American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  In the days after the PGA, owing to his unprecedented domination of the game, the Associated Press began referring to him as “Mr. Golf,” and Life magazine, read weekly by an estimated one out of every six Americans, proclaimed that he was the greatest golfer ever because he’d perfected the golf swing and wished to “quit and become a gentleman farmer,” which only confirmed his humility and grace as a champion.

  He’d now won nine in a row, but paid a heavy toll to beat what he privately considered his PGA “jinx.” Byron’s back ached so fiercely he was forced to withdraw from the St. Paul Open before play started and pay a visit to the Mayo Clinic for special osteopathic treatments. Over several days he took extended heat massages and rested.

  His friend Charlie Bartlett, the Chicago Tribune’s evangelistic golf writer, had spent years convincing his editors that professional golf wasn’t a “sissy sport” and deserved a place on the front page of the sports section; later he helped organize the Golf Writers Association of America. But the following week he couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome of George May’s All-American Open. “Surprise!” Charlie told his devoted readers on the morning of July 31. “John Byron Nelson, the man who even the gaffers of the Vardon-Hagen-Jones era now admit is the greatest golfer who ever swung a club, yesterday won his fourth and richest All-American Open championship in five years with a 72 hole score of 269 at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club.”

  Byron finished at nineteen strokes under par, scoring 30 on his final nine, and eleven strokes ahead of his closest competitor, an intensely silent Ben Hogan, freshly released from military service. In the locker room afterward, a young reporter brazenly asked Ben how it felt to be back in action.

  “Fine,” he chastely replied, pulling off his new custom-made British shoes that contained an extra spike for traction. “But I’ve had just about enough of all this Mr. Golf business.” For the moment at least, overshadowed by Byron’s historic run, he and Sam Snead—who finished in a tie for fifteenth and fled the scene—were reduced to tournament footnotes.

  Sam’s gloom deepened days later when he posted a miserable 296 at the Canadian Open, where he was a two-time champion. Ben skipped the tournament and went home to practice at Colonial, stopping en route to do a pair of lucrative exhibitions. Meanwhile, despite the loss of a dozen pounds owing to stress and injury, Byron fired an even-par 280 over Toronto’s recently lengthened Thornhill Golf Club to boost his streak to eleven. After battling swing problems for two rounds, Byron made further headlines by admitting his fatigue to reporters and officially announcing his intention to retire from professional golf within the next two years. The story made front-page headlines nationally in many of the same editions that carried news of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, which instantly killed nearly a hundred thousand people.

  Heading to the Memphis Open, Byron stopped off in Spring Lake, New Jersey, for an unofficial thirty-six-hole benefit to raise money for a nine-hole golf course for disabled veterans; the event raked in $6,000 for the charity and Byron won it, pocketing $1,500. Still, he admitted to O. B. Keeler that he was nearing the point of physical and psychological exhaustion. “It would almost be a relief not to win,” he ruefully confided, and Keeler told him Jones sometimes had felt the same way.

  New Orleans insurance broker Freddie Haas, the amateur who battled Snead earlier in the season at his hometown event, provided the relief Byron craved at the Memphis Invitational, playing the difficult Chickasaw Country Club course brilliantly to end the streak at eleven. As it happened, Byron’s historic run ended hours after the Japanese surrendered and World War Two officially ended, setting off national celebrations and, in the lobby of Memphis’s famed Peabody Hotel, a drunken week-long party.

  But it didn’t end there. Seven days later, with Sam and Ben back in hot pursuit, Byron lapped the field by ten strokes to claim the Knoxville Invitational. Only days later, at the Nashville Open, finding his own form, Ben opened with a 64 en route to a stunning 265, four strokes better than Byron’s second-place 269. Sam found his game and won at Dallas the next week—then repeated it at Tulsa, claiming his sixth win for 1945 but feeling all but forgotten in the hoopla attending Nelson.

