HARVEY PLANNED QUALIFYING rounds as the first-year coach of the Texas Longhorns. Rather than select the team himself, a prospect that made him uneasy, he wanted the players to earn their spots on the squad. Harvey strove for the positive. He avoided using the word don’t in his lessons, for example, preferring to nudge his students with phrases such as “Let’s try this,” or, “How about this?” or, “What if we tried that?” Picking players seemed untenable. Golf was a meritocracy. Harvey would rather let numbers on the scorecard—the only measure of golf that mattered—dictate the composition of the team.
Four players earned spots in 1931. Dick Gregg, Lane McAfee, Fred Gross, and Jack Tinnin qualified at Lions Municipal to represent Texas in the Southwest Conference. They won head-to-head matches that season against Baylor, Rice, and Texas Christian University, and they tied with Texas A&M and Southern Methodist. They made their new coach proud, but Harvey took no credit. He praised the foundations their teachers at home had given them and their hard work on the range.
Texas finished a distant third in the conference tournament in Dallas. SMU won both the team and individual titles. Gregg and Tinnin played in the NCAA national tournament at Olympia Fields near Chicago, but neither qualified for match play.
Still, the Cactus yearbook saw promise in the new Texas golf coach. “Coach Harvey Penick deserves much credit for the development of the team,” it noted, under a team picture that included Harvey. He wore dark, pleated trousers, a dark V-necked sweater, and a tie. His wavy hair, dark and full, shone in the sun. He held a golf club in his left hand. He looked like he could be a senior letterman—one with wrinkles raking his forehead—on the squad.
“With veteran material to work with,” the Cactus concluded, “he will put formidable teams in the field in ’32 and ’33.”
It was a forgettable year altogether for Texas sports. The football team won six games and lost four, including a 35–7 dismantling by Harvard and a 7–6 season-ending loss to Texas A&M. The basketball team finished in the middle of the Southwest Conference. Baseball ended a game out of first place, won by Texas A&M. Only the tennis team, under head coach D. A. Penick, captured a conference trophy that year.
Daniel Allen Penick was a distant cousin to Harvey. A man of letters born in North Carolina, he had been a Texan since 1882. He was, unlike Harvey, deeply educated in the formal sense. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Texas, taught English and Latin at a high school in East Texas, and became a professor of classical languages at UT after finishing his doctorate in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University. He became president of the Southwest Conference the year Harvey became the head professional at Austin Country Club. He was the only tennis coach Texas had ever known.
D. A. Penick’s tennis team and the other UT teams were established programs with savvy, veteran coaches. Harvey had never had a golf team of his own. He coached by instinct, from a position of reserve that came naturally to him. But he appreciated priorities, and his lay foremost with the club that employed him. He gave what time he could to the team, but he refused to compromise his duties in the shop and on the practice range at Austin Country Club.
His coaching style struck some as peculiar. He sometimes hid in bushes at home matches at Lions, surveilling his unsuspecting players between the branches and leaves. His instruction to them was brief before competition. “Take dead aim,” Harvey advised in his thin, waferlike voice.
He gave them all a new golf ball, then walked away.
He almost never traveled for tournaments outside Austin. He would miss too many days at the country club if he did, and the country club was his home even more than his actual home. Harvey was sure that his presence at tournaments would make his players nervous. “When they go out on the course, I have already taught them all they know. After that they are on their own.” Besides, he reasoned, if they weren’t ready to compete on the day of the tournament, no amount of sidelines coaching would help them.
The sensibilities he brought to coaching found their way into the Scribbletex. Harvey favored economy and frugality in his written words as much as he did in his golf lessons. He thought that big words, and especially lots of them, only confused a player. The game seemed complicated enough, especially to people inclined to be analytical. Through watching thousands of players, Harvey sought to simplify the actions involved in a sound golf swing to an elemental level. He wanted to know what worked universally. When he found it, he tumbled it through the finely positioned filters of his mind, until only a precious residue remained. That residue was truth. Nothing went into the Scribbletex until it was truth as he reckoned it.
Listen for swish to see if pupil [is] hitting too soon or too late, he wrote.
