by James Dodson
“I was so mad I could have spit,” Sam recalled decades later. “But I knew that was exactly what Lew had hoped would happen, I’d be rattled. We both knew what was going on and I just failed to get my mind settled in time to recover my composure.”
Grainger’s ruling confirmed what Sam already knew. He was 30.5 inches away as opposed to Worsham’s 29.5. Shaking his head, he took his stance again, inhaling and exhaling to try to regain his focus and make the smooth left-hand finish that had served him so splendidly all week. It wasn’t an easy putt, downhill with a significant left to right break, exactly the kind Sam detested. As he leaned over the ball, only the drone of a plane far overhead could be heard. He stroked the putt smoothly but too gently to hold its line. The gallery groaned as his ball missed the cup and stopped two inches away. Worsham, on the other hand, wasted no time in replacing his marked ball and firmly rolling his short uphill putt into the back of the cup to become the 1947 U.S. Open champion.
“Sam looked like he’d been shot through the heart,” Bill Campbell recalls. “I didn’t want to go over and speak to him because I knew he was in absolute agony. I followed him up to the clubhouse and we spoke a little later. By then he was pretty well composed. But coming on the heels of his other Open troubles, that one proved the most devastating. It only confirmed his worst fears about a jinx.”
After a week of farm work back home, he was in Detroit for the PGA Championship, still brooding about the incident, when Ben Hogan—who’d finished tied for sixth at St. Louis—walked over in the Plum Hollow Country Club locker room to say hello. “I was always grateful to Ben for that,” Sam remembered. “He knew what it meant to me more than anybody else because he’d been there.”
According to Bill Campbell, “If Sam had won either of the Opens he blew on the final hole I’m convinced his life would have been, in some ways, quite different. There’s no telling how much more he would have won. He would have had the respect he so desperately hungered for most of his career, especially playing in the shadows of Hogan and Nelson. He once told me a day never passed when he failed to think about that missed putt at St. Louis.”
Curiously, according to Campbell, Sam never held a grudge against Worsham. In fact, at season’s end, they went deer hunting together. “Sam always blamed himself for not keeping his composure that day,” he adds. “But what happened in St. Louis, I’m convinced, ruined the Open forever for Sam, and sent him into a very deep slump that could have ended his playing career.”
Indeed, Sam finished 1947 with no victories and only slightly more than $9,000 in official earnings, less than he’d won his first year on the tour a decade before. The following year was even more nightmarish, with a host of unimaginably bad finishes—a woeful tie for thirtieth at the Crosby and another for forty-third at St. Petersburg, a tournament he’d won twice. He played seventeen events and won just once, slipping past a modest field in the rain-delayed Texas Open in early February to finish a distant eighteenth on the money list, earning a paltry $6,980 for the year. Compounding his frustrations—and touching his greatest fear of all, common to many rural survivors of the Great Depression, the unvoiced terror of going flat broke—were whispers that his endorsement contracts with Gillette razors and Havoline Oil were in jeopardy. Only Wilson Golf and the Greenbrier reaffirmed their commitments to a suddenly struggling superstar. The company’s new mid-range clubs bearing his distinctive signature were, after all, the best-selling off-the-rack sets among the estimated one million golfers who took up the game that year.
One man’s misfortune, goes an ancient Chinese proverb, is another’s golden temple. And so it appeared to be with the remaining active members of the American Triumvirate. Following his PGA triumph in ’46, Ben won four of his seven tournaments, including another North and South Open, concluding the year with thirteen victories and $43,212, the most tour prize money any professional golfer had ever made in a single year. Perhaps more significantly, exactly three months after hoisting his first Wanamaker Trophy the game’s most dominant player appeared behind closed doors at Chicago’s stolid Bismarck Hotel, dressed like a successful Wall Street banker in a summer-weight worsted gray suit, and resumed his case for more self-governance and greater autonomy on the tour. “There’s a big need for young blood,” he argued in an article written exclusively for Detroit’s Free Press that went out over the national wires to four hundred newspapers before the meetings. “It’s wide open for those who can make the grade but that need isn’t being filled.”
