WHEN HARVEY REPORTED for his first lesson as head professional in the summer of 1923, he paused to take quick stock of his good luck. He remembered his anxious first day as a caddie. His older brother Tom had taken good care of him, watching for bullies, making sure little Harvey got agreeable members, allowing his younger brother enough independence to experience inconsequential mistakes, exposing him to older caddies who knew what they were doing. Harvey marveled at how much he had learned while carrying golf clubs.
He also thought about the head professionals who had come before him. He privately thanked them for being patient with him and answering his innocent questions. Harvey recalled with fondness the members who had helped him along the way, men such as Lewis Hancock, who allowed Harvey to fetch his balls so long as he kept his fingers, tacky with the residue of candy from Lammes, away from the grips of his clubs. The memory of Hancock made Harvey sad. Hancock had died in his bed of heart disease in 1920. Harvey still could picture the flags at the Capitol flying at half-mast and the somber resolution that city council member Harry Haynes read into the minutes: “His days began and ended in the city he loved and served.” Harvey thought about the bronzed plaque that hung over the fireplace at the club. IN MEMORY OF LEWIS HANCOCK, read the engraving, FOUNDER OF THE AUSTIN COUNTRY CLUB, 1899.
Harvey thought also about the golf course there before him on his first morning as head professional. It was twice as big as it had been when he arrived as a scrawny and shy caddie from Cedar Street, but now that he had spent nearly a decade of his life there, it seemed intimate and personal and important to his spirit, like chapel almost. Nine holes had become eighteen. The first hole now played over the intersection of East Forty-First and Red River Streets. Harvey knew the course would soon require grass greens, like the other good clubs in Texas. But those were big plans, and Harvey needed to start small. He turned to his first scheduled lesson, with a man named Franz Fiser.
Harvey watched Fiser take a few swings. With ideas echoing through his head, he said nothing at first. He inventoried the images in his memory of the best golf swings he had seen and concentrated on what he remembered most about them. What were the common themes? What worked? Harvey remained silent. He wanted to make sure he made no mistakes in his first actual lesson as the head professional. But he also knew Fiser expected some kind of return on his $2 investment—the initial fee Harvey charged, if he charged at all. He finally summoned the courage to speak. “Keep your left arm a little straighter,” Harvey said, in almost a whisper. Fiser did. His shots pierced the air with authority. Fiser was thrilled. Harvey was relieved.
The office for the golf professional at Austin Country Club was small, dank, and cramped. Harvey loved everything about it. He sometimes stood in the middle of the room and absorbed its perfection—the sweet-smelling hickory blanks stacked about, waiting to be converted into shafts, and the iron heads with the beautiful names that Harvey liked, smiling at the sound of a Scottish word wrapped in a Western drawl. Niblick, Harvey would say to himself. Mashie. Jigger. He inhaled the scent of the grass blades and the mud that carpeted the floor. Outside, a mule-drawn seed sprinkler with rust-coated wagon wheels awaited duty near the caddie yard, where boys who reminded Harvey of himself not so long ago now looked at him as he once regarded Francis Ouimet.
Ouimet visited Austin on January 4, 1924, and played an informal round at the club. More than ten years removed from his epic victory as an amateur at the U.S. Open, he installed Harvey as his caddie that day for his first experience with the curious sand greens. Harvey embraced every moment of their round. He studied every detail of Ouimet’s attack on the golf ball. He appreciated that he was in the presence of a particular kind of greatness that he might never witness again.
Ouimet played that day with Bob Connerly, one of the two brothers who were the most highly skilled club members. Connerly putted better than Ouimet, naturally. “As the ball rolled on the greens it gathered particles of oil,” Ouimet later noted.
The U.S. Open champion didn’t know much about Texas. The oil kept “the sand from blowing away,” he was informed.
Harvey shiped admirably for Ouimet and formed a mental inventory of his many impressions. Harvey admired Ouimet’s singular commitment to every shot. His conception of sound fundamentals, which began to form as he watched the good club players and continued to develop from his experiences at the Texas Open, was taking shape in his mind. He knew he would soon have to document his thoughts. He would make time soon for that.
