by James Dodson
“That was a really important win for me,” Byron reflected years later. “It gave me a nice boost of confidence just as my game was beginning to really come around. Everyone wanted to win in Pinehurst, in part because the course was so well respected but also because it was a wonderful tune-up for the Masters.”
Something else nice happened to him at Pinehurst. Following a practice round with his friend Harold “Jug” McSpaden, he was introduced to a salesman for Field and Flint, maker of fine men’s street shoes called Foot-Joys. Over dinner at the resort, Byron mentioned the deplorable construction of golf shoes—most of which, thin-soled and too narrow across the ball of the foot, hobbled players after only a few rounds of wear—and Byron wondered out loud if Field and Flint shouldn’t go into the golf shoe business. Weeks later, he and Jug took a train to Boston to be fitted at the company’s factory. Jug chose classic white bucks, Byron British tan wingtips, and fellow competitors were soon clamoring for their own custom-made shoes. For years thereafter, both men received a quarter royalty for every pair of Foot-Joys sold.
Days after his Pinehurst victory, Byron finished in tenth place in Greensboro, followed by a disappointing seventh at the Masters. Putting issues suddenly plagued him, so he decided to skip the next tournament in Asheville and head to Toledo, Ohio, for a job interview. “Even then,” he relates in How I Played the Game, his folksy 1993 autobiography, “though I was playing well and winning money most of the time, I wasn’t thinking about making a living on the tour. I needed that [club] job to survive.” Through his old friend George Jacobus from Ridgewood and the PGA, he had an interview at the prestigious Inverness Club, another Donald Ross course, where Harry Vardon’s heartbreaking collapse in 1920 had allowed his English traveling mate, Ted Ray, to capture the U.S. Open (and where the cathedral clock, courtesy of Walter Hagen, still stands in the club’s foyer).
The other candidate for the job, ironically, was one William Ben Hogan. Both men, interviewing weeks apart, made good impressions on the Inverness committee. But something about Byron’s cheerful mien and his stated affection for teaching the game to others struck the more powerful chord. Once again, Ben lost out to his old Glen Garden rival, a rejection he reportedly took hard and never spoke of again.
Weeks later, Byron signed a contract with Inverness that gave him a base salary of $3,000 a year plus all the profits from the club’s popular pro shop. Moreover, just two weeks after his interview in Toledo, and only days before the start of the 1939 U.S. Open, he caught a train down to the Boca Raton Club in Florida where Scotsman Tommy Armour had orchestrated an equipment contract for him with MacGregor. After their brief meeting, Byron selected a new set of MacGregor Silver Scots, clubs he would play with for the next three seasons until MacGregor rolled out a top-of-the-line set with his elegant signature on them. A short time later, Ben would also sign on to play MacGregors—once again following Byron.
Sam’s growing legions of fans, not to mention the official oddsmakers, however, considered him the favorite at Spring Mill, though some observers pointed out that his untidy performance at Cherry Hills the year before argued against his chances.
Designed by Bill Flynn, who worked on the construction crew at the Merion Golf Club under Hugh Wilson and later formed a design company with Philadelphia engineer Howard Toomey that created the new Cascades Course at Sam’s beloved Homestead, Spring Mill lacked the physical drama of most Open sites and finished in a rather humdrum fashion with a pair of modest par-fours and a long uphill par-five of 555 yards, the only three-shotter on the course, for the championship.
Turned out in stylishly pleated gabardine slacks, and two-toned saddle shoes, and sporting the wide-brimmed white Fedora he adopted in 1937 to cover his increasing baldness, Sam drove the ball splendidly and opened with a record-breaking 68. His 71 in the second round gave him the halfway lead at 139.
His 73 during the morning round on Saturday left him a stroke behind Johnny Bulla and tied with Craig Wood, Denny Shute, and Clayton Heafner, whose 66 was the talk of the tournament to that point. Sam’s Greensboro practice pals Heafner and Bulla fell apart in the final round, however, while he recaptured his form and played flawless golf until the seventy-first hole, where he made a careless bogey that unleashed the demons of doubt in his brain. He knew he was somewhere around the lead and perhaps even had it, but he wasn’t certain. In those days there were no leaderboards, and his uncertainty would prove devastating.
