by James Dodson
He stood for a moment in the buttery late-afternoon light, a broad smile spreading across his handsome features. He reflected that upon winning his first major championship—the most important title of his career, he always claimed—he uncharacteristically heard neither the cheers nor the catcalls from the gallery. “It ended so damn fast,” he quipped, “I almost forgot to notice.”
At the presentation ceremony, he congratulated the game’s newest star and wished him well. Six years later, Turnesa would finish second to Ben Hogan in the same major championship, then finally claim it himself in 1952, a lovely story of one man’s persistence.
But for now it was Sam Snead’s golden moment, his long-awaited redemption. He playfully kissed the Wanamaker Trophy and held it up to a large ovation from a crowd including many soldiers whose minds were apparently changed by the strength of this dazzling finish by golf’s most colorful star, and they weren’t the only detractors his victory finally silenced. For once, the press couldn’t heap enough praise on his impressive come-from-behind win in enemy territory.
On Sunday morning, Sam woke up the new PGA champion and would remain so for the war’s duration. “I never had a better feeling in my life,” he remembered. “The only thing that brought it down some was the fact that golf was pretty much done for the time being. None of us had any idea when it might come back—or even if it would.”
On Monday morning, he drove back to Norfolk and signed his enlistment form, officially making him a seaman first class in the Special Services of the United States Navy.
Sam—deep in the rigors of basic training, though treated as something of a VIP—wasn’t granted a furlough for the Hale America National Open that was held three weeks later outside Chicago at the pretty Ridgemoor Country Club. The tournament was a one-time affair, co-sponsored by the Chicago District Golf Association and the USGA, meant to serve as a fund-raiser for the Navy Relief Society and the United Service Organization, and designed to heighten public enthusiasm for buying war bonds. Millions of fans failed to grasp that it was a replacement event for the officially suspended U.S. Open Championship.
To help drive home the point that all Americans needed to chip in and do their part, newly commissioned Captain Robert Tyre Jones Jr., fresh from intelligence training in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, showed up in his new Army Air Corps uniform to play a practice round with Ben Hogan. Because of a painful varicose vein condition, Jones had actually been classified 4-F—meaning he was physically unfit for service—but argued persuasively that a legendary sportsman in uniform might do wonders for recruitment. Following his practice round, he remarked to PGA president Ed Dudley and Charlie Bartlett of the Chicago Tribune, “I have never seen anyone who works as hard at this game as Ben Hogan does. He is remarkable and an inspiration.”
In a well-publicized pre-tournament charity event, Ben allowed his red-hot Spalding putter to be auctioned off, netting $1,500 for navy relief. The gesture was seen as one of tremendous generosity and patriotism—though it maybe wasn’t as altruistic as it appeared on first glance. Back home in Fort Worth, he’d been trying out a new center-shafted model whose head was made from a melted-down doorknob. On the threshold of enlisting himself, he had already decided this would be the putter to carry him into postwar tournament action, if and when the tour resumed.
After opening with a mediocre 72, he shellacked the field with 62-69-68 to cakewalk to the tournament’s title, winning $1,200 in war bonds and a “victory” medallion nearly identical to the bronze medal presented by the USGA to its national Open winners. For the record, Byron played well, too, finishing seven strokes back in fourth place.
In the locker room afterward, Ben appeared uncharacteristically happy and approachable—almost as if he believed he’d actually won the U.S. Open. Reporters discovered that he, in fact, believed exactly that—that he’d finally won a major. When asked if he considered this his major breakthrough, Ben blinked hard at the questioner and replied without hesitation, “Yes. I think given the quality of this field it’s a major championship.” Whereupon he gave a wintry little smile and added, “At least I feel that way. Don’t know about you boys.”
The reporters laughed. Most of them, it turned out, didn’t share Ben’s opinion of the Hale America Open and its ersatz bronze medal, and neither did the blue sports coats of the USGA. For many weeks, however, a gentlemanly debate was waged in the pages of America’s newspapers. Ben’s own growing ranks of fans were multiplying, and many of them regarded the Hale America as a legitimate major, and wrote letters to the USGA demanding that it be recognized as such. But in the end, the win counted only as a standard tour victory.
