American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Old friends of Sam’s liked to tell the story of his first high-stakes match, which developed when a pair of wealthy sporting types staying at the Greenbrier offered to cover his expenses to come north and play T. Suffern “Tommy” Tailor, a Seminole member and old-money scion who would contend in several U.S. Amateur championships and play in the Masters but was far better known for the size of his wagers. Over thirty-six holes at the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island, Sam eked out a pair of victories that by some accounts earned him $10,000, to him an unimaginable sum. But according to Al Barkow, who describes the episode in detail in his biography of Sam, $50,000 and $100,000 were actually at stake in the two matches and the gullible Virginian was bilked out of a much larger payday. He also insists this took place before Sam left the Homestead, while other friends of Sam’s maintain it happened not long after he arrived at the Greenbrier.

  Whatever the truth of the matter—and Sam makes only oblique reference to Tailor and his big-money betting games in one of his autobiographies and a later book on the art of betting in golf—the undeclared windfall undoubtedly helped finance his early days on the tour, though his deep fear of the tax man or a more commonplace reluctance of rural folk to reveal their true assets for fear someone would seek favors or worse—an Old Testament fear of the stranger—dogged him and shaped his lifelong silence on the subject. Encounters like this, moreover, only deepened his natural resentment, verging on outright contempt, for the privileged classes who populated his early working life, and eventually made him wary of banks, financial advisors, even investment deals offered by close friends. The class chip on his shoulder even accounted for the pleasure he took in pricking the delicate sensibilities of snobby types—particularly wealthy condescending women—and his indifference to the criticism he received for behavior that endeared him to some and greatly offended others.

  “Sam had all the charm in the world if he liked and trusted you—and not much concern for your feelings if he didn’t,” according to his longtime friend Lewis Keller.

  His friend Bill Campbell, the amateur star and Princeton-educated West Virginian Sam eventually adopted as his golfing protégé, once elaborated on this theme:

  “As a result of the way he was taken advantage of early in golf, unlike Byron or even Ben, I don’t think there was ever anyone in Sam’s life he could model himself after and really admire—or learn to trust. Every young man needs a role model who shows him how to act and get along, but Sam never had that influence. He felt cheated and exploited by people around him from day one. My own theory is that’s why he never saw much point in refining his behavior as his success and fame came to him. He really felt that money was about the only thing anybody in America really respected, so he made up his mind to make as much of it as possible. And that’s pretty much the attitude he took with him to the early tour, which was no place for the fainthearted, and the wider world beyond these hills.”

  5

  THE UNIVERSITY OF GOLF

  HOGAN, THE YOUNGEST OF THE THREE and the hungriest, jumped out first. He was just seventeen.

  It was a cold and unusually dreary day in February of 1930 when Ted Longworth gave Ben and Ralph Guldahl a lift to San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park, a Tillinghast-designed municipal course with thin wheat-colored fairways and bare patches of mud. Both teenagers slapped down five dollars at the registration table of the Texas Open and officially declared themselves “professional tournament golfers,” the only formality required in those days to make the leap from the amateur ranks. Though he was still “Bennie” to his family members, at the desk he tersely replied, “Ben Hogan,” adopting the version of his name that his pretty, dark-haired girlfriend Valerie Fox preferred. In a sense, Bennie Hogan and his tragic past vanished forever on the spot.

  A photograph of the two young men appeared in the San Antonio Light, each dressed in crisp plus fours but neither particularly happy—Guldahl because he was suffering serious misgivings about giving up his amateur status, Hogan because after beating most of the better players around Fort Worth and Dallas in money matches over the previous year, he was grittily determined to measure up against professionals like Bobby Cruickshank and Wild Bill Mehlhorn, the tournament’s two favorites. Hagen and Sarazen—successful enough to pick and choose their tournaments, preferring sunnier and warmer climes in winter—were no-shows. Coming just four months after the Wall Street implosion, the fledgling tour of the Professional Golfers’ Association, a loose alliance of tournaments that began in Los Angeles after the new year and wound up in the Carolinas in early March, would soon be in a fight for its very survival. The popularity of golf wasn’t helped by Bobby Jones’s official retirement from competition, which left an unfillable void in many minds. Jones was set to begin filming a series of short instructional films in Hollywood for Paramount Pictures, raking in ten times what he earned in one year as a sedate Atlanta lawyer; he was also being compensated handsomely for lending his expertise and name to a cutting-edge set of steel-shafted clubs the A. G. Spalding Company was hoping to soon bring to the market. But the game was measurably poorer for his absence.