Ahead of him by thirty minutes, finishing birdie-par for 68 and a total of 284, Byron could only wait and see if anyone could beat him. A par on the home hole would put Sam into the clubhouse with 283, he calculated, and possibly win him his first U.S. Open title, though Wood and Shute were playing behind him and roars from their galleries were filling him with anxiety. According to Sam, he asked playing partner Ed Dudley if he had any idea where things stood. Dudley, who hardly said a word to Sam all day, simply shook his head. The host professional, he also served as Bobby Jones’s handpicked head pro down at Augusta National. A future president of the PGA of America, Dudley was well on his way up the establishment ladder. Not surprisingly, he was also close to Joe Dey Jr., who was the USGA’s executive director, the man who oversaw pairing selections for the championship. Dey, like Jones, made no effort to hide his growing dislike of Snead, believing his crude jokes and public japery demeaned the gentleman’s game they revered. To this day, Sam’s biographer Al Barkow and many of his fans remain convinced beyond any doubt that his pairing with stiff and proper Ed Dudley—who was nine shots behind Sam at the start of the long double-round day—was orchestrated by Joe Dey to rattle him. At this time, tournament leaders were typically spaced out through the field as a means of spreading out the galleries. The practice of placing leaders at the back of the pack, in fact, didn’t evolve until after the Second World War. Sam himself, who claimed to have a nose for chicanery dating from his very first tournament at the Homestead, was absolutely convinced of a conspiracy to hurt his chances.
“If I’d been playing with Bulla, Heafner or Wood,” he said emphatically years later, “there’s no doubt in my mind I would have won that Open. Dudley knew exactly where things stood because that was his job but he just played dumb as a plow mule. When someone told me I needed a birdie to win, that’s what I decided to play for.”
Whatever the truth of the matter, it was a disastrous decision. With his adrenaline surging, Sam lashed his tee shot into the left-hand rough, leaving his ball 275 yards from the green. Despite this, he opted to pull a brassie from his bag and go for it, figuring the worst that could happen was to come up short and have a short pitch, leaving birdie still well within reach.
Instead, he topped his ball and saw it scamper into a steep-shouldered fairway bunker on the left flank of the fairway, about 110 yards shy of the green. As Sam approached, his typically enthusiastic gallery fell deathly silent and he himself appeared ashen. The face of the bunker was five feet high. A wedge would easily have cleared it, though probably leaving him well short of the uphill green. He gambled on an eight-iron and took a ferocious swing. For an instant, in the explosion of sand, no one could see where his ball went, and then Sam realized his worst nightmare had come true: his ball had slammed into the wall and was embedded in some freshly laid sod near the top. He stood in disbelief for a long moment and then slowly shook his head. The Open—in his wheeling mind, at least—was now all but lost. He still believed he needed a four to win, but a tie was still possible. From an awkward stance, he tore through the sand and turf and sent his ball into another trap forty feet shy of the flag. Moments later, with his feet planted awkwardly outside of the bunker, he finally sent his fifth shot onto the green, rolling it forty feet past the hole—and three-putted from there for an unholy triple-bogey.
Stunned silence cloaked the huge gallery as the game’s most popular player staggered off the green, his mind numb, his eyes fixed on the ground. “Women’s eyes watered,” notes USGA historian Bob Sommers. “Men patted him on t
he back. Other players turned away to save him embarrassment.” Years later, Sam would claim he had only the vaguest recollection of this ghastly moment, and perhaps that’s true. It was the most appalling collapse since Harry Vardon’s horrific free fall over the closing nine at Inverness in 1920, a moment anyone would wish to forget, and second in the series of catastrophic Open failures that would haunt Sam Snead for life.
