American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Byron, on the other hand, started slowly in 1941 and didn’t really pick up his pace until just before the Masters, when at the Seminole Amateur-Professional Tournament he collected $803 for placing first and at least three times that amount in unofficial dough in the event’s high-flying Calcutta. He also won at Greensboro by holding off the hard-charging reigning champion, Ben Hogan.

  Of the three, Ben appeared to have the firmest resolve to win even as rumors circulated that the tour might suspend play as war loomed ever closer. In March, Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act encouraged American companies to directly aid the besieged European democracies by selling, lending, or leasing critical war materials to the tune of $50 billion, the first step toward direct American involvement, and companies were already shifting to wartime mode, cutting back on consumer products in order to build reserves of rubber and steel. MacGregor, for instance, which Byron, Ben, and Jimmy Demaret represented on tour, had stopped manufacturing golf balls and clubs, converting its production floor in Dayton, Ohio, to making parachutes and aviation safety harnesses.

  Almost overnight, there was a shortage of tournament-quality golf balls. For years Sam Snead loved to explain how, as the war effort deepened and material shortages led to rationing, he won several tournaments using the same golf ball for all four rounds; how he routinely scavenged lost balls from water hazards and often played with balls slightly out of round; how players sold or swapped excess equipment in the lobbies of their hotels. Another casualty of this period was the auto caravan that had defined the nomadic early tour. As gasoline and rubber grew noticeably scarce, many of the leading players, Hogan and Nelson among them, switched to traveling by train. Sam, however, stayed on the road.

  In fourteen starts from January to June, Ben finished second six times and placed out of the top ten once. Teaming with his former critic Gene Sarazen, he lapped the field at the Miami Four-Ball and nearly defended his titles in Greensboro and Asheville. At the Masters, where he and Valerie dined with Bobby Jones for the first time, he had his best showing yet: fourth place. Byron, closing with a strong 70, finished second to Craig Wood, the likable Winged Foot pro and the first man to lead wire-to-wire. Wood, then thirty-nine, was perhaps the tournament’s sentimental favorite, having been runner-up to Byron at the U.S. Open in 1939 and suffering an equally tough loss to Denny Shute at the British Open six years prior to that, losing both times in a playoff. It was also Craig Wood who was victimized by Sarazen’s famous double-eagle blast at Augusta in 1935, losing that in the resulting playoff. The man who could most identify with losing a major in this manner, Sam Snead, opened with an untidy 73-75 and didn’t find his footing until a final-round 69 left him tied with Vic Ghezzi.

  Even under the threat of war—and maybe because of it—professional golf continued to enjoy growing public support. The Masters set new attendance records that spring, suggesting to some that Bobby Jones’s boutique invitational had achieved “major” status. This continued a trend first seen in 1938, the year the governing USGA and PGA tour settled on a fourteen-club rule and more than sixty million rounds of golf were played, hundreds of public golf courses reopened, and more than half a million spectators turned out to watch some kind of golf tournament. Similar records were broken in 1940 and ’41. With the reviving PGA Tour featuring twenty-one official events, purses totaled $185,500 (of which Sam Snead took home nearly $20,000) and tour manager Fred Corcoran required tournament sponsors to guarantee at least $5,000 for a 72-hole event. In the years immediately prior to the war, the Cleveland Open’s $10,000 purse recalled the glory days of the late 1920s. At Augusta National, where not long before members were forced to pass the hat to keep the tournament alive, record gate receipts in 1941 confirmed not only that golf was on the upswing but also that Sam, Byron, and Ben were a primary reason why. Despite the loss of ten or so tournaments in 1939 and 1940 directly attributable to fuel and material rationing, professional golf bounced back in ’41 with an increase in purses across the board.

  During America’s nervous early summer of 1941, as movie fans went to see Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and marveled at Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak and the Nazi juggernaut rolled east into the Soviet Union, Byron and Ben were naturally considered the favorites for the U.S. Open in their own backyard at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, followed closely by Sam, Jimmy Demaret, and Dallas native Lloyd Mangrum.

  Despite a week of threatening weather, owing to Marvin Leonard’s persuasive hustle and personal magnetism every civic club and organization in Fort Worth was involved in pre-tournament receptions and evening lawn parties. Hogan arrived home after a frustrating fourth-place finish at the Goodall Round Robin in New York (where at Toots Shor’s he met Ted Williams, who when asked what shaking hands with Hogan was like tersely replied, “Bands of steel.”). At Colonial, Ben stayed well out of sight, avoiding the hoopla and lunching with Royal (who was now reigning Colonial club champion, a title he held for many years) in the men’s grill and working on his MacGregor Silver Scot irons in the workroom below the Colonial pro shop. Every afternoon following lunch, he and a caddie traipsed out to the ninth green for lengthy chipping and putting sessions, a privilege no other players enjoyed or even contemplated. Unlike many of the courses the tour played, Colonial boasted an expansive practice area, but the Hawk’s growing preference for isolation reinforced a strengthening perception among his peers and tour scribes that Hogan did things his own damn way and didn’t care what anyone thought about it.