Jimmy Demaret came up from Houston today and sure shot up our golf course. He had 28-32-60. I talked to him afterward and he’s working on the theory that the elbows should stay together in the swing. He doesn’t mean tight together, or in to the body. He just tries to keep them the same distance apart throughout his swing.
Trouble with most of the men players I’ve seen here at the club (and I suppose all clubs are about alike) is that they try to use tournament players’ techniques instead of just making the next step which is right for them.
A pupil doesn’t start [the] serious business of making corrections until he’s beyond the beginning stage. By then he should have (if I’ve taught him at all well) a clear picture of what controls the flight of the ball, the path of the club and the angle of the club at impact.
The worst trouble pupils have is that they try to think of the thousand-and-one things they hear.
Confidence is the result of a good swing and of good shots. Confidence never has been very much of a cause.
His ideas seemed primitive to some. Analytical players came to him in search of point-by-point explanations of why things worked the way they did. They often left disappointed. When trying to think of the simplest image possible to share with players struggling with tempo or the initiation of the swing, Harvey advised them to imagine swinging a bucket of water without spilling it. When he wanted someone to stay through the swing at impact instead of straightening his knees or trying to scoop the ball into play, Harvey suggested clipping the top of the tee, regardless of whether there actually was a tee to be clipped. It was the thought that mattered, and an openness, based in conviction, to pretending.
He told struggling putters to give luck a chance by creeping the ball toward the hole with such modest speed—“like a mouse,” Harvey said—that the ball would catch the side of the cup and tumble inside. He wanted everyone he taught to take dead aim—to have the penetrating focus to clear the mind of everything but the acute endeavor—and let go. He wished for his pupils the same thrill and joy he experienced in executing a shot perfectly imagined and smartly prepared for.
All of these ideas were grist for the notebook, but he wrote down only those that, to him, were as close to truth as they could be. Then, satisfied that he had done a service to his students, his profession, and himself, Harvey closed the Scribbletex and returned it to his desk, where only he knew it was hidden.
The UT golf team won the conference championship in 1932 with three lettermen—Gregg, Gross, and Tinnin—joined by newcomers Ferrell Daugherty and John Payne. It was a rising season in all sports. The football team, under sixth-year head coach Clyde Littlefield, finished as Southwest Conference runner-up. Head coach Edwin Olle and his varsity basketball team won their first conference trophy since 1924. Beloved baseball head coach William Disch, “Uncle Billy” on the UT campus, delivered his nineteenth championship. Swimming won. Cross-country won. In golf, “Texas exhibited its strength on the opening day of the Conference meet,” the Cactus annual asserted. The Longhorns beat Southern Methodist, the defending champions, in Austin with a score of 309.
The team elected Tinnin as captain for the ’33 team. Harvey had exceptional confidence in his senior. But he had an even better feeling about the next incarnation of Longhorn golf for a different reason.
He met a sharply dressed, coal-haired freshman from Bonham in the fall of 1932. Ed White, a student interested in the petroleum engineering program at Texas, was the son of a casket salesman and was also a two-time club champion in his hometown in East Texas. White had collected three aces by the time he enrolled in college. He could launch his long irons as high, as far, and as straight as Sam Snead. Freshmen were prohibited from playing on the varsity, but Harvey knew White had won the intramural singles championship in his first attempt. The third-year part-time coach waited for White to appear for team qualifying in 1933.
Meanwhile, Harvey kept playing. He shot a 63 at the club, a course record, with six birdies and an eagle. He was named captain of the 1933 Texas Cup professional team. One of 1,009 PGA professionals that year, Harvey was elected president of the Texas section, a position that allowed him to help select the U.S. Ryder Cup team. Hagen served as captain. The team, which included Sarazen and Harvey’s friend Horton Smith, lost by a point in Southport, England, to J. H. Taylor’s team from Great Britain. His election as section president earned Harvey a place already in PGA history: that year was the only one in which section presidents and the PGA Executive Committee selected the Ryder Cup team.
Back on the University of Texas campus, the Littlefield Memorial Fountain on the Main Mall sprayed water for the first time. Mae West selected the seven Bluebonnet Belles, the campus beauty queens. “It had to be seven—which is my lucky number—and seven it is,” she wrote to the university. “I would like to see every girl personally . . . College people—particularly college men—interest me. After all . . . I’m just a bad woman with a good heart.”
