American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  “I’m plenty tired. I’m not even sure these old stems can go another eighteen,” Ben confided to a crush of reporters in the locker room. But the next day, tapping into a reservoir of adrenaline and mental strength perhaps only he possessed, he finished his first tournament back with a third round of 69—a 280 total that seized the tournament lead. Coming off the famous eighteenth green, surrounded by worshipful fans packed into Riviera’s natural amphitheater, he tipped his flat linen cap to the sustained and thunderous cheer. “The second coming of Lazarus,” a Mutual Network radio commentator declared over the din. “Why, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!” Lanfield’s secret battalion of scriptwriters couldn’t have written a better Hollywood ending.

  At that moment, with Barber and Demaret having fallen back, the only player with a reasonable chance to catch Ben was his archrival, Sam Snead, who was three under after fourteen holes and needed two birdies in the final four holes simply to tie. After failing at fifteen and sixteen to get them, Sam turned to his playing partner, Jack Burke Jr., and quipped, “Guess I’ve got to knock a couple in the hole to catch the little man.” A clutch ten-footer for his fourth birdie in six holes at the next hole drew him one shy of the lead, but he suddenly faced one of the most daunting finishing holes in golf, Riviera’s difficult 445-yard, par-four eighteenth, a hole that yielded precious few birdies.

  “I had no doubt in my mind that I could catch Ben,” Sam recalled years later. “My hands were just itchin’ for the next chance to putt. That old putter of mine was magic that day.”

  On the final green, following a brilliant six-iron approach that left him a fifteen-footer for birdie, the vast gallery fell to hushed silence, and Sam took his good sweet time assessing the putt from various angles. “For three full minutes I quartered the green,” he explained, “looking for major and minor breaks, estimating the speed needed and inspecting the turf around the cup.”

  As he stood over his ball, a limb in the large eucalyptus tree just below the green snapped, sending a zealous fan tumbling into the bushes. “I’m all right, I’m all right!” he hollered, leaping to his feet, and everyone laughed.

  A year or two earlier, Sam would have blown his stack, but now he was playing the finest golf of his life. In fact, the producers of Ben’s movie hoped to convince him to play himself in the forthcoming biopic. Yet in this instance he rewrote the script by smiling and briefly backing off to take a final read on his putt. Finally, he calmly stepped up and smoothly stroked the ball, rolling it into the center of the cup to force a playoff.

  “The sound that went up at that moment was pretty amazing,” Middlecoff remembered. “Half of it was Sam’s fans cheering like crazy, the other half—or maybe more—belonged to Ben’s fans, groaning and cursing.”

  Pandemonium erupted on the hillside as rain-loosened sod gave way and spectators tumbled onto the green. Several rushed to swarm and congratulate Sam, who grimaced and shoved a few out of the way in order to reach Jackie Burke and shake hands. Sam quickly checked, signed, and submitted his card to officials and fled into the safety of the locker room where he found his rival already showered and dressed, sitting with Middlecoff and Fazio, smoking one of his forbidden Chesterfields.

  “I figured you would make that putt, Sam,” Ben told him with an icy little smile, dreading the very idea of an additional round.

  “Well, Ben, I can’t miss ’em all,” Sam said with a grin.

  A few minutes later, a knot of reporters gathered around Ben as he draped his topcoat over his arm. “I wish Sam had won it out there,” he told them. “I don’t feel bad about Sam tying me. I just don’t want to play another round. I’d rather Sam had won.”

  Someone asked, a bit inconsequentially, if he planned on driving himself and Valerie up to the Crosby after the playoff. Media access would be more restricted there and he could relax a little more with his friends Crosby, Coleman, and Eddie Lowery, the San Francisco car dealer, before the tournament got under way on Wednesday.

  “I don’t drive anywhere but home anymore, fellas,” Ben explained, excusing himself and heading up the stairs to where Valerie was waiting for him in the foyer. Left by himself to face a barrage of questions, Sam swigged a Coke and was only too happy to hold forth, having finally finished off an important tournament as well as he knew he could—with a scintillating 66.

