American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  He was careful to add, “I don’t recall a happier moment in my life.”

  After demolishing a pair of largely unknown club pros en route to the PGA’s thirty-six-hole semifinal match against his good friend and four-ball partner Demaret, Ben appeared to be a man on a holy mission, posting an unearthly sequence of nines—33–32–31—and steamrolling Jimmy ten-and-nine. Demaret took off his yellow tam and playfully fanned his pal as they shook hands and headed back to the clubhouse to await the verdict on Ben’s opponent in the final. One AP reporter compared the victory to the night Joe Louis showed no mercy in knocking out John Henry Lewis, the heavyweight champion’s one-eyed and elderly best friend, while others chided Hogan for humiliating his best friend so ruthlessly, though Demaret shrugged off all such talk. When asked, “What was the turning point in the match with Ben?” Jimmy simply gave a broad grin and quipped, “I’d say about ten o’clock, when the match began.” The room broke up. Lawton Carver of the Independent News Service, however, soberly concluded, “Hogan is the most ruthless, most cold-blooded and least compassionate of golf foemen. He doesn’t merely want to beat you. He wants to trample you underfoot.”

  That turned out to be the truth, given what happened to Porky Oliver, a friendly ape of a man who dressed almost as clownishly as Demaret, and entered their thirty-six-hole finale with the imagined momentum of having just beaten the game’s leading figure going in his favor. Oliver was a streak putter known for patches of brilliant play that could leave opponents gasping for air. Five years earlier, for instance, at the Western Open, Ben had finished the tournament with a three-shot lead and assumed he’d won, only to see Porky blaze home with a record-breaking 28 to beat him by a stroke.

  In Portland, the game’s heaviest and lightest competitors (220 pounds versus 137) put on a great show. At the lunch break, Oliver’s red-hot putter had him three up and many assumed Ben would choke as he had at Augusta back in the spring. The Hogans retreated to a quiet corner of the clubhouse dining room, where Ben ordered only unbuttered toast, chicken broth, and a glass of ginger ale, which he believed thinned his blood, improved the feel in his fingers, and eased his pesky sinuses, which sometimes flared up during a rainy summer. Before their final eighteen, he dressed head to foot in corporate gray and spent a silent forty-five minutes rapping putts by himself at a remote corner of the practice green, his jaw set like a boxer’s awaiting the final-round bell.

  Amid fluttering breezes, the knockout began when Ben went out in 30 and leap-frogged over Oliver by two with nine to play. He opened the final nine with three birdies in five holes, four of which he won, and ended the match on the thirty-second hole with yet another birdie. After starting the afternoon round three down, he’d made eight birdies in fourteen holes to win six-and-four, one of the strongest finishes recorded in a PGA final.

  At the presentation of the Wanamaker Trophy, his necktie knotted immaculately and every hair on his head neatly water-combed, Ben Hogan finally let out his best movie-star smile.

  He’d finally won a major championship.

  Beside him, wearing an open-necked shirt under a wrinkled two-tone travel jacket, pleasant Porky Oliver cupped a Pall Mall and grinned sheepishly as the flashbulbs exploded and Ben chose his words carefully.

  “It’s impossible to explain how much this means to me,” he began, halting for several seconds to self-edit whatever was coming next, a quintessential Hogan trait that allowed no room for a misunderstanding. Being misquoted or seeing his words taken out of context by lazy or inexperienced reporters infuriated him. Then he cleared his throat, smiled again, and simply added, “So I’ll just say thank you to the PGA and my wife, Valerie.”

  That appeared to be that—though his eyes did widen as he glanced around the press room until he spotted her, standing demurely in the back next to Bob Hudson, the Oregon fruit baron who would just weeks later cover the travel expenses for the British Ryder Cup team and lavishly host them here at the Portland Country Club. As usual, Valerie Hogan looked stylishly turned out, wearing a late-summer corsage of red roses pinned to the lapel of her light tweed jacket. She simply smiled back at him, too shy to reply, blushing adorably.