New fountains and flirtatious celebrities, however, were of little interest to Harvey. He had a star to chart. White swept the team qualifying matches as a sophomore with four rounds of 65 or better at the country club—a stunning feat that stirred disbelief among members, until the boys who played with White certified the fact.
White earned the number-one position that fall. He was everything Harvey had hoped he might be, returning from the conference tournament in Dallas with the singles medal and the team title with Payne, Tinnin, and Richard Snyder. The Longhorns went to the national tournament as a team for the first time since Harvey had become the coach two years before. They finished fourth behind Yale, Notre Dame, and Michigan at Buffalo Country Club in Williamsville, New York.
Harvey had his first truly dominant player in White. He also was on the cusp of his first dynasty. Texas swept its spring schedule, vanquishing Texas A&M, Rice, SMU, St. Edward’s University in Austin, and TCU by large margins. The Longhorns won the conference in all three years White played for Harvey.
White won the individual medal each time. He was the 1934 NCAA runner-up to Charles Yates of Georgia Tech, who beat White 5-up with three holes to play at Cleveland Country Club in Cleveland, Ohio, as a junior. The team finished fifth in the nation that spring. The university properly rewarded Harvey and his team by establishing golf, for the first time, as a major sport.
Harvey was eager to see what White, playing as an experienced senior, might achieve in 1935. But first, Harvey played that year on the Texas Cup professional team, joining his mentor Jack Burke Sr., the former Austin Country Club professional Willie Maguire, the charming Houston professional Jimmy Demaret, and the Oklahoman Jack Grout, who later tutored a pharmacist’s son in Ohio named Jack Nicklaus.
Harvey was approaching thirty years old that autumn. He was physically sharp, as capable as he had ever been of playing competitive golf. But his world beyond tournaments was far broader. His first child, a daughter named Kathryn, was now three years old. The club required more of his time—to organize events, monitor handicaps, and run the bustling golf shop. His lesson sheet was filled. And Ed White was about to establish a blinding standard for the Texas Longhorn golf team.
By the time the spring golf season arrived, the University of Texas was desperate for any measure of athletic triumph. The football team had lost all but one conference game, including a bleak shutout in Austin against SMU and its All-American quarterback, Sammy Baugh. The basketball team had upset “Tree Top Tall” Kelly and “Tightwad” Lodge of Rice, but San Marcos Teachers College beat the Longhorns by two, Arkansas nipped them by one, and other losses mounted. D. A. Penick had watched his men’s tennis team go undefeated in the regular season but lose the conference title to Rice. There had been few celebrations around the athletic dormitories in Austin.
White qualified for the national amateur the summer after his junior year with Harvey. He lost in match play, but his momentum carried the Texas golf team to another conference championship, this one at Braeburn Country Club in Houston. He and Nelson Munger, along with Raymond Ramsey, Bill Welch, and Bob Battle, produced the finest season in the history of University of Texas golf.
A calamitous fire at Austin Country Club had distracted Harvey the previous summer. The two-story red clubhouse was destroyed in the early morning hours of March 19, 1934, after a fraternity dance the night before. Harvey lost $3,000 in inventory, including clubs, balls, and the tools he used to grind implements. All that remained was the charred steel of dozens of sets of irons.
The fire touched no part of the course. Members even played the next day. Harvey had to operate out of temporary quarters, however, until the board could determine when and how to build a new clubhouse. The inconvenience to its coach was of no consequence to the golf team, which sent two players, White and Welch, to the 1935 NCAA Championship. White roared through the first four rounds of match play at the national tournament in Washington, DC, beating every opponent before the sixteenth hole, including Yates, who had eliminated White in the finals the year before. Every match seemed to lift White to an even higher plane of conviction.
White met Fred Haas of Louisiana State, a tall and slender former champion of the Southern Amateur, in the thirty-six-hole final match. White was 1-down after the first eighteen-hole round. After lunch, he squared the score early in the second and felt lifted again. White went on to bludgeon his opponent, beating Hass five and four to bring Harvey his one—and, as it turned out, only—individual national champion. White played his 129 holes at mighty Congressional Country Club in 3 under par.
