American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  “Cliff came out of the war years determined to make the Masters the premier event in golf, maybe all of sports itself, to attract the right kind of people and do whatever it took, leaving no detail unattended to, in order to make the Masters the hottest ticket in golf,” says John Derr, who covered his first Masters for CBS Radio that spring. “He understood better than most what golf symbolized to a nation that had just somehow beaten back the two most powerful military powers in history—a gracious, civilized game where one who played by the rules and won had something in common with the great Bobby Jones. He set out deliberately to cultivate that image, whatever it took.”

  A conservative Wall Street banker, Roberts was also enough of an armchair psychologist to understand that the Masters had a chance to become something unique, an event that made every ticket holder, or “patrons,” as he called them, feel privileged and unique, almost like members of the club. At the time, fabled tournaments like the North and South, Western Open, and even the long-running L.A. Open, long considered “major” championships a notch or two below the U.S. Open and PGA in terms of importance, were struggling to regain the premier status they’d enjoyed before the war. Roberts saw an opportunity to fill a cultural vacuum by making the Masters the best-run, most admired championship in the game—and thus, at least in theory, the most desired ticket.

  If Chicago’s George May attempted to make his tournament a circus maximus of sensational commercial entertainments catering to every fancy imaginable, Roberts aimed to make his the golf equivalent of a Carnegie Hall recital with limited seating reserved for the most discerning followers of the game. This unapologetic approach would take at least a decade and the arrival of a charismatic young pro named Arnold Daniel Palmer to come to full flowering, but the foundation of the tournament’s major stature was unquestionably laid by the intense rivalry between Ben, Byron, and Sam.

  Plainspoken Tommy Bolt, who turned pro in 1946 and drove his red jalopy up to Augusta from his Shreveport club job just to watch “Hogan, Nelson and Snead, the three by-God best players who ever lived bar none,” put it in simpler terms. “The last damn thing Cliff wanted was a bunch of sorry big-time crooks getting into Augusta’s pot of glory, that magical place where everyone felt like an important somebody—if only for a few days each year.”

  Ironically, the Masters revival in 1946 would best be remembered for exactly the kind of press Roberts hoped to avoid when a dark horse who spent much of his service time toiling in the same Norfolk navy yard as Sam Snead rose up out of nowhere to beat Ben Hogan, the favorite, and later made unflattering remarks against the tournament’s founders. Sallow-faced, long-legged Herman Keiser—sometimes called the “Missouri Mortician,” owing to his generally downcast demeanor—emerged from a group of early leaders that initially included all three of the favorites to take a commanding seven-stroke lead by the halfway mark, only to see his lead vaporize under Ben’s withering Sunday afternoon charge that brought him to the seventy-second hole needing only a two-foot downhill putt to win. The greens were rolling so firmly, he later remarked, that they almost sounded crisp.

  Finishing forty minutes ahead of him, Herm Keiser had retreated to the clubhouse, unable to watch the finish, partly because he was stewing over a host of perceived injustices he claimed began when he was assigned a lame caddie who couldn’t keep up on the hilly course, and continued when he nearly missed his third-round starting time because someone neglected to notify him in advance that it had been changed. Larger than these distractions, however, was his sensational accusation that a Bon Air bookie had informed him that two prominent Augusta National members had each placed an eye-popping $50,000 wager on Hogan to win, implying that Keiser should carefully weigh the merits of not beating a man the club powers favored to win.

  He maintained for years that it was all part of a plot in which Roberts and Jones himself conspired to get the monkey off Ben Hogan’s hardworking back and boost him to the title. Among other indignities he was subjected to, Keiser claimed that Grantland Rice, a known Hogan cheerleader, moseyed out to the course at a critical moment in round three to warn him about slow play, obviously trying to rattle him. Keiser’s charges were eventually deemed groundless, though it was no secret Bob Jones harbored unusually strong affection for both Ben and Byron. Hogan’s doggedness and formal dignity appealed greatly to him, and about this time he was asked by a wire service reporter which golfer he would choose to hit the proverbial one shot “to win all the tea in China.” Jones thought for only a second before replying, “That’s not hard for me to answer—Hogan. Hogan had the intangible assets—the spiritual.”

