American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Fazio’s nerves caused him to overshoot several greens and make bogey; Mangrum’s indecisive approach shots resulted in similarly wasted strokes. When Lloyd was assessed with a one-stroke penalty by referee Ike Grainger for illegally marking his ball for a second time on the sixteenth green, Ben went to the penultimate hole with a three-shot lead. Summoning something for the ages, he sealed this extraordinary victory with a long uphill birdie putt that sent what was believed to be the largest gallery to ever witness a U.S. Open playoff into a joyous frenzy.

  Seated on the terrace, Valerie Hogan listened to the roar, sipped her iced tea, and began to cry. “I knew then that Ben had won it,” she allowed later.

  It was, at last, the Hollywood ending that just about everyone had hoped for.

  Perhaps the only man unhappier than Lloyd Mangrum or George Fazio was Sam Snead, who concluded the championship with a baleful 74 and hit the road for Hot Springs without saying a word to anyone. Despite his brilliant finish to the year—four more victories that gave him a total of eleven, a new postwar record—he was narrowly defeated for Player of the Year honors by a man who won only one official event in 1950.

  “In some ways,” Sam conceded many years later, “that was the toughest thing I ever had to swallow. I’d had the greatest year of my career—better than anyone had had since Byron Nelson’s run—and Ben got all the honors.” He paused and added, “For a while, I seriously considered hanging it up. I couldn’t do any better than I’d done. Once I got home to Virginia and thought about it some more, though, I decided to keep on going. But between you and me, the tour was never quite the same for me after that.”

  14

  IMMORTALITY

  BYRON NELSON WAS HAPPY to be out of competitive golf.

  During the period Ben was recovering from his injuries and Sam was reveling in his rediscovered putting touch, Byron and Louise invested $20,000 in state-of-the-art chicken houses and grew their cattle herd of prize Herefords significantly. On the first night they spent at the modest house at Fairway Ranch, as Byron named his spread one mile west of Roanoke, Texas, the couple slept on the floor. But as Byron set about repairing the roof and updating the insulation, Louise went on a shopping expedition to Fort Worth that quickly made the place the kind of home she had always wanted—cozy, warm, filled with family pictures and the paintings of the Old West that Byron would eventually begin collecting. Maybe most important of all, they became active in a Church of Christ in Roanoke, substituting a routine of numbing car travel and tee times with the sweet familiarity of Wednesday evening Bible classes and Sunday morning services. “I don’t miss much about being on tour,” Byron told The Dallas Morning News less than a month after arriving home for good. “I’ll be playing most of my golf with friends from now on—if I can ever find the time.”

  Byron made good on his promise to Louise to hang up his clubs for a lengthy spell, playing only a few casual rounds during his first year out. An exception was the 1947 Masters, where he finished tied for second behind Jimmy Demaret, and could easily have won but for a couple of putts that didn’t fall.

  His success there surprised nobody. “Because of the simplicity of his swing,” said his friend Eddie Merrins, Bel-Air’s head professional, “Byron had the kind of game he could park like a fine automobile. There weren’t a lot of moving parts and the engine was beautifully tuned. That’s why he could leave the game for whole periods of time, then come back and play outstandingly well with only a little practice. In this regard, he was more like Sam Snead than Ben Hogan.”

  But the game wasn’t entirely forgotten by the man many had already begun to regard as the father of the modern golf swing. In the summer of 1949, as his instructional book continued to rack up sales, his longtime friend Eddie Lowery persuaded him to appear on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night show for five straight weeks, where, among other things, he hit plastic golf balls into a thrilled and gasping audience. He made a thousand dollars each time—or roughly a year’s worth of cattle feed, to his way of thinking. He also found enough time from the daily demands of ranching to play well in Bing’s popular celebrity pro-am, the Masters, and the Goodall Round Robin. Over the next two years, he substituted the Colonial Invitational for the Goodall and placed third there in 1951.

  For years Sam loved to recall how Ben was motoring through some hill town en route to the Greenbrier Pro-Am in early May of 1951 when he glanced up and saw that his newly released Hollywood blockbuster was playing in the theater—Follow the Sun, starring … Sam Snead.