  With the press, Ben’s growing image problems stemmed from a couple of well-publicized incidents in 1940 where he skipped town after winning a tournament, denying local reporters the opportunity to interview him and earning the wrath of both Fred Corcoran and the local sponsors, who needed every shred of good publicity their tournament could get. “Frankly, I was so excited to get to the next tournament and see what I could do, I just forgot to stick around for the interviews,” Ben explained ineffectually. With a defensive edge that bordered at times on contempt and flat-out insincerity, he told one influential Midwestern columnist, “I sure didn’t mean to offend anybody. But I have a job to do and that’s winning golf tournaments.” The only thing Ben really needed, his pal Demaret reminded those who were offended, was more hours of daylight for practice.

  Rather than lingering to savor his long-pursued success and express his appreciation to admiring fans and sponsors, Ben appeared to grow even more oblivious to the protocols of gracious winning and even less tolerant of interviews of any kind. If a question annoyed or bothered him, for example, he simply ignored it or, even worse, fixed the reporter with a brief stare that wire-brushed him into silence. If it irked veteran reporters that his answers to legitimate questions were often miserly and curt, Ben was aggravated that many of them frequently took unreasonable liberties by carelessly misquoting his carefully parsed comments or taking them out of context. The end result, in any case, wasn’t flattering. “He may be one of the best players in the game right now,” a sports columnist for the powerful Rocky Mountain News complained after Ben collected his check and vacated the Denver tournament before anyone knew he was gone, “but he’s certainly not making many friends where it counts—with reporters and fans.”

  In fairness to Ben, he appeared genuinely surprised by the vigor of the criticism provoked by what he considered unintended slights—and by doing what he believed was the only thing he was placed on this earth to do: win golf tournaments. In his ultra-pragmatic mind, moreover, winning merely helped make up for years of repeated failure, and underscored the fact that he needed to win everything he could before it all came to a screeching halt, for whatever reason. This kind of dark fatalism informed Ben’s deep interior life and game much as it did his rival Snead’s. “When Ben’s around,” Sam famously quipped about this time, “you can almost hear his watch ticking.” As a world around them teetered on the edge of the abyss, both men were already fighting their own silent wars within.

  Despite the
large and enthusiastic crowds and lavish hospitality, the forty-fifth U.S. Open Championship failed to deliver the championship ending everyone hoped for. Fierce thunderstorms repeatedly halted play, flooding bunkers and greens and turning the fairways of Marvin Leonard’s relatively young course into a quagmire, prompting one New York wag to cheekily label this the “Fort Worth Stockyards Invitational.”

  As crews fanned out under tumultuous skies and Leonard’s watchful eye to squeegee greens and bail out sunken bunkers, the pros played cards and grumbled in the locker room. Convinced his game was rounding into top form right on schedule, Sam was eager to steal a national championship from under the noses of the Texas mafia in general and Ben and Byron in particular, only to tromp through the mud to a poorly managed opening-round 76, which he never recovered from, finishing in a tie for thirteenth in the final standings. Byron’s campaign proved even more problematic. Staying with his parents on his new Denton spread north of town, shuttling into the tournament every morning by car and then encountering one rain delay after another, his tempo was hopelessly thrown off. He never found his comfort zone and finished in a tie for seventeenth place.

  Of the three favorites, only Ben maintained anything close to his normal composure and focus. His sloppy second-round 77 came during the heaviest downpours but he finished the double-round finale with the lowest score for the 36-hole closing day at 68–70, a 289 total that put him in third behind Denny Shute and the eventual winner, Craig Wood—the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal week.

  At least Wood’s success made for a poignant and compelling conclusion. Days before the tournament started, he pulled a muscle and feared his ailing back wouldn’t stand up to the pressure of an Open chase. A customized orthopedic back brace helped ease the searing pain but significantly constricted his golf swing. Only after Silver Scot Tommy Armour, fortified by nips from his hip flask, passionately urged him to carry on did Wood strap the brace back on and take his chances, expecting little or nothing in return. In fact, the pleasant New Yorker played masterfully, never missing a fairway over the final eighteen and finished at 284, giving the waterlogged fans of Fort Worth something to cheer about, and finally claiming a title that had eluded him for so long.

  To anyone in search of a message, Wood’s dogged persistence and triumph over adversity spoke volumes about what it takes to win major championships. U.S. Opens in particular are endurance contests where the plodding tortoise often fares better than the bolting hare. Every time Ben crept a little higher up the final leaderboard of a major, as he did at Colonial that year, his confidence in his own abilities grew exponentially. “The greatest thing Ben had to finally overcome,” says Jackie Burke Jr., the Masters and PGA champ of 1956, who became a preferred practice partner and one of his closest friends on tour, “was the powerful insecurity he battled most of his life. There was no question he had all the shots by 1940—nobody was better prepared in that regard than Ben, frankly. But winning major championships requires a special kind of confidence few players ever acquire, and those who acquire it never seem to be able to keep it long. That’s what finally made Ben so unique. Once it finally came together, once he finally got those big hands of his around it, once he found that kind of confidence, hell, he almost couldn’t be beaten.”

