American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Their difference of opinion regarding traditional club positions reveals a great deal more about their personalities and central ambitions. What Sam had in mind, despite his rough-hewn edges, was the living Hagen and Sarazen made off lucrative exhibitions, private matches, and endorsement deals, not giving lessons, keeping books, answering to the wishes of members, or running golf tournaments, and other club-related events. Though he maintained strong ties with the Greenbrier for decades, eventually becoming head professional and taking on some of these traditional duties, Sam’s focus never wandered too far from the developing PGA Tour he, Byron, and Ben would come to dominate for almost twenty years.

  Byron was far more conventional in his belief that a good performance on tour first of all pleased his club members back home and might possibly capture the attention of a more prestigious club down the road. Like his friend and mentor Henry Picard, he loved the analysis involved in teaching the game to others, regardless of their skill level. By now his dream was to catch on with a top Eastern club, and this came true in February of 1937 when, after George Jacobus recommended him, he signed a contract with the Reading Country Club in Pennsylvania that guaranteed him an annual base salary of $3,750 and whatever he could make by giving lessons and running the shop. “It meant,” Byron remembered, “we would never have to borrow any more money from Louise’s folks.”

  On a natural high from finally achieving one of his goals, just a week later he and Louise drove down to Augusta for the third Masters and splurged by checking into the pricey Bon Air instead of renting a modest room in a boardinghouse as they had just the year before.

  His happy mood carrying over to the golf course, Byron opened with a sensational 66, his best score and a record by a Masters champion that would hold up for three years until Lloyd Mangrum bettered it by two strokes in the first round. Paired with wiry Paul Runyan during this brilliant opener, he hit every par-five in two, and the other greens in regulation. Runyan—who typically talked out loud to himself as he played—“C’mon, Pauly, hit the ball next time,” or “Quit messing around”—said to the press after the round that he’d never seen such superior shotmaking. In a tournament where a few veterans still carried the odd hickory-shafted club in their bags, Byron’s performance was a billboard announcing the accuracy of steel, a new swing, and even a new kind of player. Host Bobby Jones went out of his way to congratulate him.

  Byron’s first Masters title didn’t come without a struggle. He shot 72–75 to lose his lead and in the final round found himself three strokes behind Ralph Guldahl at the turn. But his old friend put his tee shot into Rae’s Creek at twelve and was forced to drop a ball and finish with a double-bogey five. Byron, who was watching from the tee, then went straight for the flagstick with a six-iron, leaving his ball just six feet from the cup, and drained the putt to suddenly tie him for the lead. After Guldahl stumbled again at the dangerous thirteenth, making a bogey six, Byron told himself that “the Lord hates a coward” and went for the green with his three-wood, his ball finishing just off the green, and chipped in for an eagle three. His 32 on the back nine gave him a two-shot margin and the title. There was no green jacket then, but Jones himself presented a beaming Byron the winner’s gold medal.

  “I still have that medal,” he wrote years later, “and when my playing career was over, I looked back and realized that this was the most important victory of my career. It was the turning point, the moment when I realized I could be a tough competitor. Whenever someone asks me which was the most important win of all for me, I never hesitate. It was the 1937 Masters, the one that really gave me confidence in myself.”

  Before the couple headed north to his new job in Reading, “suddenly happy as a pair of honeymooners,” according to Louise, Byron granted Atlanta newsman (and Jones writing partner) O. B. Keeler an interview in the players’ locker room on the second floor of Augusta National’s clubhouse. “Byron, I watched you play the back nine today,” Keeler told him, “and it reminded me of a piece of poetry written by Lord Byron when Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo.” Byron smiled and explained to Keeler that his mother was particularly fond of his poetry, which was why she gave her son the middle name of Byron.

  The next day, he was surprised to see the Associated Press story headlined “Lord Byron Wins Masters.”

  The name stuck.

  Though it doesn’t show up in any record book, not long after Byron’s dazzling Masters, Ben Hogan’s luck began to change.

