American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  If John F. Kennedy symbolized the nation’s youthful anticipation of the future, so did young and brash Arnold Palmer, whose personal charisma and go-for-broke playing style unleashed the longest and most significant period of sustained growth in golf history. Not overlooked in all the fervor of “Arnie’s Army,” a phrase inspired by hand-lettered signs held up by soldiers from nearby Camp Gordon who manned the scoreboards at Augusta National that year, a gray and limping Ben attracted the largest galleries of the week and briefly rediscovered his putting touch, heading into the final round a stroke out of the lead at 213, tied with a group that included Billy Casper, Ken Venturi, Julius Boros, and Dow Finsterwald.

  “The very idea that Ben Hogan was once again near the lead was enough to rattle probably everyone in the field, I guess, except Arnold,” recalls Casper, who began his own run about this time, and went on to score more victories than anyone else in the 1960s. “Ben was a guy I’d watched and copied for years. People thought I was pretty boring because I never showed much emotion when I played. But that was the effect Ben had on me. He changed how most serious golfers approached the game. That same face is seen on most great players today. I look at them and I can’t help but see Ben Hogan.”

  He faltered on Sunday, though, with a 76, which still gave him a respectable sixth-place finish. Sam won the new par-three tournament but finished eleventh, a stroke ahead of a beefy Ohio State junior named Jack Nicklaus, the reigning U.S. Amateur champion. And the charismatic, chain-smoking Palmer beat Venturi by a stroke to claim his second green jacket. In many ways, with his quick, easy, telegenic smile and playing style, Arnold was every bit as entertaining as Billy Joe Patton had been, and suddenly the public couldn’t get enough of him.

  Eight weeks later, at Denver’s Cherry Hills Country Club, the game’s golden past, thrilling present, and glorious future all converged on the sport’s toughest stage. Mike Souchak, carrying a famous Jesuit prayer in his money clip for good luck and fresh off a putting lesson from Jackie Burke, shot 68 to seize the early lead while Palmer, who’d attempted to drive the green on the short downhill opening hole, finished four strokes back. Ben, suffering from headaches he attributed to the thinner air, and playing with the assistance of an oxygen canister, posted a woeful 75, while Sam made his customary decent start at 72. By the end of the second round, however, Souchak’s 67 gave him a new thirty-six-hole record and he seemed to be running away with the championship.

  For sheer blood-pumping drama, Saturday’s double round proved to be the equal of Merion in 1953. The most intriguing pairing was Hogan and Nicklaus, who strangely enough had a mentor in common; as a young assistant at Glen Garden, Jack Grout may have straightened out Bennie Hogan’s “hog killer” grip five and certainly encouraged him to take a shot at the early tour out west. Decades later, the same man helped young Jack Nicklaus shape his game. The aging legend and the future one went off at nine sharp and Nicklaus later remarked with unreserved awe that Ben put on a shotmaking exhibition that reminded fans of why he was the greatest of all time, hitting every green in regulation, three-putting none of them, and dropping two birdies for 69 that put him right in the heart of the fray.

  Palmer finished his morning round seven strokes back of Souchak, with fourteen players between them, and was seemingly out of it. Stewing, he stalked off to get a cheeseburger and a Coke and bumped into Bob Drum, who’d covered his rise from the amateur ranks for the Pittsburgh Press. The veteran reporter was chatting with Venturi, Bob Rosburg, and Fort Worth reporter Dan Jenkins, speculating on what it would take to win. Arnold suggested that a 65 would put him at 280, then declared, “Two eighty always wins the Open.”

  Drum snorted and shook his head. “Two eighty won’t do you a damn bit of good.”

  Palmer stormed out and hammered a few warm-up drives to the back of the range before he was summoned to the tee. Moments later, he lit another L&M and lashed his ball onto the green.

  Ben had gone off with Nicklaus just ahead of him. Steadied by a bowl of chicken soup, ginger ale, and an aspirin, picking up where he’d left off in the morning—oblivious to everything but one shot at a time, one fairway after another, nearly picture-perfect golf, in full command of the game at forty-seven years of age, shades of the great Harry Vardon himself.