  Likewise, he deeply appreciated Byron’s wondrous consistency and the ambassadorial grace under fire he brought to every situation, not to mention the revitalizing effect his historic run in ’45 had on popular interest in both golf and the Masters. These elements were at the heart of his fraternal love for Byron. Golf courses and clubs nationwide reported a nearly 50 percent surge in membership applications and actual play during the first two years following the war. Moreover, Byron would happily tell anyone who asked that his 1937 Masters title was the most meaningful victory of his career—even more important than the U.S. Open in 1939 or his two subsequent PGA Championships.

  Curiously, almost from the moment he first set foot on Augusta National, on the other hand, Sam Snead, despite his supreme physical gifts and broad popularity, never attained the lasting affection of either Jones or Roberts. Neither, for that matter, did the fourth best player of the day, Jimmy Demaret, whose witty repartee and clubhouse pranks provoked a scolding letter of rebuke from Saint Bobby himself. Sam’s early breaches of Masters protocol famously included an incident where he removed his shoes and socks and played a nine-hole practice round in his bare feet simply to make a point about the importance of footwork, which netted a swift and angry response from Gene Sarazen, the locker room’s self-appointed chief of protocol, who took the matter directly to Jones and came back with an unambiguous threat of future banishment if anything of that nature happened again. Sam let the incident roll off his back.

  But even before play resumed in 1946, it was Sam’s salty language and colorful storytelling—specifically his jokes that got bluer as his audience grew—and his casually indiscreet attitude toward women, that soured the affections of his hosts. Sam always attributed the technique of turning his head slightly at address and fixing his left eye on the ball directly to Jones, a move that enabled him to drive the ball so solidly—and that Jack Nicklaus would in time emulate. And Jones in turn was lavish in his praise of Sam’s unrivaled natural abilities. But by 1946, none of that was enough to overcome his growing conviction that Snead was an uncouth rube with a gift from the gods. His raw language and lack of discretion at moments were simply too much to bear, especially for a man presiding over America’s most elite shrine of golf.

  In any case, with the Masters on the verge of attaining the lofty stature that Jones and Roberts had been trying to achieve for more than a decade, the last thing either man wanted was any sort of scandal.

  Moreover, Herman Keiser’s final complaint that being paired with Byron Nelson—eight shots back at the start of Sunday’s final round—somehow placed him at a disadvantage simply doesn’t wash. Masters officials, like most others in those days, typically based pairings on the popularity of certain players. It would be several more years before final pairings were arrived at by fifty-four-hole scores, and putting Keiser with the decade’s hottest golfer could hardly have been a disadvantage. In fact, in 1948, after an ailing Bob Jones “officially retired” and gave up the largely ceremonial tradition of playing the fourth round with the tournament leaders, Byron Nelson took over that task at his personal request and brought the eventual winner home on at least four different occasions.

  For all the external drama, the internal seesaw battle emerging between a weary and withdrawing Byron and a hungrier-than-ever Ben Hogan in the end came down to the Hawk’s two-foot putt on the seventy-s
econd hole. Nobody in golf was better from ten feet and in than Ben. Taking the familiar tripod stance he’d developed in early 1940, he gently nudged his ball with his beloved brass doorknob putter and heard a cascade of gasps as his par putt grazed the edge of the cup and rolled to a stop four feet below the hole. He stood staring icily at the traitorous ball as the huge throng around the green shifted and whispered and attempted to settle down. A few moments later, after taking even more time to assess his bogey putt, he saw that one lip out as well—making Herman Keiser the first postwar Masters champion.

  In the clubhouse, it was the genial Henry Picard, already retired from active competition, who delivered the good news to the wan and agonizing Keiser. “Congratulations, Herman,” he said, slapping him robustly on the back. “The little man took the choke. Those were the three worst putts I’ve ever seen him hit.”

