American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  During the spring of that year, however, having heard about Ben Hogan’s work ethic from Marvin Leonard and others, Ted Longworth brought him into the shop and taught him the same skills Byron had learned there—solitary work Ben found deeply satisfying. Better yet, the club gave him playing privileges, too. “On weekends I polished clubs until three in the morning,” Hogan recalled. “Boy, I would look at those clubs and they were the most beautiful things, Nickels and Stewarts, all made in Scotland. I found that working on those clubs, usually alone and sometimes late into the evening, gave me tremendous personal satisfaction and a much better understanding of the game.”

  To replace his lost Star-Telegram income, he took a second after-school job as the doorman at the Hippodrome Theater in downtown Fort Worth. Having reached his full height of five-foot-eight with a weight of 130 pounds, Ben finally began to resemble a man. His lean facial features were set off by a surprisingly broad smile, with unusually white, well-formed teeth, and a thick head with wavy dark hair. When he was a young boy in Dublin, he and Princess had been transfixed by the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow that the town showed for free in the square on hot summer nights. Now, as a young man standing in the back of the darkened theater watching the light comedies of Pickford and Fairbanks or the popular gangster epics of the day, Bennie Hogan allowed himself to dream that even a no-name kid from rowdy Cowtown might someday go places.

  The Christmas before, Clara Hogan had done something so out of character that her son would speak about it decades later with visible emotion. She used her extra sewing money to buy Ben his first set of matched golf clubs. “It meant more to me than anyone can know that she did that,” Hogan told a Shady Oaks friend. “That she expressed some confidence in me meant the world.”

  Perhaps her support influenced Ben’s decision to drop out of Central High after his sophomore year. Formal schooling held no appeal for him, either. He’d joined no social organizations, played no organized sports, even failed to show up for his class photograph in the yearbook. “He just stopped coming to school,” a former classmate remembered. “We heard Ben planned to be a golfer.” Ben understood, as Byron had pragmatically figured out before him, that college simply wasn’t an option. But he possessed discipline and self-reliance shaped by Clara Hogan’s iron will and natural gumption. “I feel sorry for the kids these days,” he remarked in an interview with Ken Venturi in the 1970s. “They don’t know what it’s like to learn that you can survive almost anything.”

  The direct beneficiary of this decision was, of course, his golf game. He practiced on a regular basis and qualified for his first amateur tournament away from Glen Garden, the public links championship in Waco, securing a lift to the tournament from another promising amateur named Matty Reed. Ben played well, placed second, and won thirteen new golf balls—which he promptly sold to other competitors for two bits apiece before he and Reed rode home. The next summer, as his lone practice sessions grew lengthier, just prior to his seventeenth birthday, the Glen Garden shop assistant hitchhiked all the way to Shreveport, Louisiana, and made it to the finals of the Southwestern Amateur, losing out four-and-three to a sensational nineteen-year-old player from Dallas named Gus Moreland. After their match, the Shreveport paper noted that the long-hitting Hogan had been troubled off the tee by a hook that constantly forced him to scramble from the rough or the woods to stay in the match. Too broke to pay his caddie—an early glimpse of the moral code Hogan would adopt in all of life’s transactions—he hocked the runner-up prize, a wristwatch, on the spot, then paid him and thumbed home to Fort Worth.

  “After that,” Hogan later explained, “I decided amateur golf was fine but, if I wanted to continue playing golf, I’d have to make some money.”

  At least in theory, his timing, like that of Byron and Sam, couldn’t have been better—or worse. Through the balance of the summer and into the fateful autumn of 1929, Ben began showing up for “money” games in Fort Worth and Dallas against some of the area’s better players. One reason Guldahl and the Mangrums appeared sooner than he or even Byron on Texas scoreboards, Hogan’s Shady Oaks cronies later theorized, was the fact that they played so many more tough five-dollar matches that seasoned and prepared their games for tournament competition. Gus Moreland became a holy terror on the Texas amateur circuit, beating Byron, Ben, and every other significant amateur of the 1930s, even finishing second at the Texas Open. The upstart Hogan won a handful of these side games, too, prompting him to wonder how far the game might take him if he continued to diligently practice and play against the best competition.