  One major wire service went slightly overboard that evening in describing the next act as the “Golf Match of the Century,” an echo of Hagen’s ballyhooed matches against his triumvirate rivals, Sarazen and Jones. But the gods clearly had something else in mind after dense Pacific rains swept in overnight and flooded the course a second time. The playoff was postponed for a week, dampening the Hollywood ending Lanfield and the media hoped to record.

  To complicate matters, by the time Ben reached foggy Monterey, he had a nasty head cold. And by the time he finished up the three days of play with his partner, Bing, who ironically gave him an engraved cigarette lighter, a late Christmas gift, his miserable 223 left him in a tie for nineteenth place. Naturally, Sam won the affair for the second time in his career. Boarding the train back to Los Angeles, craving a smoke, Ben’s only comfort was provided by his lawyers back in Texas, whose settlement with the Greyhound Bus Company granted him $25,000 a year for life. Even if he never swung a club in competition again, he was financially secure.

  Neither man distinguished himself in their predictably anticlimactic playoff encounter, which only 2,091 fans paid sixty cents to witness on an overcast and cool Monday afternoon following Bing’s Clambake. Sam managed an uninspired 72, while Ben, swaddled in two cotton sweaters, hobbling badly and repeatedly pausing to blow his nose, scored a wretched 76. They scarcely spoke but shook hands afterward, displaying all the enthusiasm of longshoremen who’d been forced to work on a national holiday. They split the modest gate receipts—pocketing an additional $500 apiece—and parted ways. Hogan made no excuses. “I’ve obviously got more work to do,” he told reporters before vanishing into a hired car. Sam lingered a little while longer, making little jokes, savoring as best he could another victory over his greatest rival.

  Following a six-day rest at Dallas friend Pollard Simons’s house in Palm Springs, Ben arrived at the Phoenix tournament and found the event this year renamed the Ben Hogan Open in his honor. He limped to a twentieth-place finish, smoking like a chimney again, and thanked the generous fans of Phoenix for turning out in such large numbers. Within minutes he and Valerie were headed to the train station and home. Sam, continuing his tear, placed second.

  By the start of Masters week in April, Sam’s red-hot putter had carried him to record-breaking wins at Texas, Miami, and Greensboro. Ben looked rested and much better, too, fresh from two weeks of practice at the ultra-private Seminole Golf Club with his friends George Coleman and Paul Shields, a Wall Street banker and a close friend of Cliff Roberts’s. Coleman would eventually join and be elected president of the cloistered seaside club where Ben and Valerie now made their annual late-winter retreat from the Texas cold, hobnobbing with the likes of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson and Chris Dunphy, a colorful former Hollywood agent who ran the club like a genial Irish despot, arranging daily matches between millionaire members that often ran into staggering sums. His friendships with Ben, Sam, and Byron meant all three became regulars at the unofficial Seminole Amateur-Professional where as much as $150,000 exchanged hands in its famous Calcutta, played out of sight of the celebrity-hungry press and agents for an even more interested Internal Revenue Service. Not until agents posing as caterers were able to penetrate the Pinkerton security force that Dunphy hired to keep unwelcome guests off the property—and jot down the names and winnings of players they could present with tax bills—did the full scope of Seminole’s invitational become known. While other well-publicized Calcuttas began running afoul of authorities about this time, Seminole’s beautifully run event—independent of the personal tax issues it generated—never had a whisp
er of scandal due to Dunphy’s imposing presence.

  In March of 1950, just days before the Hogans set off for Augusta, Dunphy even managed to convince Ben to commit to the new Spring Golf Festival he helped orchestrate at Sam’s Greenbrier in early May. As Dunphy knew, the thought of taking one back from Sam the way the Slammer had taken the L.A. Open in Hogan’s Alley was simply too attractive to resist. Ben showed up at the Bon Air in Augusta looking tanned and unusually relaxed. Chatting with reporters, he explained he was working on a new “strategy of course management,” a phrase that quickly became attached to the growing Hogan mystique. Asked about this strategy, Tommy Bolt quipped, “New words for the same old Ben. He hits balls wherever he wants. We should just aim for his divots.”