A sportswriter named Lloyd Gregory came to the club shortly after Ouimet returned to Boston. He filed a column on January 12 that celebrated the evolution of Austin Country Club through its fifteen years of existence. “The growth and popularity of golf in this city is nothing less than astounding,” Gregory wrote in the Austin Evening Statesman, one of two dailies in the city. “Despite a bite in the air, the country club course was crowded Saturday afternoon . . . and this afternoon, barring a tornado, a steady stream of enthusiasts will play.”
A few miles away, Austin High School added golf as a sport in the fall of 1924, likely at the behest of Harvey. The new team fielded eight players, including Philip George, who later became an assistant to Harvey at Austin Country Club; his brother Felix, a future professional at a municipal course; and Don Malarkey and Tony Butler, who also would become golf professionals.
The 1924 Comet yearbook published a picture of the upstart squad. The caption noted:
Austin High School, in starting a golf team this year, has originated a high school sport in Texas that is fast becoming popular in the Eastern states and will soon take a recognized place over the country. Austin has the credit of having the first golf team in Texas high schools. The ability to do this has been due to the courtesy of the Country Club, which, unlike most country clubs, has been willing to turn over its links on Saturdays to the High School team.
Golf in Texas continued to grow around Harvey. His appointment as head professional had coincided with the incorporation of River Oaks Country Club in Houston, which commissioned the Scottish-born course architect Donald Ross to shape eighteen holes along Buffalo Bayou on a two-hundred-acre dairy farm known as Four Mile Place. The original three hundred members paid $100 each to join River Oaks, which later factored into Harvey’s life and legacy as much as any place outside of Austin.
The club hired Jack Burke Sr. as its first golf professional. Burke hailed from Philadelphia, caddied at Philadelphia Country Club, learned the trade of club-making as a boy, and became an assistant professional, like Harvey, before his eighteenth birthday. By the time he was summoned to River Oaks, Burke had taught golf at Hershey Country Club, Aronimink Golf Club in suburban Philadelphia, Hyperion Golf Club in Des Moines, Iowa, two clubs—Rockford Golf Club and the Wheaton Club—near Chicago, and the Town and Country Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’d made a name as a player too. Burke finished second in the 1920 U.S. Open, a shot behind Ted Ray of the Isle of Jersey at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio. He’d beaten the young amateur Bobby Jones, who made his U.S. Open debut that year, as well as many of the great professionals of the time, including Walter Hagen, Jim Barnes, and Harry Vardon.
Like Harvey and many other professionals of the era, Burke toggled between playing tournament golf and teaching the swing to beginners. Cold weather limited the amount of time he could spend earning an income in the clubs up north, so Burke sought winter assignments in warmer-weather states such as Texas. The founders of River Oaks came to him while he was working in a seasonal teaching position at Glen Garden Country Club in Fort Worth and offered him a monthly salary of $300 and concessions from the club-polishing service. Accepting the offer, Jack and his wife, Quo Vadis Quayle, arrived in Houston in 1924 with their one-year-old son, Jack Jr.
Like Harvey, Jack Burke Sr. found himself in the right place at the right time. The arrival of River Oaks—joining clubs in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth—would secure the state’s future prominence in the game, and River Oaks would become an important hub for Texas golf.
Burke was a golf professional who straddled two worlds. He divided his time between playing and teaching, winning the Texas PGA Championship five times while developing instructional innovations that influenced the generations after him. Burke designed the aluminum-alloy Blue Goose putter with Tracy Parks, an inventor and friend. Together they created a rubber grip woven with strands of fabric, inspired by the construction of the inside wall of a tire that ruptured on the Burke family car. Both inventions endured. The putter used the gently curved hosel called a gooseneck. The cord grip still helps millions of golfers play in the rain.
Burke also bequeathed to golf a lasting set of principles. As Harvey would soon do, he took copious notes from his observations of skilled players and beginners alike on the practice range. He kept his notes in his office at River Oaks, where a Houston amateur named Robert McKinney found them one day while waiting for a storm to clear. McKinney found the notes mesmerizing. He published them in a book he modestly titled Tips on the Game of Golf, from Jack Burke Sr. In the spirit of the early teachers from Scotland, Burke’s mandates worked because they were simple. Harvey knew when he met Burke that he had found his muse.
