American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Byron finished second in the opens at St. Petersburg and Thomasville, Georgia, won several hundred dollars at his first Seminole Amateur-Professional, and then swung through Texarkana to pick up Louise, his game suddenly purring as smoothly as all eight cylinders of his sleek Studebaker President. By March 16, when they arrived in Pinehurst for the North and South Open and checked into Richard Tufts’s elegant Carolina Hotel, the Hogans had been comfortably ensconced there nearly a week, Ben practicing for hours daily on Heartbreak Hill, and playing several practice rounds on No. 2, identifying preferred angles and danger spots on the course, leaving a trail of Chesterfield stubs in his wake. He had even lunched with Donald Ross, the course’s famous designer and tournament host.

  Though outwardly calm, Ben was desperate to break what he thought of as the ultimate contender’s curse. Over the previous year he’d racked up no fewer than a dozen top-five finishes and half a dozen runner-ups. A popular story holds that he had only thirty-six dollars in his pocket and was so frustrated by his inability to punch through and finally win that he was on the verge of abandoning the tour. Perhaps, but his spirits were sufficiently high to place a long-distance phone call on the eve of the tournament to his friend Jimmy Demaret in Houston and waggishly thank him for staying home that week to attend to club business—proof, in fact, that he did possess a sense of humor.

  Byron brought Ben an unexpected gift—a new MacGregor driver with a stronger True Temper steel shaft and fourteen ounces of swing weight. The moment Ben wrapped his oversized hands around the grip, he knew the club was ideal for him. Ironically, as an amused Byron revealed to friends a few months later, he brought two essentially identical drivers to Pinehurst and Ben had chosen the one that he himself liked—a familiar pattern in their relationship. At any rate, Ben took the new driver straight to Heartbreak Hill, pounded balls for hours, and over dinner that evening offered to buy it. True to form, Byron told him to save his money; the driver was his to keep.

  John Derr, the new assistant sports editor for the Greensboro Daily News, drove down to watch his friend Snead play and arrived just in time to see Hogan—turned out in gray slacks, dark green sweater, white shirt, navy necktie, and signature white linen cap—tee off the next morning, splitting the fairway with a 270-yard blast. A seven-iron shot to twelve feet and a putt that banged the back of the cup yielded an opening birdie—setting a tone for what was to come. “I was there primarily to see how Sam did in the tournament,” Derr recalls, “and the other buzz surrounded Byron. The crowds were there to see those two slug it out, but after I watched Ben play there was something about him that I couldn’t take my eyes off. He betrayed absolutely no emotion but there was something about him that was like an animal let out of a cage. I’d never seen anything quite like it.”

  Ben holed a bunker shot on the eleventh and finished with an impressive 66, tying the competitive course record established one year before by Harry Cooper. “His precision was painstaking,” notes Pinehurst historian Lee Pace. “On one putt of an inch, he went through all the footwork and positioning of a ten-footer.” He didn’t miss a single fairway and led by three over Paul Runyan. “There’s something about this new driver that fits me like a glove,” he said afterward in the locker room. “I tell you, I’ve never driven the ball better.”

  A second round of 67—again, he hit every fairway—widened his lead over Sam Snead and Johnny Revolta to seven. But the aging Gene Sarazen, an unapologetic fan of Byron’s, had seen it all before. “He’s never won before, and he won’t win this time,” he predicted. “Hogan’s been out front before. But someone will catch him.” When this filtered down to Ben, he vowed to prove him wrong. And as John Derr had noticed, there was something different about the tournament leader. Perhaps he’d finally fulfilled his own prescription for winning—to get so far out in front nobody could catch him. Perhaps the golf gods simply decreed it was time for all that humiliating failure and slavish dedication to perfection to at last pay off.

  Whatever the case, on the final day, a chilly overcast Thursday, Ben under-clubbed several times in the morning round and stumbled to 74 but then redeemed himself in the afternoon with sterling iron play and putting that brought him home in 277, eleven under par, clipping two strokes off Vic Ghezzi’s tournament record. Sam fired a brilliant closing 67 to finish second, Byron a workmanlike 70 for third—something that didn’t escape John Derr’s notice. “It was perfect symmetry and a glimpse of the immediate future,” says Derr. “Though nobody could have appreciated the larger symbolism at that moment, the three greatest players of their age finishing one, two, three in a tournament many considered a notch below the U.S. Open in stature, in a place that made a rightful claim to be the Home of Golf in America. It still gives me goose bumps to think about.”