  Ben’s opening round was a disappointment, however, with his stamina giving out early in the round due to the course’s hilly terrain and a putter that never got on track. He finished the Masters with an embarrassing 76 and a total of 288 that left him five strokes behind the winner, Jimmy Demaret, who claimed his third title and first green jacket—a tradition that had begun just one year before. Sam finished one stroke better than Ben, tying for third at 286, his putter giving him trouble, as well.

  A month later, however, with the Duke of Windsor and Chris Dunphy in the gallery, Ben evened the score by putting the lights out at the Greenbrier’s famed Old White Course, recording eye-popping rounds of 64–64–65–66 for a breathtaking 259 that equaled Byron’s historic 1945 mark and lifted the trophy of the inaugural Spring Festival right out from under Sam’s slightly out-of-joint nose. The closest competitor was, of course, Sam himself, who finished second but ten strokes back. “If Ben’s gonna putt like this,” he quipped at the gala dinner following the tournament, “I’d just as soon he’d go on back to Fort Worth and take it easy for the rest of the year.”

  That spring, over lunch at Colonial, Ben heard from his mentor, Marvin Leonard, that he was thinking of building a private members golf retreat somewhere in California, and had even inquired into purchasing the Pebble Beach Golf Links but found the $20 million asking price too rich for his groceryman’s blood. This conversation, however, would eventually lead to a discussion about building a course somewhere in the city’s prosperous western suburbs. During this same luncheon, Ben aired his dissatisfaction with MacGregor, his longtime equipment provider. “They can’t seem to make a club to suit my specifications,” he complained to Leonard. Ever the entrepreneur, Leonard wondered if this meant he was contemplating a company of his own that would compete with the club-making titans of Wilson, MacGregor, and Spalding. The idea seemed almost incomprehensible. The big three had factories, after all, not to mention great distribution in pro shops across the country and generations of expertise in club manufacturing.

  “It’s something I’m looking into,” Ben confirmed. “I don’t give a damn about their histories. I’ll make clubs better than they do, for anybody who wants to play golf the way it ought to be played.”

  After the Greenbrier event, Sam successfully defended his Western Open title at Brentwood Golf Club in Los Angeles, his sixth victory of the year, and then moseyed down to Fort Worth and shot a pair of nimble 66s to snatch the Colonial Invitational trophy from under Ben, who tied for third and wryly remarked that he wished Sam would consider taking the rest of the year off to hunt and fish back home in the hills.

  The good-natured public banter hid an almost palpable desperation in each man to beat the other, and this now came to a head as the year’s largest prize hove into view.

  The fiftieth United States Open, the golden anniversary of golf’s second oldest championship, was scheduled for the Merion Golf Club, the Hugh Wilson gem outside Philadelphia where Jones captured the U.S. Amateur in 1930 to complete his fabled Grand Slam and where Ben had played miserably in his first national championship back in 1934.

  Sam had his own sizable issues, of course, namely his Open jinx.

  But he also had a plan to keep the great Jimmy Stead on his bag here: several of his Merion admirers had arranged for Stead to slip quietly into the pool of Open caddies. Unfortunately, however, the USGA disallowed this move and Sam was forced to pick a caddie from the registered pool, which reinforced his growing belief that he’d been singled out by executive director Joe Dey for treatment that diminished his chances of winning the prize he most coveted. Several USGA officials, including at least two former presidents, would ultimately agree with Sam’s interpretation.

  By Open standards, Merion was short—just 6,700 yards—but a target shooter’s dream with narrow alleys of fairway and small greens fringed by thick, unyielding rough and strategic bunkering that recalled its spiritual antecedents, the great heather courses of Britain. Ben’s planning, as usual, was meticulous. Playing alone, hitting three shots on every hole in the practice rounds in welcome June warmth, he determined that his seven-iron was pointless, and replaced it with a one-iron, a move that proved critical as events unfolded.

  Ben’s two-over 72 in the opening round left him eight strokes behind Lee Mackey, an obscure Alabama pro whose 64 tied the eighteen-hole Open record. Sam, still stewing over what he considered roughshod treatment by Dey and company, opened with 73 and declined to comment when a Philadelphia reporter asked him about the flap over Jimmy Stead.