  On the chilly gray afternoon Ben Hogan made his professional debut, playing with thin-lipped Ray Mangrum of Dallas, Brackenridge’s rain-soaked fairways were so indistinct they required stakes and work ropes for players to identify them. Ben went out in a respectable 38 but came home in 40, a score of 78 that ate him up inside; not only had the unfriendly Mangrum finished with 71, even gentle stoop-shouldered Ralph Guldahl, Ben’s roommate for the event at a two-dollar-a-night boardinghouse, managed a 74. The next day, Hogan improved by three strokes—good enough to make the halfway cut—but did something mystifying, yet oddly revealing.

  Without a hint of an explanation, he suddenly withdrew from the tournament and hitchhiked back to Fort Worth. “I found out the first day I shouldn’t even be out there,” he explained years later. When pressed for particulars, he allowed that his nerves had been so jumpy he’d found himself hooking shots out of play, something he’d worked hard to cure but apparently hadn’t. Though he never addressed the subject directly, this was the first of the sudden withdrawals that plagued his early playing career and helped give rise to his reputation as a brooding loner, possibly even a quitter—though in fact just the opposite was true. “Right then and there,” he said, “I decided if I couldn’t handle the pressure and play any better than that, why, I had no right to be out there at all.” From the beginning, in other words, he was an unforgiving perfectionist.

  As the economic gloom deepened across the country, withdrawals weren’t uncommon. Ben’s eventual best friend on tour—and cheerful alter ego—Jimmy Demaret, would openly boast of pulling out of events where he didn’t figure to make enough dough to cover his basic expenses. Only the first four or five top spots meant finishing in the money, and otherwise, Demaret reasoned, “there was no sense in paying for a hotel room and a half-starved caddie. Better to see what was waiting for me at the next stop.”

  The sportswriters and wire service men who covered these sparsely attended early tournaments never seemed to hold this against Demaret, as they certainly did his unlikely pal Ben Hogan, most likely because Demaret made friends wherever he went and carefully courted their approval with cocktails and thoughtful quotes guaranteed to make their jobs a little easier.

  Ben’s surprising withdrawal from the Texas Open, however, was driven by something beyond pragmatic economics. His inability to measure up unleashed a powerful wave of self-loathing, summoning forth the demons of personal inadequacy that first surrounded him on another gloomy February day just eight years before.

  A week after his aborted start at Brackenridge, determined to try again, he took a train to Demaret’s hometown of Houston and played even worse—77–76—in the city’s open pro-am. This time he withdrew even before the cut line was determined, took a train home to Fort Worth and vowed to Valerie Fox, then a freshman at Texas Christian College, that he wouldn’t show his face at a professional e
vent again until he worked out his miserable nerves and tendency under pressure to hit a hook.

  If anyone could appreciate his depth of despair, it was this painfully shy daughter of an itinerant movie projectionist named Claude Fox. By her own account, she met Ben the summer he turned fourteen and began carrying Marvin Leonard’s golf clubs around Glen Garden. They were introduced, she claimed, at the Sunday school of the Morningside Baptist Church, which might well be true, though Hogan placed their meeting at Jennings Junior High the year before she moved on to Central High. Valerie was a year older and a grade ahead, an excellent student who had ambitions to someday be society editor for the Star-Telegram. He, on the other hand, was a poor student with a one-track mind. “Even before I went out with him I knew Ben was going to be a golfer,” Valerie told a reporter decades later. “Everyone who knew him back that far knew this much about him. Golf and movies were all he ever talked about.”