In early August, after many of his contemporaries had signed up to serve in some capacity or another, Ben was unable to let go of the reins and finished fourth in the Canadian Open, and then won the Rochester Open on his way back to Fort Worth. This pushed him to the top of the money list for 1942, a $13,143 total that just edged out Byron Nelson and Sam Snead—a powerful glimpse of the postwar world to come.
10
MR. GOLF
SIXTEEN MILLION AMERICANS, ABOUT 13 percent of the nation’s population, answered the call of duty in the Second World War, and more than half were enlistments. Despite President Roosevelt’s hope that golf could boost morale on the home front, the PGA mounted only three official events in 1943—in part because gas rationing and other shortages meant almost nobody was traveling more than a few miles by car, but also because in some cases there were scarcely enough quality players to fill out a competitive field. Ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Office of Price Administration issued an order reducing production of new golf balls by 80 percent, and within days a similar order halted club manufacturing entirely.
Despite the War Commission’s message urging Americans to get out and play golf, roughly a third of the nation’s courses and clubs shut down for the duration. Those clubs that remained open did so with skeletal maintenance crews that allowed grass to fill bunkers and narrowed fairways and removed rough entirely to reduce the need for mowing. Some shortened their course to nine holes and used the rest for victory gardens. Wykagyl Golf Club in New York, for instance, plowed up two holes to provide home gardens for its sixty members. At nearby Westchester Country Club, divers were hired to collect golf balls from the ponds, and an Atlanta country club actually drained its ponds, netting sixteen thousand balls for reprocessing. These foundlings generally performed at only 70 percent of their initial capabilities, though scientists at DuPont soon developed a synthetic rubber substitute that made them more reliable (a material still used in the golf balls of today).
Bobby Jones had been among the first to sign up after he and Clifford Roberts jointly decided to close Augusta National immediately after the 1942 Masters, hiring a wartime caretaker to raise turkeys and look after the two hundred head of steers purchased to graze on its idle fairways. The tour’s leading names followed suit. Long-hitting Jimmy Thomson went to the coast guard, and Henry Ransom the merchant marine. Lawson Little, the son of an army colonel, became a navy officer. Snead, Jimmy Demaret, Herman Keiser, and a young Lew Worsham also joined the navy. Lloyd Mangrum, Dutch Harrison, Clayton Heafner, Jim Ferrier, Horton Smith, and Vic Ghezzi signed up for the army. Most of these pros wound up staying stateside, stationed at bases where they essentially played golf with top military brass, though Herman Keiser spent thirty-six months at sea and Ghezzi, Smith, Heafner, and Lloyd Mangrum all served overseas. At the Battle of the Bulge, Mangrum sustained a serious leg wound and was awarded a pair of Purple Hearts. Jones himself went ashore with the intelligence unit of the Ninth Army Air Corps on D-Day-plus-one and hunkered down through several nights of enemy shelling.
William B. Hogan reported for active duty in the Army Air Forces on March 25, 1943. Valerie drove him to the Tarrant County Courthouse, where inductees were put on a bus bound for basic training outside Fort Worth. The night before, Ben presented her a star sapphire ring. “I don’t know when I’ll
be able to give you another gift,” he said, “so I want to give you this before I go.” She slipped the ring on her finger and never took it off again.
He requested she leave before his bus arrived. It was only a short ride out to the recently renamed Tarrant Field.
“I don’t want to leave,” she insisted. “I want to stay until the bus pulls away.”
“I want you to leave,” he repeated, displaying his usual mineral resolve.
Years later, she recalled, “I realized he didn’t want to tell me goodbye with the bus there.” So she left.