  That spring, he and his extremely shy wife of two years moved into the twelve-story Forest Park apartment building where his mentor, Marvin Leonard, and wife, Mary, were living. This was considered one of Fort Worth’s better addresses for upwardly mobile couples, though in the Hogans’ case it was a threesome that included Valerie’s effervescent kid sister, Sarah Fox, who was working for a top dress shop downtown and moved in to share expenses and cooking duties. “I’ll let you in on a little family secret,” Sarah’s daughter, Valerie Harriman, once confided to a reporter. “My mother did most of the cooking and housekeeping at the apartment they shared because Aunt Val couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. This led to some amusing situations. Uncle Ben loved scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Aunt Val had no cooking skill whatsoever, so my mother would get up early and make Ben’s eggs just the way he liked them—allowing Valerie to serve them to him. He and my mother became very close during that time, though I’m not sure he ever caught on about the scrambled eggs.”

  The toughest four-year stretch of Ben’s professional life was just ending, a dark period that included his second failure to make it on tour, his poorly paid work at Oakhurst, and the roadhouse gambling jobs he rarely, if ever, spoke about. But then he found a decent job working as the head pro at the tiny Nolan River Golf Club in Cleburne, sixty miles south of Fort Worth, a job Claude Fox most likely orchestrated for his daughter’s determined suitor. Though his salary was only $200 a month, Hogan augmented his work by giving lessons at three dollars an hour and living cheaply with his future in-laws, saving up every cent for a third assault on the tour. Meanwhile, on April 14, 1935, not long before Hogan decided to move back to Fort Worth for an office job his brother helped arrange at a petroleum company, he and Valerie got married by a Baptist minister in the front parlor of Claude and Jesse Fox’s house in Cleburne. Curiously, the Cleburne Times-Review described the bridegroom as “a well-known golf professional from Fort Worth,” making no mention of his brief but useful time in Cleburne, nor the fact that Royal and his wife, Margaret, were the only guests.

  Ben skipped the ’35 tour entirely, saving money and playing only money matches around Dallas–Fort Worth, most of which he easily won. By early the next summer, both his personal finances and his game appeared to be in better shape. He qualified for the U.S. Open at Baltusrol and asked Valerie to come along for moral support. The Hudson roadster was gone, replaced by a roomier secondhand Buick purchased, in part, because Byron and Louise Nelson had a similar car. Valerie detested travel and was prone to car sickness on any trip beyond twenty minutes, but consented to accompany Ben to New Jersey. “I had gone with Ben’s mother to see him play an exhibition in Fort Worth,” Valerie remembered. “That was all the golf I knew. But now that he was going to play in the U.S. Open, I was excited about traveling with him.”

  The first thing Ben did after getting settled in a motel two miles from Baltusrol’s front gate was to phone Byron, who was at nearby Ridgewood Country Club. The two couples had dinner together, and the next day, while the men practiced, their wives took a ferry across the Hudson to New York City; it was Valerie’s first glimpse of Manhattan. Arm in arm, they window-shopped for hours, Louise later told Grantland Rice, chatting up a storm. “Louise and Valerie liked each other right off,” Byron said many years later. “I think that particular U.S. Open created a pretty good friendship between the girls and even a better bond between Ben and me. We traveled a lot together after that. Louise and Valerie were always the glue in the relationship
.”

  Neither man distinguished himself on Baltusrol’s difficult Tillinghast-designed Upper Course. Hogan shot 75–79, Nelson 79–74; both missed the thirty-six-hole cut. So after Tony Manero closed with a brilliant 67 to shatter the old Open scoring record by four strokes and capture his only national championship, the Hogans and Nelsons took another ferry for dinner. Despite the disappointing outcome, the week had some pluses as well, especially for Valerie. Tony Manero’s wife, Agnes, a stylish and popular tour wife, had warmly befriended her and provided useful tips about the traveling life—which deeply impressed her and eased her fear of road travel. “Imagine,” she wrote her mother, before the couple headed home to Texas, “I’m a friend of a U.S. Open champion’s wife.”