  After reluctantly agreeing to take a few questions, Ben suddenly excused himself and inexplicably left the interview room, prompting a veteran reporter to grumble out loud, “Vintage Ben, another rebuff by golf’s frigid midget,” prompting ripples of nervous laughter. When Ben returned a few moments later, massaging his eyes, he didn’t bother sharing the reason for his abrupt departure because Ben Hogan never felt the need to explain himself to anyone, least of all the press.

  In fact, he’d left to take a phone call from Fort Worth, his mother wanting to tell her youngest child how very proud she and Royal and Princess were of him.

  Behind the scenes, in the days leading up to Portland, Ben had played a very different role in a dispute that had been simmering for years and now threatened to become a large and nasty public debate. With 2,168 dues-paying members, the vast majority of whom were working club professionals who never got anywhere near a professional tournament, the PGA of America functioned pretty much as a grassroots organization that relied upon its constituent members to give lessons, peddle golf equipment, run amateur events, and serve their club members in whatever social capacity was needed, effectively acting as the Johnny Appleseeds for the old Scottish game in the New World. It was the strong conviction of the PGA establishment that this approach was the one that would broaden golf’s appeal as the postwar years unfolded.

  However, to the independent contractors whose livelihood, or most of it, came from tournament purses, it was their success, covered in the nation’s newspapers and shown in movie-house newsreels, that heightened golf’s visibility and attracted newcomers. As far back as the middle 1930s, Gene Sarazen vilified anonymous club pros who slipped away from their day jobs to plunk down an entry fee and compete in a sanctioned PGA tournament, often filling up fields and sometimes depriving their touring rivals of a spot, only to disappear again as invisibly as they came. He dismissed them as “pay and play pros, guys who take the dough from a serious player’s pockets and will never be seen again,” adding that the only real measure of a player’s abilities to compete and draw crowds was how a man performed week to week on tour.

  Though only a small percentage enjoyed comfortable affiliation deals that Squire Sarazen had hashed out with a host of clubs, or that Ben enjoyed with Milton Hershey and Sam had with the Greenbrier, many dedicated touring pros believed that breaking away and forming their own management organization was inevitable. Part of Byron’s personal conflict related to his own powerful ambivalence—or simple guilt—about serving two masters at once. His internal struggle to reconcile his natural love of teaching as a club professional and his proven ability to compete at the highest level and earn the kind of money that could fulfill his boyhood dreams of owning a ranch was ultimately what drove him from the game.

  “In the end,” veteran touring pro Paul Runyan said, “Byron might have been the only guy who managed to do both jobs better than anyone. But he paid a big emotional price. Byron felt obligated to just about everybody who wanted a piece of him. That ranch saved his life.”

  Fred Corcoran’s skillful management of players and tournaments through the late ’30s and early ’40s did much to forestall any outright revolt, but as both hopes and the economy revived in 1946, the issue resurfaced in locker room grumbles that something had to give. The regular tour players wanted their independence, and some were prepared to walk in order to prove it. The PGA wanted to maintain control for a variety of reasons, most of which were related to the money earned by sanctioning accredited tournaments. Days before the pros arrived in Portland for the championship, Ben was chosen to represent them in closed-door meetings with the PGA’s board of directors, reprising his sometimes critical hero Gene Sarazen’s role in arguing for more autonomy. “Among the top playing pros,” wrote PGA historian Herb Graffis, “Sarazen and Hogan are, on
the record, the coldest, toughest, most defiant proponents of the policy that tournament golf is a problem whose answers are worked out by clubs, balls, and the scorecard, instead of being a playground for the welfare state.”

  No breakthroughs, however, were announced in the initial negotiations, merely the news that in November Hogan and the board would convene again to continue their discussion at the board’s final meeting in Chicago. Perfectly true to form, buttoned up in his gray cashmere sweater—the very symbol of a corporate man at leisure—the players’ negotiator refused to entertain any further public discussion on the matter.

