American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  It would be eight long years before the match resumed.

  8

  REDEMPTION

  VALERIE HOGAN WAS WEARY of the road. “No, it’s not too grand an experience living in suitcases and traveling 18,000 miles every winter,” she told Arch Murray of the New York Post during the North and South Open of 1939. “It was a thrill at first but that’s long since worn off,” she said, describing how long days in a four-door sedan, drafty hotels, lumpy beds, and unpredictable diner food had begun to take their toll on her. The primary job of a “fairway wife,” however, was to “hide her boredom and mental fatigue from her husband at all costs, to keep smiling and encouraging him no matter what anyone says. A golfing wife,” she added, “has to be a combination of many things—nurse, masseur, comforter and whip-cracker—but most of all she has to be a psychologist. Your reactions to your husband’s moods are vital.”

  Far more expansive than Ben had ever been with a reporter, perhaps because she’d once nurtured dreams of becoming a newspaper society editor herself, she explained to Murray that though she always preferred to await a tournament’s outcome in the clubhouse—reading magazines or simply knitting socks for her husband—she could always instantly determine how her husband had performed by his body language on the final hole, where she typically joined him. If his pace was brisk and his head up, “his jaw thrusting forward, why, that means he has had a good round.” Conversely, if his gait was slower and his gaze earthward “he’s probably shot 75.”

  Toward the end of October, Murray checked in with the Hogans again and discovered that Valerie was “dreading closing up our snug little apartment” on the grounds of the Century Club and returning to the grind of hotels and highways for the 1940 tour, and that it was only the prospect of spending a month and a half “at home with family in Fort Worth” that made, if at all, the prospect tolerable. Ben, by contrast, was “bristling like a bulldog to get back at it, to attend a couple college football games and then head to Florida for the start of the winter season and the big swing out West.”

  “I think this year is going to be the vital one for me,” Ben himself told Murray. “I have been knocking at the door too long now. I’m going to develop a finishing touch. I’ve had too many fellows in the trap, only to let them get away. That has to stop.”

  As a new decade dawned, marking the tenth anniversary of his efforts to outrun the gremlins of self-doubt, something was changing inside Ben Hogan, or perhaps just visibly hardening. Everything from his dress to his public demeanor reflected this. His clothing tastes, shaped by his fierce admiration of Marvin Leonard, ran to businessman conservative, well-tailored trousers that had both zippers and buttons to prevent accidental openings, sweaters in muted shades of gray or dark blue, with a traditional white or check flat cap that was his evolving signature and wore well in the wind—more of a uniform than a fashion statement, something he never had to think about.

  Already known to be extremely reserved socially, and occasionally curt with reporters, he had now deepened his cowl of concentration even further, often giving the impression of icy aloofness. Beyond his considerable technical refinements, he allowed a few years later, he finally learned to win by blocking out everything but his game—gallery, his playing partners, small talk of any kind, even the weather and leaderboards. Chain-smoking Chesterfields, he would plod down the center of the fairway to avoid having to see or speak to any spectators, his gray eyes sweeping the terrain ahead for any potential advantage or peril. In effect, he willed himself into a trancelike state of absolute mental isolation perhaps only a Hindu holy man could appreciate. His closest friend on tour, Jimmy Demaret, observed that the way Ben Hogan studied golf courses and silently picked them apart reminded him of a bird of prey at work, a gray hawk on the hunt—an appellation that seemed to fit.

  A writer from The Saturday Evening Post once asked Demaret, whose wardrobe preferences ran to eggplant-colored pantaloons, screaming argyles, and canary yellow plus fours, if his buttoned-up friend Ben Hogan ever said anything on the golf course.

  “Oh sure,” he breezily replied. “He likes to say, ‘You’re away.’ ”

  “Seriously, Jimmy, Hogan seems so damn … unfriendly. How can you stand him?”

  “Ben’s not a bad egg at all—if he happens to notice you. It’s not that he’s unfriendly. He just prefers to play golf alone most of the time, even when he’s your partner.”

