American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  “That easy, huh?”

  “Hell no. But it works for me.” Probably the best-known athletes in America at the time, they became good friends and regular fishing and hunting pals.

  Following the disaster at Spring Mill, Sam went home to the Virginia hills, where he always found succor and perspective roaming the woods and streambeds of Bath County’s rugged high country, an unexpectedly fortuitous move since this turned out to be his mother’s final summer. Laura Snead died suddenly in early 1940, when her son was already taking a beating in the press. “After [almost] five years as a circuit pro,” Sam recounts in his memoirs, “I’d won close to thirty opens, from San Diego to Miami, but not one national title. The papers called me a choke artist, a cheese champ, a ‘mystery,’ and a ‘hex-haunted hillbilly.’ One syndicated writer claimed I was Shoeless Joe Jackson of the links—Jackson never being quite able to edge Ty Cobb for the batting title.”

  “That stuff really began to get under my skin about 1940 and ’41,” he recalled in the ’90s. “I went home to Virginia and started looking at land to buy, trying to put it all behind me. I went hunting and fishing and tried my damn best to ignore it. But it was always there. I couldn’t pick up a paper without seeing something about myself, somebody saying this or that was wrong. Some of it was fair criticism, but it rattled me good, causing me to start pulling out whatever hair I had left in my head. My doctor told me he thought I might have myself a nervous breakdown.”

  “Sam doesn’t kick away tournaments because he isn’t trying,” O. B. Keeler felt obliged to write in his syndicated newspaper column. “And he doesn’t really choke up, the way some people claim. No one can say he isn’t a money player with plenty of heart. His basic trouble is his failure to allow for trouble. He lacks imagination. Snead doesn’t recognize the traps in front of the brook or the clump of trees in the dogleg. He doesn’t consider the gamble involved when he blithely ignores them. He just steps up and socks the ball, and the next minute he’s in a lie where a crowbar wouldn’t help him.”

  Coming from Bobby Jones’s Boswell, this analysis stung, too—mostly because it was absolutely, indisputably correct.

  Under this kind of pressure, it’s hardly surprising that 1940 was his weakest full year on tour, prompting some to speculate that Sam might simply be a flamboyant flash in the pan. After all, despite his finishing third to Byron and Ben at Pinehurst, he won only three tournament titles, all coming late in the season. But Sam had more on his mind than his deepest slump ever.

  In early August 1940, the same year his mother died, Sam suddenly took the plunge and married Audrey Karnes, a large-boned country girl whose wit was as sharp as an ax bite. They’d more or less dated since junior high back in Hot Springs, and his longtime friends took his marriage to Audrey as evidence that he was seeking the comfort and stability of home, but tactfully waited for his mother to pass away before proposing. Reportedly Sam’s mother was no fan of the Karnes clan, who managed a farm owned by Homestead president Fay Ingalls, Sam’s old foil. Audrey, the family’s youngest child, cooked for the farm’s field hands and worked part-time as a maid at the resort. Graduating two years behind Sam, she’d been valedictorian of her class. A commonly told story, however, holds that Laura Snead feared that a strain of mental defectiveness ran through the Karnes family and might adversely affect any children they produced.

  Her adamant objections only briefly delayed her youngest child’s quest for marriage, children, and a stable home life to counterbalance his demanding public life. Days after their marriage at the Hot Springs Methodist church, refusing to reveal any honeymoon plans, Sam and Audrey climbed into his new Oldsmobile and headed for Niagara Falls, which was conveniently near the site of the Canadian Open. On their way there, the newlyweds got lost, drove in circles for half a day and spent their first night as man and wife in a cheap motel in Cumberland, Maryland. “We’ll still get there in time,” Sam assured her.

  “What for?” Audrey tartly demanded. “For the falls or to see you tee off in the Open?”

  It was a relevant question that revealed something about both their natures—the groom’s restless desire to get back to the game he was expected to dominate, the bride’s natural wariness of sharing her husband with countless strangers. Sam was so rushed and rattled by the time they reached Toronto that he appeared on the first tee wearing street shoes instead of golf spikes. The large gallery howled, assuming the country bumpkin was at it again. To make matters worse, the players ribbed him ruthlessly about having spent all his vital juices on husbanding. The press had a field day.