Harvey befriended Burke soon after the opening of River Oaks. The two were part of a small but seminal group of Texas-based golf professionals whose livelihoods depended on promoting the sport. Soon after purchasing a lot in the tony River Oaks neighborhood for $3,000 and building a 3,400-square-foot house on Brentwood Drive, Burke would invite Harvey and other fellow professionals to Houston for spontaneous weekend retreats. The group often included Jack Grout, the touring and teaching professional Jimmy Demaret, Henry Picard, Tod Menefee of San Antonio Country Club, and Johnny Dawson, the decorated California amateur. Golf equipment salesmen occasionally joined the gatherings. Everyone at Burke’s gatherings shared the same interest, and no one who cared deeply about the direction of golf in Texas was denied an invitation.
“They wanted to know how to play,” Jack Burke Jr., the son the Burkes brought with them to Houston, recalled in the fall of 2012. “And they particularly wanted to know how to teach.”
The younger Burke remembered listening to the men debate methods, theories, and tactics to impart wisdom. “They didn’t talk in academic terms,” Burke Jr. said. “They told stories.” Burke Sr. had played with the titans of the game; he divined their secrets from paying attention, as Harvey had been doing in Austin. Burke was happy to share the knowledge he’d accumulated at the championships he had played throughout the United States.
“It’s a simple game and it should be taught simply,” Jack Burke Sr. often reminded his colleagues. “There’s a swing in everybody. You’ve just got to get it out of him.”
Harvey listened intently. He trusted the elder Burke and considered him a mentor. Even after the men finished their discussions and were snacking on syrup-coated biscuits, convened around a table for games of pitch, Harvey continued to interrogate his peers.
“He wanted to find the answers,” Burke Jr. said. When he did, he committed them to memory.
Back at home, Austin Country Club began to draw attention from outside the city. Harry Cooper—later nicknamed “Lighthorse Harry” by sportswriter Damon Runyon for his fast play at the Los Angeles Open—played an exhibition at the club in the summer of 1924 with Harvey, John Bredemus, and Dan Kenny, a founding member of PGA of Canada. The Lions Club of Austin invited Bill Mehlhorn and Leo Diegel to see the new public course it had built with $1,100 worth of retired municipal bonds, which were burned in celebration on the first tee.
In the fall of 1925, the Australian trick-shot specialist Joe Kirkwood, a man Harvey admired as much as anyone in his life, arrived at the club for an exhibition with Bredemus, now a professional at San Antonio Country Club, and Harvey himself. The spectators who had procured tickets to the event watched Kirkwood shoot 71 that morning to beat Harvey, who shot 73. Kirkwood entertained the gallery with a display of shots hit from different objects, shots hit in different directions, shots hit with different curvatures, shots hit with different implements, and shots hit that no one had ever imagined. Harvey and Kirkwood played as partners in the afternoon and won their match against Bredemus and Tom Lally, the pro from San Antonio.
Harvey loved his work. He found singular joy in rising each morning to immerse himself in the game, the grounds, and the people who played there. His understanding of the swing increased with every lesson he gave. His fascination with instruction fit his temperament: he had an abiding instinct for watching closely, listening intently, thinking discreetly, speaking only when something needed to be said, remaining silent when no solution seemed clear. Harvey endeavored to simplify. He cared nothing for ornamental excess.
Harvey grew immensely under Burke’s caring tutelage. He also read as much as he could find about Stewart Maiden, the golf professional from Carnoustie, Scotland, who taught Bobby Jones and Glenna Collett Vare at East Lake in Atlanta. “A man may teach one kid who becomes great,” Harvey said. “But two like that is no accident. The best teacher is like the best golfer: He’s the one who makes the fewest mistakes.”