  The next day, as often happens to unknowns who briefly catch lightning by the tail, Mackey shot himself out of contention with a woeful 81, and a scowling Sam came home with 75. The halfway lead was shared by Dutch Harrison, Jim Ferrier, and Johnny Bulla. Young Julius Boros, a darkly handsome accountant from Connecticut playing in his first national championship, held the lead. Ben, whose improved 69 placed him in fifth place, was being chauffeured from the grounds to the luxurious Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square by Frank Sullivan, a crusty lawyer who worked for the publishers of his best-selling Power Golf, when he suddenly asked him to pull over so he could throw up. A little while later, following his soak in Epsom salts and a glass of ginger ale, he confided to Valerie and Sullivan over an early dinner that he wasn’t sure his ailing legs would hold up to the thirty-six holes he faced the next day.

  Saturday dawned beautiful and warm, and Ben’s early-morning prep was precisely the same as it had been since Los Angeles—a warm bath followed by stringent leg massages with Ben-Gay, followed by an extensive bandaging routine from ankle to crotch, and an aspirin washed down with a glass of orange juice and a splash of ginger ale. After this two-hour ritual came a thirty-minute drive to the club in suburban Ardmore. Because of the Merion’s limited practice facilities, he reduced his customary warm-up period and spent more time putting on the practice green.

  The contenders all played cautiously that morning. Ben’s 72 inched him forward into a tie for second with Middlecoff and Johnny Palmer, two strokes behind Lloyd Mangrum at 211.

  After having a bowl of chicken broth for lunch on the terrace with Valerie, he trudged through an outward nine in 37 strokes, suffering such acute pain that he often stopped to rest and even clasp his legs as he ascended the steeper slopes. But the other leaders, fighting their own wars of Open attrition, all gave up ground in the first nine of the afternoon round—allowing Ben to hobble to the top of the scoreboard.

  After he lashed his drive at the twelfth hole, his legs spasmed so badly that he was forced to grab a spectator’s arm. “I thought for sure he was going to collapse,” Middlecoff, his playing partner, later told a reporter. But he didn’t. Despite several more severe leg cramps, he arrived at the last hole having squandered a three-stroke lead over the previous six, needing to make par to tie Mangrum and Fazio, already in the clubhouse with 287.

  Following a perfect drive to the heart of the home fairway, he was pinching a Chesterfield when he spotted Fred Corcoran and the pro Jimmy Hines in the gallery and asked them for the low number. Hines said it was him at 286. But Corcoran corrected him.

  “No. It’s 287. Fazio.”

  “And Mangrum,” someone else chipped in.

  Hogan studie
d the uphill green for a long moment. The very thought of a Sunday playoff made him queasy.

  As Sam said more than once, nobody ever knew which club to hit at any given moment better than Ben Hogan. Without much hesitation, choosing wisdom over valor, he opted for a one-iron instead of his four-wood and executed a beautifully balanced swing that was captured by Life’s Hy Peskin in a photograph destined to become the most famous golf shot in history, in more ways than one.

  Ben’s ball finished on the left side of the green, forty feet from the cup, and the gallery standing ten-deep in places exploded. After looking over the putt from three different angles, he firmly rapped it four feet past the hole, producing a wave of anxious murmurs. Moments later, taking much less time than usual, he stepped up and stroked the ball into the left side of the cup, igniting another monstrous cheer that followed him off the course.

  As he departed the grounds in Sullivan’s car, stone-faced and silent, Valerie Hogan was convinced her husband was finished, had no more strength left in him. “I had given up on him being able to play in the playoff,” she confided to sportswriter Dave Anderson decades later. “But I couldn’t tell him that.”

  From the spectator’s standpoint, as events proved time and again, U.S. Open playoffs are almost always a disappointing anticlimax. In this instance, starting a little later than normal owing to Pennsylvania’s Sunday blue laws, Hogan and Mangrum finished Merion’s first nine in 39 strokes, Fazio two better. On the back side, however, with five holes left to play, obviously weary but appearing to draw strength from some other dimension, Ben Hogan caught up to his competitors and began to pull away.