American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Bob Harlow, the thirty-one-year-old Corcoran learned, had once more been relieved of his duties, owing to conflict-of-interest complaints that had dogged him since day one on the job. Likewise, Horton Smith was being dumped as the players’ representative on the committee in favor of Augusta head pro Ed Dudley.

  The son of a Harvard Square tour guide and sports promoter who was credited with creating the first spectator program for a college football game, Fred Corcoran possessed his father’s enterprising hustle as well as his upbeat Irish charm. While staging and handicapping golf events around the Boston area as secretary of the Massachusetts Golf Association, he’d innovated such practices as using different colored numbers on the scoreboard to indicate a player’s status on the course, a practice soon adopted by tournaments everywhere.

  Corcoran leapt at the opportunity to manage the tour and signed a one-year contract with the PGA on the spot, though he had no idea he was facing the resumption of the fierce behind-the-scenes war for control of the tournament circuit that had been simmering for years.

  Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the winter tour’s first stop in 1937, he was collared by the displaced Horton Smith and others who were steamed that the popular Harlow had been shown the door. “He went after me like a prosecuting attorney,” Corcoran noted in his breezy memoir, Unplayable Lies, “digging at me with questions about my background and qualifications for the job that made me feel like I ought to go back to the gate and buy a ticket.”

  Even as he settled into his job, a petition was being circulated calling for his ouster—reflecting an abiding affection for Harlow and a growing contempt among lesser-known players for the PGA itself, considering it a cabal of club pros who wished to simply tighten control over those who competed on tour week to week. Meanwhile, in the absence of exciting new talent that might rekindle the public’s interest, the game’s longtime headliners Hagen and Sarazen now only made appearances at major tournaments, and relied on lucrative private exhibitions to finance their baronial lifestyles.

  Not surprisingly, it was the cool, levelheaded Henry Picard who gave Corcoran the reassurance he needed to survive his turbulent first week on the job, as the conflict threatened to explode onto the pages of the nation’s newspapers: “Fred, I don’t care what they say. You just do a good job and you’ll be okay with me. And that goes for the rest of the boys on this tour.”

  The next week in Oakland, Horton Smith orchestrated a meeting between disgruntled players and the press, hoping to force a Corcoran resignation. This gambit backfired when reporters made clear they had no interest in possibly damaging the turnout in Oakland by publicizing the rift, and again the rebellion fell short. As Corcoran later told his friends in Boston, “I survived for another day but I needed something good to happen to save my head from the Hottentots. I knew it was only a matter of time before they came back.” His salvation came from an unlikely source. “Then something happened at Oakland that signaled the dawn of a new era in American golf—and took the pressure off me by focusing interest elsewhere,” he wrote in his memoir. “Sam Snead suddenly exploded onto the sports pages. The rangy and picturesque boy from the [mountains] of Virginia popped in with 270 to win the tournament. It was the greatest thing that could have happened to golf—and to me.”

  The fuse of this sudden explosion was actually lit a month before when Sam made his second Miami Open and finished tenth, netting a paltry $108. This was where, on the range, 1931 British Open champ Tommy Armour pointed to a young player practicing diligently and asked Gene Sarazen, “Who is that kid over there with the crazy upright swing?”

  “Name’s Byron Nelson,” Sarazen told him. “He’s out of Texas. Nice kid. He won the Metropolitan last summer and placed third at the Western.”

  “Well, with that swing of his, he better go on back to Texas. He’ll never make it out here, that’s for sure,” remarked Armour, who would soon be named the new head professional at the prestigious Boca Raton Club. Within a few years of this, the Silver Scot would completely revise his opinion of Byron Nelson’s golf swing, calling it “the finest golf swing I have ever seen.” But that was yet to come. At that same moment, Ben Hogan was back home in Texas, settling into a new job at the Nolan River Golf Club in tiny Cleburn, wondering if his professional golf career was finished before it ever got started.