Harvey drove to Houston as often as possible to sit with Burke and his other peers. Between his lessons and other duties at the club, he kept his swing sharp, and he created a club championship to encourage sportsmanship and competition. He was happy to learn that Texas A&M University in College Station had suggested that the Southwest Conference formally adopt men’s golf as an official sport. Southern Methodist and Rice Universities agreed to participate, “and if the support of one more school can be gained, it is very likely that a conference golf tournament will be held in the southwest this year,” read an item in the November 25 issue of the Austin Evening Statesman. The University of Texas became that school. The conference scheduled its first championship for May 1926 at Houston Country Club. Five of the eventual eight charter schools, including Texas, committed to being there.
The city of Austin christened its own city golf championship in February 1925. More than one hundred players, including many club members who prepared under Harvey, entered the thirty-six-hole competition, which would be won by Billy Drake, a student at Austin High. Tinsley Penick, Harvey’s older brother, finished seven shots behind. He edged closer a year later. Tony Butler, who played on the first Austin High School golf team that Harvey helped to create, beat Tinsley in the final match at Lions, the new municipal course in West Austin. The two daily newspapers published scores for the city to see.
They had something else to write about in the winter of 1927: Walter Hagen had roared into town.
The stylish and garrulous player had won eight major championships, including the PGA Championship the summer before, and he was stopping in Austin on his way to San Antonio for the Texas Open. He played Austin Country Club with Edwin Juelg, the reigning Texas PGA champion, and Harvey and Tinsley, who had won the club championship in 1926. Harvey shot 71. Juelg finished the round at 76. Tinsley Penick, rattled in the presence of one of the best players in the game, shot 79. Hagen whistled and hummed his way around in sixty-eight swings, tying the course record. That summer, he won his fifth PGA Championship at Cedar Crest in Dallas.
Hagen later told a sportswriter that he thought Austin Country Club was trickier than Willow Springs, the new venue for the Texas Open. Hagen always found something positive to say about a new golf course, but Harvey still took pride in the remark. He also took an important lesson from the day he played with Hagen.
Harvey scored well, but he topped a shot early in the round. He then topped another. On a walk between shots, Hagen looked over at Harvey and said, “You want a word of advice?”
“Sure,” Harvey replied.
Hagen said he thought that Harvey was trying too hard to keep his head still. He wanted to see more freedom in his swing. Hagen said a fluid swing includes a lateral shift with the turn away from the ball. “This gets your weight onto your right foot and your head well behind the ball,” Hagen explained, “so you can put power into your blow.”
Harvey said nothing. He tried to picture the idea in his imagination.
“It’s like throwing a punch,” Hagen said.
That night it occurred to Harvey that his entire frame of reference in golf revolved around experiences like that. He learned to play golf, he would say many times in his life, by trial and error. He copied what he liked. He ignored what seemed too complicated. He listened to players and teachers who went about their work in ways different from his own. “They made me think,” he said. Now, at the age of twenty-two, Harvey was building a foundation. He was beginning to understand who he was and who he would be.
Harvey taught a free head for the rest of his life. But the advice from Hagen was a mere note in Harvey’s curated volume of wisdom. He knew how to find, keep, and share what he saw as the tested truths of golf. It made sense to keep a free head, for instance, and when tested, it worked.
Over the decades many people would ask Harvey who taught him to play and to teach the game so thoroughly. They expected a name. Maybe two. But Harvey’s answer never wavered: “Everybody.”
Golf in the United States was assuming a new level of organization and interest. The Professional Golfers’ Association of America had formed in April 1916, nearly three months after a lunch involving club professionals and elite amateurs at the Taplow Club in the Wanamaker department store in New York City. Presidents played. William McKinley famously tried golf, found the frustration insufferable, and lost interest. William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson could barely break 100, but they shared the enthusiasm that many shamelessly inept Americans had for the game. The number of golf courses in the country rose from 2,000 in 1923 to 3,500 in 1925, to 5,800 five years later. Nearly two million Americans played at least one round of golf a year.
