Chasing Greatness

by Adam Lazarus

  Five Lessons made Schlee the golf team’s technical authority and a convert to Hogan’s “fundamentals.” A chance, outside-the-ropes personal encounter following Schlee’s freshman year clinched his conversion to the Hogan gospel.

  In June 1960, Ben Hogan arrived in Tennessee to warm up for the U.S. Open, just two weeks away. Forty-eight years old and semiretired, Hogan played in only the Masters, the U.S. Open, and a few other American tournaments; the Memphis Open would be just his fifth appearance of the season.

  The site of the event, the Colonial Country Club, was only a short distance from Memphis State’s campus, and Schtee—a summer lifeguard at the club’s pool—managed to find a ticket to the third round. He even received VIP treatment, as an official brought him and a few friends to the door of the players’ locker room. There Schlee spotted Hogan, and the excitement of seeing golf’s swing guru in the flesh led Schlee to blurt out, “I would love to learn how to play golf from you someday.”

  As Schlee’s friend and future pupil Tom Bertrand later wrote, the stoic, four-time U.S. Open Champion didn’t quite know what to make of the tall, gangly collegian.

  “Their eyes locked,” Bertrand wrote, “and the room instantly fell silent. John could feel the intensity of Hogan’s gaze boring straight through his eyeballs. Everyone knew that Hogan hated to give lessons.

  “Before Hogan had a chance to reply to this impertinent outburst, John’s official escort grabbed his arm and whisked him away. The official cast an apologetic glance toward Hogan as they marched out the doorway.”

  However awkward, this brisk encounter with golf’s “Wee Ice Mon” seemed to elevate Schlee’s game. Three days later at the nearby Fox Meadows Golf Course, he scored a 70-72 (the second-lowest total) in the qualifier to earn a spot in the National Public Links Championship. A few weeks later, in July 1960, he flew to Hawaii for his first appearance in a national event. Although he failed to qualify for the match-play portion of the championship, the experience on the big stage paid off. On his return to the mainland, he finally won the Oregon coast match-play championship in Astoria that had eluded him in high school.

  The following summer, in 1961, Schlee scored the nation’s third-lowest qualifying score (138), and then reached the semifinals of the national Public Links Championship, contested in Detroit. There he lost 2 & 1 to the eventual winner and future NCAA individual champion, R. H. Sikes.

  Schlee’s tournament play only improved and he performed well in several high-profile Southern events, including the Tennessee State Amateur and two Arkansas-based invitational tournaments. That reputation blossomed with consecutive strong showings in the National Public Links in 1962 and 1963. He even had a shot at revenge against Sikes in the 1963 championship.

  “You are darned right I’ve been waiting to play him,” Schlee told a reporter on the eve of a 3 & 2 loss to Sikes in the third round.

  By then, Schlee had already left Memphis State, without earning his degree. He had begun to prepare for a professional golf career.

  “I needed a couple of dumb courses like British literature to get my degree in marketing and I couldn’t see how they would help my backswing, so I left.”

  With a few sponsors behind him, Schlee turned pro and joined the tour in 1964. Poor showings in his first three events convinced his backers to pull their support. He found work as an assistant pro at Woodmont Country Club in Nashville and competed in local events, winning the 1964 Capital City Open with a record score.

  But an ugly scuffle with a member of a new group of sponsors in Nashville—just days after he won the Capital City Open—forced Schlee out of town once again. He soon landed a club job in Phoenix, and within a few months found support from several Moon Valley Country Club members, who agreed to cover all his expenses ($13,500) on tour for a year, in exchange for a substantial share of his eventual earnings. He also secured an additional $200 per month from Arizonan Del Webb, who paid him to represent the Sun City retirement community.

  By late August, Schlee’s game was sharp (he took third in the Wyoming Invitational) and he headed for Florida in October. There he was set to compete in a brand-new event that, to some, meant far more than a U.S. Open trophy or a Green Jacket at Augusta National.