Lacking a high school diploma, Ben was assigned the rank of private. His decision to join the air forces was a curiously Hoganesque one. He was terrified of flying, but later confided to close Shady Oaks friends that, true to form, there was a strong element of calculated pragmatism to his choice. Texas and Oklahoma were home to most of the top flight training camps, enhancing his chances of staying closer to home. Beyond this—and far more psychologically rooted—Ben fancied learning to fly in order to conquer yet another fear. “His whole life up till then had been about confronting his fears and beating them to a pulp,” explained a regular lunch companion for more than three decades. “For Ben, learning to fly an airplane was all about taking control of that fear and beating it down. I’m not the least bit surprised he chose the air force.”
Ben himself said as much when he told a reporter from Dallas, “I’ve never really flown very much, and I’m eager to see what flying is all about. A number of golfers have taken to flying between tournaments. Perhaps, if I become a pilot, I might also.”
After basic training—during which he used money from his own pocket to purchase cleaning solutions for his unit’s barracks—he was shipped to Officer Candidate School in Miami. “I’m eager and willing to do whatever the Army needs me to do,” he told the Star-Telegram. “And I’m pretty sure that doesn’t mean playing much tournament golf. From now on, I think most of my golf is going to be played only on Sundays.”
In November of 1943, Valerie proudly pinned the new gold bars of a second lieutenant’s rank on her husband’s shoulder, and the newly designated squadron leader complained that his unit had not yet managed to win the weekly marching pennant. “He really worked his men,” she told a reporter back home some years later. “One of them was Mark Payne, the architect who years later would design our Fort Worth home. Mark later told me, ‘Ben was the toughest officer we had. He nearly killed us.’ Finally Ben’s squadron won the marching pennant. He was so happy, and so typical. Golf or marching, he had to win something.”
Assigned to a newly formed Civilian Pilot Training Program designed to pump out interim instructors who could teach basic techniques to younger combat pilots, Ben was shipped off to air bases in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana for his own flight training, ultimately winding up at the Spartan School of Aerodynamics in Tulsa. In an article published not long after he arrived, the Tulsa World announced that “Hogan Gives Up Golf” yet noted that he’d already played in at least two dozen Red Cross exhibitions, helping to raise much needed money for other service-related charities as well. During one of these matches at prestigious Southern Hills—a Perry Maxwell design that would eventually host three U.S. Opens—a lean and smiling Lieutenant Ben Hogan assured reporters that he felt confident he would soon be “sent overseas to join the action.”
“I frankly think Ben enjoyed being out of the tournament world for a time,” reflected Tex Moncrief, his longtime friend from the Rivercrest Country Club and Colonial. “It was a good time for him to step back and think about how far he’d come and what he might do when things swung back into action. I also think he really did want to go abroad and serve the way Bob Jones and others did. Ben had the heart of a lion, and in that regard he really was fearless. I’m sure he would have served with distinction over there.”
But owing to his age and fame—thirty was old for a combat pilot, and his status as a celebrity made him a figure much in demand among golf-loving generals—that was simply not in the cards. By early 1944, experienced combat pilots were being furloughed in droves, and Lieutenant Hogan’s talents as a pilot, whatever their level of proficiency, were no longer needed. Like others in his situation, he was sent home and allowed to put on civilian clothes and lead a fairly normal life. The Hogans found a pretty garden apartment out on Camp Bowie Boulevard and Ben worked on his game at Colonial and nearby Ridglea Country Club, played friendly matches with brother, Royal, and even ventured off to special “victory” tournaments in Dallas and Chicago, where he hobnobbed with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby to raise funds for the USO, counting the days until Germany and Japan were defeated and another kind of warfare was resumed.
Seaman First Class Sam Snead had pretty much the same wartime experience, only in navy-issue fatigues. Following basic training at Norfolk, he was scheduled to be shipped to Pensacola to teach gunnery techniques to budding pilots. Instead, owing to his fame and proximity to Washington, the brass kept him in Norfolk playing with admirals and visiting dignitaries and teaching the game to pilots, also putting on the occasional charity exhibition. He spent the concluding months of his service in La Jolla, California, playing golf with surgeons and high-ranking officers on some of Southern California’s better layouts. “I got to play plenty of golf in the service,” he later told biographer George Mendoza. “No question I was lucky, being able to continue doing what I do best while those other boys were out there giving their lives. I’m very grateful for it.”