Events at Austin Country Club reflected the national enthusiasm. The Texas Golf Association staged its annual championship there in 1928, an event of such significance that newspapers from as far away as Houston dispatched reporters to chronicle the rounds and draw sketches of the players. The tournament was flighted, meaning that players were assigned to groups based on their qualifying scores. Harvey’s brother Tinsley, a former club champion, represented the best hope for the host venue, which included thirty-five other members as contestants. Tinsley lost in the quarterfinals.
Harvey worked every day. He gave lessons most of the time, given Austin’s three hundred days a year of sunshine. He even taught if it rained, if the pupil had that kind of commitment, which some did. Between lessons, Harvey kept a modestly stocked shop, merchandising golf balls and the occasional mashie or spoon, and he liked to grind irons on his bench, sharpening the leading edge for players who took shallow divots, softening the bounce for those who dug. The work literally shaped him. Harvey was a slight man—thin as a mesquite branch, never more than 130 pounds in trousers and belt—but his forearms rippled with lean muscle. He told pupils he got strong by wrestling the rust from the cold steel of the golf clubs he cared for like heirlooms.
Harvey went to church when he could. He sometimes had a void in his lesson sheet that allowed him to attend Sunday services at Hyde Park Christian Church, where his mother was a “pillar.” One Sunday morning he noticed a petite young woman with dark hair and aqua eyes singing in the choir. He stared at her from afar and said nothing—as if he were watching a golf swing. As a kid, Harvey had taken an ordinary interest in girls. But his commitment to golf always came before silly distractions such as crushes or actual dates. Something else was happening now. He locked on this girl with the eyes and the voice. He asked after her when the service ended. Someone told him her name was Helen Holmes. She was the daughter of the new pastor.
Holmes was a student that summer at the University of Texas, a few blocks south of Hyde Park. She walked to classes, and Harvey spotted her one morning. He sensed an opportunity. He pulled his green Nash roadster alongside and asked her if she wanted a ride. Holmes liked the car. She also liked the white cap and plus-fours Harvey wore, though she had no idea why a man would be dressed that way in Texas. Holmes knew nothing about golf. She appreciated, however, golf fashion. Nonetheless, she declined the offer.
But Harvey persisted and eventually won her over. They were married two days after Christmas Day 1928 in East Texas, where her father had been called to minister at a new church. Harvey brought his wife home to Austin, took her to the Texas Open, and brought her to the club. One night a member invited them to dinner there. Helen Penick wore her wedding dress. The dining room reminded her of an English hunting lodge, with “hardwood floors and a beamed ceiling.” She noticed the slot machine in an alcove.
Sometime later she was summoned back to the club, beyond her husband’s purview. The member who had taken them to dinner presented her with a check for $100 and a set of hand-painted dishes. Helen Penick knew that her husband was regarded as much more than a nameless employee who administered lessons, tilled fairways, and hunched over the grinding wheel on his bench in the shop downstairs. It’s unclear if Helen also understood what Harvey’s career would mean for their marriage. She would not see him often. She frequently would not see him on weekends. She would share him with the club and the players who became his family of a different kind.
Tom Penick, who had introduced his youngest brother to golf as a caddie, was the head professional at Lions, the first municipal course in Austin and one of the oldest in Texas. Penick took the job in 1928, four years after the local Lions Club commissioned the project on 141 acres of land, including some in a floodplain, near the stretch of the Colorado River known as Lake McDonald. Lions was the second golf course in the city after the Austin Country Club course. It offered curious sports men and women lacking the wherewithal—or perhaps sufficient interest—to play private golf a chance to experiment with hickory shafts and mesh-patterned Dunlop balls and discover what all of the excitement was about. The city even upstaged Austin Country Club: the municipal course installed putting greens of natural grass. A year later Harvey convinced the membership to vacate the sticky sand greens—and his beloved shipe—for good.
Harvey spent much of his discretionary time at Lions. His brother had been appointed the first golf coach at the University of Texas when golf became a varsity sport in 1927, and Harvey liked to watch the young collegians when he could. The Penick brothers consulted on the unfamiliar task of supervising a varsity college golf team. They worked closely together on all matters of golf, from the caddie yard at the club to the construction of Lions. With Harvey’s help, Tom Penick organized a program that would give rise in their lifetimes to national champions.