  In 1965, the PGA established a new avenue to the tour: a grueling event in which fifty-one players certified by their local PGA section competed to earn their “tour card.” The commencement of the first “Q School” (officially, the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament; the players also studied business, rules, and public relations, and attended lectures to pass a 150-question examination) took place at PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens.

  Before the advent of Q School, prospective touring pros could get into the field for PGA events only if they finished among the top sixty money earners the year before, or if they made the cut in the previous week’s tournament. They could also receive special invitations to play in select events. After the creation of Q School, the seventeen top finishers became eligible to play in each week’s tournament, but only by qualifying on Mondays for one of the limited entry spots.

  Still, a “tour card” provided a regular opportunity to compete for purses, and the PGA had created this new path explicitly so that fervid dreamers, like Schlee, might chase golfing greatness. “If we all realized how much it meant to everybody,” said one member of the pioneer Q School class, “we probably all would have fainted.”

  Schtee—who found short-term sponsorship from a Valley Dodge, Californian named Bill Smith—made the most of the opportunity, emerging as the school’s prize pupil. He bested the course’s par 71 during the opening two rounds, then hung on to his lead through the next ninety holes, finishing three strokes better than the runner-up, John Josephson. His tour card in hand, Schlee wasted no time in beginning his career. He Monday-qualified to play at the Cajun Classic in Lafayette, Louisiana, the PGA’s last event of the 1965 season. In his first round as a tour professional, he shot a 69, matching the same score as Jack Nicklaus. Schlee tied for eleventh and earned $850.

  But during the opening months of his official rookie season in 1966, Schlee’s game deteriorated and he made the cut just twice in his first thirteen starts.

  “[Out] here on the tour is something else. That’s been one of the biggest problems ... adjusting to losing,” he told the Dallas Morning News in April. “I have $1,000 a month to spend, but I try to send some of it home to my wife. She works. It’s hard to get by for less than $200 a week. I have made it for $175 on occasion ... you know, when a (club) member takes you to lunch, maybe. A couple bucks here and a couple of more there add up.”

  Because Schlee had to qualify on Mondays before events began, and play in the Wednesday pro-ams, he sometimes played six formal rounds per week, and the grind wore him down.

  “I seem to get it going and then have a bad round,” he said. “But I don’t intend to stay out here that long if I’m not doing any good. I figure I’ll have the answer after twenty tournaments.”

  Schlee’s mental toughness was his strongest asset, recalled Curt Siegel, a fellow Q School student whom Schlee traveled and roomed with during their first season on tour. From the start, Schlee exuded a confidence that eclipsed every other rookie.

  “[He] had that instinct, ‘Nobody’s gonna beat us,’” said Siegel.

  Schlee validated his self-assured psyche by July. At the Minnesota Golf Classic (the same event where Tom Weiskopf met his future wife, Jeanne Marie Ruth), he shot a closing-round 66 to finish in second place, only one behind Bobby Nichols.

  “It was only my fifth [pay] check. I figured I had a chance to do something big on those last few holes and I was shaking like a leaf,” Schlee said after accepting the $12,000 runner-up prize. “I look back at a double-bogey seven I had on the twelfth hole Friday and think maybe.... But I have no regrets. This is the biggest day for me. It’s a super day.”

  Another “super day” followed just two weeks later, as he fired nine birdies and a 66 in the openin
g round of the Indianapolis “500” Festival Open. He tied for twelfth to earn another $2,000, then scored a pair of late-season top-fifteen finishes in Canada and Louisiana. In the end, despite the poor start, he finished forty-eighth on the tour money list—posting an impressive 72.62 stroke average that season—and earned Golf Digest’s PGA Rookie of the Year.

  The prize money and honors meant less to Schlee than the approval of his peers.

  “I enjoy being on tour. The players are a nice bunch of guys. Nicklaus came around to me after I shot an eighty-two and told me not to lose confidence and told me how he shot eighty in the British Open once. Palmer came around and congratulated me once after I had a round in the sixties.”

  Playing beside the tour’s best only bolstered Schlee’s confidence.

