THE SPRING OF 1943 nearly altered the course of Harvey’s life and that of his family. The city, which now approached 100,000 residents, had given Harvey both a career and a legacy at the club, but he also felt a tinge of restlessness. He wondered, as he had done as a child, what more might await in golf. Harvey was never an overtly ambitious man. He achieved in small, quiet steps that over seventy years brought him a certain level of fame. But he occasionally thought about a life in golf beyond the city of his youth.
That winter, Jack Burke Sr., whose elegant home in Houston had served for many weekends as an informal teaching salon for Harvey and his peers, died at the age of fifty-two. That left River Oaks without a head professional for the first time since it opened in 1924. The club appointed an eleven-member search committee, which identified two preferred candidates. One was Jimmy Demaret, the gregarious and immensely popular touring professional who won the 1934 Texas PGA Championship and six tournaments in 1940, including the Masters. The other was Harvey.
The choice to be made by the River Oaks committee members reflected some stark contrasts. Demaret, then thirty-two years old, was from Houston. Like Harvey, he had started in golf in the caddie yard; unlike Harvey, Demaret was more interested in playing tournaments for purses than he was in teaching a membership and managing a shop. Demaret thrived on attention. He performed on the golf course as much as he played it. He bought his clothes in New York City and once described himself as sartorially partial to brick red, mulberry, royal crimson, pale pink, purple, hunter green, Nile green, heather green, and flaming scarlet. Demaret played the piano and sang. He spun mesmerizing stories for audiences that swelled as the punch line drew near. He was loud, magnetic, occasionally brash, eternally effervescent, a pleaser of crowds, an entertainer in metal spikes and snazzy plus-fours, always quick with a joke or a verse to croon. He was everything Harvey was not.
Harvey was six years older than Demaret. The River Oaks committee respected his reputation as both a builder of champions and an uncompromising steward of his club membership. Demaret had the name, but Harvey was the pure teacher, a consummate club professional who knew how to perform the job, from keeping a tee sheet to stocking a shop to fixing a bent wedge or a loose spike. Burke had been both, a touring and teaching professional. With Harvey and Demaret as the finalists, the next head professional would be one or the other.
The River Oaks committee convened on April 22 to consider two proposals drafted by chairman T. J. Ahern. The first: “That Harvey Penick be engaged as golf professional as of June 1, 1943, on the same terms as those which were in effect with Mr. Jack Burke at the time of his death.” The second: “That the hiring of a professional be deferred until October 15, 1943, in the hope of hiring Jimmy Demaret if he should be available at that time, and that the present arrangement with respect to the golf shop be continued until that time.”
The minutes of that meeting suggest that Demaret, who worked at Plum Hollow Country Club in Southfield, Michigan, would be unavailable by contract until the fall. River Oaks already had installed Burke’s widow, brother, and son to continue the golf operations, so the club faced no urgent need to act quickly. But the committee could have voted to offer the position to Harvey, who presumably was available sooner, providing a more seamless transition and the likelihood of longevity in the position.
The committee voted. Because one member was absent, it resulted in a tie. Months of debate ensued. Finally, in November, the club elected to offer the job to Demaret, who accepted. “Some directors wanted a teacher; some wanted a name golf professional,” said Ed Turley, who played at Texas from 1952 to 1956 and later became a prominent tax lawyer in Houston. “Demaret’s unbelievable personality carried the day for him, plus he was a known personality, having worked in the golf shop as a teenager for Jack Burke Sr.”
Contrary to an assertion repeated in many published accounts that Harvey was offered, and turned down, the position at River Oaks, a formal offer was never made to him. He later told Preston Moore Jr., an accomplished junior player at River Oaks who tried unsuccessfully to qualify for Harvey’s teams at Texas in the late 1940s and early ’50s, that River Oaks was the only job for which he would have considered leaving Austin.
The division among the members of the search committee in 1943 illustrates how narrowly Harvey missed an opportunity to advance to a bigger city, work at a more prestigious club, and teach a different population of pupils. He would have been forced to resign as head coach at Texas before he won the second half of the twenty team Southwest Conference championships his teams eventually earned. Harvey might never have met Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw. And he might never have acquainted himself with the screenwriter, novelist, and journalist Bud Shrake. The Little Red Book might never have been published.