“When Ed lost to Charlie Yates in the finals of the intercollegiate the year before last, it was like someone hit me on the head with an ax,” Harvey told The Daily Texan, the campus newspaper. “And then when he beat Fred Haas, I was on top of the world.”
Members at the Bonham Golf Club, White’s home club, threw a rollicking surprise party for the champion in late July. More than one hundred people attended. The president of the Fannin County Fair Association feted White with a new wristwatch.
White never strongly considered professional golf as a career. He understood that his engineering degree from Texas was worth far more than his golf skill. The stock market crash of 1929 depleted the supply of tournament sponsors, which financed competitions on the PGA Tournament Bureau (the forerunner of the PGA Tour). The dream of Henry Ford to put a car in every driveway in America had made traveling between sites a great deal easier. But tournaments could, by rule, offer as little as $5,000 in prize money. No one got wealthy playing golf in the 1930s. Paul Runyan, for instance, led all professional golfers in 1935 with $6,767 in earnings. Johnny Revolta won $9,543 a year later. Horton Smith, Harvey’s friend and playing companion, earned just $7,682 in 1936. Tournament purses combined amounted to no more than $185,000 until after World War II, when Ben Hogan won more than $42,000.
White knew the financial consequences, and he also knew the social implications. Amateurs then had far more prestige than professionals. They were regarded as true sporting gentlemen of a higher station than the lowly professionals laboring in the golf shops. The names of amateurs carried courtesy titles in the newspaper golf agate. The names of professionals like Harvey did not.
After graduating from Texas, White moved to Houston, where he kept playing golf at a high level. He won the Mexican Amateur in 1935, captured the individual medal at the Little Rock Invitational the same year, and in 1936 accepted a coveted invitation to play in the Walker Cup matches against the best British amateurs of the day.
“I knew they’d have to,” Harvey told a student reporter for The Daily Texan. “How could they leave him off?”
The U.S. team and its captain, the 1913 U.S. Open champion and former caddie Francis Ouimet, cleanly won the matches at Pine Valley, 9–0. White and his foursomes partner, Reynolds Smith, eliminated Jack McLean and John Langley, eight and seven. In singles, White beat Langley again, six and five. White then returned to Texas to start his career as an engineer. It was his only appearance on the Walker Cup team.
“I guess I owe most of the credit for wherever I am in golf to Harvey Penick,” White said.
“Naw,” Harvey objected humbly. “I didn’t make him. He was a golfer the first time I saw him. All I did was to just polish him a little here and there.”
More than sixty thousand people now lived in Austin. The city no longer exuded the brittle, always-under-construction feeling of the Western frontier. Swarms of Model Ts and some newer Model As sputtered up and down the newly paved streets of the widening downtown. The university had built its iconic twenty-seven-story tower near the Littlefield Fountain. The phallic landmark, a symbol of opportunity in a state and city that embraced adventure and risk, loomed over the southern skyline from the first tee at the Austin Country Club. Pedestrians saw a billboard atop the Bybee Drug Store touting American New Deal optimism: PROSPERITY’S ROSE BLOOMS AGAIN WITH ROOSEVELT. Meanwhile, golf had become increasingly popular with the arrival of each new spring and each new golf season in America. Both Austin newspapers frequently carried wire service reports about the new Augusta National Invitation Tournament in 1934 at a golf retreat for the wealthy built on an old orchard in eastern Georgia at the direction of Bobby Jones.
Harvey learned that his dear friend Horton Smith, whom he had seen three years earlier at the tournament in Harlingen, had beaten Craig Wood by a stroke in the first invitational in Augusta. Smith made a twenty-foot birdie putt on the seventeenth hole and a tense, downhill four-footer on the eighteenth to win. The manner in which Smith won came as no surprise to Harvey, for two reasons. Smith was the best putter Harvey knew. And putting was the best way Harvey knew to win a golf tournament. “A good putter is a match for anyone,” Harvey liked to say to anyone who might listen. “A bad putter is a match for no one.” Good putting—twenty-eight putts, for instance, in a round of 67—constituted about 40 percent of the strokes played. Even on sloppy ball-striking days, a sound, graceful, and confident putting stroke could turn a 72 into a score at the top of the leaderboard. Years later, when Tom Kite was evolving from a good player into a great one, Harvey gave him a piece of advice that seemed strange at first. “Go to dinner with good putters,” Harvey told Kite. That was it. That was all. But the more Kite considered it, the more that advice made sense. Like so much of what Harvey said, the truth of the words lay in the implication or the inference. In the stripped-down, logical way Harvey looked at the game, good putters are happy golfers. Happy golfers, the logic goes, are positive forces. They have a third of the game figured out. Kite began seeking out good putters as dinner companions.