  Then it was out to Spokane, Washington, for the reformulated Esmeralda Open, where Mr. Golf beat Jug McSpaden by six, Sam and Ben by eight, and captured his sixteenth official win for the year. Sam, who’d shot a course record 63 during the event, joked to reporters that he hoped Byron—who spent hours signing autographs for servicemen and -women—might soon “decide to enlist.”

  Much to the delight of America’s golf-starved, war-weary golf fans, Nelson, Hogan, and Snead were suddenly engaged in a battle royale for the dominant position in golf. During the tournament seasons of 1945 and ’46, for instance, Byron’s final two years on tour, with PGA fields again at full strength with veterans and several promising newcomers, Byron would collect twenty-five victories, Ben sixteen, and Sam twelve—better than 70 percent of the tournaments played during this interval—and collectively finish second twenty-two times, an unrivaled period of domination by any trio of golfers.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Corresponding to this juggernaut, several scoring records fell and gallery turnouts steadily increased, giving professional golf exactly the postwar boost it needed, bringing both stress and relief to tournament manager Fred Corcoran, who behind the scenes survived yet another nasty power struggle between the governing home pros of the PGA and touring professionals who desired more autonomy, leaving the tour’s future hanging in the balance. In late 1944, Corcoran’s contract came up for renewal and key figures on both sides of the dispute demanded his ouster, some citing the paucity of tournaments during the war as a reason to give him the boot while others complained that his handling of business affairs for stars like Ted Williams, Babe Zaharias, and Stan Musial distracted from his duties of managing the tour. Looking for any excuse to claim his head, a third faction even objected to his close friendship with the likes of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and Byron Nelson, relationships that developed during the scores of charity exhibitions that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Red Cross and other wartime organizations.

  “It was mostly subterfuge,” Corcoran said many years later. “Everyone was eager to get back to business and each side wanted their own man and I was once again caught in the middle. The truth was, many of the tour players had done their time away in the service and were eager to make up for lost revenue, and in no mood to be told by anyone—least of all the PGA establishment—how to run their affairs.” At one point Corcoran considered an offer to leave the tour and work as the road secretary for the Boston Red Sox, but eventually signed a new contract with the tour that paid him a base salary of $7,500 plus expenses to take on a greater role in promoting the reemerging tour.

  The highlight of Ben’s return to the tour during Byron’s most triumphant year in 1945, in any case, came at the Portland Open just days after Byron’s win at the Esmeralda, where he put together four extraordinary rounds (65–69–63–64) to shoot an unearthly 261 that clipped three strokes off Byron’s seventy-two-hole scoring record—even sweeter because Ben bested Byron by a yawning fourteen-stoke margin. When a grinning Jimmy Demaret congratulated him on this new record, Ben merely grimaced and remarked, “I guess that takes care of this Mr. Golf business.”

  “There now was not much love lost between Nelson and Hogan,” according to Gene Gregston, who knew both men fairly well and wrote the earliest biography of Ben. “Their rivalry was too close for the close friendship to survive. Nelson backers said Ben in action and word showed he resented the success Nelson had attained in the war years. Hogan backers explained that he was too combative to be a buddy to the man who stood between him and his goal.”

  “The way I remember this time,” Sam Snead recalled years later, “was the tension both Ben and Byron seemed to play under every week. I felt some of it too, but the truth of it was, in my case, I was just so happy to be
back in the game I figured it was only a matter of time before I started winning my share. Ben seemed to be still fightin’ that war we’d just won.”

  Two weeks after Portland, Byron shattered Ben’s mark with a 259 and won the Seattle Open by thirteen strokes. “I was so embarrassed at having Hogan beat me by fourteen,” he admitted, notably saying Hogan instead of Ben, “that I might not have played as well at Seattle if I’d only been three shots back at Portland.” When asked how long he calculated his 259 might stand, he mused, “You don’t know in this game. The record could be broken next week. Or maybe not forever.” In fact, the record stood for a decade, until Mike Souchak shot 257 at the Texas Open.