  During the three weeks over the holidays that Ben and Valerie stayed with Royal and his wife, Margaret, Valerie filled her days by lunching and shopping with her sister, Sarah, while he went to the Colonial Country Club every morning for a couple hours of practice on the range, lunch with Marvin Leonard, and a round in the afternoon with him and Royal. During the years Ben had been away up north, and elsewhere, Leonard had spared no expense to make Colonial the premier golf course in Texas and waged a tireless campaign to attract a national championship, at one point tracking down USGA president Harold Pierce at his home outside Boston, keeping him on the line for half an hour with promises of unprecedented crowds, fabulous playing conditions, and incomparable Southern hospitality, not to mention a huge potential windfall for American golf’s governing body. The USGA eventually submitted, designating Colonial as the first U.S. Open in the South for 1941. For years afterward, Marvin Leonard was ribbed by pals for making the most expensive long-distance phone call in Texas history.

  The sight of a solitary Ben Hogan on the practice range at Colonial was becoming familiar to members. Tex Moncrief remembered asking him once why he spent an entire morning hitting nothing but wedges. Ben looked at him and tersely replied, “Because a good short pitch can almost always make up for a mistake.” But his calculations didn’t cease there. A year later, Moncrief spotted him hitting nothing but four-woods for an entire afternoon, pausing only for an occasional cigarette, Coke, or Hershey bar.

  “Why four-woods, Ben?” the oil man asked him later in the bar. “You hit four-woods better than anyone in golf.”

  He told him, “I lost a tournament last summer up in Chicago due to a poor four-wood shot. I don’t want that happening again.”

  “The message I took away from that was that he intended to leave no margin for failure of any kind,” Moncrief recalled. “Ben didn’t practice swings. He practiced shots. He wanted no shot to surprise him. He wanted them all, by God, to be perfect.”

  Before the season-opening Los Angeles Open, tour manager Fred Corcoran staged a long-drive contest inside the Los Angeles Coliseum, where Ben gave a preview of his new power, accuracy, and determination by placing second with a 255-yard blast that netted him $150, which he used to take Valerie out to the Brown Derby restaurant and a screening of Gone With the Wind that evening. When a Los Angeles reporter spotted the couple and asked Ben about how a slight 140-pound fellow who stood only five-foot-seven could hit a golf ball so unearthly far, Hogan merely looked at him and remarked that someday players his size would be hitting the ball over 350 yards. The reporter laughed, but Ben didn’t. He wasn’t joking at all. Byron Nelson, meanwhile, won the accuracy portion of Corcoran’s contest, nailing three 225-yard drives directly between the goalposts.

  Neither man did particularly well in the opener. Ben finished in a tie for eleventh, pocketing just seventy-five dollars, while Byron opened with a sloppy 75 and withdrew. A week later up in Oakland, Ben blazed to a second-place finish and Byron once again withdrew. At the San Francisco Matchplay, Byron briefly found his game and finished fifth. But the next week at Phoenix, he withdrew for the third time in four weeks.

  In his memoirs, Byron confesses to being a little nervous early that year, happy about his new contract with the Inverness Club in Ohio but disappointed over medical tests that indicated he was sterile—probably as a result of the typhoid fever, or the mumps, he’d suffered as a boy. Both Nelsons were eager to start a family, and Louise was immensely dismayed. Almost immediately, and encouraged by Valerie Hogan, she began to try to convince her husband that they sh
ould adopt a child. Byron wrestled with the issue for months before deciding that adopting was too “risky” and, given their nomadic lifestyle, probably not fair to any child. “If I had it to do all over,” he told a reporter in 1994, “I probably would have adopted that child. Louise sure was eager to do it. It was one of the few things we disagreed on. I’ll always regret she never got to be a mother. And I’m sure I would have enjoyed being a father.”

  The two-car caravan resumed. After Phoenix, the Nelsons in their new Studebaker President and the Hogans in their aging maroon Buick headed together down the highway for the Texas Open at Brackenridge Park in San Antonio. En route they always stopped at a place in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for homemade tamales. Plucky Louise and shy Valerie enjoyed staying together in inexpensive motels and eating in roadside diners because they had so much in common, including a desire for children. Valerie and Ben had discussed this as well, but he was firm about not wanting children in the foreseeable future. During their stop in 1940, however, the mood was considerably lighter, and the couples inquired about taking some of their favorite tamales home to Fort Worth with them, only to learn from the waitress that the tamales came from a can and were made by the Armour Meat Company of Fort Worth. “All four of us just looked at her,” Byron recalled. “Then at each other. Somehow, those tamales had suddenly lost their appeal, and we never ordered them again.”