  Her parents, Claude and Jesse Fox, liked him from the start, for all the reasons any parent approves of a potential suitor. He was polite, and always well dressed, and unfailingly on time when he came to call on their elder daughter, who in contrast to her younger sister, Sarah, was something of a high-strung and emotionally fragile young woman. “I think my grandmother saw immediately how good Uncle Ben was for my aunt Valerie,” says Sarah’s daughter, Valerie Harriman. “He was strong and good-looking, and a take-charge kind of guy—not unlike her own father. Behind closed doors, Valerie could be hell on wheels if she didn’t get her own way. But something about Uncle Ben seemed to calm her down.”

  The Fox girls were known around Fort Worth’s Southside for their striking beauty and divergent personalities. Sarah was four years Valerie’s junior, a natural extrovert, cheerful and unself-conscious, a spirited gal who relished her family’s unapologetic Wild West past and would eventually blossom into one of the city’s most popular hostesses. Valerie, by contrast, was extremely reserved and forever anxious about appearances, deeply insecure about her own prospects.

  “For this reason my mother always said Uncle Ben and Aunt Valerie were perfect for each other, clearly destined to be together because they provided something vital the other needed,” says Harriman. “She needed his strength of character and he needed someone to wholeheartedly believe in him through thick and thin. He provided her with a life she could never have found on her own, and she rewarded him with unwavering devotion and loyalty.”

  One trait they shared, she adds, was an almost pathological need to control everything around them, including the people closest to them. “Aunt Valerie’s closest friend was my mother. My mother, on the other hand, possessed a real cowgirl spirit that I suspect embarrassed Aunt Val at times but made her very popular with lots of different kinds of people. She loved people and the social swirl of Dallas and Fort Worth, and could move through any circle. Uncle Ben loved that about her. They became great friends. She even became a good golfer. But his loyalty to Aunt Valerie was something entirely different. Both my grandmother and mother always said they fell in love the instant they met because each had a large void only the other could fill.”

  Though Ben publicly declined to comment in any depth on the long years that followed his first bitter forays in San Antonio and Houston that year, he later confided to friends that this only deepened his resolve. The expression commonly used by his mother and older brother, Royal—“Nothing divided by nothing is nothing”—reverberated in his head, driving him forward like a man who was afraid to look back and see who, or what, might be gaining on him.

  Living in the small back bedroom of his mother’s tiny frame house on East Allen Street, Ben at least had the satisfaction of his first head professional job at Oakhurst, a modest nine-hole public course—partially owned by Ted Longworth—between downtown and the banks of the Trinity River. “Not much of a job, with no real pay,” Hogan recalled years later, noting that drought eventually took care of whatever was left of tiny Oakhurst by the time the Depression finished with it. There were few regular customers, but plenty of free afternoons to beat balls. “Practically all my revenue came from selling golf balls to one rich group of four businessmen, and by winning bets from them.” By his account, these wealthy hackers made him perform like a trained seal at times—forcing him to play with only three clubs, or only while standing on one foot, demeaning and intolerable circumstances for a player with serious aspirations, though he was happy to clean out their pockets. His greatest excitement occurred, he explained, when two bank robbers holding “hog-legs” (long-barreled .45 pistols) held up the startled foursome as they teed off one Saturday morning, prompting Ben to sprint to his secondhand Hudson roadster (purchased with the $1,600 he’d recently won off the group) where he kept a .30-caliber rifle beneath the front seat for security purposes. He was prepared to give chase until his pigeons prevailed on him to let the police handle the matter.

  To supplement his meager income from the course, Ben took a succession of nowhere jobs he refused to speak of to anyone save Marvin Leonard and a few Shady Oaks cronies decades later. For a while he mopped floors at a popular downtown restaurant and bell-hopped bags at the Blackstone Hotel, where he sometimes dealt poker at night. His facility with cards and natural affinity for numbers, an inherited family trait, eventually led to a brief stint as a stickman out at the Top of the Terrace, a notorious gambling joint off the main highway between Fort Worth and Dallas, and possibly a dealer’s job at the notorious Green Oaks Inn, not far from the sanatorium where his father had been treated. When Royal found him a nine-to-five gig doing maintenance work for a local bank, that didn’t last long because those banker’s hours cut into his afternoon money matches at Z-Boaz, Katy Lake, and Glen Garden.