  Two weeks after Seattle, Ben won the Richmond Invitational in Virginia, then drove his new Buick down to Pinehurst hoping to add another North and South trophy to his hardware collection. This was a tournament all three men thoroughly enjoyed playing; Ben (who won it three times) because Pinehurst was his first solo win; Sam (also three) because the friendly galleries often contained neighbors and friends from nearby Greensboro; Byron (who won once) because of his high personal regard for Richard Tufts and everything Pinehurst symbolized. But with November now upon them and Byron utterly exhausted, he phoned Dick Tufts and apologized for being unable to appear, explaining that he needed to go home and rest his back.

  Unfortunately, neither of his rivals seized this golden opportunity. Ben’s dodgy putter left him in third place behind winner Cary Middlecoff, and Sam finished a disappointing ninth.

  Byron and Jug McSpaden went hunting for two weeks in Idaho, where he “completely forgot golf and forbade any talk of it.” Afterward, he rendezvoused with Louise in Denton and turned up to speak at the Rotary Club for “Byron Nelson Day” in Fort Worth. The proud Rotarians presented the Nelsons with a pair of Tennessee walking horses named Linda and Rex. “While Rex turned out to be a bit difficult to handle,” notes John Companiotte in his fine book about Byron’s streak, “Linda was gentle and cooperative, and the Nelsons kept her for years.”

  Ben, meanwhile, went on a small tear, making his intentions for the future clear by winning the new Orlando Open. Before he and Valerie turned toward home themselves, he finished sixth at the Miami Open.

  As the gods of bittersweet irony would have it, just two weeks before the tour’s official Christmas break, he and Byron ended their historic year at the inaugural Glen Garden Invitational, where they’d both been introduced to the game and, in a playoff that now seemed a distant lifetime ago, one of them won his first tournament ever, and the other suffered his first stinging defeat.

  Perhaps the Ghost of Christmas Past was too much in evidence. Driving to a Wednesday practice round, Byron’s new Studebaker President skidded on an icy bridge and overturned. Both he and Louise escaped injury, though they had groceries and a carton of eggs splattered all over the car. Valerie Hogan took Louise into Fort Worth to shop and have lunch and take in the festive Christmas window displays at the Leonard Bros. department store. Byron joked with proud Glen Garden members about having egg all over his face.

  Beyond the unusually cold temperatures that had spectators cloaked in wool overcoats and hats, both he and Ben later conceded that there was something distinctly uncomfortable about what should have been a nostalgic return to their youthful stomping grounds. Ben in particular played poorly over the modest little course where they’d learned the game as boys. His 287 was good enough only for sixth place.

  Byron won again, of course—by a fourteen-stroke margin over a strong field that had showed up in large part out of respect for the two of them, though it didn’t include Sam, who chose to take a few weeks off in the relative warmth of Florida. The victory increased Byron’s unprecedented winnings to $62,437.62, not counting an additional $12,000 in exhibition fees paid mostly in war bonds.

  Even as he prepared to leave the game, winning his eighteenth official tournament of the year was a firm reminder to the world at large, and maybe to his erstwhile friend and greatest rival, that Byron Nelson was—at least for the moment—still Mr. Golf.

  11

  AN UNEXPECTED OPEN

  FOR A MAN SERIOUSLY contemplating retirement, and possibly because of it, following a brief holiday break with his folks in Denton, Byron started 1946 pretty much where he left off by winning the first two events, in L.A. and San Francisco, by impressive margins. At Riviera, a tournament he’d always set his hope to capture, he was five strokes better than Ben’s second-place 289. Days later, at the San Francisco Golf Club, his 283 bested him by ten strokes, and Ben finished third. Sam, meanwhile, had difficulty getting started, tying for tenth and sixteenth respectively. “If Slammin’ Sammy finds his putting stroke anytime soon,” wrote a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, apparently anticipating the most intense three-man rivalry since Hagen, Sarazen, and Jones, “golf could enjoy its greatest year ever.” But this was just the beginning of Sam’s fabled putting woes, which for years would cost him dearly.