Texas won the Southwest Conference again in 1936, even without the great White. Austin Country Club hosted twenty-four players, who arrived for the tournament that May from Baylor, Rice, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Christian University, and Southern Methodist. Bill Welch, White’s old teammate, won the individual medal. The Longhorns swept the team championship by eighty-three shots.
But the tournament carried far greater meaning for Harvey, one that he would not understand for a quarter-century: he met a Baylor student named Charles Crenshaw, who would settle years later in Austin to practice law, join the club, and have a son in January 1952.
He would name his son Ben.
That summer Harvey entered the sectional qualifying for the U.S. Open at Baltusrol. He finished fifth in the field of thirty-four, missing a spot by a single stroke. He also coached the golf team to a sixth consecutive conference championship, joining UT track, cross-country, swimming, and tennis—the program D. A. Penick had turned into one of the finest in the country—in the winners’ circle.
Harvey taught many women at the country club, but women’s golf in Texas and across the country was limping far behind what the game offered for men. The Texas Golf Association, established in 1906, had sanctioned the West Texas Amateur since 1925, a senior championship since 1937, and its marquee event, the Texas State Amateur Championship, since the year of its founding. The first state amateur competition for women was established in 1931. It was the only tournament of its kind in Texas.
The few women in the state who wanted to play competitive golf knew where to get their instruction. Harvey knew young Betty Jameson well before she enrolled at UT in the fall of 1937. The head professional at San Antonio Country Club, Tod Menefee, who often joined Harvey and the others at the Houston home of Jack Burke Sr., was Jameson’s teacher at the time and told Harvey about her. For her part, Jameson had overheard other women at the San Antonio club praising the man who taught at Austin Country Club.
Jameson sought out Harvey as soon as she arrived on campus. He learned that she had won the Lakewood Country Club women’s championship, the Dallas women’s city title, and the Texas women’s state amateur in 1932. That also was when she made sports history in Texas: Jameson shot a round of 82 at Stevens Park Golf Course in Dallas to qualify for the Sunset High School golf team, one of five players in a field of twenty-seven. No girl had ever made a varsity golf team in Texas. Jameson had done it at the age of thirteen.
She won her second state amateur in 1937, the summer before she moved to Austin. A women’s golf team at UT was decades away still. But Harvey pictured his commitment to the university golf culture as an abiding stewardship that included both the men’s varsity team and all women who showed potential and a willingness to work hard. He gladly accepted Jameson as a pupil in the fall of her freshman year.
Harvey’s wife Helen picked up Jameson at her dormitory and drove her to her lessons at the club. There, Harvey traced her tendency to pull her iron shots to an exuberant left arm. He prescribed drills. She practiced after class. In 1938, as a freshman, she won the intramural golf championship at Lions.
Jameson won two more state amateurs, in 1938 and ’39. She qualified for the 1939 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Wee Burn Country Club in Darien, Connecticut, where she beat Dorothy Kirby in the finals. She repeated in 1940 at Del Monte Golf & Country Club in Monterey, California. She was the medalist a year later at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.
The champion that year was a beaming Southern Californian with a bow in her hair. Elizabeth “Betty” Hicks, who also swept the California and the Doherty women’s amateur titles, was honored as the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. Harvey and Betty Jameson already had a deep respect for Hicks, a future golf writer and women’s golf pioneer who would factor deeply in Harvey’s life. She was eighteen years old, already a Long Beach city champion, when Jameson dispatched her in the national semifinals in Pebble Beach.