  After he played poorly in the next event, in Nassau, Bahamas, Sam himself questioned whether he had the means to keep following the caravan, but a chance conversation with Henry Picard and Craig Wood bolstered his confidence. “I asked Henry if he thought I was good enough to head for California for the tournaments out there and he told me I’d have to place one, two or three to even make my expenses. I was pretty downcast about that because Dunlop hadn’t come through yet with the five hundred dollars they promised and I had only my puny earnings from Miami and some of the three hundred from finishing third at the Cascades Open. Then Wood said something that gave me a real boost. He told me I ought to give it a shot and if I ran out of dough, why, he’d help me get back home on his own nickel. Henry agreed to help out, too, and suggested I find someone to split traveling expenses with. That just made a world of difference to me.”

  Picard’s confidence was justified when Sam met Johnny Bulla, a brainy Quaker minister’s son from Burlington, North Carolina, a natural left-hander who grew up caddying and honing his game by playing right-handed against some of the best young players of the Carolinas. Bulla was Sam’s junior by two years, but they shared a love of bass fishing and were kindred spirits. Their friendship blossomed quickly and only deepened as the years rolled on. Sam was soon calling Bulla “Boo Boo” for his tendency to blow important shots under pressure and moan about them later. Johnny Bulla, however, a dedicated reader of psychology and science magazines, believed he was on the verge of a major breakthrough, and he planned to be in Los Angeles when the winter tour started. He’d even already lined up a traveling partner—a homesick tight end from the University of North Carolina headed back to California to play football for USC. Bulla was only too happy to have Sam join them and divide expenses into thirds.

  The three agreed to split oil and gas and lodging, and Sam volunteered that he had an uncle in L.A. who promised to put them up for the week. But when he proposed that he and Boo Boo split their tournament winnings, as well, his friend balked. “Don’t mean any offense, Jackson,” Bulla said, using the middle name he preferred, “but I don’t see how I can come out on the better end of that deal.” So off they went, staying in fleabag motels and living on roadside hamburgers. Every morning before they hit the road, the footballer made the golfers run a mile just to keep their legs limber. “Boo Boo hated that, but I wasn’t that far from high school football myself so it didn’t bother me much. That fella made all-American, too. But we had to squeeze nickels until the buffalo groaned,” Sam remembered. And though Bulla had rejected Sam’s offer to split earnings—one of worst decisions he ever made, he later admitted—he now suggested they have a standing five-dollar wager on every tournament, for a little extra motivation.

  On the practice tee before the start in Los Angeles, Henry Picard offered to let Sam try out a new George Izett driver he’d spotted in his bag.

  Made by a respected Philadelphia club maker, it weighed 14.5 ounces and had eight degrees of loft, an extra stiff shaft and a swing weight of E-5, basically unhittable by anyone short of a gorilla or a serious athlete. “The Dunlop driver I was using was so whippy I had a helluva time controlling my tee shots,” Sam explained. “But this club was something else. The harder I swung, the straighter it went. That club gave me more control than I’d ever had in my life. Pick said I should just take it along and use it. My driving improved right then and there.”

  He insisted on buying it and paid Henry Picard $5.50 for the club that would make him the longest driver in the game, a club he used to win all of his major titles and, by Sam’s account, more than a hundred tournaments. “That act of generosity by Henry Picard,” he said, �
��could never be repaid because that wood was the single greatest discovery I ever made in golf and put me on the road to happy times.”

  Another bit of good fortune awaited him in L.A. During an impromptu quarter-a-hole putting contest with fellow pro Leo Walper, Sam borrowed his upright knockoff of Bobby Jones’s famous “Calamity Jane” and nailed three long putts. Walper joked that he ought to buy it, and Sam had the money out of his pocket before Leo could change his mind. They made the exchange for $3.50. “You can’t believe what those two clubs did for my confidence,” Sam recalled years later. “Those are the two most important clubs in the bag by far, you know, and finding them when I did, first one then the other, was like I was supposed to win.”