  As the summer wound down, many reporters believed the Hogan-Nelson duel that failed to materialize at the PGA in Portland might, ironically, take place at George May’s grandiose World Championship in the first week of September, a somewhat meaningless and unofficial two-day moneyfest that was the spiritual antecedent of the big-money, season-ending TV extravaganzas that came to define the game’s silly season three decades later. But owing to his revulsion of May’s antics—having actually been docked half his earnings for refusing to wear a demeaning number at the All-American earlier in the season—Ben skipped it altogether.

  Yet news of the most sensational kind was made at Tam O’Shanter that week when Byron chose this unlikely spot to announce that he was retiring from tournament golf. Though he’d been dropping hints for more than a year, many insiders chose to believe this was just talk, given how brilliantly he was playing and winning. Nothing else made sense. Byron was only thirty-four, realistically at the peak of his game, coming off a streak unlike any in the history of the game. But he had made up his mind.

  “From this point onward,” he told Charlie Bartlett of the Tribune, creating front-page headlines on the eve of the tournament, “I’ll only play a few times a year, at the Masters and Texas PGA events mainly.” He didn’t elaborate on this stunning decision or explain in any depth that owning a ranch and being a homebody would grant him the kind of stable life he’d been craving for years. Eerily presaging the future he’d now charted out, he finished two strokes behind Sam in May’s two-day, winner-take-all golf extravaganza. The winner, aping as usual for the photographers, took home the $10,000 first-prize check, while everyone else merely earned traveling expenses for the week.

  Within days, Byron was off in the mountains of Idaho elk hunting with a Seattle businessman and Jug McSpaden, telling tales and eating grub by a campfire. Looking down the sights of his rifle at a large bull elk, he squeezed off a shot and saw its knees buckle. “Truthfully,” he allowed decades later, “I always felt a little bad about killing animals in the wild. But that turned out to be a wonderful trip in many ways.” He had the elk’s head mounted and shipped to his father-in-law, Pop Shofner, who hung it on a post in his grocery store and left it there for many years.

  Byron’s final tournament of the year was the newly renamed Fort Worth Open, where as defending champion he felt obliged to play. Uninspired, he finished seventh. Tellingly, neither Sam nor Ben bothered to show up.

  “What a relief to have it all over with,” Byron said later. “I packed up my clubs and sent them to MacGregor and told them to keep them till I asked for them, which was going to be a long time. That way, if someone asked me to play even a casual round of golf, I could just tell them I didn’t have my clubs, and that would get me off the hook.”

  And what of Sam? In a year understandably defined by the media’s fascination with the storybook rivalry between the departing Byron and the ascendant Ben, Sam was hardly a forgotten man. Despite his growing problems with the flatstick, he managed to collect a respectable six victories, highlighted by a third Miami Open and a second title at Greensboro, both of which were upstaged by an unexpected title he never saw coming, and one of the biggest plums of all—the Open Championship at St. Andrews.

  Eight weeks before taking George May’s loot in Chicago, he had a meeting there with I. B. Icely, the president of Wilson Sporting Goods, to discuss the latest version of his premium Blue Ridge irons and a line of Sam Snead wedges the company planned to roll out early in 1947. Sam was already playing a custom Wilson golf ball, and in the years ahead would receive a princely royalty off every sale using his name or image. Over the next thirty-five years, Wilson also counted LPGA founders Patty Berg and Babe Didrikson, Walter Hagen, and a promising Pennsylvanian named Arnold Palmer among its playing staff. The company would produce no fewer than four different lines of Sam Snead clubs, sustaining one of the longest player representation deals in any sport.

  Icely had been talking to wily old Hagen, four-time Open champion and honorary Anglophile, who convinced him that Snead needed to be the first postwar American to win a Claret Jug. With the golf’s oldest and most venerated championship resuming at St. Andrews after a six-year break, a win by the most colorful American in the game—not to mention the closest in spirit and personality to the Haig himself—would amount, he argued, to a public relations windfall for both Sam and Wilson.