Jameson advanced to the finals of the first U.S. Women’s Open in 1946. She lost, five and four, to Patty Berg. Three years later, she and a dozen other women founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association, of which she served as president, and she was in the first class of women inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame. With Jameson, Harvey drew his first measure of fame as a teacher of women. She and many others ensured his place in the legacy of American women’s golf. It was a legacy that would live longer than Harvey himself.
The game continued to grow in the United States. Some sixty million rounds were played in 1938, and a year later more than half a million spectators flocked to watch players such as Byron Nelson, Henry Picard, and Sam Snead compete for $172,000 in prize money at PGA Tour tournaments. By then, the PGA of America had swelled to more than 1,800 members, including Harvey.
Although the distant rumblings of World War II began to quell some of the enthusiasm for the professional game—fewer tournaments were scheduled, and fewer tournaments offered more than the mandated $5,000 minimum purse—the game had traction across the country as well as in Texas. The condition of the sport pleased Harvey considerably, especially as it related to men. Of all people in golf, however, it was Harvey who might have suspected that women’s golf was about to blossom into something equally extraordinary and permanent.
Since 1923, the women at Austin Country Club had been drawn to their head professional for the same reasons elite players such as Jameson sought him out. Harvey exuded a spirit of equality, dignity, and fairness in his treatment of players that appealed to women who had long tolerated disdain from other teachers. Harvey had been nurtured at a country club that embraced women from its founding. His attraction to golf never hinged on whether a man or a woman was holding the club. He valued commitment and enthusiasm above all in a pupil.
The success of Jameson in the late 1930s tapped a deep and career-defining quality in Harvey: he was, by nature and circumstance, a man in the right place, at the right time, and in the right frame of mind for the inevitable rise of women in the game throughout Texas and the nation.
At the time, Alexa Stirling and Glenna Collett defined women’s golf in the United States. Stirling was a childhood friend of Bobby Jones at East Lake in Atlanta, where she was the second of the three daughters of a Scottish-born ear, nose, and throat specialist who served as British consul to the city. She played with the great British champion Joyce Wethered. Stirling and Jones toured the South as the “Dixie Kids” during World War I to raise money for the Red Cross. She eventually won three national championships and finished second in three others in the 1920s, a few years after a strong and graceful girl from Providence, Rhode Island, joined her father at Metacomet Golf Club at the age of fourteen.
Glenna Collett watched the older men play a few holes, then asked if she could try. A tennis and baseball player on her brother’s team, Collett lined a piercing shot down the center of the fairway. Her impressed father arranged for lessons that summer with Alex Smith of Shennecossett.
Their work together led to six national women’s titles for Collett between 1922 and 1935. She won her last one at Interlachen over the young and petite Patty Berg, who later accepted an invitation from Bing Crosby and Bob Hope to play them along with a near-legendary woman from the Texas coast with a reputation in baseball, basketball, bowling, tennis, track and field, softball, and, finally, golf. The two entertainers were no match for Berg and Mildred “Babe” Didrikson.
They beat the celebrities in front of 2,500 spectators that summer day in California. Babe Didrikson Zaharias, as she would be known to the sporting world after her marriage in 1938, had roared into the golf consciousness on August 8, 1932, when she joined three sportswriters, including Grantland Rice, for a round at Brentwood Country Club after the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. She had just won two gold medals and a silver with the U.S. track and field team and set two world records and one Olympic record. “She is an incredible human being,” wrote Rice, who was on hand. “She is beyond all belief until you see her perform. Then you fully understand that you are looking at the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination the world of sport has ever known.”
Now Rice wanted to witness her prowess with a golf club. She had boasted to him at the Olympics that she could drive a golf ball as long as the men on the tour. She told him she had shot 82. She also told him she had played only ten rounds of golf in her life. Rice wanted proof.
Using borrowed clubs, Babe pounded 240-yard drives through the dense California air. She scored poorly on the front nine, but rallied for a 43 on the back, winning her informal match. Rice could barely catch his literary breath. “She is the longest hitter women’s golf has ever seen,” he wrote, “for she has a free, lashing style backed up with championship form and terrific power in strong hands, strong wrists and forearms of steel.” He added: “If Miss Didrikson would take up golf seriously, there is no doubt in my mind . . . she would be a world beater in no time.”