  During the last summer of the Jazz Age, a young man could have been forgiven for entertaining lofty golf dreams. Fueled by the material successes of Hagen, Sarazen and, most of all, Bobby Jones, the game was at its zenith of popularity, coming off its greatest growth period ever. Bernard Darwin, the grandson of the great naturalist whose theory of evolution sparked 1925’s sensational Scopes trial, remarked in the London Times that America had eclipsed Britain in the sport. As summer moved on, a leading Wall Street light confidently declared there would be no end to the rampaging bull market, predicting it might actually extend its run “indefinitely owing to the insatiable American appetite for creating success upon success.” Echoing this sunny forecast for the summer of 1929, Vogue magazine declared that next to acquiring a “fashionable sun tan, there is no better indication of one’s social acumen than displaying a fine game of golf.”

  That autumn, Byron won several small amateur tournaments and some member-only events in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, arranged by Ted Longworth or Jack Grout, suggesting great things might follow in the near future.

  Twelve hundred miles away in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the summer before his senior year at Valley High in Hot Springs, Virginia, Sam Snead was working as a short-order cook and cleanup man at his uncle Ed’s restaurant, and occasionally caddying on weekends at the Homestead for spending money, and courting his high school sweetheart, Audrey.

  Owing to his natural Snead athleticism and saturnine good looks, he was a popular student at the tiny high school (population: 150) though he rarely applied himself in the classroom. By 1929 he’d already lettered as a halfback on the football team and possessed a reasonably good sinker pitch in baseball. In basketball, his best sport, he was known for his deadly jump shot. He also ran track—able to clock the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds flat—and even boxed on the side to earn some extra money, once knocking out a journeyman Golden Gloves boxer who passed through town looking to score an easy payday against local contenders. Though golf didn’t rival team sports in his estimation, Sam played that as well, entering two schoolboy tournaments on the sand-green nine-hole course at the prestigious private Woodberry Forest School during his junior and senior years, never finishing better than third place, but he was runner-up both times in the long-drive contest, belting the ball over three hundred yards using a driver he borrowed from Doc Ridgeley, the drugstore owner back in Hot Springs.

  Team sports and prizefighting would fascinate Snead his entire life, as friendships with Ted Williams and Gene Tunney would attest. For a time, until he worried the mob connections could hurt his own reputation, he even owned a percentage of a prizefighter. Early on, though, his coach, Harold Bell, realized that golf held the best prospects for Snead. Virginia Polytech and even Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia had already made inquiries about the versatile star athlete from Valley High, but Bell advised Sam that he might put these gifts to better use—and see quicker results—if he skipped college altogether and concentrated on golf. His reputation as a big hitter, Bell noted, was the talk of the county. Sam’s frustration was how to make the jump from high school stardom and part-time caddying to something more substantial. “You’ve seen these small town star athletes who ran out of eligibility and don’t marry a rich girl or land a job selling stocks and bonds and hang around the hometown pool hall and cigar store, wondering where the cheers went,” he wrote years lat
er. “That’s the way I seemed to be headed.”

  To hear Sam tell it, his life changed forever the summer evening a stranger entered Uncle Ed’s restaurant near closing time and ordered a hamburger. They chatted, Sam cooked the man’s burger, and it turned out that the man was a good friend of Freddie Gleim’s, the Homestead’s head professional. Having heard of Sam’s prodigious length, the man suggested Sam contact Gleim about a job—even offered to put in a good word for him.

  Weeks later, toward the end of summer, Sam had an interview at the Homestead and was hired to clean clubs and keep the golf shop stocked and swept. Gleim was sufficiently impressed that he taught him how to repair and reshaft clubs—tasks that Sam, like Ben Hogan out in Texas, took a liking to. He learned to taper shafts with his pocketknife and strengthen them by rubbing them down with linseed oil and shellac, developing a good sense of a club’s balance, feel, and flexibility. The job paid only twenty-five bucks a month but permitted him to use the practice range and sometimes even play the course when things were slow. That carried him into late October, when the course shut down for the winter. The day after they closed the shop, the stock market collapsed.