  For Ben Hogan, the last reach for glory came on the seventy-first hole of the championship, the dangerous, moat-fronted par-five seventeenth hole. A little after five in the afternoon, now tied with the young Turk who’d miraculously made up those seven strokes and was waiting on the tee directly behind him, Ben struck what he believed was a perfect wedge to the scary front pin and saw his ball land six feet from the flag and spin back, pausing for an instant on the slope before trickling into the water. The vast gallery, estimated at 25,000, released a sustained groan.

  Marty Leonard, Marvin’s daughter, standing just outside the gallery ropes, covered her face in horror, then watched as Ben removed his handmade English golf shoes and socks, waded into the moat, and lashed his ball onto the green in an explosion of mud and water. Moments later, he two-putted for a bogey six that dropped him back into a tie with Nicklaus for second place. “He was still only one back,” Marty Leonard recalled, “but I think all hope went out of him at that very moment.”

  He trudged up the eighteenth fairway with his head lowered ever so slightly, the telltale sign of her husband’s mental state Valerie Hogan had perfectly described decades before. He was lost in the swirl of his own thoughts, after having made a calculated gamble far more typical of the man in the following pairing who’d taken his place atop professional golf. Attempting to cut the corner of the dogleg par-four eighteenth, he knocked his tee shot into the lake and finished with an uninspired triple-bogey, staring blindly at the ground the entire time. Grim-faced but still gracious, he shook hands with the brilliant young amateur he’d been paired with, wished him well, and left the green, barely acknowledging the long standing ovation.

  Twenty minutes later, Arnold Palmer tapped in for the miraculous 65 that gave him his first—and only—U.S. Open Championship. By that point, Ben had already spoken with reporters and refused to second-guess his decision to go for the pin on seventeen—a moment, friends say, he would nevertheless spend the rest of his life replaying in his mind. By the time the new king of golf was talking on the phone with his appealing young wife, Winnie, back home in Latrobe with their infant daughter—“Hi ya, babe! Guess what? We won!”—Ben was being driven to the Denver train station. Years later, in the TV interview, he conceded to his friend Ken Venturi that the fateful shot at seventeen still haunted him. “There’s not a day that passes that doesn’t cut my guts,” he said simply.

  Safely ensconced back in his daily routines, Ben Hogan would not be seen again in public until the 1961 Masters, sadly finishing tied for thirty-second place with Byron. Sam, who nearly took Greensboro the week before the Masters and claimed the Tournament of Champions later that summer, finished fifteen places ahead of his greatest rivals.

  By this point, Ben mostly had business on his mind. Earlier that year he had sold his equipment company to the American Machine and Foundry Corporation for an estimated $5 million, enabling him to bring forth a number of technical innovations including the first significant advance in shaft technology since the introduction of steel shafts. Now among Fort Worth’s wealthiest citizens, he stayed on to run things.

  The Apex shaft, as it was called, was expanded to five different flexes and soon became the standard of the industry. “The game,” as Ben said in his advertisements, “is all about feel.” When a curious reporter asked how his company tested clubs, he answered, “We have a testing machine here—me.”

  As living legends, however, Ben and Sam waged one last public battle for supremacy, which would have splendid repercussions for the game. It came at the Houston Country Club in the spring of 1965, when both men agreed to appear on Shell Oil’s popular Wonderful World of Golf, hosted by Gene Sarazen and Jimmy Demaret, a series that began in
1961 and lasted nearly a decade.

  The show was the creation of a visionary TV producer named Fred Raphael, challenge matches played between veteran stars going head-to-head on famous courses around the world, after which one or both would give a brief lesson. The first show, appropriately enough, featured Byron Nelson and reigning U.S. Open winner Gene Littler at the Pine Valley Golf Club, with $3,000 going to the winner and half that to the loser. With cameras mounted on a station wagon, it took two full days to film the full eighteen-hole match and Byron eventually came out on top, shooting 74 to Littler’s 76. The episode was broadcast on Byron’s fiftieth birthday the next February. In effect, it was his last tournament.