Babe returned to Texas with a hot passion to conquer another sport. Harvey played with her a short time later in her first exhibition as a professional. The match pit Babe and Al Espinosa against Harvey and Vola Mae Odom, a member at Austin Country Club. Babe kidded Harvey about the firmness of the greens. She flirted with a judge in the gallery. Harvey gave her no formal lessons, but did offer a tip or two. He later regarded her as the second-best female golfer he had ever seen, behind Mickey Wright. The Babe later credited Harvey with part of her success, but the modest pro demurred. He said she was a player who made herself.
The arrival of Patty Berg, Betty Jameson, Babe Zaharias, and other skilled women in the 1930s signaled an energized level of interest from the public and led to early agitation for formalizing women’s tournament golf. Their rise also brought Harvey a greater role in the game. Every woman he met, from nervous club members learning the grip for the first time to veterans seeking his renowned counsel, left their encounter with a connection of some kind to the gentle, well-mannered man who treated women with dignity. Soon all roads to the future LPGA traveled through Austin.
The Texas men’s team, meanwhile, continued its steady escalation in the ranks of college golf under Harvey. The Longhorns repeated as Southwest Conference champions in 1937, the year Jameson arrived at Harvey’s shop with so much potential. The trophy made six consecutive titles for Harvey and his boys, an accomplishment the Texas athletic department made the smart decision to promote.
Weldon Hart, a publicist for the university, asked Harvey to complete a brief questionnaire the following spring. In blue ballpoint pen, Harvey listed his height at six feet and his weight at 132 pounds. Under education, he wrote: “Finished Austin High.” Under coaching experience: “I have been helping the University golf team for the last seven years.”
He listed nothing under athletic experience. He cited no hobby. After reading the last question—“Can you recall the most thrilling incident of your athletic or coaching experience?”—Harvey left it blank. Perhaps he found it difficult to isolate just one. More likely, he blanched at the prospect of boasting. That rubbed against his nature. He was a proud man. But he was not a boastful one.
He welcomed Walter Benson Jr. to his team in 1938, a year Texas returned only two lettermen but nonetheless won the conference for the seventh consecutive time. The Longhorns beat Texas A&M that season at Austin Country Club, four matches to two. They swept Texas Tech.
A dark-haired sophomore who favored understated sweater vests and crisp creases in his trousers, Benson factored immediately into the Texas starting four. Harvey knew him before he even entered the seventy-two-hole qualifier to make the team. Benson’s father, who owned a prominent publishing company in Austin, was a charter member of the club. A picture of him and other club founders hung on a wall in Harvey’s golf shop.
The younger Benson caddied often for his father. After their rounds, he liked to poke his head around the door of the golf shop and see Harvey, toasted by the sun and sweating through his wavy hair, hunched over his bench, buffing irons and smoothing shafts with a plane. Benson had no inkling that he was looking at the man who would make him great.
Harvey one day introduced young Benson to Ed White. Benson watched White hit crisp, hissing shots—no fade, no draw, just climbing and unwavering arcs—that left geometrically perfect divots. Benson once asked Harvey what made White such a good player. “Because Ed takes a square divot,” Harvey told him succinctly. Benson heard the message. He soon was taking square divots too. “Like a dollar bill,” he said.
Benson later spent part of World War II in England as a communications officer in the Army Air Forces. Upon his discharge, he succeeded his father to lead the family-owned publishing company in Austin. Benson won the Labor Day tournament at Austin Country Club and the Firecracker Open three times at Lions Municipal, carving dollar bills on the fairways he once played for the Texas Longhorns.
“Harvey would come out, drop a hint here and there, and probably give five million dollars’ worth of lessons for free,” Benson said. “Harvey didn’t like quick cures and was turned off by people who came to Austin thinking they were going to take one lesson and knock ten strokes off their games. He liked people who worked over a period of time to develop their games.”
Rice University snapped the Longhorns’ conference streak in 1939, when Texas finished second in the field of five teams. It was an anomaly. Harvey and his team won all three of their team matches, and the Southwest Conference again, in 1940 and 1941.
The successful golf program wasn’t the only reason the mood inside the athletics offices at the university was soaring. The 1940 football team—the “heroes of a new era” in “the dawn of a new day,” trumpeted the Cactus yearbook—lost two conference games but shared third place with SMU and Texas A&M at the finish, which was reason enough for celebration. It was the Longhorns’ best season since 1932. Making matters merrier, they beat both Oklahoma and Texas A&M.