  As usual, Valerie Hogan joined her husband for the final walk up the eighteenth fairway. “Don’t pinch me,” she told Derr and others scribbling in their notebooks. “I’m afraid I’ll wake up. Ben has been close so many times, only to see one fatal shot crumble all his hopes. He’s never given up trying, though, even in his darkest hours.”

  The new North and South Open champion disappeared into the locker room to comb his hair and wash his hands and gather his wits, accepting the congratulations of Byron and Sam before appearing at the winner’s ceremony, where he was presented with the trophy by Donald Ross himself and his earnings in crisp new fifty-dollar bills. Wary of carrying so much cash with him, he asked instead that a check be drawn and sent ahead to a bank in Greensboro.

  On the porch of the resort later, Ben drank a glass of milk and talked to a group of reporters with surprising candor, explaining with visible relief, “I won one just in time. I had finished second and third so many times I was beginning to think I was an also-ran. I needed that win. They’ve kidded me about practicing so much. I’d go out there before a round and practice, and when I was through I’d practice some more. Well, they can kid me all they want because it finally paid off. I know it’s what finally got me in the groove to win.”

  John Derr raced home though the chilly spring darkness to file his story for the morning edition of the Daily News. When the first copies of the paper came up from the composing room around midnight, he was horrified by the headline—“Hagen Wins Pinehurst North and South.” He bolted downstairs to correct the mistake.

  “What? It’s not Hagen?” the foreman snarled at him above the din of the presses. “Well, who the hell is Hogan?”

  In a matter of a days, the world would know the answer to that question.

  Ben and Clayton Heafner fired matching first-round 69s to lead the Greater Greensboro Open, a tournament scheduled to finish with thirty-six holes on Easter Monday. But a spring snowstorm dumped three inches on the course on Easter itself, postponing play until Wednesday. “Let’s ski it off,” Sarazen blithely proposed. During the three-day delay, Ben stayed quietly out of sight at the O. Henry Hotel reading newspapers and putting on the carpet in his guest room, and playing bridge with Valerie, Byron, and Louise. His second-round 68 included three birdies and no bogeys, at which point the tournament shifted out to the elegant Ross-designed Sedgefield Country Club and he continued his assault on the field, posting 66-67 to finish at 270, a tournament record, nine shots ahead of Craig Wood. Byron finished third. “It was easy to see we couldn’t catch that fellow, the way he is playing,” Johnny Revolta remarked to reporters afterward. “You can’t beat perfection.” The Greensboro victory guaranteed nobody would ever confuse Ben Hogan and Walter Hagen again.

  But redemption didn’t stop there. Ben and Val’s travel-worn Buick trailed Byron and Louise’s Studebaker through a heavy fog to Asheville for the Land of the Sky Open, played over three mountain courses and ending at the lush Biltmore Forest Country Club where Bobby Jones honeymooned in 1925. After thirty-six holes, Ben and Lloyd Mangrum were one stroke back of Guldahl, with Byron just one back of them. The challenging Biltmore Forest course—another Ross gem—suited Ben’s exacting eye in ev
ery respect. He later said it was among his favorite courses on tour. It didn’t hurt that its elegant, wealthy, and refined membership treated him like he was one of their own. Not surprisingly, he closed with 69, which beat Guldahl by three strokes. In the clubhouse afterward, slightly chilled from his afternoon’s work, he drank a cup of hot tea, posed for photographs with members, and told a man from the Asheville Citizen, “You wait and prepare so long for something like this to happen. I don’t want it to end. Every time out I feel like I can win now.” Byron, who finished seventh, made a point to congratulate his friend and urge him to keep it up. “Those wins couldn’t have come at a more important moment for Ben,” he recalled decades later. “Because they led up to the Masters, Pinehurst and Greensboro were tournaments everyone wanted to win, and Asheville was like icing on the cake. That Ben won all three in such a quick and decisive manner identified him as someone special, a player to watch.”