As he bluntly put it to the PGA’s executive committee, if the touring pros’ growing resentment and their desire to handle their own affairs and determine their own fate wasn’t soon addressed, promising prospects would either stay put in the amateur ranks or opt for safer club jobs. In order to give professional golf a suitable platform to create new stars that would, he argued, “stimulate interest and grow the game,” the tour’s players needed—in fact demanded—their own governing organization. “If you don’t do this,” he soberly warned, “you’re likely to soon have one hell of a civil war on your hands.”
The PGA board listened to his assessment with clenched teeth, and one of them later remarked that Hogan left the room the most “loathed man in golf.” His remarks sounded more like a manifesto than a discussion, but if anyone had the power to call down the long-threatened rebellion, it was Ben Hogan. So the committee reluctantly voted to create a Tournament Bureau run strictly by the players themselves, essentially independent of direct PGA influence. It was further proposed that Fred Corcoran continue merely as the tour’s promotion director, a clear demotion owing to his close business ties with Sam Snead, though everyone agreed that he was unrivaled at lining up sponsors and generating commercial perks and lucrative exhibitions.
In a fascinating footnote to these negotiations, the genial Corcoran tore up his old contract with the PGA and accepted this diminished role in exchange for a new contract that granted him exclusive TV and radio rights on all tour events. With his marketer’s genius, he saw the advent of commercial television as a potential windfall for professional golf in general and himself in particular. Introduced in 1939 but derailed by the war, the first TV sets reached the consumer marketplace in 1946, and the far-sighted Corcoran understood that this exciting new medium could make Snead, Hogan, and their colleagues (not to mention his other star clients) even wealthier and household names across the country.
In this sweetheart deal, he retained a full third of any profits that derived from broadcast rights for the next three years. “That was the most valuable document I ever held in my hand,” he lamented years later. “Today that contract would be worth millions. But I was a little ahead of my time.” Among other things, he described calling on Tom Gallery, the sports director of the National Broadcasting Company in late 1948, and offering him exclusive rights to PGA golf for television. Since the early ’40s the network had limited coverage of the U.S. Open, the Masters, and the PGA Championship through its radio network, competing for this privilege with rival CBS Sports—soon to be headed by John Derr, who shared Corcoran’s belief that TV would soon become a factor in the broadcast mix. “All he [Gallery] had to do was sign up and NBC would have owned television golf,” Corcoran said. Instead, Gallery told him, “Listen, Fred. Golf is just not a TV sport. Don’t bother me anymore.”
Derr and Corcoran weren’t the only ones who saw a future in televising golf. In the fall of 1945, Cliff Roberts sent a memorandum to Augusta National’s club manager, James Searle, expressing interest in the emerging medium. Moreover, when upstart CBS Sports declined to renew its radio contract with the Masters—having failed to strike an exclusive deal—Roberts signed a new contract with NBC that gave NBC the option on television as well. “As late as two months before the 1947 Masters,” according to Masters historian David Owens, “Roberts believed they might do so.” But Gallery showed no interest, convinced that the logistics of covering a tournament with unpredictable lighting and stationary cameras were unfe
asible. That same summer at the U.S. Open where Sam Snead’s heart was broken again, a St. Louis TV station broadcast the final hole of the fourth round—a first in television history. Little came of it, however.
It wasn’t until six years later—or three years after Corcoran’s new contract ran out—that another visionary, Chicago’s George S. May, decided to give the medium another shot by broadcasting live coverage of the final hole of his World Championship at Tam O’Shanter, a drama that remained in doubt until the tournament’s final shot. Once more Lew Worsham was at center stage, needing to get down in two from the fairway in order to tie journeyman Chandler Harper, who was already perched on the clubhouse terrace enjoying a gimlet cocktail. A single wide-angle lens secured on top of the grandstand (another May innovation) enabled the viewing audience to see Worsham punch a wedge from a hundred yards, his ball disappearing into the cup for an eagle. Unable to contain his excitement, Jimmy Demaret, who was commentating for radio and television, blurted out, “The son of a bitch holed it!” What in time would be called the “shot seen round the world” stunningly illustrated the medium’s dramatic potential, though regular coverage was still three years in the future.