  “If there’d been any way to leave,” Sam later said, “I’d have taken it.”

  While Audrey raced back to their hotel for his shoes, he played the first three holes in his stocking feet, slipping several times. Once his spikes arrived, he was in and out of bunkers and stabbing at putts en route to a 72 that was under the circumstances fairly remarkable. According to the Toronto Star, “Shoeless Sam, the Bashful Bridegroom, the winner of the Canadian Open two years ago, is a 25–1 shot not to repeat, after arriving with a new wife and playing with all the pep of a sleepwalker.” But he buckled down and played the last thirty-six holes nine under par to win, earning a small bit of redemption. “For once, the other fellows had nothing to say about it,” he told Audrey.

  The newlyweds immediately drove to Hershey for the 1940 PGA Championship, Henry Picard’s finale as host professional. The early headlines, however, belonged to Walter Hagen, five times the champion, who found a bit of his old spark and advanced through the first two rounds of match play before being edged out 1-up by Jug McSpaden.

  Ben, playing with his newfound confidence, easily pressed on to the quarterfinal, where Ralph Guldahl narrowly beat him. A significant consolation was that he was hired as Henry Picard’s replacement. Sam had also interviewed for the post but later insisted he never really wanted it. Under the terms of Ben’s new contract, he would be handsomely compensated with a base salary of $10,000, and required only to make periodic appearances at the club—terms almost identical to Sam’s arrangement with the Greenbrier, which had slightly upped his pay to keep him on the premises. He wasn’t obliged to give lessons to members or run the shop, merely to represent the Hershey family’s good name out on tour. This made Sam and Ben among the first to enjoy this kind of sweetheart deal, which over the next decade became commonplace on tour, as Vegas hotels and Florida resorts began signing up celebrated professionals, hoping to feed off their success.

  Sam, still hot under the collar from his honeymoon adventures, soundly defeated Jimmy Hines and Gene Sarazen, then thumped McSpaden five-and-four to reach the PGA final against none other than Byron Nelson.

  Byron had spent most of the summer settling into his new job at Inverness, and had basically been out of action since the U.S. Open in June, when he placed a respectable fifth and Lawson Little nipped past the still dangerous Gene Sarazen in a playoff to claim the title. The caravan then brought him home to the Inverness Four-Ball, where he sentimentally teamed with Walter Hagen, who found the event so grueling he simply skipped playing the back nine in their last two rounds. “You can handle the boys,” he assured the host pro, who as a kid had once lent him his cap to block the brutal Texas sun, and then headed back to the clubhouse for a toddy. Byron and his famous partner came in dead last, but Byron naturally savored the experience.

  Unlike Sam and Ben, Byron viewed his club job as his main priority. Inverness had 350 golfing members who demanded the attentions of a full-time professional, and he was only too happy to provide it. He loved teaching players at any level, and believed a self-taught instructor was the best kind. One of his first pupils there was a hotheaded, club-tossing teenager named Frank Stranahan, whose daddy ran the Champion Spark Plug Company; despite a shaky start in their relationship, Stranahan went on to become the world’s leading amateur player for a time. Moreover, Byron enjoyed the give-and-take with members and viewed Inverness as his own version of Nirvana. Among ot
her things, he innovated the practice of stocking Foot-Joy golf and street shoes in his shop, and convinced a member who owned an umbrella company to manufacture ones that could withstand the awful conditions golfers often played through. For several years, even after he was internationally famous, he visited leading department stores wherever he went, picking up $25 for every sales call he made plus a royalty from every golf umbrella or pair of Foot-Joy shoes that got sold.

  Louise appreciated the settled life in Toledo even more than her husband did. Like Valerie Hogan, she was tired of life on the road. “I was very busy at Inverness and extremely happy,” Byron recounts. “I did enough traveling during the winter in California and the Southeast that by the time the Masters was over, Louise and I were happy to get back to Toledo and spend the relatively cool summers there.”

  A month before the PGA at Hershey, he warmed up for the championship competing in a series of better-ball matches with his club’s finest players. During this same interval he purchased a fifty-five-acre farm near Denton, Texas, not only to establish residency for tax purposes, but also to provide his parents and siblings with a comfortable place to live. His father was running a feed store in Handley and his younger brother, Charles, was preparing to follow their sister, Ellen, off to college. Byron picked up the tab on it all. Supporting the family who had always supported him was always high on his list of priorities.