  Sam had an unshakable faith in such signs. In L.A., he picked up $600 in winnings and another five bucks off Johnny Bulla, who made nothing in the tournament. To make matters worse, driving north to the next event at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, Bulla cracked up his car and had to dole out $140 for repairs. “The way we figured it was one of us had to finish high in the money or we were finished,” said Sam, who opened the tournament with a 69 but was annoyed that the scorer had spelled his name Sneed. “My gallery consisted of my caddie and an old man who kept hobbling after me, coughing and snapping his false teeth when I was putting,” he said. After a third-round 69 tied him for the lead, the scorer finally spelled his name correctly—though few observers expected his luck to hold up.

  Unaware that he’d taken the lead by the seventieth hole, a narrow “barrel” par-four where interlocking trees formed a canopy over the fairway, Sam became momentarily unnerved by the large gallery suddenly swarming around him and slugged his approach shot into the trees, dropping a stroke. After he recovered with a birdie at the home hole, he bolted for the locker room followed by a “mob” slapping him affectionately on the back.

  A photographer wanted to take his picture but Sam superstitiously refused, believing this would ruin his chances of winning. He was heading for Bulla’s jalopy when Fred Corcoran caught up to him. “Where are you going, Sam?” he said, having spotted something appealing in him and taken him to breakfast earlier in the week. “You’ve won this thing, son. The press is waiting to speak with you inside.” The club’s banquet hall had been turned into an impromptu press room and Sam was asked to stand on a table and field questions fired rapidly at him from all sides.

  He looked, according to Corcoran, like a deer caught in headlights. “The room was blue with cigar and cigarette smoke and Sam didn’t like that,” Fred recalled. “He was grumpy and uncomfortable. He wanted out.” When a kneeling photographer flashed his photograph, a startled Sam leapt from the table and rushed for the parking lot, advising everybody to keep away from him. The photograph went out over the wires hours later and wound up in newspapers across the country under headlines like “Country Kid Takes Oakland Trophy” and “Reluctant Star Runs Away from Field.”

  Accustomed to being either ignored or condescended to by Country Club types, Sam was overwhelmed. But Corcoran recognized a promotional windfall when he spotted one, and scrambled to gather additional details from the colorful young Virginian as he fled the premises. Two days later down in Rancho Santa Fe, where singer and actor Bing Crosby was hosting his first annual “clambake,” there was a protracted rain delay, during which Corcoran showed Sam his photograph in The New York Times. “Mr. Corcoran,” Sam reportedly declared, “how come they got my picture in New York? I ain’t never been there in my life.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, of course, though both men mention some version of the exchange in their memoirs. Just about everything that happened to Sam Snead in those days was subject to artful exaggeration—by the press or the man himself or the gifted image maker who would soon become his business partner.

  From Corcoran’s standpoint, the timing simply couldn’t possibly have been better. As the country was just beginning to lift its head from seven years of relentless bad news, the reading public craved stories about underdogs who rose from Nowheresville to succeed against all odds. While the undersized but big-hearted Seabiscuit was heading for the ultimate showdown against the presumed invincible War Admiral, Sam Snead seemed almost too good to be true, a poor rube from the backwoods who struck it rich in California, like a character from a Frank Capra film, a real-life Mr. Smith in golf spikes. Even his name possessed a magical, all-American simplicity—easy to remember, hard to forget.

  The enterprising Corcoran quickly turned Sam’s purported confusion about New York—which he’d passed through once, if not twice, before—to incalculable promotional advantage, feeding it to the idle pressmen at Rancho Santa Fe with various other enticing bits and pieces of his colorful Blue Ridge bio, somewhat indifferent to the purity of facts. He had “Slammin’ Sammy Snead” loving to play golf barefoot and hunting possum whenever possible, and learning to play the game while dodging moonshiners in the hidden retreats, using no more than a hickory nut and a stout swamp maple limb for a ball and club.

  It didn’t stop there, either. When Sam mentioned to Jimmy Demaret that he’d made a practice green by sinking empty tomato cans in his family’s backyard, the affable Texan quipped that he probably was planning to keep all his winnings there, too, a joke that grew more truthful with each passing year. Corcoran nimbly wove his natural frugality and mistrust of banks into Sam’s rapidly evolving bio, because it resonated with millions of ordinary Americans who shared his beliefs. And the press ate up these folksy details and just about everything that Sam said, with his distinctive, wide-eyed drawl. Corcoran’s hokey moniker—Dan’l Boone with a driver—seemed even more relevant when Sam captured the rain-shortened Crosby and pocketed $1,000 before heading up to San Francisco for the Matchplay Championship. Years later, of course, Sam would confide to friends and his first biographer that he resented being portrayed as an ignorant hayseed, but it played splendidly at the time, giving the tour a little sparkle when it needed it most—putting him on the road to wealth and fame.