The first UT golf team was little more than a thrown-together, self-sustaining group of students with no identity beyond a shared zeal for the game. The Longhorns had no team uniforms, no team bags, no team vehicle, and no team home. Tom Penick allowed the members to practice and play at Lions as often as they liked, but he was busy running the popular municipal golf course. He could do little more for the team than secure tee times for team qualifying and make sure the players knew where the tournaments were and how to get there. He was less a coach than a secretary.
His tenure as the Texas coach lasted four years. When he gave it up, the university asked Harvey to succeed his brother. Harvey wondered how he could assume the responsibility, given his obligations to the club, to the Texas section of the PGA, and to his own playing schedule, which he considered important because watching the great players he played with was one of the ways he became a better teacher. But Harvey knew the university needed him. He accepted the job after the 1930 season.
Tom remained the head professional at Lions. Harvey sent his players there to play one another for 20¢ pecan pies, but he also invited them to the club, which had given him permission to use the course. Harvey’s new responsibilities limited the amount of time he could devote to playing tournaments, and his game suffered.
He and Tom entered the 1931 Harlingen Open in the Rio Grande Valley on the South Texas coast, where touring and teaching professionals competed in one round of medal play at the municipal golf course. The field of sixty-five included many of Tom and Harvey’s acquaintances: Jack Grout, Mike Turnesa, Denny Shute, Tony Butler, Ray Mangrum, Ralph Plummer, Al Espinosa, Jimmy Demaret, Harry Cooper, and Craig Wood, who later won the 1941 Masters and U.S. Open. Harvey was delighted to learn that he would be sharing the 1:05 P.M. starting time with his dear friend John Bredemus.
Bredemus was a marginal player but a prolific course architect, and his enterprising spirit left an indelible imprint on golf in Texas. Born in Michigan and educated at Ivy League schools as a civil engineer, Bredemus designed dozens of courses in Texas, including Memorial Park in Houston and, with Perry Maxwell, Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. Bredemus had helped to organize the first Texas Open in 1922, when he was a professional at Brackenridge Park. He later designed the municipal golf course at Memorial Park, “practically in downtown Houston,” Harvey wrote years later, “yet [it] is a beautiful, pastoral setting with tall trees and is circled by a jogging path that Bredemus insisted on putting there, rather than the road through the course that some of the city planners wanted.” Harvey thought Memorial Park was as good a golf course as Colonial.
The designer of that course traveled the Southwest with a bag of books, a handful of golf clubs, and a sack of checkers and a checkerboard. Bredemus had been an athlete at Dartmouth and Princeton. Harvey respected Bredemus. Others in the emerging Texas golf scene thought him mercurial and aloof, a man who refused to enter a private clubhouse because he never felt like he belonged, but Harvey accepted his idiosyncrasies and sought his counsel throughout their lives. Harvey wrote many years later in a letter to a friend that he considered Bredemus a “fine architect, smart man . . . a straight shooter who gave his best with what he started with.” When the club announced in early 1924 that it planned to add nine holes and convert to grass greens—the latter decision no doubt reached under pressure from the debut of the new municipal course in West Austin—Harvey recommended Bredemus for the work. They remained close until 1946, when Bredemus died in Big Spring, Texas. He was buried there under a flat, unremarkable stone etched only with his name and the seal of the Texas PGA.
Harvey knew Bredemus could barely break 75 on his best day, but he was glad to be paired with him in Harlingen the morning of February 7, 1931. As he scanned the rest of the pairings for the tournament, he noticed another name he held in equally high regard: Horton Smith, the magnificent “Missouri Rover” from the Ozark Mountains, who had the purest putting stroke Harvey had ever seen.
Smith joined the tour from Springfield Country Club, where he was a lanky assistant professional with wavy blond hair. He had attended classes at Southwest Missouri State Teachers College before settling on a career in tournament golf. Smith won his first title, the Oklahoma Open, in 1928. A year later, he seized eight more tournaments and earned his nickname: he would travel great distances by car, train, and, when necessary, boat to compete. Harvey admired Smith and considered him a friend. Later in his career, when he became primarily a teacher, Smith taught an amateur from Fort Worth, John Grace, who later befriended Harvey. Grace told Harvey that Smith suggested devoting 90 percent of practice to the vital pitch and chip shots around the green.