  He won several matches at Inverness, largely because his game didn’t need much tuning up. When he reached Hershey, his drives were as straight and his irons as crisp and sharp as they had been earlier in the year. There was no trace of a layoff.

  During his semifinal match against the tediously deliberate Ralph Guldahl, Byron—one of the quickest players ever—found himself struggling to stay patient and focused, but also a little unsteady on his feet. Beforehand, in the locker room, he’d thrown up his breakfast—a story that in time was broadly circulated and contributed to the idea that Byron, like his hero, Bobby Jones, was often queasy before a big match. In fact, such nervousness did increasingly assert itself with a churning acidity in the pit of his stomach.

  The previous year he’d been runner-up, as his opponent, Sam, had been the year before, so in a sense 1940’s PGA was a battle between two bridesmaids. Each had his ardent supporters on hand in Hershey, and over the first eighteen holes of their final match, Byron took a two-up lead. But Sam fought back in the afternoon to square things and take a one-up lead by the thirty-fourth hole. When Sam just missed his twenty-foot birdie attempt there, Byron made a two-footer to square things again with only two holes to play. On the next hole, a shortish par-four, Sam again put his approach inside twenty feet and Byron carved a magnificent wedge to within two feet again; Sam’s putt lipped out, prompting a chorus of groans from his followers, and Byron coolly tapped in his birdie to take a one-up lead to the final hole, a long par-three.

  Teeing up quickly, Byron made a smooth pass with a three-iron and finished ten feet from the cup. Sam, using the same club, pulled his shot slightly and watched his ball trickle off the green into a grassy collar. A few minutes later, his pitch came up short and he then narrowly missed his par effort, leaving Byron a careful two-putt for his first PGA Championship. At the presentation of the Wanamaker Cup, he reached over to offer a gracious hand to Sam, who shook and grinned. His left hand, however, firmly held the handle of the trophy he so desperately wanted to win. It was a telling moment—the first head-to-head outcome in a major that involved this great triumvirate.

  A week later, just up the road in Scranton, Sam edged out Byron to capture the Anthracite Open.

  Three months later, to close out the year, Byron fired three rounds in the 60s to beat Clayton Heafner by a stroke and won the Miami Open, where Ben Hogan finished third.

  Days after Miami, a syndicated columnist from New York flew to Fort Worth to interview Ben in the members’ grill at the Colonial Country Club, where Marvin Leonard’s staff had already begun preparations to host the 1941 U.S. Open.

  “How do you assess this year?” the columnist asked 1940’s leading money winner, and Ben seemed more cordial and relaxed. He declined to talk about his past but had no problem addressing the season just ended. He complimented Byron and Sam and singled out his good friend Jimmy Demaret for particular praise. Excepting Sam, he explained, they’d all gone deer hunting in northern Texas only weeks before. The reporter later observed that he had a hard time picturing the three of them—the silent Ben, the genial Byron, and the outlandish Jimmy—together in the woods. Byron bagged a buck, however—and got socked with an eighty-dollar fine for not having a hunting license. “The year was very gratifying,” Ben summed up, finishing his Coca-Cola. “But I’ve set my sights on winning major golf tournaments, and I still haven’t done that.” He thought for a moment and added, just so there was no confusion about the matter, “Until I manage to win a major tournament, I really won’t be happy.”

  And with that, he excused himself and headed for perhaps the only place that made him truly happy—the practice range.

  9

  THE WAR WITHIN

  GOOD PLAYERS WIN GOLF TOURNAMENTS, goes one of the game’s simplest truths. Great players win major championships.

  The North and South, the Western Open, the Metropolitan Open, and more and more the rapidly improving Masters were all considered just a notch below major status, titles any champion would be thrilled to claim. But they weren’t the U.S. Open or the PGA crown, and with Britain now at war, the Open Championship, golf’s oldest championship, was on hold and out of reach until further notice.