  This anecdote speaks volumes about the ongoing rivalry between them, which reached its peak during these years. But the film was released that spring to uniformly lukewarm reviews, with phlegmatic Glenn Ford and Anne Baxter playing the title roles of Ben and Valerie, featuring brief cameo appearances by Sam, Jimmy Demaret, and Cary Middlecoff. Ben, who had script approval and also served as a technical advisor, had become so obsessed with having himself portrayed accurately, he personally gave lessons to the actor, a high-handicapper who never sufficiently mastered Ben’s incomparable swing. Given Ben’s intransigence about authenticity, Sidney Lanfield agreed to have a special mask created that enabled him to stand in for Ford in key action shots, a strange reversal of roles. Lanfield later confided to associates that he’d never been so happy to wrap up a film because Hogan, he said, was more difficult to work with than any temperamental Hollywood starlet.

  Sam’s memory of that marquee, however, was off by at least a year and maybe two. The Greenbrier Pro-Am wasn’t played in 1951; the nonofficial tournament took a one-year break before it resumed in 1952—won, naturally, by Sam in record-setting style—and thereafter briefly became the the Greenbrier Invitational and eventually the Sam Snead Festival. Still, considering how slowly Hollywood films found their way to the hinterlands, it could easily have been in 1952 or 1953, when Ben played in the popular event for the first time since his car accident. If Ben did in fact see a marquee with his movie and Sam’s name on it, this probably didn’t happen while he was driving down unknown roads in West Virginia. After the crash, Hogan was mildly skittish about driving anywhere outside of the familiar Dallas–Fort Worth area. As a rule, he and Valerie took sleeper trains or flew to wherever he chose to appear.

  Whatever the fact of this matter, perhaps even more revealing of Sam’s state of mind—still simmering from his sloppy eighth-place finish at the ’51 Masters where Ben, after ten solid days of solitary practice on the course with a caddie, finally won his first title before the largest gallery in the event’s history—was that he turned up just over a month later for the elegant pre-tournament champions dinner on Ben’s turf at the Colonial Country Club with a woman who was not his wife. This didn’t go down well at all with his hosts, especially since he was the event’s defending champion.

  “Someone called her a professional debutante,” recalled Marvin Leonard’s witty daughter, Marty, “and my father and the other members were deeply embarrassed and insulted. Some thought it was a personal dig at Ben. Whatever it was, because of it, the committee refused to invite him back for the next year. That was something to have to tell to a reigning tournament champion—you can’t come back because of your behavior. But Sam was doing a lot of things like that in those days, I’m afraid. He seemed oblivious to what people thought of him.”

  He finished in a tie for nineteenth place and left town immediately and never returned to Colonial.

  Sam’s professional summary for 1951 reflected his own weariness with the nomadic life on tour, and also the hard feelings that were building up between himself and the golf establishment at large, particularly with certain USGA types and Bob Jones of Augusta National, largely the result of stunts like the one he pulled at Leonard’s Colonial fete. He entered just fourteen events that year, and won only twice, though he did rack up his fifth major in a manner that left no doubt about his talent and desire. In early July, submitting once more to the Darwinist ordeal of the PGA Championship—by now a road too rough for eithe
r Ben or Byron—he reached the thirty-six-hole final against Walter Burkemo, a Detroit club pro and Purple Heart survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, at mighty Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh, demolishing him seven-and-six. Burkemo, who returned to claim this title just two years later before returning to the far less grueling club life, described Sam’s play that week as that of a “man who was out to prove something.”

  Whether this was some kind of statement to the ruling elites or just a very good week that caused him to reconsider giving up the grind, Sam finished his paltry year with yet another Miami Open title, his fourth in a decade. Fortunately for him, money was no longer a primary concern. His contract with the Greenbrier—where he oversaw the introduction of electric riding carts and earned income for their use by hotel guests—and his ongoing winter association with the Boca Raton Club paid him better than anyone else on tour, almost forty grand a year between the two. Moreover, his exhibition fees topped the rest, as much as a thousand for a day’s outing.