  Perhaps it was an omen of sorts, for something else began to change later that week.

  Despite heavy downpours that turned Brackenridge’s thin turf to muck, requiring the use of rubber tee mats, both Hogan and Nelson played brilliantly, each carding all four rounds in the 60s. As Ben waited out Byron’s finish in the locker room, smoking a cigarette and rubbing liniment into an aching left hand, several players congratulated him on winning the Texas Open. Ben would have none of it, perhaps remembering what happened so long ago at the Glen Garden caddie tournament. “I hope he gets a 66 and wins, or takes a 68 and second so there will be no playoff,” he told a reporter from the San Antonio Express, as if expecting the worst. Then he brightened a bit. “But if he wins, there’s no one I’d rather lose to than Byron, for he’s one of the best friends I’ll ever have.” Moments later, Byron birdied the seventy-second hole for 67, a record-tying 271 that left him all square with Ben.

  Both men agreed to appear on a radio show in downtown San Antonio to generate local interest in their playoff. When asked about the quality of Ben’s game—a pair of closing 66s had gotten him here—Byron smiled and replied, ever the ambassador, “Anytime you can tie or beat Ben, it’s a feather in your cap, because he’s such a fine player.”

  The two men were sitting side by side in the small studio. When the interviewer looked to Hogan for his response, an unsmiling Ben thought for a moment and said, “Byron’s got a good game. But it would be a lot better if he would practice. He’s too lazy to practice.”

  It was probably meant as a joke, a gentle poke in the ribs between old friends, though few outside the locker room knew Ben Hogan had a sense of humor. But the comment stung Byron, he admitted years later, partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He didn’t practice nearly as much as Ben, without question, but not out of laziness. Rather, he’d completed his five-year transformation plan a bit earlier than expected, and his swing mechanics had evolved to a point where everything worked so beautifully and fluidly that some had begun calling him “The Robot.” Tommy Armour was now on record as saying Byron’s was the finest golf swing ever, and Gene Sarazen and Henry Picard agreed. His drives and long irons were by far the straightest and most accurate on tour, at moments machinelike in their precision, and his short game was fast approaching the level of Paul Runyan’s. Only his inconsistent putting remained a problem. Otherwise, Byron saw absolutely no point in wearing himself out by practicing a swing that already displayed remarkable consistency. As he explained to Louise, too much practice might even compromise the great progress he’d made.

  The other reason the remark bothered Byron was far more private in nature. From their early days together in Captain Kidd’s caddie yard through their shared struggle to establish a toehold on the tour, Byron had always been the soul of encouragement, a friend reaching back to help another along. And though the two never spoke of it, he was one of the few people who knew something terrible had happened early in Ben’s life, having heard whispers about Ben’s father—a tragedy Valerie Hogan herself wouldn’t learn of until she and Ben had been married almost a decade.

  “I think Ben had some resentment about their early years together, due to Byron’s early success,” Sam Snead once told a writer in Hot Springs. “And I always heard that Ben really wanted that job up at Inverness that Byron got. Tournament golf will only magnify that sort of thing. Some fella you think is your best friend one day, well, you’d cut his throat and he yours the next day to have half a chance of winning a golf tournament. It’s just the nature of the game. Nothing personal.”

  Maybe so. But in Ben’s case, everything was personal. And something palpably began to cool in their relationship. While their wives would remain close until Louise’s death in 1985, their own friendship would never be the same again.

  The next day, Ben arrived two hours before their tee time and went through his comprehensive warm-up routine in his usual cocoon of unapproachable silence, pointing to shift a caddie equipped with a catcher’s mitt and a bucket, a human target, around the range. Byron arrived an hour later, admitting that he hadn’t slept very well. His stomach was acting up, as it often did in playoffs. Neither man, judging from their body language and expressions, appeared terribly happy.