  By the middle of 1941, the quality of American life itself was threatened by events that had already engulfed much of the world, and especially its closest ally. “There was kind of an eerie waiting that went on,” Byron recalled. “Everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until America joined the war against Germany, but we all tried to keep up normal life, so to speak, doing the things we’d always done.” For Byron, who owned two major titles, and perhaps more urgently for Sam and Ben, who claimed none, this meant focusing their concentration more intensely than ever on winning a major championship before circumstances altered their opportunities. “Once Britain was in that thing,” Sam remembered, “we all knew it was only a matter of time until even the tour got canceled. That put the hurry-up, let me tell you, in more than a few of us.”

  By the start of U.S. Open week at Marvin Leonard’s magnificently groomed Colonial Golf Club in June of 1941, Sam had nearly fifty official and unofficial wins and had perhaps done more than any other single player to revive popular interest in the professional game. For him, winning a major championship would mean finally getting the monkey off his back and quieting the boo-birds of the press, some of whom openly doubted whether he could do so under pressure. Several influential sportswriters, most notably Grantland Rice, acknowledged the many positive effects of his yeoman popularity, but resented Sam’s occasional crude antics and apparent indifference to their criticisms, not to mention his mercurial mood swings. Many were all too happy to question his resolve and knock his reputation down a peg or two.

  For Byron Nelson, collecting another major championship trophy would simply burnish his already sterling reputation with the general public and the press, not to mention his past and present associations with Ridgewood, Reading, and Inverness, deepening friendships he carried with him wherever he went. From his point of view, winning a national championship was secondary to his reputation as a working golf club professional. The familiar duties and settled airs of club life were key components of Byron’s personal happiness, in some ways the most enduring rewards of his career. As he confided to more than one friend, winning another major title would simply grant him the luxury of spending more time at home among friends and club members, doing what he loved best.

  For Ben Hogan, finally, a major title would put even greater distance between himself and his carefully guarded childhood and the brutal years he’d spent struggling to master the
game and coming up with little to show for it—nothing divided by nothing. “Ben’s greatest struggle, I think, was always hidden pretty deep inside him,” Byron remarked to a visitor to his ranch in the early ’90s. “Almost from the day I first met him he was in a hurry to win something significant. And once he won, despite those unfortunate things—and maybe because of them—I don’t believe there was anything that could possibly have stopped him.”

  Sam returned to action in 1941 with a rested body and a refortified attitude, quickly posting impressive wins at the Crosby Clambake, St. Petersburg, St. Augustine, and the North and South before turning his flashy new Cadillac into Magnolia Lane. On the downside, the new Mrs. Snead, a homebody at heart, found long-distance road travel and the social swirl on tour entirely to her disliking—the tedious hours on the road every week, the uncertainty of the food and lodgings, the boredom of waiting with gossipy spouses while Sam performed his magic on the course. Audrey didn’t enjoy shopping or seeing the sights, and unlike her husband she wasn’t a terribly stylish dresser, her tastes running to plain, sensible well-made dresses that could be bought off the rack cheaply at Sears. As natural as the mineral hills she’d grown up in—in this respect much like her husband—the former Valley High valedictorian and farmhand manager wasn’t interested in social drinking or parties. Not surprisingly, almost from the beginning of their travels together, she made her displeasure known to Sam. The two sparred and argued, made up and moved on. “It was not a marriage made in heaven,” notes Snead biographer Al Barkow. “It wasn’t hell, either. It lived more or less in its anteroom—purgatory. It was a clash of fire and oil, of personalities that were, in some ways, too similar.”

  “Audrey and me had been arguin’ since we were kids in the school yard,” Sam once addressed the subject with a laugh. “But she sure didn’t think much of life out on tour, that’s for sure. I wasn’t all that crazy about the travel, to tell the truth, though I do love drivin’ a car just about anywhere I go. I got a big kick out of rollin’ into a place where there was a big tournament, and bein’ on the road helped me get my mind set around that, thinkin’ about what I needed to do. But I think that’s maybe why she didn’t take to it at all. She wasn’t really part of it. Audrey was a woman who had to have something to do—and at home there was always that.” After months of mostly contentious travel, Audrey was homesick for Hot Springs and Sam was fed up with her refusal to go with the flow; they agreed she’d tend to things at home and think about starting a family while he took care of business on the road. As the East Coast portion of his schedule got going, Sam either went alone or invited his former traveling pals John Derr and Johnny Bulla along for the ride.