by James Dodson
Many of them took the bait, and May’s lavish Roman spectacles became a highlight of the war-reduced tour. One of his more controversial moves was to insist that players wear nametags so fans could easily identify them. Several balked at what they regarded as a humiliating distraction, and one William Ben Hogan famously dug in his heels and simply refused to submit. When he captured his first World Open in 1947, May retaliated by shaving three grand off the eye-popping $10,000 first-place check. Ben responded by snubbing the tournament for the next seven years. By then May no longer required pros to wear identifying nametags, replacing that with a system that had all caddies wearing numbers—a practice that became commonplace on tour.
“Going to a tournament at Tam was like Christmas morning and a major sporting event all rolled into one,” remembers Paul Gerlacher, a Chicagoan whose father took him to his first All-American in 1943 and soon found himself manning a booth selling Cokes and cold beer during his high school and college days. “For anyone who liked golf or was even mildly interested in the game, May’s tournaments became something thousands looked forward to. They were more than just golf tournaments, and I’m convinced a lot of people took up the game because of them.”
Reporter John Derr could only read about the colorful goings-on at Tam O’Shanter from the Associated Press news wire in a radio broadcast booth in Calcutta, India, where he did a daily half hour news roundup for American troops stationed in the China-India-Burma Theater. Initially trained to serve as a radio mechanic on B-17s in the Far East, the enterprising Carolinian—during a long boat trip around Cape Horn—met a VIP who remembered him from covering a Duke-Army football game before the war and invited him to join the staff of theater commander Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell. Derr soon found himself interviewing no less than Mahatma Gandhi and reading the latest home-front news and sports on his evening broadcast. He stayed abroad for thirty-three months.
During this interval, he received letters from Sam Snead and Johnny Bulla, filling him in on their eagerness to get back into competition and their worries about the tour’s future.
“Sam was particularly worried about this,” Derr remembers. “Of course, it was just his luck to have finally broken through and won the PGA just as the party shut down, so to speak. That played right into his private fears about being hexed by fate, and I think he was chomping at the bit to get back out there and prove something to everyone, especially himself, that his one major championship was no fluke. The problem was, nobody knew for sure what kind of golf tour would resume when peace broke out—or even if it would. I think that thought ate him alive, especially to see what Byron was doing in 1944.”
In 1944, mostly through some persuasive hustling and arm-bending by Corcoran and Dudley, the PGA Tour managed twenty-three events including a PGA Championship, though the Masters and U.S. Open remained dormant and most of the marquee names were unavailable. Standing in for them were aging stars like Paul Runyan, Lawson Little, Craig Wood, Johnny Revolta, and Henry Picard, players whose splendid careers would basically ebb during the hiatus. Fortunately there was Lord Byron Nelson, who was over par only three times in his twenty-one events, collecting ten wins, six second places, and a record $37,000 in war bonds—twice as much as anyone had ever earned in a single season—and winning the Associated Press’s coveted Athlete of the Year Award in a romp. Byron’s only disappointment was losing in the PGA final.
Late in the summer, as he consulted with Cliff Roberts on how quickly the devastated turf at Augusta could be put back into tournament condition, Bob Jones was asked to assess Byron’s terrific year in light of Ben’s and Sam’s conspicuous absence. Saint Bobby minced no words.
“It is my belief that Nelson is one of the greatest golfers the game has ever known,” he said. “He has that rarest of all qualities—consistency. Byron rarely has a bad day or a bad round. He has more finesse than any of the others. You remember that I told you Ben Hogan was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen on any golf course. He was the hardest worker I’ve seen in any sport. I’ve also felt that Sammy Snead was the greatest stylist I’ve ever seen. By stylist I mean the accomplishment of results with the least amount of effort. Snead has always been a fine artist. But it’s Nelson they all must watch and fear.”
The public supported Jones’s opinion, frequently turning out in record numbers to watch Byron as well as Jug McSpaden and other “old-timers.” At George May’s All-American—which Byron won easily, claiming $10,000 in war bonds and his sixth title of the year—the crowds were so large and enthusiastic that extra transportation and police were put on. Just a week earlier, no doubt encouraged by accounts of the Allied successes following D-Day, record galleries turned out to watch the unknown Bob Hamilton nip him one-up in the final of the PGA Championship at pretty Manito Golf and Country Club in Spokane.
Even better for the casual fan, Sam Snead was released from duty early in the autumn and quickly jumped in to make up for lost time. He was barely out of his navy issue and into his favorite two-toned golf shoes and newly adopted banded straw hat before he lapped the field at Portland and scored a second win at San Francisco a week later. “Byron’s been having all the fun since some of us were away,” he told a group of reporters in high spirits before crossing the bay to Oakland, the city where Sneadomania began in 1937. “But a few of us would like to cut in on some of his action. They say Ben will be back any day now, too.” He had a disappointing tie for eighth in the Oakland Open, barely covering his expenses for the week, but then bounced back by winning the Richmond Open, collecting $1,600 in war bonds. His winning Wilson golf ball was auctioned off to the highest bidder, netting $1,000 for charity. Buoyed by his immediate success, Sam proposed a two-man match with Byron, who responded that he would be happy to meet him “anywhere, anytime, over thirty-six or seventy-two holes, match or medal play.” Tour impresario Fred Corcoran immediately got to work on the logistics, aiming to stage the greatest challenge match since Gene Sarazen played his hero, Walter Hagen, for the hyperventilated Championship of the World in 1922. Within weeks, he set the date for May 26–27, and the venues, Fresh Meadow in Flushing, New York, and Essex County Country Club in West Orange, New Jersey.
Back home with Louise and his parents in Denton, America’s newest Athlete of the Year settled in briefly to enjoy the holidays and take stock of his game and financial situation. Byron had covered his own traveling expenses while touring for the USO and Red Cross, so despite his record-setting earnings that year he incurred a significant loss that forced him to redeem the war bonds he’d won before they reached maturity, taking a loss.
The significance of this wasn’t lost on him. Before the Masters was suspended in the spring of 1942, he had dinner and a life-changing conversation with Cliff Roberts, who bluntly advised him to find a career outside tournament golf. “You’ll wear out long before you ever make any serious money at this game,” Byron remembered him saying in no ambiguous terms. “I suggest you think about other opportunities that will provide a reliable income and not grind you to pieces.” Roberts knew a great deal about his financial situation because after his U.S. Open breakthrough in 1939, Byron had called on Cliff at his Wall Street brokerage and asked if he could invest some of his winnings. “I’ll do it on two conditions,” Roberts told him flatly. “The first is that you send me a regular contribution to your account. The second is that you never ask me what I do with that money.” Byron agreed to the terms.
Years later, Byron recalled that even then Roberts believed it wouldn’t be long before the top tournaments were carried live on radio, and perhaps even television, assuming that nascent medium ever amounted to anything. (RCA’s David Sarnoff had introduced the first commercial television set at the 1939 World’s Fair, and by 1944 more than 100,000 American homes had early models.) Their conversation in the 1942 Masters simply underscored these points.
“Cliff believed I ought to get into a business of some kind with a future, invest my money in something solid, and maybe even co
nsider broadcasting golf in some form or another down the road. He thought my background as a club pro and a top tour player and the fact that I enjoyed people might lead me to something else in golf, though my mind was really elsewhere by that point.”
Specifically, it was down on the farm in Texas. When he spent time at the modest spread he’d provided for his parents in Denton, tending his father’s small herd of cows and doing simple chores, Byron was powerfully reminded of his own boyhood dream of someday owning enough land to graze a couple hundred head of beef cattle. He was almost thirty-three years old, in his athletic prime yet aged beyond his years from more than a decade of chasing the game across the continent. Privately he yearned for the slower life he and Louise always talked about, with Sunday mornings that were free to attend church instead of giving golf lessons or competing, a permanent home with real neighbors and an actual mailing address. Though he rarely spoke of this, dating from the life-and-death struggle that defined his boyhood Byron’s faith was central to everything he did on and off the golf course, yet the practice of that faith necessarily took a backseat to the demands of his public life. He prayed every day, sometimes several times, and those prayers included a petition to find a more meaningful life of service to others. At moments, he actually considered using his fame to become a missionary and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through a world ravaged by war. Like Bob Jones before him, the pressure of tournament golf frequently twisted his fragile stomach into knots so painful that he and Louise both worried about potentially dire consequences.
“One of the first things I learned about Byron when we got to be friendly after the war,” remembers John Derr, who returned from the Far East in early 1945, got married, and signed on to work for CBS Radio as a sports broadcaster, “was the quiet fear he had that his upset stomach in tournaments might lead to a bleeding ulcer. Given his unusual blood condition, which wasn’t quite that of hemophilia but something close enough to it, I think that possibility genuinely concerned him and Louise both. The pressure on Byron was immense. Sam and Ben were really gunning for him every time they played, and the press trumped up that rivalry every chance it got. The other two thrived on that kind of competitive grind, but I think it took its toll on Byron. I have no doubt that’s why he was in a rush to wind up his playing career as the tour resumed. He told me this several times over the years.”
To be sure, the social life Byron and Louise enjoyed in Ohio offset some of this psychic ache for a more settled life, but even sedately beautiful Inverness presented pressures of its own. The historic club where Harry Vardon bid adieu to America in 1920 and Gene Sarazen played in his first Open now boasted more than five hundred members who demanded more attention than Byron was able to provide. When former board president Cloyd Haas let slip that several members had privately complained that his extended absences and his financial success on tour seemed to reflect his different priorities, he took this to heart and contemplated resigning. He would greatly miss the steady annual salary—estimated at around $20,000, not counting the revenues from the pro shop—but the reliable stream of income he’d developed working as a roving vice president for Haas-Jordan, selling golf umbrellas and Foot-Joy shoes for Field and Flint, helped spur his feeling that he was ready to move on.
“I had pretty well made up my mind by the end of 1944 that it was time to resign my club position,” he later explained. “I had been a club pro for over a decade and enjoyed my work in every respect. But I felt it was time to do something different and the members at Inverness, many of whom remain my very good friends, were very understanding about that fact.” After the summer golf season wound down, he resigned his post at Inverness, whose members gave him and Louise a lavish and emotional farewell dinner before they headed home to Texas for the winter. For years thereafter, as an honorary Inverness member, Byron returned annually to play with his friends at the club.
“Leaving Inverness made it possible for me to enjoy for the first time the freedom the pros in the sixties later knew,” he summed up in his 1993 autobiography, “of being able to play in as many tournaments as you wanted and concentrate solely on your game, with few distractions and worries. It was another part of what made the year to follow as memorable as it was.”
In his famous little black book, the log of his tournament earnings and observations he’d faithfully kept since 1935, Byron noted two areas of his game that needed improvement for 1945: “1) I wasn’t concentrating as well as I could, and 2) my chipping wasn’t as good as it needed to be.”
By January of 1945 Paris had been liberated and the Allies had the Wehrmacht on the run in Belgium. With the Japanese suffering a string of defeats in the Pacific, strategic war planners were already working on a massive air and sea assault on the home islands in hopes of ending the war, a bold strategy that would undoubtedly cost countless American lives. For this reason, coverage of the tour’s newly expanded roster of thirty-six tournaments received only moderate notice at the start of the year, opening with the revived Los Angeles Open at the Riviera Country Club.
“We think the open this year will resolve into a battle between Slammin’ Sammy Snead, late of Uncle Sam’s navy, and Lord Byron Nelson, the Toledo sharpshooter recently named athlete of the year,” wrote the Los Angeles Times on January 3. “And of this pair we have a leaning toward Snead, come rain—oops, inclement weather, or shine.”
The winter rains held off but dense fog rolled over the daunting course, designed by George C. Thomas Jr. in 1927, halfway through the third round, halting play with Jug McSpaden, Sam, and Byron clustered near the top of the leaderboard. In the morning, followed every step of the way by his pipe-smoking friend Bing Crosby, Byron finished that round at one under par and then shot even par to finish the tournament, apparently headed to yet another playoff with his Gold Dust pal, Jug.
On the treacherous eighteenth hole, however, playing just behind the leaders, following a burst of birdies that tied him for the lead, Sam struck a gorgeous four-iron to five feet and drained the birdie putt to win by a stroke, his third victory in five starts since returning from service, conveying the message that golf’s most colorful attraction now really understood how to close the deal. Byron immediately set off on the 375-mile road trip to Phoenix. Sam, according to a gossipy report in Variety, nursing a slipped vertebra in his lower back, booked a table for six at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills but never showed up because he was already on the road to Phoenix in his Cadillac, eager to resume the hunt. Lieutenant Hogan, officially still in army fatigues, could only watch Sam’s rampage and grind his teeth.
Under cloudless skies and ideal temperatures in Phoenix, Byron’s second-round 65 included seven birdies and gave him the halfway lead. “If you can’t shoot good golf on a day like this,” he remarked to reporters coming off, “you might as well give up.” His closest contenders were reigning PGA champ Bob Hamilton and recently discharged veteran Herman Barron, five strokes back. Byron then finished with 72-69 to breeze to his first title of the year. Blaming his sore back, the hero of week one finished fifteen strokes behind the man he was gunning for.
The caravan trundled on to Tucson’s El Rio Golf Club where Byron had set the course record of 63 in an exhibition match in mid-1943. He posted four rounds in the 60s but finished second to Ray Mangrum, Lloyd’s older brother. A week later with neither Sam nor Ben in the field at the Texas Open in San Antonio, it was ex-Yankee outfielder Sam Byrd who nipped Byron by a stroke and claimed the prize. Sam Snead skipped the following Corpus Christi Open to rest his ailing back, too, though this saw the return of Jimmy Demaret, who used a week’s furlough shortly before officially mustering out of the navy to make his debut. In the third round, Byron shot a scintillating 63 to pull away from a pack that included Byrd, amateur Freddie Haas, and Craig Wood. Demaret, twirling his irons and dressed in bold peacock colors like the showman of old, mounted a strong bid with matching 68s in the middle rounds but still found himself eight strokes behind Nelson in the concluding double
thirty-six-hole finish on Sunday, February 4.
It was Byron’s thirty-third birthday. Following a light breakfast of buttered toast and warm tea, he carved a 65 out of the relatively short course in the morning and concluded with a workmanlike even-par 70 in the afternoon, chipping and putting brilliantly in the breezy gusts off the Gulf of Mexico to claim the $1,000 war bond and his second win of the young year, tying the tournament’s scoring record. Jug finished fourth while Demaret’s 66 put him in sixth. Owing to Byron’s unwavering steadiness and accuracy an Associated Press reporter playfully labeled him “Golf’s automaton.” Years later, Byron confided to a writer that during this period his irons were so accurate he occasionally had to guard against losing concentration and becoming a little bored. “My swing was so familiar to me I rarely had to make an adjustment for the same reason I didn’t have to practice so much,” he explained. “To some of the reporters I suppose this seemed a little monotonous at times. But fortunately I had a major goal in my mind that helped keep me focused.”
Unknown to anyone save Louise, Byron was on a dual quest to earn enough money to purchase his dream ranch outright—she was willing to go along with the plan, he said, as long as they didn’t incur any debt—and to leave an indelible mark on the game in the form of the lowest tournament scoring average. “At the time, the [tournament] scoring record was 264 held by Craig Wood and a few others,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I also wanted to be the leading money winner again. So you see, I had a whole collection of goals I wanted to reach, and every good shot I hit supported them all.”