“Your short game will help your long game in every way,” Smith told Grace. “But your long game won’t help your short game at all.” Harvey particularly liked a putting drill that Smith used—stroking balls with his right hand exclusively, until he’d developed a keen sense of motion, line, and pace. Harvey recommended it to his pupils for the rest of his career.
The drill failed, however, to deliver Smith to victory at the Harlingen Open in February 1931. A friendly pairing with Bredemus was no help to Harvey either. Wood won that Saturday afternoon in the Rio Grande Valley, the sixth of his eventual twenty-one titles deemed official by the PGA Tour. The players scattered—some of them went on to the next tournament, some of them went home. The Woods and the Smiths and the Demarets chased the purses; the teachers, like Harvey, simply absorbed new ideas to convert into lessons.
But Harvey returned to Austin with more on his mind than how and what to teach to his members.
He had a golf team to prepare at the University of Texas, with no firm idea what that meant. He had helped many fine players get better at the club, but most of them had learned golf from the ground up from Harvey. Now he was meeting accomplished players from other parts of the state who had learned other ideas from other teachers. Harvey was unsure how to handle the inconsistencies between what he believed and what his university players had been taught. Though his personality naturally kept him away from confrontation—he shunned conflict as much as possible—that trait in fact would help him become one of the most successful coaches in the history of college golf.
Harvey had few critics in his life. His kind, disarming disposition earned him loyal friends and admirers, not adversaries, and people were drawn to his warmth. Not surprisingly, his relationships with his players stopped well short of being dominant. “If there’s one thing against Harvey, it’s that he doesn’t motivate players,” said an unidentified touring professional quoted in an April 1971 magazine story. “He’s so gentle, so mild, that he’s not forceful. He doesn’t take hold of a guy, shake him and say, ‘You’re going to win this match.’ He doesn’t teach competitiveness. He’s not aggressive.” Harvey’s record as the head coach at Texas proved, however, that aggression and force were irrelevant to success. His embrace of learning from other teachers—through the players they sent to him at Texas—would be one of his greatest decisions.
Harvey was twenty-six years old on his first day as a college golf coach in the Southwest Conference. He had no scholarships to award because the NCAA had a rule stipulating that golf scholarships were equal to compensation, and compensation made a professional out of a player. Harvey had the authority to do what he wanted with his team within those codified limits. He had no interest in meddling with his players, however, unless they directly asked for his help or when he noticed a new player hitting his tee shots on par-3 holes from the bare earth. “Bobby Jones did that until he got really great,” Harvey would tell him. “Then he always used a tee.”
Students who wanted to qualify for his teams typically were commendable junior players from clubs in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, or smaller towns in the state. By the time Harvey met them, they already had been trained by proficient club professionals Harvey either knew already or would know soon. He studied their techniques. He paid attention to their mannerisms. He knew, as a part-time college golf coach in the early 1930s, that what he needed was a system. He was beginning to parse the golf swing in ways he could never have predicted. His players learned a great deal from Harvey, but the arrangement was reciprocal: Harvey was learning just as much from them.
One day in Austin, Harvey decided it was time to catalog his ideas. He stopped at a store, scanned the shelves, and found just what he’d come to buy.
Harvey held the notebook for a moment. It felt perfect in his hands: fifty pages, narrow-ruled, with a crimson-red cover made by the Southwest Tablet Company of Dallas. He bought it without a second thought. Sometime later he opened the Scribbletex that would become, in seventy years, one of the most important relics in the history of American golf. He produced a pen. Most of my knowledge came from other pros, Harvey wrote in his tiny, precise cursive. Coaching: Boys had pros from everywhere.
The hour was getting late. Harvey had lessons to give, a shop to run, a course to care for, a golf team to supervise, a wife to go home to, and more to discover about the game of golf. He closed the crimson-red cover, opened his desk, and placed the Scribbletex inside.
His book had begun.