Harvey played as often as his increasingly busy schedule allowed. He and Helen had seen their family grow by one in 1938, when Tinsley Penick, named after his uncle, joined his sister Kathryn at the new family home near the club.
The Great Depression during the 1930s had muted participation in golf. Americans returned steadily to the game as the economy brightened later in the decade, when more than a half-million people came out to watch professional tournaments. In addition, more than 2.35 million players patronized the nation’s 3,705 private clubs, 1,050 daily-fee courses, and 606 municipal facilities like Lions in Austin. But World War II would threaten the sport’s recovery and change American golf in deep and lasting ways.
The attack at Pearl Harbor not only threatened to dampen golf’s economic recovery but also affected public opinion on the pastime. “The only justification for golf or any other sport in these times is that of providing earned relaxation for war workers and protecting and renewing the keenness of those who are doing their full duty on the civilian front,” argued golf journalist and historian Herb Graffis, who edited Golfing and Golfdom magazines.
Everything in golf scaled accordingly. All PGA-sanctioned tournaments, even at the sectional and local levels, set aside 20 percent of their purses for defense bonds. Exhibition tours to benefit the Red Cross, like the one Alexa Stirling and Bobby Jones played across the South, replaced regular competitions. Manufacturers quit making golf balls. The war effort needed the rubber. Some companies even reconditioned old, damaged balls like the ones Harvey had around the clubhouse for practice. MacDonald & Son Golf Company in West Chicago refurbished them at 84¢ a dozen. Gas rationing forced the cancellation of competitions governed by the PGA Tournament Bureau. Harvey’s friends Jimmy Demaret, Ben Hogan, Horton Smith, and Sam Snead joined different branches of the military. Nothing about golf resembled what it had been the year before.
Harvey saw the difference each time he drove the short distance to the university for business involving the athletic department and noticed students walking to class in their dress uniforms. He also saw changes at the club. Club members who enlisted and were dispatched to Sicily or Guadalcanal were gone for months, some of them forever. The PGA, meanwhile, waived dues for the 201 members who also joined the war effort. Harvey tried to convince Helen that he should report to the recruiting station. She reminded him that he was thirty-eight years old, with crippling allergies.
The United States Golf Association canceled the 1942 U.S. Open as a gesture of respect for the national war effort. In its place, the USGA, the PGA of America, and the Chicago District Golf Association created the Hale America National Open, a benefit for the Navy Relief Society and the United Service Organizations, and scheduled it for that summer at Ridgemoor Country Club. Harvey won the local qualifier on May 25 at his country club, earning a handsome certificate signed by Francis Ouimet, who represented the joint tournament committee. But the path to the National Open ended there for Harvey; had he advanced, he would have competed against his friend Ben Hogan, who won the Hale at Ridgemoor.
As he approached his fortieth year, Harvey had everything he wanted. He loved Helen. More important to him, she returned that love, reflecting commitment that Harvey sometimes found heroic given the amount of time—six days a week, sometimes seven in the summer—he spent away from their home and children. Harvey went to work at first light. He returned after the sun set over the hills of Tarrytown. Helen made sure Kathryn and Tinsley had breakfast before school, a snack afterward, and dinner before homework and bed.
Her husband was a golf professional, a good and committed one. As his lesson sheet filled, his Scribbletex did too. Helen understood her husband and the sacrifices that he believed came with a life in golf. More and more, Harvey was asked to lead PGA teaching seminars throughout the state, and he considered these requests a noble privilege not to be denied. He was shaping the next generation of golf professionals and keeping his promise to his own calling, the one he heard as an eight-year-old boy the day he stood at Austin Country Club and felt the hot, open wind on his cheeks.
Harvey had two homes. Each required, in his mind, equal attention, though to Helen and the children it seemed the country club beckoned more. But Kathryn and Tinsley would long remember the one thing their father was sure to do each night after he got home. Harvey always made it home in time to kneel at their bed and say the Lord’s Prayer before they went to sleep.
It was one small thing they could count on. It was something Harvey could count on too.