  The following summer, however, after high school graduation, he got his job back and, two weeks later, while Gleim and his assistant pro were busy elsewhere, a bosomy matron steamed into the shop and demanded to have a golf lesson. Sam demurred, but she persisted. Finally, after the the starter promised to keep a look out for Freddie Gleim, the two of them went to the practice ground and he showed her the basics of grip, stance, and swing. “I got her so she could pelt it out there a little ways,” he remembered. “Gave her a pretty good workout, though she wasn’t in danger of being a good golfer anytime soon.”

  He was summoned into Gleim’s office afterward, half expecting to be fired. Instead, he was informed that the deeply pleased guest had gone straight to the general manager to compliment the young man’s courtesy and teaching abilities. Gleim “promoted” him to the Cascades Hotel course three and a half miles down the road. His new title would be “apprentice professional,” which meant he drew no salary but was free to charge a dollar for any golf lessons he gave to guests.

  The good news was that he now had almost free run of the resort’s finest golf course and plenty of free time to work on his game. The bad news was that nearly one third of working Americans had either lost their jobs or soon would, so the affluent resort trade the Homestead and Cascades hotels relied upon pretty much dried up overnight. Sam spent the next three years working there, polishing his own game and giving the occasional lesson for minimal compensation, playing his trumpet at night and wondering if he’d been smart to choose golf over college football or baseball. “I was thin as a razorback hog,” he recalled of his lean years in the Cascades shop, “and had sharpened into a long hitter with a fair amount of ability at chipping and putting—while not having a prospect in sight for getting up in the world.”

  When word spread that Sam was regularly shooting in the 60s on the tough Cascades course, Gleim brought him back to the Homestead shop at the start of the 1935 season, but kept him largely out of sight while he himself monopolized hotel guests’ attention. This slight was magnified when Gleim refused to give his assistant a discount when he began putting together his own first set of matched golf clubs, buying them one club at a time, for five dollars each, the same price hotel guests paid. Moreover, on the few occasions Sam asked Gleim to take a look at his golf swing, Gleim snapped, “You’re a professional now. You shouldn’t have to ask anyone for help.”

  Sam got the message. “It was pretty clear to me he was holding me back, probably because there wasn’t anybody around who could beat me on the golf course. I figured I just had to bide my time. The Depression was pretty thick on us all by then, let me tell you. Besides, there wasn’t anywhere else to go. I thought a lot about trying to go out on the circuit, but I had no backing and no money of my own.”

  That winter, however, Gleim did invite Sam to his first “professional” tournament, the Miami Open. Using a two-wood on loan from his boss, he played well enough to earn $150. But afterward Gleim demanded the club back before the following tournament in Nassau, Bahamas. “So I don’t have a club to play with, and have to go back home,” Sam recounted to Al Barkow in Gettin’ to the Dance Floor. “Gleim leaves for Nassau and I go look in the locker he was using. I just wanted to see if that club wasn’t there. Well, it was there. Gleim didn’t take it to Nassau; he just didn’t want me to go.”

  The final indignity came when the Homestead hosted the Cascades Open the following summer, attracting an impressive field that included Bobby Cruickshank and a pair of U.S. Open champions, Johnny Farrell (1928) and Billy Burke (1931). Initially, the resort management refused to let its twenty-four-year-old apprentice pro compete, but Farrell and Cruickshank—eager to get a look at the long hitter they’d been hearing about—let it be known they might withdraw if the kid were snubbed. Sam was permitted to play.