  The Hogan-Snead duel at the Houston Country Club was one of the most memorable installments. True to form, Ben showed up several days before the start of filming and studied the comparatively modest course from one end to the other, leaving nothing to chance. Likewise true to himself, Sam didn’t show up until the night before filming, fresh from a lucrative exhibition in the Bahamas, relaxed and spinning his saucy tales.

  Impressively, Ben hit every fairway and green en route to a 69 that beat Sam by four strokes, prompting Gene Sarazen to proclaim, a bit far-fetched under the circumstances, that the match was “the finest round I have ever seen.” This brief, magical appearance was made even more special by the lesson Ben gave at the end, conveying a few of the fundamentals from his best-selling instruction book. For his part, Sam playfully shrugged off the drubbing by telling to a wire reporter afterward, “The real reason I can’t seem to win an Open is that Ben won’t really retire.” On a more serious note, he expressed his belief that Ben Hogan was the finest player in the history of the game, bar none.

  After the program went off the air in 1969, the producer dreamed up a new one in which stars of the past would compete in a three-day, fifty-four-hole best-ball affair. The Legends of Golf, as it was called, couldn’t have enjoyed better timing. “The country was in a nostalgic mood,” notes Al Barkow, who served as a writer along with Herbert Warren Wind. “Major league baseball was having its Old Timers Days, and Fred Raphael thought, why not a golf Old Timers Day?” The producer recruited Jimmy Demaret to help sell the show to his longtime tour mates.

  As eager sponsors lined up, ultimately producing an initial purse of $400,000 that guaranteed every participant a $50,000 payday, the first phone call he made was to Sam, who agreed to play. When asked later why participation in a show that featured aging golfers well past their prime had any appeal to him, he gave one of his patented catfish smiles and explained simply, “I frankly didn’t need the money. But there are other guys out there who did. I played for them.” This comment earned Sam a lot of gratitude and respect from his former colleagues, many of whom were just scraping by.

  In hopes of luring another old friend out of retirement, Demaret prevailed on Jack Burke—his co–founding partner at Houston’s beautiful Champions Golf Club, which hosted the Ryder Cup of 1967 with Ben serving as nonplaying captain—to personally contact him at his office in Fort Worth. Apparently Ben listened to Burke’s pitch before telling him he had no interest in a bunch of has-beens playing golf for a meaningless title.

  But others jumped at the chance, including Paul Runyan. “Do you realize,” he told Demaret, “I can finish last and win more money than I ever won in any tournament I ever played in?” He’d been the first money winner of the tour in 1934, with a total of $6,767. “The Legends of Golf was a godsend to the players who made the game what it had become by the end of the 1970s,” says Al Barkow. “Like manna from heaven. The public loved it.”

  In 1978, at the Onion Creek Golf Club in Austin, Texas, a dozen teams teed off in the first tournament. Two years later, featuring a new sponsor, the event expanded into the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, with sixty-six-year-old Sam and his partner Gardner Dickinson defeating Peter Thomson and Kel Nagle by a single stroke at thirteen under par. The TV viewing audience was impressively large, indicating the public’s interest in these players.

  As a direct result of this show’s success, the PGA Tour established the senior tour in 1980, and acknowledged the vital role Sam Snead had played in its creation. During this same span of time, as if to emphasize the point, from 1963 through 1980, Sam won six PGA Senior Championships, five World Senior Championships, and a pair of Legends of Golf titles with Gardner Dickinson and another with Don January.

  “Without Sam Snead,” January told a gathering in Texas some years ago, “there would never have been a senior tour. He gave it instant credibility and made people come out and watch us play. For this reason alone, a lot of guys who never appreciated the antics of Sam Snead will be forever grateful to him.”

  Like Ben, Byron declined to participate in the rapidly evolving senior events, principally because he already had two full-time jobs.

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, his active church life and cattle ranch continued to prosper and demand a great deal of his attention. For a while, he and Louise reportedly considered becoming foreign missionaries. In 1963, however, after doing his TV work at Augusta and picking up some important broadcasting tips from John Derr at a tournament in Las Vegas, he signed a contract with ABC Sports and became the first player to do full-time commentary, starting out in the booth with Jim McKay at the PGA Championship at the Dallas Athletic Club where Jack Nicklaus captured the first of his Wanamaker trophies, then moving on to work with Chris Schenkel for nearly two decades.