Eight-time Walker Cupper Bill Campbell, the West Virginia amateur who became something of Sam’s protégé and a close friend as the years passed, often described a “darkness that fell like a November rain” on Sam at several critical times in his career. “There was a moodiness and fatalism in him that is often common to rural people,” he told a writer from Golf Magazine. “I think it had to do with growing up in the woods, hunting and fishing on his own, being part of a natural world where life and death were all around and, in truth, he always felt most comfortable. The golf world, in some respects, was not a natural place for Sam. It was simply an arena where his talents made him a star. Sam delighted fans because he hid nothing. If his game was on, he conveyed his pleasure like no one else I ever saw. He loved to clown around and entertain people. He would roll his eyes, spin tales, talk up a storm. But there was always something in Sam that half expected things to eventually go badly. Country people learn to live by the seasons, you see, and know a storm will eventually come. Sam always had that feeling, I think, about the U.S. Open.”
As the drama at Spring Mill played out, Craig Wood holed a birdie putt on the seventy-second hole to join Byron in the clubhouse at 284. Like Sam, Denny Shute needed a pair of pars to win outright, but bogeyed the seventeenth and made it a three-man playoff.
The next day, Shute faded quickly while Wood and Nelson, wearing the same kind of casual open-necked shirt that would soon become commonplace in golf, battled nip and tuck to the final green, where Wood’s bold effort to reach the green in two knocked a spectator out cold. Regaining his composure, he chipped his third shot to within six feet of the cup. At that point he was a stroke ahead of Byron, who had his own birdie opportunity from inside eight feet.
As he addressed his ball, Byron said afterward, he suddenly remembered “all the times when we were playing as caddies at Glen Garden and we would say, ‘This putt is for the U.S. Open.’ Now I was really playing that dream out, and it steadied me enough that I sank my putt.” Wood’s effort stopped short, requiring a second playoff day.
For Byron, followed by many of his Reading members and good friend Jug McSpaden every step of the way, the highlight of that round came when he holed a one-iron shot for eagle on the fourth hole to take a three-shot lead, a margin that held up and gave Lord Byron Nelson his first, and only, U.S. Open Championship.
At week’s end, the grateful members at Reading threw the Nelsons a party that was both a victory and farewell fete and presented Byron a gold watch inscribed “Byron Nelson, Winner U.S. Open 1939–40. Members of Reading Country Club.” They also gave him a Winchester rifle for hunting, and a large silver bowl to Louise engraved with her name.
A few days later, Ben and Valerie Hogan spent a week with the Nelsons in Reading, during which “the girls spent time shopping and going to lunch with Louise’s friends while Ben and I played golf.” The couples were as close as they would ever be, and Byron saw an intensity in his friend’s gray eyes that suggested Ben was getting close to something—either a breakthrough or a breakdown. Despite his miserable tie for sixty-second at the Open, he’d already recorded seven top-five finishes and two seconds for the year. “Ben never revealed much about his thinking,” Byron recalled, “but I knew him well enough to know he had a resolve like never before to win. There were also changes in his swing that year, which told me he was working harder than ever and getting closer.”
A week after the Hogans returned to their cottage in Purchase, Byron won the Massachusetts State Open by four shots over his pal Jug McSpaden. Then he went on to the Pomonok Club on Long Island for the PGA Championship. For the first and only time, his mother made the long trip from Texas to watch him play in a major. With his game clicking on all cylinders, he performed well, too—blitzing six players to reach the final against his good friend Henry Picard. Their match ended on the thirty-seventh hole when Picard rolled home a twenty-foot birdie putt to win his second major championship of the year. Byron took the next week off to prepare for the Western Open at Chicago’s splendid Medinah No. 3.
Though the battle between Byron and Henry claimed the majority of press attention at Potmonok, a story with even larger implications unfolded a day before the first round on the practice tee, where Ben Hogan did something he had rarely if ever done before, confirming Byron’s impressions about his state of mind. He asked Henry to watch his swing to see why he retained the maddening tendency to hook his drives when a tournament was hanging in the balance. Both his runner-up finishes that year had resulted from hooked drives and costly bogeys. Over the spring and summer, as he confided to Valerie just days before, he’d concluded that long straight drives were essential to winning any tournament, especially a major championship, and the way to “guarantee that win” was to “get so far ahead of everyone else [that] nobody can possibly catch me.”