  “I was in a threesome with Arnold Palmer and Mike Souchak. I shot a lousy score but I’m a good driver. Every hole, Palmer is here, Souchak is a little farther, and I’m maybe five yards ahead of him. The gallery can’t believe a young guy can outdrive them, although I do it all the time. Now, Palmer hits his ball and the whole gallery takes off.... I’m lucky I get to swing. It’s a race to keep ahead of the gallery.... All I hope is someday, they’ll be following me like that.”

  SCHLEE FREQUENTLY APPEARED IN THE spotlight during his sophomore season on tour. In February 1967, during the final round of the Tucson Open, he was again paired with Palmer (the tournament’s eventual winner), and even had a few chances during the weekend to catch the King. Schlee’s hitting into a lake on the last hole on Saturday, coupled with a wild tee shot out-of-bounds at the fifteenth on Sunday, widened the gap between him and Palmer to four strokes. Despite besting Palmer by two in the final round, Schlee had to be content with finishing fourth in the Arizona desert.

  Just four weeks later, Schlee shot a course-record final round of 63 in the Greater Greensboro Open (trumping the record shared by Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and George Archer) to tie for eighth. Some believed him to be the tour’s next big star.

  Then it all fell apart. His game probably didn’t benefit from his constantly experimenting with different putting methods and a variety of innovative golf clubs, including the Shakespeare Company’s fiberglass Wonder Shaft, and the bizarrely shaped, reconfigurable driver head with removable weights invented by Steve Biltz of Phoenix. (Schlee claimed that at the 1966 Sahara Invitational, Jack Nicklaus was curious enough to ask Schlee to order him two of the triangular-headed drivers.)

  A collapse in Schlee’s personal life probably also triggered his professional decline.

  Schlee’s wife had given birth to a daughter around the time he triumphed at Q School. His absence while on tour, coupled with financial hardships during his initial fallow months, badly damaged the marriage. And when Schlee happened to meet a woman he had briefly known and corresponded with several years earlier in Oregon, his first marriage effectively ended.

  “It’s something I had to do. It’s a lonely life,” he tried to explain later.

  Schlee divorced quickly and remarried in mid-1967. He chose to have nothing to do with his daughter (his new wife had a child from a previous marriage). In the meantime, as his wife and stepchild accompanied him on tour, his game continued to deteriorate. Although he competed in his first U.S. Open that June at Baltusrol (he missed the cut by six strokes), the remainder of the season was a disaster: He earned less than $5,000 in the final eight months. When the 1967 season ended, Schlee had fallen from forty-eighth on the money list a year earlier to seventy-fourth.

  The slump turned out to be more than just a sophomore jinx. Aside from two fine individual rounds that led to top-fifteen finishes in 1968—a third-round 65 in January’s Los Angeles Open, and another in August on the tough Firestone course at the American Golf Classic—Schtee turned in a second consecutive terrible season. Few reporters or sponsors noticed him any longer, other than to poke fun at his triangle-shaped driver and the odd putter he was then using (the head came from a discontinued model that had spent the past decade as a secretary’s paperweight). The media that did cover him mostly just commented on how the twenty-nine-year-old was “graying prematurely at the temples.”

  By March 1969, Schlee was ready to give up the tour. “I was materially, not spiritually, in bad shape,” Schlee recalled. Having been dropped by his Arizona sponsors, Schlee and his family moved to Texas. There he paid his own way on tour for the next few months and returned to using the more standard Wilson clubs with which he had learned the game.

  “There are a lot of young kids who can play good, but their sponsors don’t give them enough money. They have to eat hamburgers and hot dogs, sleep in cheap motels, and then go out and try to play against the millionaires. It’s hard to do. You have no idea how hard it is to play golf without money.”

  The whole Schlee family struggled to endure financial hardships.

  “Christmastimes were the worst for us,” his wife remembered a few years later. “We have an eleven-year-old daughter and twice in recent years sponsors have called us just before Christmas to tell us they were dropping us. It was awful always to be broke around that time of year. However, John never stayed in any flophouses on the road. He always believed in staying in good hotels. He felt if you stayed in cheap places then you played like a cheap person.”