  “My hillbilly background provided sports writers with plenty of grist, and Corcoran kept them well supplied,” Sam told writer George Mendoza in the 1970s. “I don’t think I was ever totally the rube they made me out to be, but they loved to hear about how I’d spend my time between tours back up at Ashwood with my folks.”

  “No Hollywood scriptwriter could have invented Sam Snead; he was the real article,” Corcoran wrote in his own memoirs. “He had the flavor and tang of authenticity, plus the magic that promoters dream about, that extra quality that brings people to the ticket window waving their money. Sponsors all along the line were wiring and phoning. They wanted assurance Snead would play in their tournament. And I promised them delivery of the new sensation.”

  Before the Houston tournament that closed out 1937’s Western swing, at the suggestion of George Jacobus, Corcoran officially signed on to become Sam’s manager and thus fanned the conflict-of-interest flames that cost Bob Harlow his job. Many fellow competitors, especially the lesser-known players, groused that Snead was suddenly given preferential treatment in the form of favorable tee times and other perks, including his pick of lucrative exhibition matches and endorsement deals. Indeed, before the year was out, though he didn’t smoke or drink, Sam’s name and likeness would grace Chesterfield cigarettes and National Bohemian beer, neither of which he consumed, not to mention Firestone tires and Gillette razors. He posed wearing Mexican sombreros and goofy straw hats, even put on overalls and had his picture taken pitching hay. The fact that he made no attempt to fraternize after hours with other players didn’t boost his popularity with fellow players.

  For their part, Jacobus and Corcoran were willing to overlook all this sniping and focus instead on exploiting this golden opportunity. For the first time in nearly a decade, professional golf had a bankable marquee player. And during the fifteen years Corcoran managed both the PGA Tournament Bureau and Sam Snead, the value of the former jumped from $120,000 to more than $1 million and the latter becam
e a household word and a very wealthy man. (During this same time, Corcoran produced similar windfalls managing the likes of Ted Williams and “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias.)

  “Sam Snead was a dream come true for golf,” Corcoran confided to his former associates from the Massachusetts Golf Association. “But almost from the beginning it was Sam against the world. He didn’t make many friends among the other pros and the reporters who got under his skin, but the gallery gobbled him up.”

  In 1937, Sam snagged five PGA victories, came in second place three times and third another five, earning $10,243 in official money (and close to twice that in side exhibitions and endorsement deals). The only man to win more, Lighthorse Harry Cooper, won seven tournaments and also took home the newly created Vardon Trophy for the lowest tournament stroke average, but bitterly complained that the hick kid he’d once beaten in a rain-soaked playoff back in 1935 at the West Virginia Open was commanding all the attention.

  Byron Nelson got his first good look at this phenomenon in 1937 at the San Francisco Matchplay Championship, where he dispatched Sam three-and-two in the second round. “I’d heard a lot about Sam before I ever saw him swing a club,” Byron recalled. “For one thing, he came in with a lot of momentum from Oakland. Reporters were following him everywhere he went. I had to play well to beat him though I don’t remember much about our match. What I remember most was thinking what an absolutely wonderful golf swing he had. I’d never seen a better tempo. He was about my age yet he looked like he never worked at it at all.” Ironically, Henry Picard, who’d helped them both find their footing on tour, then eliminated Byron from the championship.

  For all the excitement surrounding the long hitter from the hills, Byron was considerably more advanced at that point in terms of experience. He’d played in over two dozen tournaments, collecting important wins at the New Jersey Open and the Metropolitan Open in 1936, earning about $1,800, which barely covered his and Louise’s traveling expenses but certainly made him a player to watch.