  His most cherished memories in this role, he later said, included Ken Venturi’s heroic march through the wilting heat at Washington’s Congressional Country Club to win his lone U.S. Open in 1964, Lee Trevino’s sudden emergence at Merion in 1971, and Nicklaus’s brilliant one-iron at the seventy-first hole of the Open he won at Pebble Beach in 1973, all of which he commented on in his distinctive, flat—and highly audible—West Texas accent. During a tournament at the Firestone Country Club, after describing the severe break on a putt facing Billy Casper to his viewing audience, Casper drained the putt, turned, and wryly thanked Byron for helping him read the putt. Following this amusing incident, broadcast booths all featured Plexiglas screens to mute commentator voices.

  “I think the fellows appreciated what I had to say,” Byron said of his surprise career that provided him with the largest income of his life—allowing Louise to really decorate their modest home for the first time. “Among other things, I tried to speak honestly about the quality of a shot without being harsh or judgmental. Golf is the hardest game of all to master, in my opinion, and I always wanted the audience and the players to know how much I respected them.”

  He was finally appointed nonplaying captain of the Ryder Cup team in 1965, leading a strong squad that included Venturi, Palmer, Casper, Boros, January, Littler, Dave Marr, Tommy Jacobs, and Tony Lema to Southport’s Royal Birkdale, where they defeated a formidable home team, 19½ to 12½. Inspired by the first-class preparations seen at the Atlanta Athletic Club during the previous match, Britain’s hosts treated spectators and visiting press to the first tented village on a golf course, a five-star treatment that set a new standard for the biennial classic. Not to be outdone, when the Ryder Cup came to the Champions Club in Houston two years later, hosts Burke and Demaret rolled out an even bigger welcome mat, arranging lavish dinners, entertainment, and royal treatment for the wives—all under captain Ben Hogan’s perfectionist gaze.

  In the late summer of 1965, a spectacular private club called Preston Trail opened for play seventeen miles north of downtown Dallas, a true player’s course that Byron had a major hand in shaping along with Ralph Plummer, a talented Texas architect (and former Glen Garden caddie). After Byron did radio commentary for the Dallas Open the next year, a group of dedicated business philanthropists called the Salesmanship Club of Dallas approached him with a novel idea—to rename the tournament the Byron Nelson Classic and move it to Preston Trail. Following some gentle arm twisting by a Who’s Who of local business and religious interests, he agreed. He w
as impressed with the organization’s camp for troubled boys and its other charitable works in the Dallas area. Following a gala opening, this was the first tour event to use a player’s marquee name, and almost overnight the Nelson event became the working model upon which most PGA Tour tournaments operated. In the early days, the Byron Nelson Classic raised more than 80 percent of all money donated to charities by professional golf, prompting tour commissioner Deane Beman to study the excellent performance of the Salesmanship Club.

  “It really became the best thing that has ever happened to me in golf,” Byron told a visitor to Fairway Ranch in 1994, visibly emotional. “As surprising as this might sound, I rank that golf tournament even above my Masters win in 1937 or my eleven in a row in 1945. When I look back on my life,” he added, “that will be the thing I’m proudest of accomplishing—because it helps so many people.”

  In his own humble way, Byron was saying, helping others was truly his Last Hurrah.

  Epilogue

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  IN LIFE AS IN GOLF, endings perhaps say even more than beginnings. So it was for the American Triumvirate. Following their deepest instincts, one achieved mythic stature and withdrew from view, another continued playing the game and chasing the public’s affection until he quite literally dropped from exhaustion, the third used his faith and fame to become a leading ambassador of the game, a statesman who defined the notion of giving back.

  During the last twenty-five years of his life, Ben made only a handful of public appearances and seemed to shun all adulation, which ironically stimulated the public’s fascination even more. As time passed, his fans caught infrequent, fleeting glimpses of the little gray man whose mastery of the game and determination not to explain himself helped make golf seem like a monastic discipline and a scientific quest.