American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  As Augusta tradition dictated, Byron played in the final pairing of the tournament with the third-round leader. To avoid any embarrassment that might arise if his own pupil became the first amateur to win the Masters, Jones and Roberts asked him to step aside in favor of Sam, who was fresh off his sixth win at the Greater Greensboro Open the week before. Not unlike Ben, however, Sam intensely disliked playing with amateurs and made his feelings known immediately by giving his impressionable partner the cold shoulder. After all, he was still chasing glory himself—just off the lead when the final eighteen began, in quest of a fourth green jacket that would draw him closer to Ben in major titles. If he couldn’t manage to win the U.S. Open, he told friends back home in Hot Springs, he at least planned to own the Masters.

  When Harvie Ward finished his final round, he learned from Byron that Venturi was crumbling before the gallery’s eyes on the back nine, further shades of Billy Joe. Harvie bolted back out, hoping just the sight of him might bolster his friend’s fortunes. Instead, marshals threatened to eject him after several failed attempts to get inside the ropes, and Venturi staggered home with a horrifying 80 that included four three-putts and left him a stroke out of the lead held by the eventual winner, Jackie Burke. To his mentor’s credit, despite a few inaccurate articles that portrayed him as a sulky sore loser, Venturi in fact handled the collapse with grace and humor, though it would forever haunt him much as the U.S. Opens did Sam. For the record, Sam finished tied for fourth and Ben tied for eighth.

  Less than a month later, after visiting Ben’s factory in Fort Worth to be fitted for new clubs and returning to San Francisco, Ward was confronted by reporters who informed him that Eddie Lowery had been indicted by a federal grand jury for tax evasion. Chief among many disputed charges was $11,000 designated as a “loan” to Ward that appeared, on the surface at least, to fully cover his travel expenses to the National Amateur, Masters, and the British Amateur and Open. The implications were profound, and potentially devastating to a player who supposedly symbolized the golden amateur ideal. Though Lowery and his attorneys passionately maintained it was all above-board and legitimate, the federal indictment claimed it amounted to a gift that should have been declared as such and taxed, not written off as a business expense. To some in the press, charming Harvie Ward suddenly appeared to be gaming the amateur code of ethics.

  In fairness to Lowery and Ward, prior to the widening Deepdale and other well-publicized Calcutta scandals, the rules governing how amateurs’ expenses got paid were politely overlooked in the general interest of promoting strong amateur play. Any number of emerging collegiate stars, for instance, could give examples of supportive patrons who assisted them financially. Otherwise, they argued, only wealthy players like Frank Stranahan could afford to play at its highest levels of competition. As Mike Souchak once noted with irritation, “This was the worst best kept secret in golf—we all had people who helped us along. Were they trying to violate the amateur rules of the game? Hell no.”

  Five months after his collapse in Augusta, Venturi was eliminated in the third round of the U.S. Amateur at the Knollwood Country Club outside Chicago but loyally stuck around with Byron Nelson to watch their mutual friend Harvie Ward beat Chuck Kocsis five-and-four to claim his second consecutive U.S. Amateur title. For the moment at least, the firestorm around his boss’s tax problems seemed to abate. Back home in San Francisco, there was a lavish party for the new national champion, and when asked if he might turn pro the way his old Atlantic Coast Conference rival Arnold Palmer had recently done, especially given Eddie Lowery’s ongoing troubles, Ward gave his best Zeta fratboy smile and repeated his oft-stated intention to remain an amateur. He was, after all, approaching thirty, the age when Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam and retired from competition to make instructional films, a move that ironically resulted in his amateur status being lifted by the USGA. Whatever else is true, Harvie envisioned himself playing amateur golf into a comfortable dotage, purely for love of the game, the personification of the gracefully aging amateur champion, perhaps rewriting the record books along the way.

  “Besides,” he’d fatefully quipped to his good friend Richard Tufts shortly before his life took a wholly unexpected dark turn, “unless your name happens to be Hogan or Snead there really isn’t any big money in golf. Why do you think Byron got out to raise cows?”