Coming on the heels of his first major championship, Ben’s successful negotiations with the PGA of America in late 1946 serve as an effective birth date for modern professional golf, establishing a working blueprint that would lead to formal separation and a fully independent PGA Tour two decades later. In the meantime, just six days into the new year, Hogan blitzed the field to win his second L.A. Open, wasting little time while his rivals jockeyed for influence in the new self-governing tour and haggled with Corcoran over such minutiae as caddie fees and entry fees. During a dispute over the higher exhibition fees Corcoran set for marquee names—a charge he didn’t deny—Johnny Bulla confronted Corcoran and sucker-punched him in the gut, followed by an equally irate Dick Metz, who poked him in the nose. “I felt like I was under siege all over again,” Corcoran explained to a reporter decades later. “No one really knew what this new independence would mean to the players, or how it would essentially work. So everybody wanted in on the decisions, fearing they’d be short-changed. Eventually it settled down when the boys realized Hogan was a bigger threat to their livelihoods than either me or the PGA of America.”
As Sam disappeared to deal with the worst slump of his career, Ben put together a strong year by anyone’s standards except perhaps his own, winning nine tournaments (two unofficial) and more than $30,000, good enough for second spot on the money list behind his pal Jimmy Demaret, who also captured his second Masters. The real surprise of 1947 came on the eve of the U.S. Open in June, when nationally syndicated sports columnist Oscar Fraley broke some startling news: “Ben Hogan, the miniature Irishman who ranks with the all-time golfing giants, has just about reached the point today where he is ready to retire. Hogan, like many of his illustrious predecessors, is deathly tired of the competitive fairways and greens. Others who reached that breaking point where they actually hated the game were Byron Nelson and Henry Picard—and they didn’t hang around long afterwards.” Declining to name his sources, Fraley concluded, “The bantam Benny is hanging on because he wants one more crack at the U.S. Open and wants to try and defend his PGA title. After those two are over he is expected to say adieu, even though he won’t admit it now.” Weeks before, Fraley and others had begun writing the same thing about Sam Snead, noting that his age—thirty-five, relatively old for athletes of any other sport—and ailing putter might finally be pushing him to the front porch for good.
True to form, Ben made no effort to either confirm or deny Fraley’s claims—though his sixth-place finish in St. Louis did little to challenge them. Just a week later, in a rare back-to-back staging of major championships, both Ben and Sam seemed to confirm Fraley’s clairvoyance, with the former free-falling to a tie for thirty-third at the PGA Championship at Plum Hollow, and the latter struggling home in seventeenth place.
Only the dazzling performance at the 1947 Ryder Cup at Oregon’s rain-swept Portland Country Club in early November briefly stanched the rampant speculation about the game’s biggest stars. Under a new points system that allowed each team’s captain to make two additional selections, Ben invited Byron to play and the American side demolished the visiting Brits 11–1, the largest rout in Ryder Cup history, small consolation being that host millionaire and Oregon fruit baron Bob Hudson picked up the entire traveling tab for the distinguished visitors. In the Saturday foursomes, Sam and Lloyd Mangrum, Ben and Jimmy Demaret, and Byron and Herman Barron won with relative ease, while on Sunday, secretly nursing a severely sore back, Ben sat out and watched Sam destroy Henry Cotton and Byron polish off Arthur Lees in singles matches that sealed the lopsided triumph.
During the Christmas break, Ben saw a specialist in Fort Worth and took heating treatments for his lower back and the mysterious pains radiating through his shoulders and neck; a battery of tests determined there was nothing wrong beyond the draining effects of fatigue and stress on his well-traveled thirty-five-year-old body. His physician prescribed daily aspirin, an improved diet, and plenty of rest and relaxation, advising him to take up a new hobby.