But this much is known: Harvey never had that choice to make. River Oaks retained Demaret. Harvey remained in the city where he was born, thus assuring his fame—and the salvation of swinging the bucket, clipping the tee, giving luck a chance, and taking dead aim.
The Longhorns, meanwhile, kept winning golf trophies. Rice took the conference championship in 1939, ending the seven-year run Harvey and his players had enjoyed at the top of the Southwest Conference, but Texas snapped back to form in 1940. Texas won that trophy and the next seven.
The state of Texas observed its centennial in 1945 without the revelry such an occasion would have commanded in peacetime. The university annual published the names of former students killed in action—in France, in India, in Italy, in Luxembourg, in planes, in automobiles, in skirmishes, in seas. The 1945 Cactus’s list of the dead ran for eight pages. There were first lieutenants with BBA degrees, captains with MDs, ensigns who left for duty before they could graduate. “The world which emerges from the present conflict will be ours to shape,” the editors of the annual noted. “For this reason the 1945 Cactus is dedicated to no one man, but to the builders of Texas—past, present and future.”
An Army Air Corps veteran from Wichita Falls named Bob Watson came to Texas in 1946, hoping to make a life in golf. Big and sturdy, Bob Watson had trained as a flight engineer for B-29s until the program ended, then ran the golf clubhouse for enlisted men at Maxwell Field in Alabama until his discharge. He enrolled at Texas, inquired about the golf team, and found himself one day at the country club, meeting the head coach.
Watson won the qualifier his first year on campus. Harvey liked everything about his new player but his grip. Harvey wanted Watson to play a right-to-left draw. “If you learn how to do that,” he told Watson, “you can learn to do anything with the ball. You have to learn to draw the ball first.”
Watson obeyed. He helped the Longhorns win the team conference championship in 1946 and ’47, the latter at Lions Municipal. Watson claimed the individual medal by twenty-five shots as a junior, when Texas narrowly vacated the 1948 conference title, won by Texas A&M. A season later, Texas won thirty of thirty-six matches. No one could touch the Longhorns. Watson proved a formidable leader for Harvey with teammates Reece Alexander, Marion Pfluger, William Smith, and a winsome junior from Austin named Morris Williams Jr., a supremely gifted player Harvey regarded as fondly as a second son. Williams finished second to Watson that season in the Southwest Conference tournament. “The powerful one-two punch of Bob Watson and Morris Williams Jr. led the way to the SWC golf crown and bathed the tower in orange light once more,” the Cactus yearbook noted.
Watson wanted nothing more from life than golf. He left the University of Texas before he graduated, certain his education was complete, and started a career, both playing and teaching golf, that brought him many low-level professional victories and elite club positions throughout Westchester County in New York. Years on, when he was a professional at the tony Westchester Country Club, Watson invited Harvey to New York for the 1959 U.S. Open at nearby Winged Foot Golf Club. They walked among the swells of the gallery, two friends deeply responsible for one another’s success in golf, watching Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper, the eventual winner. Harvey “asked about Claude Harmon and Tommy Armour and Gene Sarazen,” Watson said a half-century later. “He wanted to know what they were thinking about while they were playing, what they were teaching. He was always willing to learn and listen to other people.”
The fall semester of 1946 brought another University of Texas freshman to Austin: a serious and science-minded woman with wavy hair parted on the side and a budding fascination with golf.
Betsy Rawls was born in South Carolina, lived the first three years of her life in North Carolina, and moved to Texas when the National Park Service sent her father to Burnet, a Hill Country town where the children, both girls and boys, played football, baseball, and cowboys and Indians in fields teeming with bluebonnets that rippled in the spring winds from the southeast.
She and her older brother, Bob, explored the craggy granite hills around Inks Lake, part of the Highland Lakes chain of the lower Colorado River, where their father was developing a state park. She barreled through her childhood with spontaneous vigor. Before she finished elementary school, Rawls had fractured one arm while swinging from a rope tied to a tree, pretending to be Tarzan, and the other arm after a tumble from a bicycle, which she attempted to ride while standing on the seat. Rawls relished even the most inconsequential challenge. But more than that, she burned to conquer it.
