d get a barrel and put a new kid in it and roll it down a hill from the clubhouse. That was even worse than running the gauntlet, but for some reason they never did that to me. They did try to run the new boys off, but I didn’t run off very well. After I became a regular caddie, I never did pick on the younger boys because I didn’t like it when they did it to me and didn’t think it was right.”

  Ben, on the other hand, was a natural target. His size worked against him—he was almost too small to carry a bag—and his brooding intensity made him an even more appealing mark. The larger boys snatched off his aviator’s cap and shoved him into an iron-staved wooden barrel and sent him rattling down the hard clay hill of the practice range, laughing and taunting the new arrival, a game that never failed to reduce the victim to tears. In his case, however, no tears appeared. Ben Hogan didn’t cry for anybody, life had already made damn sure of that. When they forced him to fight an older kid who stood at least a full head taller, Ben used his oversized fists t
o quickly reduce the boy to a blubbering heap in the dust. After that, they left him alone. He’d found a hard-won, if uneasy, place for himself in the Glen Garden caddie yard.

  Five decades later, with his place among the greatest names in the game assured and the equipment company bearing his iconic signature producing the most desired clubs in golf, he sometimes spoke wistfully of “Hennie Bogan” to his longtime secretaries Doxey Williams and Sharon Rae or his regular lunch pals at Shady Oaks. “Hennie Bogan was Ben’s alter ego,” his longtime friend, the insurance man Gene Smyers, explained, “and I always thought Hennie was the boy Ben wished he could’ve been. This may sound odd but Ben was proud of the hard things he’d endured. He genuinely believed the tough things he went through—from losing his father to having to fight his way into the caddie yard—only prepared him for being the best he could be in life. That’s why he never showed a ripple of fear or intimidation to the world at large—and certainly not another golfer. If he did, he knew he wouldn’t make it, might not survive. Hennie Bogan, on the other hand, had an easier time of it—a happy childhood, probably more like Byron’s than Ben’s. He even had Hennie’s name on a desk plate someone gave him. He was very proud of that.”

  “I think Hennie Bogan was the boy Mr. Hogan always wished he could have been, but life never worked out that way,” Sharon Rae added. “Sometimes he would sit and tell me stories about his childhood and actually call himself Hennie Bogan without even realizing it. That always brought tears to my eyes, I have to say. Hennie Bogan was very much a part of Mr. Hogan, the man who loved to help stray dogs and doing things for people down on their luck, never wanting anyone to know about it. I think he was really that boy deep inside.”