American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  After weeks in Argentina with his friends Picard and Shute, which handsomely compensated each man with $1,500 on top of expenses but made Byron so exhausted and homesick he was forever cured of wishing to go abroad, he was happy to get home to Texas for the holidays. Owing to that mental fatigue, made worse by a stomach that was sensitive to exotic foods, he made a hash of his debut at the 1938 Los Angeles Open, finishing forty-eighth, and wasn’t really a factor until he reached the Thomasville Open in Georgia. There, he briefly recovered his form, edging out fellow Texan Lloyd Mangrum to win a rain-shortened fifty-four-hole event. Weeks later at Augusta, he mounted only a fair defense of his title and wound up in fifth place, but at least saw his good friend Henry Picard win his first Masters title.

  The enduring memory he took away from this tournament—the first one where “The Masters” was commonly used by reporters and officials alike—was of playing the opening round with Bobby Jones, who shot 76 to Byron’s 73. “It was the second biggest thrill of my career up till then,” he said years later. “The only thing bigger was winning Mr. Jones’s tournament.”

  There was also a rather poignant footnote that year. At the Bon Air Hotel, Augusta members conducted a rowdy Calcutta party, a wagering pool in which players and members were invited to “purchase” a player they believed would win the tournament, the most highly rated going first. Cliff Roberts explained to Byron that it was tradition that the reigning champion attend the festivities, so Byron went along. He didn’t drink alcohol or gamble, but when no one bothered to “buy” Ben Hogan, he was moved to do so for $100. The next day, Ben approached Byron and asked if it was true he’d taken him in the Calcutta pool, and Byron confirmed that he had. “That’s not something I normally do,” he added cheerfully, “but in your case I thought that might be a pretty good bet.”

  Anytime a fan or reporter commented on how hard Byron practiced his game, he liked to point out others who worked even harder—notably Henry Picard and Ben Hogan. At that time, the vast majority of players never practiced unless they needed to work out a specific swing problem or wanted to test a new set of clubs. The idea of a daily, regulated practice session designed to reveal both strengths and weaknesses, and that included a range of shots from various kinds of lies, was a concept embraced by only a handful of pros who understood, as Ben once put it, that making practice shots identical to tournament shots “was the shortest route to success.”

  “Could I buy half an interest in myself?” Ben asked Byron that next day in Augusta.

  “Of course,” Byron told him, taking that as a healthy sign of Hogan’s determination to make a good impression on Jones and Roberts.

  Ben went away and came back a little later with the fifty bucks. Just a week before, he’d finished seventh at the inaugural Greater Greensboro Open in North Carolina, and was encouraged that his long hours on the range were beginning to pay off. But he opened his first Masters with a 75, blew to 78 in the third round, and finished with a baleful 301, in a tie for twenty-fifth place. He gathered his things and left town minutes after signing and turning in his card.

  For Byron, another frustrating fifth came at the U.S. Open in June, where Ralph Guldahl successfully defended his title at Cherry Hills, high in the thin air of the Colorado Rockies. Weeks later, in the quarterfinals of the PGA Championship at Shawnee-on-Delaware, following a rest at home in Reading, Byron narrowly lost two-and-one to Pittsburgh pro Jimmy Hines in the quarterfinal, who in turn got demolished by Sam Snead in the semis, placing the lanky Virginian in the final for the Wanamaker Cup against diminutive Paul Runyan, who’d challenged Hagen’s choice of Snead for the Ryder Cup team. To nobody’s surprise, Sam was both the bookmakers’ and the fans’ clear choice.

  “I don’t think anyone but my wife gave me a chance to beat Sam that year,” Runyan remembered with a wry smile. “He was on fire and the fan favorite by at least a two-to-one margin. I spent most of the match watching him put on a driving exhibition, outdriving me by at least seventy yards on most holes. Fortunately I had a few tricks up my sleeve.” Even when using a four-wood to Sam’s six-iron, Little Poison repeatedly placed his ball closer to the pin and holed a number of long birdie putts to win the PGA title in a romp, eight-and-seven, the widest winning margin in the championship’s history up to that point, a humiliation that a visibly sulking Sam Snead never forgot.