Picard deduced his technical problem pretty quickly. “Ben,” he said, “in your case it’s pretty simple. You’ll never win until you learn to fade the ball.” Using a five-iron, he shifted his grip to a more neutral or “weak” position on top of the club, then widened and opened his stance a touch. In a photograph taken of this interlude by a wire service photographer, the elegant, necktie-wearing Picard tilts forward to adjust his powerful left hand, while Ben’s head remains bowed in an attitude of almost prayerful concentration—all of it adding up to the classic setup for a workable fade, the shot that would soon lead Ben from the wilderness into the land of milk and honey that Byron and Sam had already found.
Indeed, over the first thirty-six holes of this PGA, Ben fired a pair of impressive 69s, missing just three fairways, to take the qualifying honors with Ky Laffoon, Chuck Kocsis, and Dutch Harrison. Then he demolished Steve Zappe, a talented Springfield club pro, seven-and-six, and went on to face Paul Runyan in the third round. In their match, Ben’s driving was peerless and often placed his approach shots well inside Runyan’s. Using his famous metal-spooned putter, however, Little Poison rattled several long putts into the cup to claim the match.
“That sort of thing, repeated hole after hole,” Ben confided to reporters, slumped and demoralized in the locker room afterward, “chokes the heart out of you. At least five times the gate was wide open for me, but Paul wouldn’t let me through.”
Also suddenly driving the ball straighter than he ever had before, Byron went on to win the Western Open the very next week, a tournament then regarded by many as a major championship. Next, he held the lead in the Hershey Open going into the final round but mysteriously lost his ball in the fifteenth fairway, congested with fans; this resulted in a two-stroke penalty and fourth-place finish. Ten days later, an anonymous letter showed up in his mailbox, with a note explaining that a young woman who knew nothing about golf had unthinkingly picked up Byron’s ball and put it in her pocketbook. The letter also contained a money order for $300—the difference between third- and fourth-prize money.
By summer’s end, Byron had replaced Sam as the new darling of the national sporting press, a gentlemanly counterbalance to the sometimes rough-edged Snead. “Regardless of how he played, Byron was always an approachable fellow, the soul of courtesy,” John Derr observed. “He was such a contrast to Sam in almost every way. Sam was fun to watch, clearly the people’s favorite, but Byron provided a class that reminded everyone of Bobby Jones. For that reason—especially coming after Sam’s collapse at Spring Mill—I think Byron’s rise to the national scene couldn’t have been better timed. If Sam’s success made golf popular again, Byron’s elevated the game’s stature in many sets of eyes.”
Not surprisingly, the press also gave plent
y of coverage to the episode of the lost ball and mysterious letter that concluded Byron Nelson’s most rewarding year yet, in which he won a total of three “major” championships and more than $9,000 in purses. His stroke average of 70.02 also earned him his first Vardon Trophy. The happy Nelsons would celebrate by spending a month with Louise’s parents in Texarkana, where Byron could practice and play every day to his heart’s content with pro Don Murphy and other local friends, preparing for his new job at mighty Inverness and the start of the 1940 winter season out west.
All but lost in these unfolding events was Ben’s strong performance at the PGA [where he was co-medalist] and impressive second-place finish at the Hershey tournament, where he closed by hitting every fairway on his final nine and was invited, with wife Valerie, to dine with Milton Hershey. This excellent showing also strengthened Ben’s hopes that returning nonplaying captain Walter Hagen might make him a captain’s pick for America’s defense of the Ryder Cup, scheduled for early November down in Ponte Vedra, Florida. Byron and Sam had already qualified.
On September 3, however, when Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Poland, the storm clouds that had been gathering for years finally broke and Britain officially declared war on the Third Reich. Within days, a letter arrived from the chairman of the British PGA regrettably canceling the Ryder Cup until further notice.