  Back home in the jagged hills of Bath County, life was considerably more problematic, a source of constant worry and irritation. His eight-year-old namesake, Sam Snead Jr., “Jackie,” was a pleasant kid born with severely crossed eyes that required several surgeries to correct and made him a natural target for ridicule in a community where all Sneads were resented for their physical prowess and material success. The bullying problem was compounded by Sam’s frequent absences.

  “Probably for the first fifteen years of my life,” Jack Snead confirms, “I wasn’t in a rush to tell anyone that I was Sam Snead’s son. You know how kids pick on anyone who is different, especially one who has crossed eyes. I heard all the awful things kids could say, which only made it worse when they learned who my father was. Dad was often gone in those days. My mother was one strong lady, but who wants your mama sticking up for you?”

  During the first week of April in 1952, Sam came out of seclusion to claim his second Masters convincingly, displaying the kind of intelligent shotmaking that recalled his brilliant British Open course management (to borrow Ben’s term) six years before at St. Andrews, battling a week of wild winds and tempestuous spring weather to win his second green jacket with a two-under total that beat Jack Burke Jr. by four strokes and Ben and Julius Boros by seven. Within the month, he won his own Greenbrier Pro-Am with a record 264 and took the Palm Beach Round Robin seven days after that, whereupon he went home for the birth of his second child, born on his own fortieth birthday no less, one Terrance Dillon Snead, whom his parents simply called Terry.

  From the beginning, there were complications. Sam and Audrey spent years insisting Terry had been born perfectly normal, but then had contracted a virus and fever that greatly diminished his mental state. Two decades later the symptoms would be instantly recognized as some variation of severe autism or Down syndrome, an impairment brought about by the presence of a twenty-first chromosome that affects roughly one in every one thousand newborns in this country and causes mild to moderate retardation.

  Without question, Sam’s closest friends and associates would agree in time that having a son who would require lifelong care and steadfast attention dealt his superstitious psyche a major blow, yet Sam remained devoted to Terry for the rest of his days, often traveling great distances just to see his son for a few moments at various institutions where he stayed. “Sam’s devotion to Terry was very real,” says his friend Bill Campbell. “Family and friends meant more to Sam than he sometimes let on. The golf world wasn’t his natural home—these hills were. He had a decency and kindness that really flowered when he was back home in the place that made him.”

  Following his heroic comeback year and miraculous U.S. Open win at Merion, Ben appeared in public only four times in 1951. But those four weeks of work would deepen the gathering mystique of a damaged man who could apparently summon greatness at will. “If anything,” Tommy Bolt once told a writer in Florida, “that wreck made Ben an even more dangerous critter. He saved everything inside for the titles he wanted most and the rest of the time he just practiced, practiced, practiced.”

  From its inception in 1895, the United States Open was designed to be golf’s sternest test, the game’s version of an Olympic marathon. In 1951, it returned to suburban Detroit and the Oakland Hills Country Club where in 1937 Ralph Guldahl deprived the red-hot rookie Slammin’ Sammy Snead of his first national championship.

  Embarrassed by how Guldahl, Snead, and others had manhandled their Donald Ross gem, the members subsequently hired English-born Robert Trent Jones to update the course to modern standards. Known for his risk-reward philosophy, multiple platform tees, and the concept of signature holes, the designer actually shortened it by one hundred or so yards, cinched the fairways like a Victorian corset to reduce preferred lines to frighteningly narrow aisles, sharpened angles and installed large “flashed-up” bunkering at strategic points, ditched two fairly humdrum par-fives entirely and shifted and shrank putting surfaces into even smaller targets requiring pinpoint accuracy. “While no one denied [the revised] Oakland Hills was good,” Open historian Bob Sommers remembered, “they questioned if it was great.” The players, almost to the last qualifier, howled about its amplified difficulty from the first day of practice. More than two dozen complained personally to the USGA’s Joe Dey.

  Ben and Sam weren’t among them, though after several practice rounds the former artfully let slip to reporters that the course was “probably too hard for most players in the field,” effectively halving the number he regarded as a threat, soberly adding that the changes were “completely ridiculous.” The only player whose driving prowess and touch around greens the new Oakland Hills really favored, Ben cagily declared, was Snead. When Sam heard this, he winced, owing to a deeply held superstition that anytime anyone complimented him on his game—especially a rival—it fell apart.