  Byron addressed the elusive topic in a conversation with Al Barkow some years later. “Is there a psychology for winning? I don’t understand the psychological function of the human mind sufficiently to answer that very well, except to say that winners are different. They’re a different breed of cat. I think the reason is, they have an inner drive and are willing to give of themselves whatever it takes to win. It’s a discipline that a lot of people are not willing to impose on themselves.”

  A poignant footnote to Marvin Leonard’s one and only national Open underscores this point. Following the presentation of the trophy, during the drive back to his hotel in downtown Fort Worth with tour impresario Fred Corcoran, Wood found himself gazing out the window at a lighted driving range where patrons were beating balls into a clearing evening sky.

  “Want to stop and hit a bucket?” Corcoran asked, giving a good Irish chuckle. “Just to keep the back loose?” He later explained that he’d been joking.

  Wood needed only an instant. “Yeah,” he said, “let’s do that.”

  To the surprise and astonishment of the range’s patrons, America’s new national golf champion got out, paid his money, and hit a bucket of balls. Perhaps Wood appreciated how fortunate he’d been, trussed up in a corset, to claim a prize the three hottest players in the game were desperate to win. Or perhaps he sensed, as he later admitted to close friends at Winged Foot, how quickly the magic of success arrived and vanished in American sports, like moonlight on the water. Today’s news wrapped tomorrow’s fish, particularly in tournament golf.

  In any event, classy Craig Wood had finally won the events he’d long dreamed of winning, the Masters and the U.S. Open, both in the same year. Maybe, as he hit shot after shot into the pleated evening sky over Fort Worth, prompting bursts of vigorous applause from the lucky hackers gathered around watching this extraordinary impromptu exhibition, he had a premonition that this would be his final moment in the light of victory. He would return to his job at Winged Foot a deeply grateful and satisfied man, winning only two more times before his game abandoned him for good.

  As for Ben, if there was a message in his brilliant closing rounds of 68-70 in fitful conditions over one of the toughest Open courses, his score of 289 would actually have won three previous championships and seemed to suggest he now understood how to finish off a major with a cold killer’s efficiency.

  True to form, however, he took no consolation from his best Open showing to date. Within hours he was packing for a train ride up to the new Mahoning Valley Open in Ohio, where he took a third, then carried on to Toledo for Byron’s Inverness Four-Ball, where he teamed with Jimmy Demaret to run the table. After losing to Byron two-and-one in the quarterfinal at the PGA—whereupon Vic Ghezzi subsequently beat Byron one-up in a taut thirty-eight-hole final to claim the Wanamaker Trophy—Ben went on a tear to conclude the season, winning in Chicago and at his own Hershey event, in total claiming second place at five of the six remaining tournaments to finish as the tour’s leading money winner—with $18,734—and the game’s most maddeningly elusive star.

  After Fort Worth’s Open, Byron went on a modest tear of his own, placing second at Mahoning Valley, and then winning George S. May’s inaugural Tam O’Shanter Open outside Chicago, whose first prize was a tour-best $2,000 check. Before returning to Texarkana to spend the holidays with Louise’s family, he captured opens in Ohio and Miami to earn $13,526 in official money.

  That was just $650 more than Sam, yet because two of Byron’s wins came at unofficial events he wound up as second-leading money winner, producing a final standing of Hogan, Snead, and Nelson, one, two, three, in the money race, a perfect snapshot of each man’s psychological motivation. Sam likewise went on a post-Open run and collected victories at the Canadian and the Rochester Times Union opens followed by a blistering Henry Hurst Invitational, where he won by carding three rounds in the mid-60s.

  That December, while tooling with his friend John Derr down to Miami’s season-ending tournament in his Cadillac, Sam confided that he believed his game was poised to finally end his biggest hex. “Despite the fact that Ben and Byron were getting as much or even more attention than he was, Sam felt his game had finally matured to the point where something like a Spring Mill disaster could never happen again. He was ready to claim a major—but the question that haunted everybody, and maybe Sam most of all, would there even be another major championship anytime soon?”

  An answer of sorts came during their drive. “It was a beautiful Sunday and we were going down a week early so Sam could practice and enjoy the warm weather, having a great time talking about everything from baseball to women,” Derr recalls. “I think we were somewhere in Georgia and had stopped for gas.
It was late in the afternoon. We had the radio on and suddenly the announcer was telling us that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t believe it. I remember Sam just listening and shaking his head. All he said was something like, ‘Them sorry sons-a-bitches.’ It was all pretty solemn after that, very little bantering. We got down to Miami and everything had suddenly changed. It was all about business but the war was on everyone’s mind. There was talk that the tour would shut down immediately. Nobody had a clue what might come next. Suddenly every shot, some guys figured, might be the last one in competition for a while. Sam was particularly concerned about that. He wanted that major championship more than anything and feared he’d been jinxed one more time—this time by the Japanese.”

  Byron blistered the Miami Lakes course with three rounds in the low 60s to win with a total of 269. Ben and Sam both had three rounds in the 60s, with Ben finishing at 274 and Sam one back of that, a one, two, three conclusion that seemed to splendidly summarize the state of professional golf.