  For Ben, the stinging memory of his poor Masters showing was softened somewhat by his new post at the Century Club in Purchase, New York, where the wealthy members provided the Hogans with a cozy cottage on the grounds and days off for excursions into Manhattan. Maybe best of all, Ben found himself routinely invited to play with fellow pros at the better known Metropolitan clubs like Winged Foot and Westchester. Owing to the demands of his new club job, he wasn’t able to play a tour event between the Masters in early April and the Cleveland Open (where he finished fourteenth) the second week of August.

  Though both Ben and Valerie were homesick for Fort Worth, and Ben was chafing to get back on the circuit, in many respects these were nevertheless pleasant days for the road-weary Hogans, especially Valerie. Ben had time to work on his game at the Century Club’s splendid facilities and at least once that summer Valerie met Louise Nelson in the city for shopping and lunch. Ben’s only real complaint was having to give lessons to his members. “Giving lessons to rich ladies isn’t Ben’s favorite thing,” Valerie confidentially admitted to her sister. “He’s working so hard on his game, and all he can think about is getting back out there on the tour.”

  Without question, 1938 belonged to Open champion Ralph Guldahl or Slammin’ Sammy Snead, who not only successfully defended his Crosby Clambake earlier in the season but also won the inaugural Greater Greensboro Open and six other tournaments, including the Canadian Open. Moreover, finishing second six times and third three others, he was the tour’s leading money winner that season, earning just shy of $19,000. “Sam’s going to need to buy the tomato canning company just to have enough cans to bury his money,” an ecstatic Fred Corcoran quipped to reporters. It was in Greensboro, during the opening two rounds at the Sedgefield Country Club, that John Derr got his first look at the “Virginia hillbilly everybody was talking about.” In his twenties and new to town, Derr was the son of a rural North Carolina postman and a hustling college dropout who’d talked his way into various jobs as a stringer, reporting on Duke and Carolina football, and somehow had managed to wangle an invitation to the 1937 Masters, where he met Bobby Jones and hobnobbed with famous sportswriters Grantland Rice and O. B. Keeler. In the late winter of 1938, he was hired (for sixty dollars a week) as assistant sports editor at the Daily News in Greensboro, then the second largest city in North Carolina.

  “I followed Sam for two rounds at the GGO to see if what everybody said about him was true. My first impression was that he had a golf swing of a serious athlete and, by golly, looked just about unbeatable. Folks were eager to get close to Sam—who was always uncomfortable in crowds—but someone introduced us and we seemed to connect right off the bat. From a reporter’s perspective, I found him refreshingly candid. He would answer whatever you asked him, no evasions whatsoever, honest to the point of bluntness—though if he had a good audience he could spin a hell of a yarn, especially if there was a pretty woman anywhere around. Sam had a real weakness for a pretty gal, though I had no inkling of how much until I got to know him better.”

  Not long afterward, George Corcoran, Fred’s younger brother and the head professional at the Greensboro Country Club, invited him to tag along with a friendly match he’d put together: Sam; Johnny Bulla; a pro from Danville, Virginia, named Al Smith; and the promising and fiery Clayton Heafner, who’d just made his own first foray to the touring circuit.

  “Sam had pigeons up at the Greenbrier but no real competition to keep his game sharp between tournaments,” Derr explains. “There wasn’t a tournament every week in those days, sometimes weeks between events. So whenever there was a lull Sam would come down to Greensboro
to fish with friends and play with Bulla. The deal presented to me was that I was free to come and watch them play but not write about anything I saw. That was fine by me.”

  More important to the young sportswriter was the opportunity to get close to the hottest player in the game. “Fred Corcoran understood ordinary people loved reading about Sam and at that instant he was exactly what the tour needed to get back the respectability it had lost during the Depression. Sam was happy to oblige. He loved an audience and played for the galleries—as long as they didn’t try to get too close. By ’38 people were coming out of their shells again, following baseball and horseracing and college football. Thanks to Sam, golf began to find its way back to the front pages, too, really for the first time since Jones left the game—all due largely to the Slammin’ Sammy Snead image.”

  Even in a casual match, Derr noticed, Sam displayed an athlete’s sensibility and a competitive edge. “He always attacked, never eased off. He also wouldn’t play even a friendly match without something riding on it, at the minimum a five-dollar Nassau. With Bulla and Heafner and occasionally [tour player] Johnny Palmer it was never about the money, though. For Sam, it was about beating them.”