  In winning three tournaments over twelve days, Ben Hogan played 216 holes at thirty-four under par, a historic blitz none of his better-known rivals had accomplished. Prior to Masters week, the Hogans drove to Richmond so he could play an exhibition match at the venerable Country Club of Virginia, where he gave his first extensive interview. Choosing not to correct a reporter who asked about “growing up in Fort Worth,” Ben explained how much his widowed, hardworking mother had sacrificed in order to buy him his first real set of golf clubs one Christmas. Beginning in Richmond, he doubled his exhibition fee from $250 to $500, and as a further indication of having arrived on Easy Street he agreed to do a national magazine ad for Bromo Seltzer.

  By the time they reached Augusta, however, he was emotionally drained by his sudden success and all the resulting hoopla. Seemingly overnight, professional golf had a spectacular third new star, a workaholic nobody knew much about. Wherever Ben went, notebooks and microphones were poked in his face. He tried to be cordial and polite, mostly savoring the long-overdue recognition for all his hard work. In fact, he handled his explosive debut far better than Sam had his own “Sneadomania.” He never fled in terror or shoved past overzealous fans, for instance—not yet, anyway. Besides, he’d had plenty of experience watching gracious winners like Picard and Byron perform in the spotlight. It was his turn now.

  Madison Avenue was pursuing him as well, and a New York ad agency was eager to convince him to endorse certain brands of razor blades and beer. Though Ben personally preferred Schlitz, he signed a deal worth $3,000 with Rheingold. More tellingly perhaps, leading players who’d heretofore given him a fairly wide berth—Toney Penna, for example, or the increasingly imperious Gene Sarazen—now made it a point to speak and even chat up the hottest player in the game and welcome him to the winner’s circle. The Squire’s recent comments in Pinehurst still rankled him, of course, as did other swipes going back to his insistence that tour wives had no place on the circuit—a dig, Ben thought, about Valerie’s steadfast presence—and his reflection on Ben’s practice routines: “They exhaust me. With that swing of his, he won’t last out here much longer.” Still, he had finally risen above these absurd pronouncements by a man he’d admired early on and in some respects styled himself after.

  His greatest opponent, however, his own self-doubt, had been soundly beaten. And though he would go on to become the top money winner for 1940, with $10,655 in earnings, capturing the popular Goodall Round Robin and finishing in the top five six more times before the season ended, succeeding Sam and Byron to win his first Vardon Trophy for the season’s lowest scoring average, he perhaps paid too dear a price at the Masters, a victory he needed to draw even with Byron and keep pace with the emerging Texas mafia of Guldahl, Mangrum, and Demaret. Instead, he closed with a 74 and a disappointing ninth-place finish. The rested and red-hot Jimmy Demaret, to nobody’s particular surprise, won the tournament by four shots over Lloyd Mangrum and five over hard-charging Byron. When Ben congratulated Jimmy in the locker room afterward, his colorful friend snapped open a cold beer and cheekily toasted him back, adding with a grin, “It was nice of you to take the week off and let me win one, Ben.”

  A very good thing came Ben’s way that week, however, when Henry Picard pulled him aside and confidentially explained that he had just accepted the top job at Cleveland’s prestigious Canterbury Country Club, doubling the $5,000 salary he’d been receiving at Hershey. The timing was perfect. Hershey was hosting the PGA Championship later that summer, and Picard was the reigning champion. “They’re interested in either you or Snead as a replacement,” he told Ben. “But I’ve told them you’re the right pick. I think they’ll listen to me.”

  As for Sam, he finished eighth in Augusta, one ahead of Ben, and pocketed just $200 for his trouble.

  If Ben’s excuse was simple exhaustion, Sam’s problem was more complicated—an unexpected slump brought about by the strain of his giddy three-year ride to the top of the earnings list, and the challenge of living up to the fame and homespun personality that the media drummed to the public week after week. When in a good mood and performing well, he seemed to be a natural-born showman. But the truth was, he was as much of a loner as Ben—sharing an almost identical wariness of people in general and of big banks, smooth talkers, and in particular the inquisitive press. He, too, made his own travel arrangements, and allowed only manager Fred Corcoran to negotiate his lucrative commercial deals and exhibitions. “Nobody had helped Sam coming up,” his longtime friend Lewis Keller says, “so Sam really wanted—or should I say trusted—nobody to help him. He preferred to do everything himself, from managing his money to driving to tournaments.”