  In the wake of recent events, Tufts—the incoming USGA president and grandson of Pinehurst founder and something of a father figure to Ward—had been charged with restoring amateur golf’s tarnished image. In The Amateur Creed, a slim manifesto that laid out in elegant patrician prose the values of golf played for healthy competition and fellowship rather than money, Tufts expressed growing concerns about the rampant commercialization of the game, as reflected by his controversial decision in 1951 to end the professional segment of the popular North and South Open after the pros demanded a major pay boost. It goes without saying that Dick Tufts never envisioned this cleanup job would help destroy the career of the player he loved like a son.

  Meanwhile, determined to prove his Masters success was no fluke, and perhaps nudged by Lowery’s deepening crisis, Venturi turned pro in the autumn of 1956, following the lead of Arnold Palmer, who turned pro only weeks after his National Amateur win in 1954. Three months into the new year, Venturi finished thirteenth in the Masters but caught his stride by early September by winning back to back the St. Paul Invitational and the Miller Open in Milwaukee. In the latter, he withstood a furious late charge by none other than Sam, the bane of his Masters quest, who again apparently attempted more gamesmanship as they strode to the ninth tee of their final round by asking, “You ain’t chokin’ again are you, boy?” Reportedly, Venturi calmly replied, “I’ll show you choking,” and closed the deal by winning not only his second tournament in a row, but also claiming Golf Digest’s Player of the Year award. Following this encounter, so the story goes, Sam told other veterans not to mess with the young San Franciscan.

  By this point, Venturi’s pal Harvie Ward was in a state of disintegration. After a pitched battle against Sam at the Masters—where Sam slipped past Ward to wind up second to Doug Ford, though Ward again finished as low amateur, in fourth, his best finish yet in either a Masters or an Open—fallout from the negotiated settlement of Eddie Lowery’s troubles detailed in the newspapers proved too much to bear for Richard Tufts and the USGA. Within days, Ward was summoned by Joe Dey to answer questions about his expenses.

  He consulted with a couple of high-powered lawyers but ignored their advice and appeared without benefit of counsel before the executive committee at a club in suburban Chicago, just days before the U.S. Open commenced, believing he would be vindicated if he truthfully answered questions and apologized for any mistakes in judgment he might’ve made in an otherwise sterling amateur career. In a nutshell, Ward maintained that the $11,000 loan was justified by the work he did selling cars for his boss at these golf functions, simply an advance against his salary so he could invest some money in the stock market.

  The tribunal lasted for a full day, including testimony from Lowery and personal letters requesting leniency from a host of corporate leaders and politicians, all of whom regarded Ward as a shining example of amateur golf at its best. Some bluntly warned of a chilling effect if this charismatic young man were sanctioned for inadvertent mistakes. Dick Tufts sat silently throughout the proceedings, without meeting Ward’s gaze.

  In the end, it was Tufts’s own misfortune to have to inform his protégé that the committee had unanimously decided that he’d violated his amateur status by being paid to travel to two U.S. Opens, three U.S. Amateurs, two British Opens, and three Masters. His standing was temporarily revoked, rendering him ineligible for the 1957 Amateur, though he was encouraged to apply for reinstatement in 1958.

  “I walked out of that hearing room numb from head to toe, with a real burr up my ass,” Ward recalled years later. “I simply couldn’t believe what had happened to me. I never saw it co
ming and decided, unfortunately, that golf needed me more than I needed golf.”

  “I never felt Harvie got a fair shake at all,” Byron agreed decades later. “The timing was very unfortunate. They were obviously eager to end certain bad practices and send an important message to other young players coming along in the game. But I don’t think anyone could possibly have guessed what the consequences would be. I’d hoped Harvie would just accept the decision and move on. But he chose another path entirely, I’m afraid.”

  Within months, Ward began a long downward spiral that would end in a rambling life of booze and women and declining skills until his determined fourth wife, Joanne, cleaned him up in the early 1990s and he reclaimed a life in Pinehurst—“the only place,” as he told friends years later, “I ever felt truly at home.” Serving as director of golf at clubs both there and in Orlando, Ward blossomed into a splendid teacher and a wise elder of the game, working with a host of promising young players, including Payne Stewart.