When her family moved to Arlington, between Dallas and Fort Worth, in the early 1940s, Rawls took up tennis. She also cultivated a deep interest in books, and her father recommended she read Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Rawls finished the entire works of both before she turned sixteen. She never played football again.
Reading allowed Rawls a rich view of the world beyond Texas. But she found true joy in science, especially physics. She possessed a sharply rational mind and an aptitude for calculation, qualities she hoped to sharpen in a college science lab after high school. Then she discovered golf.
R. M. Rawls took his precocious daughter to the golf course with him when she was seventeen. Her first attempt to propel a ball with a club secured her unshakable calling. From that moment, Rawls sought absolute dominion over a game that repelled sovereignty. The prospect of winning at golf, of beating other people, held no particular appeal to Rawls. She wanted to push to be perfect. She wanted to own the singular, physical relationship between her and her golf ball.
A week after graduating in 1945 as valedictorian of her high school class, Rawls enrolled at North Texas Junior College. She remained there for a year, until her brother returned from service in World War II and her family moved to Austin. Rawls had just played her first tournament that summer, the West Texas Invitational, and she had qualified for the championship flight. But she lost her first match. She lost her first consolation match too. She was not perfect. Nothing was. “I went home with fire in my eyes,” she said.
Rawls studied physics at Texas. Her coursework demanded a great deal of time in the lab, but she also committed more time than she ever had before to golf, patronizing Lions Municipal and its head professional, Tom Penick, who cooed to his younger brother about her organically pure form. Rawls never sacrificed her schoolwork for the practice. She was far too astute for that. But she learned that a disciplined routine on campus allowed enough time to fit in a round or two on the weekends and a couple of evenings on the practice green, where she sometimes was the only woman—and usually the one holing the most putts.
The regulars at Lions recognized promise when they saw it. She needed to meet Harvey, they recommended. Rawls soon made arrangements to secure her first lesson at Austin Country Club, where she saw the players on the men’s team. She wished the university had a team for women, but it did not. Rawls was smitten the very moment she met the thin, polite, and shy man who insisted she call him Harvey.
He invited her into the clubhouse for a cup of coffee and a visit. He asked about her start in golf. He asked her what she wanted to accomplish in their venture together. He wanted to know why she wanted to play, and how much she was willing to devote to the craft, and whether she would work hard in between their visits. He asked to see her grip.
Harvey was honest with Rawls. He told her he would be delighted to help, but he wanted her to know that he intended to learn from her too. “I’m just practicing on you,” he said often, notably when she inquired about the cost of a lesson, an overture he resolutely deflected. His sincerity touched Rawls. She was drawn to his modesty, “his interest in students for their own sakes rather than for the sake of his own reflected glory,” she would write a decade later in Professional Golfer magazine. She detected his interest in a “mutual confidence,” the feeling that their alliance functioned on a level of absolute belief in one another.
But her instant fidelity toward Harvey was about much more than that. It was the 1940s in Texas, after all. Rarely had Rawls encountered a man, especially one twice her age, who treated her with such dignity and in such a spirit of equality. With men, Rawls said, “he was one of the boys.” But Harvey resonated with women on a different level. “He had that old-fashioned idea that put women on a pedestal. He gave them total respect. He was so kind.”
They did not see one another often. Rawls came four or five times a year, between experiments in the physics lab or whenever she felt a tick in her swing. “It was a different world back then,” she said. “The relationship between coaches and students was completely different.” Harvey sought to fix her feet in a position that looked natural. He reminded her constantly to check her grip. He supervised a succession of shots without uttering a word. If they sailed well, he simply nodded and ambled away, leaving Rawls with the notion that nothing required his attention, which filled her with confidence. Harvey never bothered with small matters, like whether her wrists pronated or supinated, or how she held her finish for imagined photographers at some future U.S. Women’s Open. “He wasn’t the kind that overcoached,” Rawls said.