He added, “Winning the 1942 PGA seemed to prove to the world—and to me—that I’d managed to learn something during those years. And as my tour of duty came to an end, I was rubbing my hands. Once I got back on the tour, I felt sure it was going to be Katy-bar-the-door. I felt alive again.”
Byron Nelson was turned down for military service. The culprit was a previously undiagnosed blood-clotting problem the press broadly interpreted as a form of hemophilia. Days after his rejection in early 1943, PGA president Ed Dudley invited him to contribute to the cause by participating in a series of exhibition matches for the Red Cross and USO being arranged by Fred Corcoran. His pal Jug McSpaden, also rejected because of a sinus condition, had already signed up. Byron enthusiastically agreed and the two of them—dubbed the “Gold Dust Twins” by a Midwestern newspaperman—did 110 exhibitions, crisscrossing the nation on troop trains and military aircraft dozens of times between late 1942 and early 1944. Along the way, they visited wounded soldiers in military hospitals, gave lessons at special rehabilitation camps, and toured with Hope and Crosby at USO shows, often getting swarmed by fans seeking autographs. “Bing sang ‘White Christmas’ just about wherever we went and Bob entertained everyone with his one-liner jokes,” Byron fondly recalled. “It was a lot of fun, looking back, traveling with the troops and my best friend Jug, who later named his son after me. Louise stayed with her parents in Texarkana for most of this time, or with her sister Delle in Fort Worth, and that turned out to be the only real hardship for me. I really missed her. But Jug and I felt we were making a real contribution.” To be sure, the Gold Dust Twins helped raise thousands for the war effort—but also kept golf in the public eye at a time when it could easily have disappeared from sight.
Byron played in the only three events the PGA mounted that year, placing third at George S. May’s All-American Open at the Tam O’Shanter Club in Chicago, picking up $900 in war bonds, and narrowly failing to defend a title he’d won annually since 1941. May would have a significant, if unlikely, impact on the revival of the game immediately following the war. A short, potbellied former Bible salesman and self-made millionaire, he’d purchased equity shares in the run-down Tam O’Shanter Club throughout the Depression; he then acted on longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Charlie Bartlett’s suggestion that he seek to host the struggling Chicago Open in 1940, and thus began an eighteen-year run of tournaments that not only broke barriers in terms of purses but also provided a stage for returning stars that attracted thousands of curiou
s newcomers and introduced several critical innovations, including live television coverage. But that was yet to come.
Initially May launched a pair of tournaments called the All-American that ran concurrently with one division for amateurs and another for professionals, with the $2,000 first-place prize being the largest payout in 1941. Two years later, he added another for female pros and announced a new tournament ambitiously called the World Championship. Displaying a marketing moxie perhaps only a P. T. Barnum or Marvin Leonard could fully appreciate, he turned his tournament grounds into a Romanesque carnival of popular delights by hiring airplanes to drop free tickets to his tournaments in the city’s financial district and engaging strolling musicians, jugglers, and magicians to entertain the huge crowds that resulted. May is credited with being the first to erect major grandstands at finishing holes, and became a tireless promoter of the women’s game, welcomed minority patrons into his galleries, treated visiting reporters to lavish accommodations, and aggressively wooed foreign players to his ever-expanding events. He also retained local club professionals, trick shot artists, and comedians to mount entertaining clinics for newcomers who understood little or nothing about golf, thus broadening its appeal.
Without question, at a moment when tournament golf hovered on the brink of cultural irrelevance, May’s colorful exertions kept the sport visible with a host of stunts including his propensity to personally open his events wearing his signature Hawaiian shirts and introducing players to delighted crowds by encouraging them to predict their final scores in advance—offering to pay up to $100 for every stroke under their prediction if they, in turn, would pay him fifty dollars for every stroke over.