  On the eve of play, Ben seemed to soften his appraisal by predicting that Guldahl’s course record of 281 might actually fall that week, prompting a worried USGA committee to hastily convene and decide to skip a final mowing of the rough and, in fact, water it more heavily, causing Sam to smile lazily, shake his head, and point out that this really only benefited one man in the field—Hogan.

  Ben had a history of successfully picking final winning scores. And from the outset, he looked to be both a prophet and a contender. As he’d predicted, Sam followed his usual Open pattern by shooting 71 and charging to the front of the pack. Ben struggled around the course—generally having to lay up shy of Jones’s new arsenal of bunkers that now required longer shots from everyone—with a 75 that left him in a large group clustered near the top. “The stupidest round of golf I’ve ever played,” was all he had to say on the matter, then falling silent in the locker room.

  Following an opening day in which no one managed to break par, grumbling reached a new crescendo among the 144 qualifiers. After following Sam and Demaret during their final warm-up round, watching them miss targets and three-putting, even wily old Walter Hagen felt compelled to wipe a hand over his gleaming pate and declare Oakland Hills the toughest Open layout he’d ever seen. “This course is playing the players instead of the players playing the course,” he drolly remarked. “It really is a monster”—a phrase that stuck.

  Majors are generally won by those who refuse to give up ground, and Sam himself fell victim to the Monster in the second round, blowing to a 78 largely due to three-putting and chipping poorly from the deep and clingy rough, falling into a large cluster that included Ben and Lloyd Mangrum. For his part, Ben played steady golf through the steambath heat that eased the strain on his legs, finding a strategic rhythm in the process, resulting in a respectable 73, leaving him five shots off the pace being set by Bobby Locke, the ever-beaming South African who’d returned from exile, with his billowing plus fours, old-style neckties, and incomparable wristy putting stroke.

  Fourteen players lay between Ben and Sam and the title both craved with every fiber of their being. “But I’d h
ave to be a Houdini now,” the former said on the eve of Saturday’s taxing double rounds. He noted that veterans Demaret and Locke were atop the leaderboard and that neither typically gave up ground. They were joined by Clayton Heafner and Julius Boros, relative youngsters who seemed oddly impervious to the Monster’s meanness. “It would take 140 to get to the lead,” Ben soberly concluded, “and how can anyone shoot 140 on that course?”

  Not surprisingly, a new record single-day gate of eighteen thousand spectators turned out on a hot, cloudless Saturday to see if either of the sentimental favorites could somehow catch the leaders and claim the championship. Ben began his run quickly, birdieing three of his first five holes and completing the opening nine in 32 strokes, sending tremors of excitement through the galleries, many of whom began drifting away from the leaders to follow the two players who had a scent of immortality about them.

  They weren’t disappointed. Ben, lighting a fresh Chesterfield off the end of the one dying in his hand, completed his morning round in 71 strokes, the second-best round of the tournament, and was right back in the thick of things. Sam played well, too, finishing with a 72 that could easily have been three strokes better. But he later admitted that when he heard a fan excitedly remark to a companion, “Sammy’s hot but he always seems to find a way to blow it,” he felt his gut churn with the old anxiety.

  During the break, Sam had a light lunch in a quiet corner of the club dining room with Fred Corcoran and then disappeared into the locker room, where he sat marking several new Wilson Staff golf balls and gathering his thoughts on how to subdue his Open jinx. Tommy Bolt remembers pausing to speak to Sam when Ben suddenly walked past and stopped, coming off the tournament’s fifty-fourth hole with his head down. The two men greeted each other cordially, according to Bolt, who was being thoroughly humbled by Oakland Hills (he would finish in twenty-ninth place), and chatted for a few moments about “everything, it seemed, but what a mean sumbitch that golf course was out yonder. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Here’s probably the two best damn players who ever lived, fellas who could beat this beast if anyone could, and by God they’re talking about their laundry or Ike’s golf game or some such thing.’ I have to say, that made one helluva impression on me. They were like two old prizefighters who knew what they had to do, but neither of ’em wanted to talk about it.”