Rawls won the second annual Austin Women’s City Championship, played at Austin Country Club, in 1948. She won the Texas Women’s Amateur title later that summer. She played in the Texas Open and, before classes began in August, traveled to California for her first competition outside of the state. There, she said, “I realized how far I had to go to become a good golfer.”
In the spring, Rawls packed for Fort Worth to play in her second state amateur championship. She and Harvey had buffed her game to a fine polish, and Rawls won the trophy, beating established amateurs such as Betty MacKinnon and Polly Riley. Rawls played a full schedule in the summer of ’49. She lost in the first round of the Western Open, but won the Trans-Mississippi Championship. She qualified for her first U.S. Women’s Amateur that fall, but lost in the second round. Nevertheless, she smartly understood the deeper rewards that came with every competitive round, win or lose. Rawls was evolving into a force in women’s golf.
Harvey recognized that. Their lessons became less pedagogical and more about fundamentals maintenance. It would remain that way throughout Rawls’s blossoming career. “He was a teacher of how to play the game of golf,” she said, six decades after she met him for that first lesson in Austin. “He wasn’t a teacher of golf swings to [the] exclusion of everything else.” Rawls and Harvey maintained their friendship—their mutually respectful alliance—for the rest of his life. Rawls somehow always knew they would. She was especially aware in the summer of ’49 that she would need him occasionally, and that Harvey would be there when she did.
“He wanted no credit,” Rawls said. “He didn’t seek the limelight. He didn’t teach for recognition. You never saw him on a practice tee at a golf tournament. He would never stand on a stage and give a lesson like some of those hotshots do today.”
In the fall of ’49, Rawls prepared for her final year at Texas. She would graduate in the spring with a degree in physics and math and a gold Phi Beta Kappa key.
Harvey often told Rawls how proud he was of her. For years, when someone asked him about her, Harvey might mention her elegant tempo, or her burn for perfection, or her discipline to practice the drills he gently suggested. He might say something about her role as a pioneer in women’s golf. The golf anecdotes varied. But one fact did not.
He always mentioned the key.
As Harvey celebrated his team’s second consecutive conference trophy in 1950, other matters occupied his mind. Austin Country Club, whose property north of the university had been such an important part of Harvey’s life since he was a scrawny eight-year-old caddie, was making a move to the other side of the city.
It was an evolution years in the making. It also was inevitable. Readers of the Austin Evening Statesman had noticed a brief, vague article on March 3, 1945, under the headline “Country Club Property Too Valuable for Golf.” The sentiment likely appealed to those well-traveled Austin Country Club members who had seen other prominent private courses in Texas, such as River Oaks, Houston Country Club, Oak Hills Country Club in San Antonio, or the gleaming parkland jewel of Texas: Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth.
Colonial opened in 1936 on the western edge of the city, along the Trinity River, just north of TCU. Designed by two distinguished course architects, Perry Maxwell and Harvey’s friend John Bredemus, Colonial showed guests from Austin what a modern golf course should be. Its understated, red-brick clubhouse gave members sweeping views of a broad, muscular golf course with long par-4 holes and bentgrass greens, a rare privilege in warm-weather states such as Texas. Tall pecan trees lined the ribboning fairways. Precisely engineered water hazards, walled at the edges in stone, conveyed sublime harmony with the elements—and frightful challenges to players. Thoughtful bunkering multiplied the thrill. Every one of the eighteen holes exuded a mark of originality that the old Austin Country Club, charming though it was, thoroughly lacked. Colonial established a new standard for golf in Texas.
Members noticed. Their travels to Colonial, Oak Hills, Brook Hollow in Dallas, or River Oaks in Houston suggested that Austin Country Club was a marginal test of golf at best and, at worst, obsolete. When the USGA awarded Colonial the 1941 U.S. Open, momentum prevailed two hundred miles south in Austin: the time had arrived to modernize.
Austin Country Club announced in late 1946 its intention to sell “the old homestead” and find “commodious quarters” elsewhere in the city. A year later, it identified a treed, modestly flat, and available-for-sale two-hundred-acre former dairy farm near the Colorado River, five miles east of downtown. The tract was rich in soil good for growing Bermuda grass and close to the river, a reliable water supply in a region that invariably encountered harsh summer droughts.