  In a much broader impact, the chilling effect Byron Nelson and others foresaw surfaced when a stream of top collegiate stars feared they might also face the same kind of inquiry and turned pro, sending a flood of talented young guns into the professional ranks, effectively thinning the ranks of amateur golf in America.

  Fifteen years after this sea change ruling, Herb Wind visited his old friend Dick Tufts at his cottage beside Pinehurst No. 2 shortly before his death, and found him still grieving over the Harvie Ward affair, as it came to be called.

  “He told me it broke his heart—his very spirit,” Wind told me in 2001, three years before Ward passed away from liver cancer. “And it certainly changed the state of golf forever. I mean, at that very moment, you had Hogan and Snead and Byron coming to the end of their remarkable reign but amateurs like Billy Joe Patton, Ken Venturi, and Harvie making a great case for the validity of amateur golf. But taking into account what happened next, the year after Harvie Ward was sanctioned, Arnold won his first Masters and suddenly everyone wanted to be him.”

  Following his heroic efforts at Olympic in 1955, Ben Hogan made only two significant runs at the fifth U.S. Open title he craved.

  The first came in 1956 at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, when he put together four outstanding rounds over the rugged Donald Ross track and needed only two pars in the last two holes to tie Cary Middlecoff, already fidgeting in the clubhouse.

  Once again, though, his putter froze over a thirty-inch putt on the penultimate hole. “I had my watch on him,” John Derr remembers. “He stood over the ball for at least sixty-six seconds, an eternity, and finally made a terrible little stab at the ball. You could see he was in pure agony.” He made bogey, followed by a par on the final hole, coming up a stroke shy of a playoff. He confided to reporters that he felt relieved and furthermore that this would be his last U.S. Open. Sam, also facing the verdict of time, finished tied for twenty-fourth.

  On a far happier note, at the next Masters, Byron made his debut as a color commentator, paired with veteran announcer Chris Schenkel, behind the sixteenth green. Cliff Roberts had calculated that Byron’s incomparable understanding as a competitor and former champion would be enhanced by his tasteful refusal to make any commercial references to crowd size or the money list or even a player’s current rank on tour, all major taboos in the image-obsessed mind of Augusta’s fabled majordomo. Though no particular moment stood out from that first nervous telecast—this was the year Doug Ford slipped past Snead and Ward to win—Byron’s relationship with Schenkel would prove invaluable to his career, and Byron soon became the first player to work full-time on TV.

  Ben’s uncharacteristic 75-76 caused him to miss his first cut in thirteen years at the 1957 Masters, Byron’s first in the booth, and—seemingly true to his word—he chose not to enter the U.S. Open at Byron’s old stomping ground at Inverness, where reigning champ Cary Middlecoff lost in a playoff to Dick Mayer. His mind was absorbed by growing his equipment company and the challenges of moving into his new house on Canterbury Drive, not far from the Shady Oaks Golf Club’s simple front gates. The next year, however, unable to completely let go of the dream of an elusive fifth, he ventured to Perry Maxwell’s beautiful Southern Hills in Tulsa, where his protégé Tommy “Thunder” Bolt won his first major championship and Ben got paired in an early round with the newcomer and eventual runner-up, Gary Player. After their round together, the story goes, Ben congratulated Player and predicted that the hardworking South African would soon win on the American tour. Player thanked him and explained that he maintained a strong exercise and dietary routine.

  “How much do you practice?” Ben abruptly asked, and when Player told him, he simply shook his head.

  “It’s not enough,” he said, then walked away.

  Among the first to view the Hogans’ new four-thousand-square-foot dream house, a classic buff-colored brick ranch, were the Nelsons, who dropped in for supper with Marvin and Mary Leonard one evening in early 1958. The years of rivalry had caused the friendship that once existed between Ben and Byron to fray at the edges, but their wives remained in touch and relatively close. Though they enjoyed distinct different orbits in the Dallas–Fort Worth area—Louise maintained a broad range of friends and an active church life out in Roanoke while Valerie’s narrowing world continued to revolve around her husband and a few social friends from Shady Oaks and Rivercrest Country Club—they occasionally talked by phone and more than once met for lunch and a bit of shopping in Dallas.