  The playoff, Ben’s first as a professional, began at one o’clock on Monday, February 12, under low gray clouds, with an estimated two thousand spectators—having paid an extra $1.50 for admission—swaddled in wool overcoats and gray fedoras. They witnessed Ben leap ahead by one stroke only to fall back by the turn. By the fifteenth, he’d regained momentum and a one-stroke advantage, but here his tee shot landed in a muddy divot, and his approach came out heavy and landed in a small stream fronting the green. His bogey squared the match, then Byron struck a beautiful iron shot onto the sixteenth green and drained the birdie to go one-up. Both finished with workmanlike pars, leaving Ben at 71 and Byron at 70.

  They took off their caps, and shook hands, and briefly posed together for a photograph, Byron looking more relieved than victorious, Ben smiling through his gritted teeth.

  Asked what he planned to do next, Byron replied, “Drive home to Fort Worth and rest a bit.” He added that several players from the canceled Ryder Cup team had a match against a group of top Texas pros at a charitable exhibition on Wednesday.

  “How about you, Ben?”

  “Houston,” he replied tersely, then headed for the locker room to collect his things.

  “You can’t blame Ben,” Byron commented to the reporters after he stalked away. “He’s been close more than anyone lately.”

  One of them followed Ben to his car and discovered that some of Byron’s equipment had been loaded into his trunk. He was taking extra shoes, balls, and clubs on to Houston for the Western Open, where Byron would collect them.

  “That’s awful decent of you, Ben. Not every guy would do that for the guy who just beat him out of an important tournament.”

  Ben gave him a withering look. Loyalty meant everything to Ben Hogan—and whatever else was true, he knew few souls on earth had befriended him as loyally as Byron Nelson had over the years. “Really?” he asked. Then he softened. “Well, we’re friends.” Another pause. “It’s just a golf tournament. There will be others.”

  By mid-March, the PGA Tour seemed to belong exclusively to one James Newton Demaret, who’d dropped out of junior high to help his disabled house painter father support nine children and found his way to golf through humor and a hardscrabble Houston caddie yard. Two years older than Ben, Byron, and Sam, Jimmy didn’t begin to find his game until 1938, at which point he began dressing
like a human peacock and shooting the lights out. Johnny Bulla remarked that before Demaret came along the tour resembled an undertaker’s convention, and Ben Hogan said devil-may-care Demaret was the most underrated player in history—his talent overshadowed by his showmanship, loud clothes, practical jokes, and reliable quotability. “This man played shots I haven’t even dreamed of,” Ben once said. “I learned them. But it was Jimmy who showed them to me first.”

  “Get out and live, you’re dead a long time” was sunny Jimmy’s prescription for the good life. Bing Crosby, a frequent playing partner, claimed Demaret was the funniest guy he ever knew who didn’t have a script. “He was a wonderful guy,” according to Sam Snead. “I never met anyone who didn’t like Jimmy—except when he was beating you like a rug and making it look easy.” Ben said the two met in Houston early in their careers and developed an almost instant rapport. Though their friendship struck some as wildly improbable—the dour tour loner who preferred shades of gray and the court jester whose bright pantaloons and friendly antics gave golf its most colorful star since Walter Hagen—they became an almost invincible four-ball team. In retrospect, it’s not difficult to fathom why Ben was drawn to him. In many ways, Jimmy Demaret was a living and breathing personification of what he himself wished to be—Hennie Bogan.

  After claiming a playoff win over Toney Penna at the Western Open in his hometown, “The Houston Hurricane” won in New Orleans and St. Petersburg to top the money list and bring his stunning early-season total to six victories in six tournaments. For the moment, he fascinated the press every bit as much as Sam Snead, curiously absent so far this year, was used to doing. After playing in the Seminole Golf Club’s popular Latham Reed Amateur-Professional Tournament, a private pro-am where a winning player carted home at least 10 percent of a mammoth Calcutta pool, Demaret took a break from the action and returned home to play his trumpet and rest his game before the Masters, now only a month away.