  Sam initially rebuffed the idea. “I still had memories of the bad food and the sorry accommodations from the Ryder Cup in 1937,” he explained years later without a whit of hesitation. “And when I learned they were putting up something like only six hundred dollars, why, I said no way to that. That wouldn’t even cover my expenses.” Sam’s opinion was best summarized by this acid comment: “Anytime you’re playing golf outside the United States, hell, it’s just camping out.”

  He also protested that his putting was, at least for the moment, in terrible shape. He could handle the thirty-footers all right, he said, but every time he stood over a three-footer “it’s like a rattlesnake lifts its head out of the cup.” Moreover, the firm and quirky British courses—typically less manicured than their American counterparts, producing unpredictable bounces and situations—simply didn’t suit his game. Undeterred, Icely replied that the greens at St. Andrews were “big as a barnyard” and that Walter Hagen had graciously offered to give him some putting tips and advice on playing links-style courses. Then he sweetened the deal by promising to pay his travel expenses. Reluctantly, Sam agreed to go.

  Things went unpromisingly from the start. The sum of Sir Walter’s putting advice was that he should strike the ball above the equator in order to impart more topspin, ostensibly producing a truer roll. Sam rejected this notion based on his own conversations with Hogan, who maintained that too much topspin prevented the ball from “dying” near the cup, a theory he’d picked up from watching Jones putt. Since Ben was then widely regarded as the finest putter in the game, Sam was quick to trust his ideas. “Using Hagen’s method,” he later wrote, “I’d seen many a ball go half in and flip out. And I’d topped far too many putts, also.”

  Then, before taking off from New York’s Idlewild Airport, the distinctive three-tailed Lockheed Constellation sprang a fuel leak and suffered an engine fire, prompting a hasty runway evacuation of the smoke-filled plane. Sam, shaken by the episode and forever susceptible to a cosmic reading of events, perceived it as a sign of awful things to come. Only the thought of facing down both Hagen and Icely got him back on the plane. Upon reaching London, a city still in the throes of postwar reconstruction, he found that the hotel Wilson had booked for him was still undergoing renovations and hadn’t reopened yet. He spent the entire afternoon and evening carting his large leather golf bag around Mayfair and Kensington Road, looking for a suitable hotel or guesthouse, before giving up and making for Paddington Station, where he spent the “miserable night cussing my bad luck” on a bench waiting for a morning train to Edinburgh.

  Transferring to the smaller train that linked Edinburgh to St. Andrews, Sam was pleased to discover his fellow American Lawson Little ensconced in a cramped first-class compartment with a tweedy British gentleman. He joined them and fell into conversation, offering his usual blunt perspective on a range of subjects, starting with his belief that British food was even worse now than it was before the war. At one point, as the dreamy spires of St. Andrews appeared
on the horizon, Sam glanced out the window and casually remarked, “Well, boys, what do you make of that? Looks like an old abandoned golf course.”

  “That, sir,” his British traveling companion declared with visible indignation, “is the Old Course at St. Andrews, the most famous golf course on earth. That building beyond it is the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.”

  “Well, how about that?” Sam came back, unimpressed. “Looks more like a pasture back home than a golf course.”

  Within hours, his comments found their way to the sports pages of Britain’s dailies, featuring him as a Twainian rube abroad. “Snead, a rural American type,” sniffed the Scotsman on Sunday, “would think the Leaning Tower of Pisa a structure about to totter and crash at his feet.” A columnist for the Evening Standard wondered why arguably the most popular player in his own country had even bothered to come so far if he found “The Home of Golf so unsuited to his tastes. Perhaps a pasture back home in Virginia would suffice.”

  The mutual disaffection deepened when Sam was unable to secure a decent caddie, and in fact he had four different ones over his days of practice rounds and the tournament itself. The first whistled whenever he putted and was sent packing the moment they finished. His successor, a young man in Royal Navy pants, couldn’t read distances worth a lick, and Sam—who unlike Ben relied heavily on a caddie’s judgment—came up woefully short on several approach shots. He was let go in favor of a veteran caddie recommended by the head porter at Rusack’s Marine Hotel, where Sam was staying.