  These were optimistic, almost euphoric times, with postwar America standing alone in terms of economic power and prestige—at the “summit of the world,” as an admiring Winston Churchill put it. Despite concerns about rampant inflation, both farms and factories were quickly answering growing consumer demand using technologies refined in wartime to boost the country’s workforce to nearly full capacity, fueled by a sudden national enthusiasm both for work and play. And when Secretary of State George Marshall’s plan to rebuild war-torn Europe with $13 billion in guaranteed loans and aid took shape beginning in 1947, signifying America’s position as the leader of a new world order, ordinary pleasures, especially spectator sports, were once more available to the masses. In 1946, both major league baseball and the National Football League significantly expanded their offerings, lowering admission prices to lure fans back out to the field. Not to be left behind in the stampede for things at once familiar and dear, the PGA presented its most ambitious roster ever: twenty-five open fields, plus half a dozen invitational tournaments stretching from January to December, offering a record amount of prize money that topped $410,000.

  Perhaps no single sporting event symbolized these elevated hopes more than the revival of the Masters. By the end of March, Byron had claimed a victory in New Orleans and Ben had matched him by winning at Phoenix, San Antonio’s all-important Texas Open, and Petersburg. Meanwhile, hungry youngsters like Arkansas’s Tommy Bolt and four-time Tennessee amateur champion Cary Middlecoff were rising to the challenge. So Bobby Jones’s personal championship was perhaps in even better shape than ever. Clifford Roberts had overseen his own Marshall Plan at Augusta National by using a small army of laborers to restore the course to peak condition in the fourteen months prior to reopening. Moreover, an unexpected gift from a member just before the war had funded a much needed overhaul of the clubhouse, providing modest accommodations in the “Crow’s Nest.” In the fall of 1945, when the still closed club’s membership surged to a new high of 130, a generous gift from Edward Barber of the Barber Steamship Lines in the form of a $100,000 loan at extremely favorable interest rates enabled Roberts to go on a building binge that added a golf shop, residential suites, and kitchen and formal dining room to the original clubhouse, not to mention the first of a series of residential cottages or “cabins,” as Roberts insisted they be called. The first cabin went to founder Bobby Jones.

  In feverish anticipation of watching their tournament being revived, Augusta’s members voted to boost their purse to $10,000. Cliff Roberts, however, was worried about the inadequacy of spectator housing. The small but loved Richmond Hotel was showing its age, and the popular, sprawling Bon Air had fallen out of the Vanderbilt chain and never recovered its footing. In a letter to the town fathers, Roberts hinted that the tournament’s future itself might be in doubt if additional accommodations weren’t soon developed—a move that led to the construction of several small hotels and the first appearance of postwar “motor hotels” along adjacent Washington Avenue.

  Anothe
r concern had to do with popular Calcutta auctions that were dutifully covered by the Augusta Chronicle. “Betting was still big, and still acceptable, in 1946,” Curt Sampson noted in The Masters: Golf, Money, and Power in Augusta, Georgia. “Bookies patrolled hotel lobbies as well as the golf course, never neglecting their best clients, the golfers themselves.”

  For his part, ironically, Roberts early on had consented to the club’s own wagering fete in hopes of fostering bonhomie among members, but privately disdained betting of any kind as “simple banditry.” Upon reopening in 1946, he began a diligent if unpopular campaign to halt the club’s involvement in Calcuttas once and for all, especially in light of the Bon Air’s growing reputation for hosting known big-time gamblers. Increasingly obsessed with shaping the Masters’s image as that of an elite gathering of the game’s finest players and movers and shakers, golf’s classiest invitational, he expanded the club’s infrastructure by creating patron stands and improved access and parking, and instituted policies aimed at discouraging betting pools and the common practice of purse splitting. It would take him, in fact, until 1952—when Ben Hogan first proposed the idea of a Champions Dinner, and newspapers across the country began to write about poorly regulated Calcuttas rife with fraud—to shut down Augusta National’s auction, though the Bon Air’s Calcutta roared merrily along for many years thereafter.