  The following summer, Ben chose not to try to qualify for the 1937 Open. By now the Hogans had saved $1,450, and Ben was ready to attack the tour again. “It’s now or never,” he told Valerie before they loaded up the Buick and headed for Niagara Falls, Ontario, for the General Brock Open, where Hogan began keeping a little black book of both expenses and results for the first time, much like the one Byron had kept since the start of his career. Ben calculated that his odds of winning were improved at this tournament, in part because he was driving the ball more reliably, but also because many of the better players had returned home to attend to their regular club jobs. Jimmy Demaret, for one, who was growing close to Ben about this time, saw a new confidence as the two warmed up on the practice range in Ontario. “I’ve got the secret of this game now,” Ben assured him. Demaret later wrote, “But if Ben found the secret at that time, he lost it again immediately. It was the same story, and a heartbreaking one, for the Hogans. Ben tied for eleventh in the General Brock, he came in ninth in the Shawnee Open, he placed ninth in the Glens Falls Open. And so it went.”

  In fact, though Ben’s tendency to hook the ball in the heat of competition was still the main source of his undoing, the results of his efforts weren’t quite as futile as Demaret suggested. Before Glens Falls, he’d snagged seventh place at the St. Paul Open, followed by an encouraging third at Lake Placid—netting $600, enough to keep going. Moreover, he won the long-drive contest over tour player Jimmy “Siege Cannon” Thomson, pocketing another $50. A local newspaper columnist wrote of Ben, “Now he’s on the tournament trail and unless we are mistaken, that beautiful swing of Hogan’s should really soon take him places.” Valerie dutifully clipped the piece and pasted it into the new oversized scrapbook brought along for just such notices.

  When the couple’s travel-worn Buick rolled into the parking lot of the $5,000 Hershey Open, Ben’s frustration was palpable. Henry Picard, the event’s gracious host and eventual winner, spotted it right away. “I’d never seen a player work so hard as Ben Hogan and have so little to show for it,” he recalled years later. “He reminded me of all the hard work I’d put in to get my game where it was, though in Ben’s case you could see there was something beneath the surface that was driving him along. I was never quite sure what that was but I liked Ben. He kept to himself but he had an air of dignity that appealed to me. He wasn’t afraid to work.”

  A touring professional needed to earn about $3,000 a year on the expanded year-round circuit to cover expenses. After six months on the road, the winnings noted in the Ben’s black book amounted to just $1,164. They went home to Fort Worth to discuss whether there was enough left in the kitty to risk heading for California for the start of the 1938 West Coast swing.

  Not surprisingly, it was Picard who once again came to the rescue. A few days after Christmas, he and former Glen Garden assistant Jack Grout were having dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, where not so long ago Ben had dealt cards and even moonlighted as a bellhop, when they spotted the Hogans sitting at a corner table. They walked over to say a friendly hello, and discovered they were having a disagreement over the approaching winter tour. Valerie wanted Ben to go, but Ben disagreed, citing their depleted savings. “I want him to go,” she told Picard and Grout in no uncertain terms. “I’ll just stay home and find a job.”

  “In that case,” Ben said, “I won’t go. We both go or nobody goes.”

  “All right. Let’s end this argument here and now,” Picard calmly proposed. “Ben, take Valerie with you and go out west and play. If you need anything, come and see me. If you run out of money, I’ll take care of you. You’ve got my word on that.”

  Ben stared at him for a long moment. Years later—when he fondly recounted the story to his members at the Scioto Golf Club, where he was tutoring young Jack Nicklaus—Jack Grout liked to say he could almost hear the battle being waged inside Hogan’s proud and analytical brain. He wasn’t the kind of man to accept charity from anyone, but Picard was one of the game’s finest players and a model of everything Ben hungered to be—urbane, polished, a brilliant student of the swing, an unflappable and generous champion.

  In a pure golf context, though neither man could fathom it at that moment, Henry was filling the same black void that Marvin Leonard had already addressed—an older, more accomplished man who recognized the decency and work ethic of a promising young player who simply needed someone to express confidence in him. In the end, Picard gave Ben something far more useful than money.

  “Knowing that help was there helped me forget my troubles,” Ben confided in a rare moment of self-revelation years later when his first book of instruction, Power Golf, appeared. “The support and confidence Henry expressed in me in the summer of 1937 meant all the difference in the world.” The book, incidentally, was dedicated to Henry Picard.

  So instead of giving up, the Hogans made a pact to head for California with their paltry savings and an emergency plan to sell the Buick, if necessary, and use the money for train fare home, at which point Ben would abandon his quest and find a better-paying club job or something in oil or finance.