  These stark echoes of the past, the effect of this failure yet again to close the deal, followed Ben home, where he spent the next month in solid seclusion at Colonial working on his game—a pivotal turning point, or so he later claimed. “I left the tour and went home to Fort Worth about as desperate as a man could be,” he recounted in his famous 1955 Life magazine cover story in which he supposedly revealed the “secret” of his success to the public. “I sat and thought for three or four days. I did not pick up a club, although I wanted to in the worst way. One night while laying awake in bed I began thinking about a technique for hitting a golf ball that was so old it was almost new.”

  Ben’s revelation involved pronation, an old Scottish technique from the age of hickory clubs in which players “rolled” their hands upon takeaway, permitting the face of the club to open at the top—an archaic system largely discounted by most modern teachers of the game, who warned it could provoke hooks. Ben coyly explained that “two further adjustments” rendered his swing “hook-proof,” noting they were “so delicate that no one would ever think of looking for them—and I certainly was not going to tell anyone where to look.” Over the following decades, as teachers and players alike attempted to deconstruct his swing and learn his alleged secret—generating an avalanche of speculative articles and books all claiming to decipher his Archimedean swing perfection—Ben himself revealed nothing further, and his Shady Oaks cronies chortled at what they considered a brilliant exploitation of his growing mystique. Who, after all, was going to challenge the greatest shotmaker the game ever produced? Moreover, they noted, the estimated $50,000 from Life came exactly when his fledgling equipment company needed a serious infusion of cash.

  Perhaps Tommy Bolt, one of a group of younger players Hogan took a shine to, came closest to summing up his friend’s complex and unique form of genius. “You got the feeling that everything was his real so-called secret. By that I mean, piece by piece, nothing too small was considered and either used or discarded. And once he took it and learned and refined it, brother, it was his. Nobody did it better than Hogan, and that’s the bottom line.”

  Even Herb Wind—who ghostwrote the famous “Secret” article for Life and collaborated on his groundbreaking 1957 instruction book, Five Lessons, the best-selling instruction book in history—didn’t believe there was anything particularly “secret” about this so-called discovery. He pointed out that Ben merely placed his left thumb down the center of the shaft and locked his left wrist as it came through the ball at impact, avoiding a rollover effect that would create a hook. “There wasn’t anything revolutionary about what Ben learned about this,” he said years later. “Most good players knew these principles as well as he did. But Ben Hogan was all about evolution—specifically his own. The more he worked at these principles the better he got. I often think, to this day, Ben Hogan’s real secret was the difficulty of his life, the effect his long climb to the top had on his mind, his spirit. He thought through every detail every second he was out there. His mind never drifted. That was his real secret. Life made him, in time, fearless and almost invincible—and down the road, though he never saw it coming, a golf immortal.”

  In Life, Ben claimed he took his new secret straight back to the tour and proved it successful by winning George May’s All-American Open, though in fact he finished fourth, and complained so sharply about being asked to wear an identifying number on his back, which he ultimately refused to do, he declined to return for many years. The sustaining highlights on the heels of his devastating Masters loss were back-to-back wins at Marvin Leonard’s Colonial Invitational and the still mighty Western Open. Two weeks after the latter, however, he missed a four-footer on the final hole at the U.S. Open—at Canterbury, in Cleveland—that left him a stroke out of a playoff with Byron, Lloyd Mangrum, and Vic Ghezzi. But he rebounded quickly, claiming five more wins in nine starts that made him the joint favorite with Byron for the PGA Championship, scheduled for the end of August at the Portland Country Club in Oregon.

  Byron’s playoff at Canterbury exhausted whatever enthusiasm he had left for the highest levels of competition. “I was really tired by that point and though I’d really hoped to get another U.S. Open title before I left,” he explained years later, “my focus just wasn’t the same as it had been. I was too busy thinking about ranchland back home in Texas,” he added. “I think that’s perhaps why just about everything went wrong that could.”

  On the weekend, with some twelve thousand spectators swarming unchecked over the course, largely indifferent to the marshals who haplessly tried to contain them behind hastily strung yellow ropes, players and caddies had to shove through galleries and hit their shots through alleys of unruly fans—perhaps costing Byron his last best hope for a second national championship. After he played his second shot on the par-five thirteenth hole in the third round, for instance, the excited crowds rushed ahead and closed around his ball. His caddie, young Eddie Martin, struggling to maneuver his heavy leather bag through them, lost his balance and stumbled onto Byron’s ball, resulting in a penalty stroke. Even so, he fashioned a 69 and after fifty-four holes held a one-stroke lead over Ghezzi and Mangrum, Ben just another stroke back. Sam putted atrociously, blew to a 74, and was never a factor—the U.S. Open jinx again blooming evilly in his mind.