Ben Hogan was not a hobby kind of guy. For two decades every molecule of his being had been dedicated to putting him through the refiner’s fire, transforming himself from a West Texas nobody into the most efficient killing machine in golf. Telling him to find a new hobby was like asking Fred Astaire take up square-dancing for fun, or Humphrey Bogart to try community theater. Even so, he accepted Jimmy Demaret’s invitation to go deer hunting in Arkansas, where for three nights they sat under the stars by a fire and shared views on a variety of subjects, including the touchy one of retirement. Time was also knocking on Jimmy the Showman’s door. For years, he’d implied that Ben, Byron, and Sam were his venerable seniors—when, in fact, he was actually two years older. Taking full advantage of his recent breakthrough and domination of the money list, however, he was already pondering a second career in radio, and possibly television, and was eager to start his own golf club back home in Houston.
“You know, Jimmy,” Ben surprised him by saying on their drive back to Texas, “I feel better than I have in years. This break has been just the thing.”
According to Demaret, they’d spotted several trophy-sized white-tails, but unlike Byron in the Bitterroots two autumns before, neither man had the desire to fire a shot.
Two weeks later, in vivid contrast to the gloomy, unapproachable figure who failed to make any headway at the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship the previous summer, a visibly relaxed and beaming Ben Hogan showed up at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades three days before the start of the L.A. Open. Being in Tinseltown, where he and Val dined with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and his pal Bing Crosby, always elevated Ben’s spirits, a poignant echo of his childhood fascination with Hollywood stardom. As more than one reporter noted, whatever had been chewing at him for most of 1947 appeared to be gone. He granted several relaxed interviews and made self-deprecating jokes about his back and Oscar Fraley’s fortune-telling skills.
Few if any sportswriters had a clue about what made Ben Hogan tick. Like Sam, he was actually a friendly and highly sentimental man whose life was governed by a strong code of honor, though he carefully entombed this part of his nature behind an impenetrable wall of hard work, accomplishment, and an unshakable fear of revealing any more than was necessary about his past. His hard shell and curt responses were merely about self-preservation. Hennie Bogan, on the other hand, had a soft spot for stray animals and a natural compassion for anyone who’d been dealt a raw hand. He sometimes clipped newspaper stories about people facing undeserved setbacks and tragedies, piling them neatly in his office desk drawer, and he always exhibited great personal warmth and almost fanatical devotion to his wife and her family and a handful of intimate friends that included Marvin Leonard, Bing Crosby, and oil man George Coleman, whom he met on tour in the early 1930s a
nd later became Oklahoma Amateur champion.
Two other factors gave Ben’s spirits a lift that week at Riviera. One was the publication of Power Golf, an instructional book that would soon follow Byron Nelson’s book onto the best-seller lists. In gratitude to the man who’d helped him unlock the mystery of his own golf swing, Ben dedicated it to Henry Picard. As this remarkable year unfolded, the fact that his book outsold Byron’s gave Ben untold satisfaction.
The other positive was Riviera itself. Ben had grown to love just about everything about this tight and challenging course with its small, firm, and fast greens and sticky kikuyu grass rough. It’s where he began the 1947 season with a convincing victory, and he naturally hoped to defend his title. Unlike most of his colleagues, Ben generally played his best golf on the most difficult layouts, which made his unsuccessful U.S. Open performances doubly frustrating. Not counting his controversial 1942 Hale America Open victory, which he considered the national championship under a different name, in seven appearances before 1948 he had never finished higher than tied for third—rather pathetic for a man now regarded as the best player in the world. In June, however, the Open was scheduled to return to sweet Riviera, which made the L.A. Open feel a little like a glorious warm-up session, reflected by Ben’s four beautiful rounds of 68–70–70–67 for a record-breaking 275, a mark that would stand for another quarter century.
When asked about his sterling play, he attributed it to the fast greens and superb conditions, then added that Riviera would be a “very different place” for the national championship, playing at least six to eight strokes tougher. Before heading to Bing’s Clambake, while signing books at Bullock’s department store in downtown Los Angeles, he confided to a sports columnist, “I think a score of 282 to 284 will win the Open,” a distinctive Hogan ploy to make a demanding course seem even more intimidating to any would-be rivals. As usual, what he didn’t say was more important than what he revealed. As he confided to Valerie afterward, the more psychologically intimidated other players were by the prospect of Riviera in June—and, not coincidentally, by his mastery of it—the fewer of them he would have to beat.