  Schlee didn’t practice at cheap places either.

  Regardless of his meager earnings and winless record, he was still a regular member of the PGA circuit and enjoyed a few of the perks that came with tour celebrity. Dallas’s Preston Trail Golf Club—a luxurious, Ralph Plummer/ Byron Nelson-designed club composed of wealthy businessmen and high-profile athletes—invited Schlee to play their course and use their facilities free of charge. Hitting balls on the Preston Trail driving range in April 1969, Schlee noticed Ben Hogan drive right past him in a cart and hit balls at the opposite end of the range. He hadn’t seen the legend—who had now entirely given up tournament golf—since shouting out to him at the Memphis Open nine years earlier. Schlee tried in vain to “look my best and be professional, but I was scattering golf balls everywhere.”

  Then, a life-changing event—according to Schlee, a “miracle” and one that he likely distorted while retelling—occurred.

  “After about twenty minutes, he got into his cart and approached me. I could feel myself freezing with anticipation. Could he possibly remember the fleeting moment when we first met? Would he even know my name? He stopped his cart a few yards away and said simply, ‘John, would you like to play?’ I put my clubs on his cart and we headed for the first tee. It was the beginning of a journey that would change my life.”

  The gawky nomad and golf’s most revered shot maker were well into playing the back nine at Preston Trail before the two exchanged a single word.

  “The first six, I witnessed near perfect golf from tee to green. Ben hit every fairway, every green and never had a birdie putt over fifteen feet. In total contrast, I was spraying the ball all over the course. Also in total contrast, I made every putt. I holed them from sixty-five feet ... forty-five feet, you name it.

  “After five holes, I could sense a turmoil in Ben’s mind.... Finally, he looked at me with total honesty—the kind a father might show toward a son—and said something like, ‘John, you are destroying everything I’ve worked for in my life. It’s so obvious you are confused and have no idea what you need to do to swing a club and play golf. All you can do is putt.’

  “He sensed my desire to learn and, in the next six holes, he tried to help me. My mind was so confused, so stuffed with ‘try this, try that’ golf, I was unable to comprehend what he was telling me. There literally wasn’t any place for the information to go.”

  Hogan soon took Schlee under his wing (how much so remains unclear, although Schlee kept a tape recorder in his car to retain Hogan’s advice while it was still fresh in his mind). Over the next few months, the two met periodically and worked on every technical part of his faltering game, from setup to follow-through. Schlee also signed up
to play exclusively with Hogan golf equipment.

  “He said to me, ‘Son, with that left-hand grip, you’re going to have to learn how to use the right side—your power side, where you’ve got most of your athletic and artistic ability. You’re going to learn how to load that side to the maximum ... then let it go to the target,’” Schlee recalled twenty years later. “Ben taught me to look at the left side as the stabilizing side. There is no cup in the back of the left wrist. The bowed-out left wrist allows maximum cupping or leverage in the right wrist.”

  And Hogan tweaked more than just Schlee’s grip on the golf club; he secured his mental grip on the game itself.

  “You see, golf is an attitude game,” Schlee wrote in his book, Maximum Golf, paraphrasing another Hoganism. “It’s played one shot at a time with a dream ... and believing it will come true. When you have the courage to let this concept underly [sic] your golf strategy, you’ll be a winner.”

  Schlee’s association with the game’s greatest technician also strengthened his confidence. More important than any swing advice Schlee drew from Hogan was a focus on the now, not on past failures. “It is a mind that wipes the slate clean with moment-by-moment, minute-by-minute rebirths, one shot at a time. It is a renewed mind, the ultimate clean machine, washed with forgiveness and forgetfulness.”

  Having absolved himself for all the missed cuts, the dropped sponsorships, and the struggles to provide for his family, Schlee believed he could start again. And there was no better occasion for that rebirth than his thirtieth birthday.

  BEYOND ITS BOLD POLITICAL and sexual messages, the 1968 Broadway musical Hair— especially its theme song, “The Age of Aquarius”—rejected 1960s Americans’ growing fascination with the cosmos.