  “These were not Ben’s proudest years,” recalled his longtime friend, oil man W. A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. “He rarely spoke of the things he did to get by, though it was clear to many of us that he did what he had to do in order to save up enough to ask Valerie to marry him and—maybe most important of all—to take another shot at the tour. That was one helluva tough time, let me tell you. Ben would always tell you that. Any of the fellas who tried to make money at golf then said the same thing.”

  During the summer of 1931, Ted Longworth, who’d moved up from Glen Garden the spring before to the prosperous Texarkana Country Club in Arkansas, offered to take Ben and Ralph Guldahl along with him to an open tournament in St. Louis. Both enthusiastically agreed, but only Guldahl wound up in the money; Ben with nothing. The sting was mitigated slightly when Longworth invited them to accompany him out west for the start of the winter circuit. The three could split expenses, he proposed, and maybe even their earnings, a common practice in those days.

  Ben had little or nothing to lose, but also nothing to finance his part of the bargain with. He first turned to Royal, who despite the economy was steadily making headway in the office supply trade and a name for himself in the local hierarchy of amateur golfers. When asked for a twenty-five-dollar grubstake, Bubber came through. Many years later, after he’d won the club championship at the Colonial Country Club almost more times than anyone could recall, Royal liked to entertain visiting reporters by telling them in no uncertain terms that he was considered, at least early on, the more promising player. “Someone in the family had to have an honest paying job,” he would grimly assert, rattling the ice in his empty whiskey glass, and gazing over Colonial’s immaculate, sun-splashed eighteenth green. “I’m just glad I could help him out when I did.” For his part, though this brief trip west produced only empty pockets, Ben never failed to mention his brother’s initial financial investment, nor the fact that Royal refused to take any money when he could finally afford to pay him back.

  Ben also turned to Marvin Leonard for a starter loan. Despite the devastating effect the Depression was beginning to have on cattle prices and therefore on most of Fort Worth’s banking and business communities, Leonard’s department store was doing exceedingly well down on North Houston Street, now sprawli
ng over an entire city block. Moreover, Leonard’s interest in golf had become an almost all-consuming passion. During the summer of 1932, he served on the board of directors at Glen Garden and aggressively promoted the idea of installing bent grass putting greens, which struck some members as lunacy given Fort Worth’s long and impossibly hot summers.

  Not to be deterred, the genial businessman pointed out that better courses in the East all featured bent grass greens and offered to foot the cost of the experiment himself. The board agreed and the work began. By that autumn Glen Garden had the lushest greens in the state of Texas.

  Eager to see a significant championship of some sort come to Fort Worth, Leonard proposed a similar renovation across town at the Rivercrest Country Club, where he was also a member in good standing. The board at Cowtown’s leading private club, unconvinced that bent grass had a future here, or deterred by the expense in such perilous times, wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about turning their Bermuda greens over to him. “Marvin, if you like bent greens so damn much,” the president reportedly told him, “why the hell don’t you go build your own goddamn golf course!”

  “Good idea,” Leonard replied, and turned to the best courses in the West to gather both design ideas and insights for a true bent grass championship course in the Southwest. A short time later, displaying his willingness to think as big in golf as in his day job, he bought 157 acres of land along the winding Clear Creek branch of the Trinity, not far from the Forest Park subdivision where he and wife, Mary, resided. In 1934, he hired John Bredamus and Perry Maxwell of Oklahoma and asked each to submit five different plans for the course. Leonard liked options and wanted the very best results. Bredamus was known for his outstanding layouts in Houston and Galveston; Maxwell would soon design the spectacular Southern Hills layout up in Tulsa. Construction work on the Colonial Country Club—the name Leonard finally settled on—began the very next spring.