  He opened with a blistering 68 and after three rounds owned the lead. Before the final round, however, Gleim got summoned to the office of the Homestead’s president, Fay Ingalls, and was informed in no uncertain terms that Snead should not be allowed to win the tournament. “Do whatever you have to do to prevent that from happening,” Ingalls told him, sensing a public relations disaster in the making. At a time when hotels and resorts everywhere were struggling to keep their doors open, the last thing the Homestead needed was a no-name local assistant beating a pair of U.S. Open champions. The newspapers would either write it off as a fluke or ignore the tournament completely.

  Before the final round, Gleim pulled Sam aside and advised him that his “flying left elbow” would ruin his chances under pressure. “How do you expect to ever be a pro with that left elbow coming out like that?” he said.

  Sam realized Gleim was trying to unsettle him, that this was the same rank jealousy and gamesmanship he’d been dealing with on and off the course for almost five years. The idea that Gleim would sabotage his chances to win a tournament and get out of Hot Springs for good chewed deeply on his psyche. A photograph of Sam, Billy Burke, and Johnny Farrell taken as they strode down the first fairway shows the two Open champions smiling graciously, and Sam wearing an almost hangdog expression. “I was spitting mad inside at what that no-good bum was trying to do,” he recalled years later. Even so, on the second hole, he tried to keep his elbow from flying and sliced his drive “halfway up the mountainside,” requiring eight strokes to complete the hole, and 80 for the round; though he finished in third place, he still managed to put $358.66 in his pocket.

  “That was a lesson I learned two ways. First was that I let my anger take ahold of my game and distract me—that was a lesson Coach Bell had taught me years before back in school. Anytime you lose your cool, brother, you’re usually done for. The next thing I learned was to trust my own game. If anybody ever offered to ‘fix’ what was wrong with me, why, I was gonna run for the hills.”

  However, this episode also brought him an unexpected turn of good fortune. While he was counting his money behind the caddie shed, a well-dressed man walked up and congratulated Sam on his good showing, introducing himself. “My name is Fred Martin from the Greenbrier Hotel over at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia. How would you like to be a full-fledged professional for me?”

  According to Sam, he was momentarily at a loss for words, then asked the man if he was joking. The Greenbrier was as famous as the Homestead.

  “Let’s not waste time,” Martin told him. “One of our pros is leaving and his job is open. We’ll pay you forty-five dollars a month and room and board. Anything you can make teaching our guests is yours to keep. Do you want the job or not?”

  They shook hands, and Sam gave his notice to Gleim the next day. Ingalls made no effort to keep him from moving on. Throughout his life, Sam possessed a strong sense of predestination not uncommon to the mountain people he descended from—and this moment only deepened that na
tural inclination. “I remember thinking that everything in my life was about to change, to really look up for once,” he told a reporter decades later. “It was like a door suddenly opened up and I didn’t waste no time gettin’ through it.”

  By the end of the first week at the majestic Greenbrier, however, he nearly lost his job for driving the green on the 335-yard fifth hole of the Old White Course while a hotel guest was putting out. This happened to be Alva Bradley, who owned not only the Cleveland Indians baseball club, but also the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company, which owned the Greenbrier itself. A portly despot known for his volcanic outbursts, Bradley ordered Martin to sack his new professional. It wasn’t until a caddie confirmed what had happened that Bradley reluctantly agreed to play a round with the young man and witness his alleged power for himself. Sam let the shaft out and drove the fifth green a second time. Almost instantly, to hear Sam tell it, the two became good friends, and Bradley his work in progress. A short time later, Bradley broke 90 for the first time and tipped Sam a hundred dollars and told him to buy some new clubs. Instead, Sam bought a used tin-lizzie jalopy and a new check sports jacket.

  “A thing that helped me in golf,” he wrote years later in The Education of a Golfer, “was that every knock is a boost.”

  Like Ben Hogan, he learned early on that golf was pure survival of the fittest, and beating the other guy sometimes required every mental game and legal maneuver in the book. But unlike Byron and Ben, he had no kindly Ted Longworth or Marvin Leonard to influence his thinking and soften his perceptions of the motives of many who were drawn to the game, especially the high rollers and hucksters who were plentiful on the early tour and in the resort world and never far from any large amateur event.