  In Los Angeles, he failed to finish in the money. Sam Snead won the second Crosby Clambake, where Ben placed eighth and earned seventy-five dollars, just enough to cover room and board for the week. A week later, at Pasadena, he made another sixty-seven dollars for tenth place; Henry Picard won, and Byron placed third, making $350.

  On the drive up to Oakland, even Valerie’s confidence in Ben began to waver. They had only $100 left—just enough to get home to Texas if they left right away.

  “No, honey,” Ben told her. “We made a deal to go as far as Oakland. If we don’t make any money there, I’ll sell the car and we’ll go home, and I’ll never mention golf to you again.”

  On the morning of the first round, he walked out to their car in the parking lot of their inexpensive hotel and found the rear end of their Buick resting on cinder blocks, thieves having made off with the tires. Reportedly he threw up his arms and marched back into the hotel, informing Valerie they were finished. “Nonsense, Ben,” she told him. “We’ll just find someone to give you a ride to the golf course and worry about the tires later.” Afterward, in several interviews, Ben downplayed the incident, claiming he’d forgotten the precise details, undoubtedly in no rush to relive the most agonizing moment of his career, staring his darkest demon—abject failure at the one thing he believed he could succeed at—right in the face. As Valerie later explained to her sister, Byron and Louise happened to be staying in a hotel only a few blocks away, so a single phone call solved the immediate problem. Byron picked Ben up and drove off to the Sequoia Country Club while Valerie arranged to have the tires replaced. Days later, she told her sister, the new Masters champion offered Ben a loan. Though he declined, the gesture meant a great deal to Valerie, who suspected that it was Louise’s idea.

  Years later, Sam Snead recalled standing with some other young pros when they saw Ben outside the clubhouse, looking anguished and lost. If Sam’s memory can be relied upon, this was the first time the two had the occasion to speak to each other.

  “What happened, boy?” someone asked, and he pounded his fist against a brick wall, groaned, and declared, “I can’t go another inch. I’m finished. Som
e son of a bitch stole the tires off my car.” He then looked at Sam, the new darling of the press. “How bad can things get?”

  “He was as close to tears as that little guy can get,” Sam remembered.

  Whatever Ben’s particular motivation was that week—a fear of more nothing divided by nothing or a sheer desperation that focused his attention as never before—he placed sixth and won $285. “We thought we were rich,” Valerie said.

  “It was the biggest check I’d ever seen in my life,” Ben told Ken Venturi in the famous 1983 TV interview, his voice catching at the memory of it. “And I’m quite sure it was the biggest check I’ll ever see.”

  The modest windfall paid for new tires and carried them on to Sacramento, where he earned $350 for a solid third-place finish.

  Several weeks later, seemingly out of the blue, the head professional of the Century Country Club, one of suburban New York’s finer private clubs, offered Ben a position as the club’s assistant professional. His pay would be $500 a month plus anything he could earn giving lessons. After learning that Henry Picard had wholeheartedly recommended him, Ben signed on enthusiastically.

  Two months after that, Ben played in his first Masters. Like Byron before him, as he later told Sarah Fox, the moment he walked onto the grounds at Augusta National he felt a special affinity for the place. Perhaps, also like Byron, he was initially a little overwhelmed by the grandeur and significance of the club Bobby Jones had built. He finished in a tie for twentieth place, well out of the money, but expressed his deepest gratitude to Henry Picard, who won the title, beating the ever-present Ralph Guldahl by two strokes.

  Of all the promising young pros refining their games with steel shafts that particular warm spring, Guldahl was by far the most polished—and ultimately perplexing. The affable, stoop-shouldered Texan—who began his pro career the same day as Ben in 1932—had progressed so rapidly he needed only a short birdie putt to beat the amateur Johnny Goodman by a stroke on the final hole of the 1933 U.S. Open at the North Shore Country Club. Instead he made bogey and finished second. Despite a personality so devoid of excitement and color that even natural promoters like Harlow and Corcoran were hard pressed to generate stories that made him seem interesting, his combination of finesse and power made him the leading threat of a new wave of Texas gunslingers that included Houston’s Jimmy Demaret, Ray and Lloyd Mangrum, Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan.