by James Dodson
The following week in New Orleans, competing against a strong field that included Snead and several U.S. Open winners, Byron beat Jug by five shots in an eighteen-hole playoff to claim his third win, Sam finishing fourth. The next event, the Gulfport Open, required only a seventy-five-mile drive to the historic Great Southern Golf Club. Overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, the short 6,200-yard Donald Ross course is Mississippi’s oldest, the birthplace of Ole Miss golf, dating from 1908, eccentrically bisected by a railroad track that once brought wealthy Yankee snowbirds to the sunny coast. Here, Sam Snead needed only a par on the final hole to win the tournament but missed the green, and then—as Bobby Jones had in the 1925 U.S. Open—called a penalty stroke on himself after his ball moved at address. The resulting bogey left him tied with Byron Nelson, who closed with a blistering 66.
On the final hole of the following day’s playoff, after Byron’s uncharacteristically poor approach to the green, Sam had a five-foot putt to win—but missed. They went back to the first hole in a sudden-death, whereupon Byron drove his ball into an irrigation ditch, took a drop and eventually made bogey. And when Sam stroked his third shot within a foot of the cup, Byron conceded the match—a technical violation, as it happened. Under the rules of stroke play, everything must be putted out. Even so, it ended in a one-shot victory for Sam.
At Pensacola, where hundreds of rowdy uniformed navy men turned out to cheer on their fellow sailor, Sam picked apart the course and won with 267 while Byron closed with a 65 to place second again. Seven days later, Sam bettered his winning margin by a stroke at the Jacksonville Open, where Byron wound up nine shots back, in sixth. Moreover, he’d never enjoyed much success at the popular Miami International Four-Ball, where a revitalized Sam received the lion’s share of press coverage. Complicating the scenario from Byron’s perspective, the event marked the brief return of Lieutenant William Ben Hogan to tournament action, who’d mustered out six weeks earlier and had been polishing his game ruthlessly at Colonial during the Gulf Coast swing of the tour, watching Sam and Byron collect all the hardware and headlines.
Ben teamed with his friend Ed Dudley but lost four-and-three to Byron and Jug McSpaden in the second round. The Gold Dust Twins then polished off Henry Picard and Johnny Revolta three-and-two before demolishing Sam Byrd and Denny Shute eight-and-six in the final, a romp that placed them twenty-one strokes clear of the field for the tournament and set the tone for the onslaught to come. Demoralized, Ben went home to Fort Worth to knock some more rust off his game and play several lucrative one-day exhibitions, while his rivals carried their running feud on to the Carolinas, growing the galleries with every stop.
The week after American troops successfully crossed the Rhine into Nazi Germany, the next battleground on tour came at Charlotte’s Myers Park Country Club, another Ross gem, and a featured attraction at one of the nation’s first planned residential communities. En route, Sam, Byron, and Jug stopped off for a Red Cross exhibition at the beautiful Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken, South Carolina, where Sam fired a course-record 63 and became—after winning three in a row, and six since returning to golf—the 2–1 favorite at the Charlotte Open.
After seventy-two holes, Byron and Sam were tied at 272, requiring another eighteen-hole playoff. In this one, they reached the final hole, a 220-yard uphill par-three, with Sam up by a stroke. He played a one-iron to the lower front half of the heavily bunkered, two-tiered green, leaving himself a monstrous putt of over ninety feet. “I was getting a little tired of having Sam beat me,” Byron later recounted, “and I thought, ‘There’s a chance he might three-putt from there.’ ” So Byron put back his own butter knife and took out a three-wood and hit a splendid shot to within twenty feet on the upper tier. Sure enough, Sam three-putted and Byron made his par, forcing a second eighteen-hole playoff.
“I was steamed at myself for leaving that first putt short,” Sam remembered decades later. “There’s no damn doubt in my mind that missing the chance to shut him out left the door wide open and gave Byron a helluva boost in confidence, explaining the tear he went on after that.” Even more troubling, the next morning’s Charlotte Observer suggested that Sam intentionally three-putted so he could get a share of additional gate receipts for a second playoff round—exactly the sort of rumor that damaged his public image among the game’s governing elites. “Nothing could have been further from our minds,” Byron said in his defense. “I know I was trying my hardest to make that birdie putt on the eighteenth hole and you could see how put out Sam was with his bogey.”
After reading the assertion in the paper, Snead blew his stack and began packing up to hit the road to Greensboro, where he won the inaugural event in 1938 and was so popular and accomplished it would eventually be nicknamed “Snead’s Alley.” All week he’d been annoyed by the gallery’s seeming hostility to him, and the scandalous suggestion in the paper merely confirmed that someone had it out for him. Only a lot of smooth talking over breakfast by Fred Corcoran and Byron convinced him to ignore the story and complete the playoff. The reporter who wrote it later published an apology.
Several misinformed hecklers nevertheless populated the considerably smaller gallery, but Sam appeared to put the fracas behind him by taking the lead on the opening hole with a birdie. Yet once it became apparent that most of the spectators were openly rooting for Byron—whoops went up when a couple of Sam’s shots flew wide of their targets—he increasingly showed irritation and discomfort as the match progressed, twice driving into the woods on the closing holes. Byron, conversely, was supremely calm throughout, curling a thirty-foot birdie putt on the final hole as the gallery erupted, shooting 69 to Sam’s 73.
“From there on,” Byron said, “I just kept going and playing well and it seemed everything was going my way.” A poignant footnote to this pivotal tournament was Henry Picard’s surprising announcement after a first-round 75 that Charlotte would be his last tournament on the PGA Tour, ending an illustrious career that included twenty-six wins, two major championships, and a pair of winning Ryder Cup appearances—not to mention the seismic influence he had on the three budding stars of his era, shaping their swings, minds, and fortunes. Gentle and classy as always, he told reporters that he would teach golf “to promising youngsters” for the rest of his days. The moment certainly didn’t go unnoticed by Byron Nelson, even as his remarkable turnaround against Sam commenced a string of victories unrivaled in golf.
At Greensboro’s Starmount Country Club, in the heart of Snead Country, ten thousand spectators, the largest gallery of the year, turned out in warm spring sunlight to watch Byron’s beloved Spalding blade putter scorch the greens for a 271 that shattered the course record by eight strokes, earning him his sixth win of 1945. Sam hobbled home in sixth place, complaining again of an aching back. “Byron Nelson remains lord of golf!” crowed Smith Barrier of the Greensboro Daily News, one of the regional and national reporters the sponsoring Jaycees had treated to free meals and an improved press tent, an innovation that reflected the sport’s sudden revitalization. Then they followed the pros to Durham’s beautiful Hope Valley Golf Club, another Donald Ross masterpiece. A robust Easter Sunday crowd of three thousand trailed Byron, Sam, and Toney Penna and saw a scowling Sam falter badly with his putter. Byron, on the other hand, displaying an otherworldly accuracy, missed only two greens and made five birdies in the afternoon, shooting a course record 65 to lock up his fourth win in a row, equaling Ben Hogan’s sweep of the Tar Heel State in 1940.
In Atlanta seven days later, a front-page story in the Atlanta Constitution—just below an account of the U.S. Army tightening the noose around Berlin, heralding the approaching end of the war in Europe—told a nearly identical story: another win, and a record-shattering score, 263, for the courtly Texan who always broke into a gracious smile after finishing a round. This title held extra luster because the Masters was still under wraps and Atlanta was Bobby Jones’s hometown—he came out to cheer Byron on, in fact—and also because the event raised thousands of
dollars to provide portable iron lungs for kids with polio. The runner-up, Sam Byrd, was twelve shots back, and poor Sam Snead finished in sixth place, a full eighteen. In the clubhouse, Louise Nelson apologized for the nasty head cold she shared with her victorious husband, and then revealed to the Associated Press’s Ruth Ingram that she and Byron hoped to use Byron’s winnings from the year to buy a cattle ranch and retire. “Well, boys,” Byron was quoted as quipping when he sunk a birdie putt, “there comes another cow.”
“Byron Nelson,” Sam Byrd told reporters in the Capital City Club’s locker room after his final round, “is playing the most consistent golf of any player in history. The way he’s going, why, none of us may catch him this year.”
Five wins in a row—a new PGA tournament record—netted Byron headlines in every newspaper in the country and an offer from Wheaties to put his picture on their cereal box, which in the past had used the likenesses of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams to promote the “Breakfast of Champions.” They paid Byron $200 plus all the cereal he could eat—most of which he wound up giving away.
Atlanta marked the official end of the tour’s winter season, and during this eight-week break the pros who held club positions returned home to stock and reopen their shops for the summer. Free of these duties for the first time in a dozen years, Byron embarked on a series of well-paying one-day exhibitions in Mobile, Montgomery, Memphis, and St. Louis that led him to his father’s farm in Denton, where he began scouting around and found a large parcel of appealing pasture-land near tiny Roanoke, Texas.
The break hadn’t come a moment too soon, because he was feeling the stress of being under constant scrutiny by the press as the excitement surrounding his streak grew week to week. Unlike Ben, who had no interest whatsoever in promoting the tour, or even Sam, who had the fame and personality to do so but was notoriously unpredictable with his off-color stories and sudden mood swings, Byron felt obliged to serve as a field ambassador for a game that was struggling to gain back the popularity and respect it had enjoyed not so long ago. That is, beyond his stated hopes for a retired life on a cattle ranch, he felt pressured to keep playing and winning for the good of golf.
Wherever the Nelsons showed up that year, tournament sponsors clamored to have him speak at banquets and civic luncheons, and Fred Corcoran arranged radio appearances that meant they usually had to arrive a day or two early. Byron obliged them all, partly because he had a deep, genuine interest in the game’s health and was by nature grateful for his good fortune, and partly because the larger the gate receipts, the closer he edged to fulfilling his dreams in Texas. “You see, golf in that day and time was so small and needed help so badly that when we’d get into town for a tournament we had to go to the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, all the types of clubs to promote the tournament,” he told Al Barkow years later for Barkow’s oral history of the tour, Gettin’ to the Dance Floor. “And because of the streak, all they wanted was me.”
Four days after the Atlanta Open, President Roosevelt passed away at his winter retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. For millions of ordinary Americans, this felt like the death of a beloved parent, or at least a national hero—the avuncular, patrician figure who’d guided the country through its darkest days of economic depression and the costliest war in human history. Byron Nelson understood this impact on the national pysche better, perhaps, than most public figures. From the day near rock bottom of hard times in early 1933 when—just weeks before Roosevelt was sworn in—he boarded a Greyhound bus in Fort Worth with little more than his mother’s prayers and thirty-five dollars in his pocket to ride up to Texarkana for his first professional tournament, to his electrifying fifth straight win in Bobby Jones’s hometown that made him a star whose name was known by virtually every sports fan, he had witnessed both the terrible struggles of ordinary Americans and the country’s determination to shake them off and get back on its feet.
With industry still operating on wartime production schedules and the economy deeply mired in debt, there was no guarantee that when peace broke out and millions of soldiers returned to civilian life they would even find jobs. In fact, one influential economic board warned that depression might resume if companies didn’t find a way to retool for peacetime and start hiring in a hurry.
In May of 1945, during the tour’s brief hiatus, the government’s War Production Board lifted the ban on manufacturing that covered goods like golf balls and equipment, and courses from Bangor, Maine, to Bakersfield, California, began getting their fairways back into shape. In some ways, Fred Corcoran’s cooked-up “World Championship” match between Slammin’ Sammy Snead and Lord Byron Nelson couldn’t have occurred at a better moment. New York City, after all, was still enjoying the afterglow of an exultant V-E Day celebration when Byron and Sam teed it up in front of an estimated eight thousand spectators at the Tillinghast-designed Fresh Meadow Club in nearby Flushing.
Sam bolted to a three-stroke lead after the first eighteen holes, but Byron closed the gap on the second loop and only lost, 143–144, when he missed a long birdie putt on the thirty-sixth hole. The next day at New Jersey’s Essex Country Club, this time in a match-play format, Byron seized a commanding six-up lead by hole thirteen and held on to win the match four-and-three. Because his overall total of 272 was lower than Sam’s 276, most commentators declared him the winner. The gallery, eager to see “the streak” continue in any form, seemed to unanimously support this view. In a celebration broadly interpreted as a polite swipe at Snead, Grantland Rice was inspired to write a poem in honor of Byron’s wonderfully consistent swing.
Would I trade all my slicing arcs and all my hooking swerves
For Byron Nelson’s perfect play?
You bet your shirt I would!
Despite the tournament lull, owing to Byron’s daily practice back home in Texas, that swing was in great shape when he opened the Montreal Open on June 10 with another 63 before a gallery of some 25,000 at the Islesmere Golf Club—then went on to forge a new record for tournament play in Canada at twenty under par, ten strokes better than the runner-up, Jug McSpaden.
Seven days later, at the Llanerch Country Club in suburban Philadelphia, he and Jug raced to the finish of the Philadelphia Inquirer Invitational, Byron edging out Jug out by two strokes to extend his streak to seven and boost his official earnings for the year to $27,000. “The phlegmatic Nelson was so overjoyed at his victory,” Harry Robert reported in the Evening Bulletin, “he took two swigs of beer from McSpaden’s bottle, the rarest occurrence in the world for him.”
Beginning with his first appearance at the Western Open in 1933, Byron had never managed to win anything in Chicago. But he made amends for that at the Chicago Victory Open the next week by beating perennial long-drive champ Jimmy Thomson in the pre-tournament driving contest and—despite a suddenly flaring backache that nearly caused him to withdraw before Sunday’s thirty-six-hole finale—finished seven strokes ahead of McSpaden and Ky Laffoon for his eighth victory in a row.
His loss to unknown Bob Hamilton in the 1944 PGA Championship still weighed heavily on his mind. Facing a brutal format that required two qualifying rounds followed by four individual matches of thirty-six holes each to reach the final, Byron arranged this year to have osteopathic massages every evening just prior to and throughout the major championship at the Moraine County Club in Dayton, Ohio, admitting to a local reporter at the start of the week that he felt like he was “100 years old.” His desire to compete was heightened by the fact that he knew the course well and that, with the U.S. Open and Masters still in suspension, this was the year’s only major. It didn’t hurt that Ben Hogan and Jimmy Demaret, still in uniform, were unable to play, or that Sam Snead fractured a bone in his arm in a pickup softball game back in Hot Springs during the two-month break. Another motivating factor was that Byron had reached the PGA final four times in his career and only once, in 1940, had came away holding the Wanamaker Trophy. In his mind, his record in this championship was one o
f missed opportunities and frustration. It was now or never.
Fortunately, because he was runner-up in 1944, he wasn’t obliged to play in the qualifying rounds; curiously, he chose to do so anyway, most likely to see how the course was playing under competition—and to pick up an extra $125 for being co-medalist. “More cattle feed money,” he joked to Louise that evening after his extensive back massage. After dispatching the aging Gene Sarazen four-and-three with relative ease, he survived a close match with Mike Turnesa, needing two birdies and an eagle over the closing holes to win 1-up and advance to the quarterfinal against Denny Shute, the former British Open champ, whom he beat three-and-two on the strength of flawless driving and a suddenly hot putter. The magic carried over against Claude Harmon, the future Winged Foot head pro who would go on to capture the 1948 Masters, send a number of great teaching pros into the game, and sire a famous clan of teachers himself. In a match delayed by rainy weather, Byron overcame a shaky start to take a three-hole lead by the halfway mark, and went on to win with relative ease, five-and-four. The final was against Sam Byrd, who’d been eating Byron’s dust all year. In the morning, Byrd finished with four straight birdies to take a two-hole lead to lunch, then went up by three early in the afternoon, by all appearances cruising to victory. Ignoring the tender soreness in his lower back, and remembering his vow to concentrate on chipping and putting, however, Byron hung tough and won three holes in a row when Byrd’s putting stroke suddenly went cold. Byron also had some lucky breaks when errant approach shots struck spectators and dropped close to greens, allowing him to save par with clutch chips. After he drained a lengthy birdie putt on the twenty-ninth hole, Byrd all but threw in the towel.
After he’d retreated to the locker to comb his hair and put on a sports jacket for the trophy presentation, a somewhat pale Byron admitted to reporters this was “the toughest tournament I ever won.” Flanked by Ed Dudley and Fred Corcoran, he smiled at the record gallery assembled. In all, 38,752 people had turned out to see if Byron could extend the magical streak. For the first time ever, the PGA deployed ropes to keep spectators confined to designated viewing areas. After the presentation, Byron took his sixteen-year-old caddie, local high schooler George Gould, into the Moraine pro shop and paid him $150.