  In the final round, on the seventy-second hole, Byron needed only a par-four to claim his second title. But he uncharacteristically smother-hooked his drive into ankle-deep rough twenty yards off the fairway, and had to use an eight-iron to get back into play, leaving his second shot thirty yards shy of the green. The fatigue was visible in the slackened face, as O. B. Keeler described it, “of a man who simply wanted to go home and put away his clubs for a while, maybe forever.”

  “You could see the strain showing on Byron’s face all right,” USGA rules official Ike Grainger agreed. “At the seventy-first hole, the long par-three, he hit his approach shot right into a lady spectator’s hat, for instance, and had to have a ruling, which cost him a lot of waiting and loss of concentration. He made bogey. That’s where I believe he actually let the Open slip.”

  Byron’s desperate twelve-foot putt for par on the final hole just grazed the cup, leaving him tied with Ghezzi and Mangrum. A few minutes later, Ben and Herman Barron reached the final green and had medium-long birdie putts to win outright, but they both made weak attempts and missed maddeningly short par putts. Ben shook Barron’s hand and stalked to the locker room without saying a word to anyone.

  The next morning, all three men shot 72 in their eighteen-hole playoff, forcing another round in the afternoon, when whatever strength Byron had by the seventeenth hole vaporized when he missed a short par putt and—again, uncharacteristically—slammed the putter into his bag in pure frustration and disgust. “I was so angry with myself for the terrible chip that preceded that putt,” he remembered. “Because that cost me my last chance at the Open. I knew at the moment I would never have that opportunity again.”

  In the end, the four thousand spectators who stuck with the marathon beneath blackening skies that periodically spit cool rain and rumbled with distant thunder saw
dual Purple Heart recipient Lloyd Mangrum, the most underrated player of his time, according to Byron, tap in a short putt for 72 to beat Barron by a stroke and Byron by two. The three men shook hands, and Byron offered a weak smile that almost looked, upon reflection, relieved.

  He would never play in another U.S. Open. But at least he had something wonderful to go home to.

  A few weeks earlier, he had paid $55,000 cash for 630 acres of ranchland just west of tiny Roanoke’s sleepy main street junction, the contribution coming from his work on Winning Golf, an instruction book with Minneapolis sportswriter Otis Dypwick. By the time sequence photos were being called for by publisher A. S. Barnes in late summer, Byron was busy painting fences on his dream ranch, and splotches of red paint are visible in the photographs. The first among his rivals to produce a how- to book, he was uncommonly proud of it. And it netted him some decent money, too, a neat quarter from every copy sold. By Christmas that year Winning Golf had sold 130,000 copies, the equivalent of a New York Times best-seller.

  PGA boss Ed Dudley personally assigned archrivals Byron and Ben to separate brackets in the championship that summer in Portland, hoping to produce another great duel in the year’s last major. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be: Byron’s heart simply wasn’t in it. With rumors circulating that he hoped to win the Wanamaker Trophy and then announce his official retirement, in the quarterfinal he was upended by Ed “Porky” Oliver on the final hole of play. (Sam and Mangrum, for the record, were booted out in the first round of match play.)

  At that point, the Nelsons headed home and began moving to the somewhat ramshackle ranch house they’d just been given the keys to in Roanoke, leaving the retirement announcement for another day. Tellingly, they needed only two carloads to accomplish the task. After enduring fifteen years of cramped rental houses and drafty hotel rooms, the couple finally had a home. “We had no furniture of our own because we had rented furnished homes the entire time I was on the tour,” Byron explained. They borrowed a stove and refrigerator from Louise’s sister, Delle, whose husband was still away in the service, and made a few other modest purchases. “When everything was settled, we found we had $2500 to live on,” Byron later wrote, “which we figured we could make last six months.”