  In a word, Sam was all too human. Beginning with his disappointment at the U.S. Open in 1937, followed by 1939’s debacle, his larger-than-life personality appeared at times to vacillate between euphoria and gloom, depending on events. For example, in 1938—his sophomore season, when he seemed to win everything in sight—he was the picture of country charm and pure folk wisdom until Guldahl, his nemesis at Oakland Hills, eclipsed his brilliant closing 68 at Augusta and beat him by a stroke to win the ’39 Masters, at which point Sam’s mood blackened and he stormed past fans and reporters alike as he fled Magnolia Lane. He later apologized to Roberts and Jones, but the display of poor sportsmanship left a lingering bad taste in both their mouths.

  “Early in his career,” says John Derr, “Sam became convinced he was up against a lot more than either Ben or Byron or anyone else out there faced—including a golf establishment he didn’t think liked him much, players who were jealous of his quick success and genuine fame, and maybe even the Fates themselves. He made a few relatively minor mistakes attributable to youth and inexperience that were amplified by his brutally honest personality. Sam could never hide his emotions. Being a diplomat wasn’t in his nature. If he was having a great time and enjoying himself, you absolutely knew it. If he was in a bad mood, stewing about a bad break or how he played, you knew that, too. In that respect Sam was the exact opposite of Ben, who locked up everything inside.”

  Critics pointed to his lack of grace following the eight-and-seven thrashing administered by Paul Runyan at the PGA Championship at Shawnee-on-Delaware in late ’38, for instance, as well as his disqualification for marking a wrong scorecard at the North and South and a lackadaisical U.S. Open effort at Cherry Hills that offended sponsors and prompted some veteran players to question whether Walter Hagen should pick him for the ’39 Ryder Cup. There was also his indulgence of lucrative private exhibitions, his continuing refusal to fraternize after hours, and, finally, his appalling self-destruction on the final hole that allowed Byron Nelson to win the ’39 U.S. Open. That failure seemed to signal something more problematic than a mercurial personality: a tendency to choke when the stakes were highest.

  To add salt to the wound, he met an attractive young woman out west and proposed marriage after the ’38 season wound down. She briefly considered his offer before marrying a wealthy Arizona physician instead. This devastated Sam, according to his closest friends back home,
which was directly reflected in his uneven play in 1939. He balmed his angst by helping himself to a string of attractive alternative candidates who showed up at sponsor parties and tournament shindigs, and increasingly on the course itself. “Oh, Sam led the league in pretty gals,” uxorious Paul Runyan remembered with a quick laugh. “There always seemed to be one waiting for him wherever he went. They saw Sam as something between a star and Joe DiMaggio. And he could literally charm the pants off them.”

  It all added up to a young man struggling to reconcile his native instincts with the rigors of fame and constant exposure. Like most athletes, Sam loved performing well for the crowds. Success brought out his better side and fueled his natural sociability, elevating both his mood and charm. He’d horse around with players and fans alike, roll his eyes and make funny expressions for the photographers, happily sign autographs, and spin hilarious stories about characters back home that crackled with folksy wisdom. But let the round go sour or a hapless reporter question a particular shot or, worse, the state of his game, and Sam Snead went cold and wanted to get the hell away from the scrutiny, the pesky questions, the pressure of being golf’s biggest draw.

  At Toots Shor’s in New York not long after America entered the Second World War, the story goes, Red Sox slugger Ted Williams—who’d just finished the season batting .406—was ribbing Sam about his sport being so much easier than baseball because a golf ball, instead of going eighty miles an hour, was hit while perfectly still, sometimes on a tee. “That may be,” Sam drawled smoothly for the eavesdropping reporters, “but I have to play my foul balls.” At one point, though, he pulled Williams aside and asked how he handled the high expectations and fickle judgments of the press, the pressure of fans, and his own growing fame. “Hell, Sam, they’re just doing their jobs,” Williams told him with a grin. “Some better than others. Just ignore ’em and go fishing.”