  During these “friendly” matches in Greensboro, if Bulla cut the corner of a dogleg, for example, Sam always did the same without a moment’s hesitation and often needled his traveling partner whenever he outdrove him. “As most pros do, Sam was always looking for an edge, regardless of the risk involved. This quality would serve him well. He was basically fearless. But it would also cost him dearly. There were moments—as Ben Hogan liked to say about Sam—when a little mental caution would have gone a long way and probably served Sam better in the long run, but you couldn’t tell Sam Snead that. He was on top of the world. He never took his foot off the accelerator.”

  The same was true on the highway.

  Before the tour swung back east to Florida in March of 1939, he invited Derr to ride down with him in Bulla’s new Buick Roadmaster sedan. “Sam loved to drive and he never worried much about posted speed limits, if there were any. The other thing he loved to do was talk, both on and off the golf course. He loved to tell stories and jokes, the raunchier the better. Because of his big personality, a common belief about Sam was that he never thought much about his golf swing, that it all just came naturally to him. In fact, Sam actually worked constantly on his swing, always trying to refine it. I’ll never forget pulling into a gas station in the middle of nowhere with Sam and Bulla arguing about whether a good shot was hit on the third or the second groove of a middle iron, and whether a well-hit draw naturally goes farther than a well-hit fade.

  “Next thing you know, why, even as the poor guy is pumping the gas into the car, the two of them have their clubs and are marching out into a field behind the gas station, arguing every step of the way. They must have hit balls back and forth for a full hour. Sam had just signed up to play Wilson golf balls, and Bulla played a thing called the Peau Doux, a ball that was sold exclusively through Walgreens Drugs stores for thirty-five cents apiece. They argued about that, too. Then we’re all back in the car, happy as you please, barreling on to Georgia and Florida with the two of them still carrying on like a couple field scientists about the physics of the golf swing. Bulla was very much into that sort of thing, a highly analytical and scientific mind—and Sam just egged him on. They were quite the pair.”

  Sam’s brilliant ball striking was in part due to his comfort with his new Wilson Staff clubs, a deal that came about in typical Snead fashion when, while having a casual driving contest with Ralph Guldahl on the practice range in Cleveland, Sam picked up one of Ralph’s Wilson balls and was photographed holding it. Dunlop, his own sponsor, was incensed and offered him only $3,500 to re-sign at season’s end. When I. B. Icely of Wilson Sporting Goods heard this, he tracked Sam down and offered him $5,000 on the spot. According to Sam, MacGregor offered him twice as much, but a hunch told him to sign with Wilson.

  A venerable Chicago company established in 1913 to find creative uses for slaughterhouse by-products, Wilson Sporting Goods made surgical sutures and violin strings before manufacturing tennis rackets, catcher’s mitts, and footballs endorsed by Knute Rockne; Wilson’s stable of sports legends would eventually include Ted Williams, Babe Zaharias and Jack Kramer, the “Father of Modern Tennis.” In the aftermath of Gene Sarazen’s spectacular win at the 1932 British Open, the company created its fabled Sarazen signature R-9 sand wedge, selling fifty thousand of them in the first year alone. Sam signed with Wilson just weeks after the incident in Cleveland, forging a relationship that existed for the next half century. Down the road, Sam would reportedly receive a twenty-five-cents royalty off every ball Wilson sold, and they also sold more of his own signature Blue Ridge golf clubs—the first perimeter-weighted clubs of their kind, debuting the spring of 1939—than any other player’s club maker did of his era.

  As their records in early 1939 indicated, Sam’s golf swing was slightly more advanced—or at least more productive—than Byron’s and Ben’s, if not as much as he himself believed. Veteran golf writer Al Barkow compared the sound Sam’s irons made at impact to a Rolls-Royce door being slammed shut—“a rich sound, unmatched in his day, or perhaps any other. With a driver the sound was different; it had more of an explosive quality, the brisk but definite report of a rifle shot.”