  After they were given a tour of the beautiful home with its polished hand-laid pecan floors and stark white interiors—the basic color Valerie Hogan associated with “all things French”—Byron casually wondered why the spacious residence contained no guest room. “Because if we have a guest bedroom,” Ben told him, “someone will want to use it.”

  “I always got the feeling,” Byron mused later, “especially as the years came on to us both, that Ben was perfectly happy to withdraw from life. I’m not just talking about just public life, either. Except for his occasional trip out to a tournament and his annual spring visit to Seminole, everything in his life became centered around his office and Shady Oaks. It’s my understanding from mutual friends that the increasing privacy may have actually mellowed him a great deal. I believe that is true. But his only real comfort seemed to come at home, especially over at Shady Oaks, where he could practice all day long and nobody would bother him.”

  Indeed, out of the glare of constant media scrutiny, Ben developed a highly structured routine that defined the rest of his life: at his desk on West Pafford by eight o’clock sharp every morning, lunch with his Shady Oaks cronies at the big round table overlooking the eighteenth green, an hour or two of practice at his favorite spot out on the course’s back nine, then it was back to the office. By this point, he was getting several hundred letters a week, from invitations of every kind to letters from players seeking sponsorship and advice. Autograph seekers wanted his distinctive signature, and a budding generation of teachers inspired by his best-selling instruction book—golf’s new swing Bible—wanted a personal connection with the game’s most iconic star. Some of them received brief, courteous, and quaintly formal replies. Others he ignored.

  During Masters week in 1958, Augusta National named the footbridges that spanned Rae’s Creek in honor of Ben and Byron. Henceforth, in a gorgeous stretch of the course that Herb Wind poetically christened “Amen Corner” that same year, golfers moving to the twelfth green would cross the gently arching Hogan Bridge commemorating the Hawk’s record-breaking total of 274 in 1953. Leaving by the thirteenth tee, they would walk over the Nelson Bridge, which memorialized his first Masters win in 1937, the first major title of his remarkable career.

  Notably absent from these proceedings was Sam, who had one more green jacket than either of them. His partisans, considering the bridge dedications a snub, could point out that he’d won more tournaments in his career and his popularity and colorful style had done much to elevate the Masters
’s profile during its most challenging years. He was even on record as saying that, given the chance to win just one major championship, most players would choose this one.

  These arguments, however, cut little mustard with Jones and Roberts, the determining deities behind the bridge dedications, both of whom felt that the less-dignified aspects of Sam’s private life disqualified him for a similar recognition. “There’s no question,” says a longtime Augusta member, “that some of Sam’s poorer social judgments hurt him tremendously with Jones and the rest. That’s too bad. Sam was an American original and together with Ben and Byron he put a very human face on professional golf, including the Masters. Masters lore would be nothing without Sam Snead.”

  In the end, playing long and well was Sam’s best and final revenge. That year alone, he entered fifteen tournaments, finished in the top ten in twelve and won two in playoffs, his own Greenbrier Invitational and the successful defense of the Dallas Open, an event that would come to play a defining role in the rest of Byron’s life. And in a run for the ages that lasted another seven years, he entered at least a dozen tour events every season and won eight more times, concluding with a record eighth win at his beloved Greater Greensboro Open in 1965, at fifty-three the oldest winner in the history of the tour.

  Ben Hogan’s Last Hurrah came at the U.S. Open of 1960, a year of momentous change that began when four well-dressed black students sat down to be served at a segregated Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina—sparking a nonviolent protest that would transform America’s laws and racial attitudes and result in the election of a young, vigorous president, himself a golfer. In between the signposts of cultural change, the contraceptive pill was officially introduced, NASA launched its first communication satellite, and the first Playboy Club opened for business in Chicago.