  Early in his career, however, not unlike Byron but even more like Ben, Sam had such difficulty avoiding a low-running hook that he abandoned his driver and used a two-wood in competition, relying on his own superior athleticism to produce long drives. And he worked hard to build a repeatable swing tailored to his supremely athletic physiology. Contrary to another commonly held view, he was not double-jointed, merely blessed with unusually long muscles and superior joint flexibility, another Snead family trait. Once Picard placed the ultra-heavy Izett driver in his hands, according to Jack Burke Jr. and others, Sam Snead was destined to become the finest long driver of the ball ever.

  But golf is nothing if not subjective. Within a very short period, other pros were saying exactly the same thing about Byron and Ben, each of them engaged in a similar quest to perfect the modern swing and edging ever closer as the 1939 tour got under way.

  Perhaps because he really had begun playing the game barefoot, Sam’s starting point was footwork and balance—factors many accomplished players overlooked and teachers rarely mentioned. “Footwork, balance, is everything to me because my life-long theory (and Ben Hogan agreed) is that the more you minimize hand, wrist, and arm action, the better,” he wrote in his best instruction book, The Education of a Golfer. “I believe the body pivot launched by the feet is the big factor.”

  Beyond his considerable physical advantages, the key to Sam’s unrivaled power and grace was a stance closed ten degrees to the target, a slight turn of his head to the right to place it in a position that could be held during the swing (a tidbit he claimed he’d copied from Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen), a gentle outward “kick” with his left knee to initiate the backswing, a slow and slightly more upright takeaway (“ ‘Draw the bead easy, boy,’ I tell myself, ‘or there won’t be turkey dinner tonight’ ”) with his right elbow tucked close to his side, followed by a full turn balanced on the slight “roll” of the feet, and an unrushed downswing that appeared to “wait” for the body to catch up with the clubhead at impact. It was a model for the athletic swing of modern times, studied and copied by the players and teachers of generations to come.

  On the mental side—by his own admission always his biggest challenge—as Sam addressed the ball, he attempted to clear his head of all distracting swing thoughts. “You don’t think about how to swing the axe when you’re splittin’ wood,” he once told a young reporter. “The same is true of a golf swing. Once you get ready to swing, you just let it go. The smoother you swing, brother, the easier the wood splits. Same thing with a golf swing.” Yet owing to his innate musicality, he often hummed the “Tennessee Waltz” or some other four-be
at popular tune not only to keep from dwelling dangerously on mechanics but also to establish his masterful tempo and rhythm. His position at impact, with his knees slightly bowed and nicely flexed, produced a slightly squatting posture that enabled him to accelerate naturally through the ball to a full finish.

  As he adamantly insisted to Derr early in their evolving friendship, and anyone who ever asked about his incomparable swing, Sam never had a formal lesson from anyone, claiming everything he knew he’d picked up from watching the best players or experimenting on his own—though 1951 Masters runner-up Skee Riegel recalled something different from playing with him and Nelson Long, the Homestead pro, in 1939. As Riegel later told Al Barkow, “Long said that on a hole on the back nine he had Sam stop at the top of his backswing. He then pushed Sam’s arms and hands high up over his right shoulder. He told Sam that was where the club needed to be. Sam had been swinging the club around his body, on a flatter plane, which he probably picked up from watching the [older] pros and others of that era.”

  At any rate, as 1939 dawned Sam’s Rolls-Royce swing prompted the sportswriters once again to unanimously pick him as the man at that summer’s U.S. Open at the Spring Mill Country Club outside Philadelphia. But as he struggled to regain his form out west, Byron Nelson began making headlines of his own with a second at the Crosby and a win at the rain-shortened Phoenix Open, where he beat runner-up Ben Hogan by an eye-opening eleven strokes.

  Just six weeks later he rolled into Pinehurst, where the Tufts family’s hospitality at the regal Carolina Hotel included black-tie dinners and French mineral water in their guest rooms—all on the house—made Pinehurst Louise Nelson’s favorite stop on tour. The North and South Open was regarded as a major championship by the players, dating from 1902 and won by elite stars that included Walter Hagen, a three-time winner. Owing to the tournament’s prestige and popularity, combined with a splendid Donald Ross golf course the designer constantly tweaked in search of perfection, writer Dan Jenkins once called it “the Masters before there was a Masters.” Despite a shaky putting performance, Byron’s superb iron play and 280 score was good enough that year to win the North and South by a margin of two strokes.