Harvey favored Bredemus, his friend and occasional fellow competitor, as the architect of record for the new course. But club officials retained Maxwell, who also had designed Southern Hills in Oklahoma and Prairie Dunes in Kansas in addition to Colonial. The city bought the old club. Maxwell sharpened his pencils.
Harvey moved his family to a limestone ranch house on a short loop behind the tee of Perry Maxwell’s new twelfth hole, a block north of Riverside Drive. The city later named the street Penick Drive.
To the family, the new club seemed to truly be in the country. Tinsley, now twelve, had become interested in raising stock, and he and his father built a pen behind the house for his Hereford steer. Harvey had long ago purchased a horse from a member for Kathryn, who was preparing for her freshman year at TCU. When Tinsley went outside to tend to the animals, he often found arrowheads in the dirt.
The move to the Riverside location added to Harvey’s obligations, and so he curtailed his own competition schedule even more. It was Harvey’s first experience with preparing and opening a club. With the new, bigger golf course and additional room for infrastructure, the club could build a larger membership. It could also serve as a site for the Texas Golf Association state competitions—a welcome development for the prestige of golf in Texas but yet another claim on Harvey’s time. Byron Nelson, who later became one of Harvey’s closest friends in the PGA community, came to Austin to survey the new course. He declared that it “will be one of the best in this section of the country . . . good enough for any championship tournament.” Harvey appreciated the endorsement, but he also understood the implication. If the new Austin Country Club was good enough to please Nelson, so it would be for everyone else. The new club would be a busy place, and Harvey would be an even busier man.
Helen kept a scrapbook of her husband’s accomplishments as a player. The neatly trimmed headlines taped to the pages reminded Harvey of how good he used to be. “Course Record Established by Penick.” “Penick Pushes by in Tourney.” “Penick and Burke Leading State Tourney.” “Penick Enters Los Angeles.” “Penick Honored by PGA.” “Penick Elected to Lead Pros.”
Yet Harvey knew his time as a player was reaching its inevitable end. He was forty-five years old when the club moved to East Austin. Now he was traveling farther, beyond the boundaries of Texas, to lead teaching seminars for the PGA. He bought a small farm in Lockhart, thirty miles south of Austin, where he and Tinsley drove the only car the family owned to clear brush and care for a modest herd of cattle. His lesson sheet, meanwhile, remained full. And the Scribbletex notebook in his rolltop desk contained fewer blank pages.
He continued to enter state PGA-sanctioned events, but he no longer regularly attempted to qualify for the Texas Open and other tournaments. His identity began to shift. The caddie who became a player who became a club professional who became an instructor now was becoming ensconced, firmly and forever, as the guardian of golf’s simplest truths. They were there, in the notebook seen by no one but Harvey.
Occasionally he appeared in exhibitions, as many local professionals did in Texas. None was more celebrated than the one on May 13, 1950, at Lions Municipal in the prosperous West Austin neighborhood of Tarrytown, where his brother Tom was the pro.
More than a thousand spectators gathered for that bright morning in Austin. It was the largest crowd ever assembled in the city to watch a golf event. Each patron paid $2 that day for the privilege, but not to watch Harvey, or even Morris Williams Jr., the NCAA runner-up in 1949, or Ed Hopkins Jr., the runner-up the year before.
They came to see Hogan.
Harvey had arranged for Ben Hogan—now thirty-seven years old and the cagey winner of a U.S. Open and two PGA championships—to participate in a golf clinic and exhibition four-ball match sponsored by the Austin Junior Chamber of Commerce. The appearance drew enormous interest. Hogan had nearly died fifteen months earlier, when his car collided with a bus in West Texas. But he had recovered and was now thriving. He had just tied a tour record of 21 under par the week before, winning the Greenbrier Open in 259 strokes.
Hogan was on his way to Hollywood to film a movie when he stopped that Saturday morning in Austin, where he and Harvey were set to play Williams and Hopkins. A parade of Fords, Dodges, and a few new Cadillac convertibles lined Enfield Road that morning where it intersected with Exposition Boulevard. Traffic was thick, and so was the excitement. “The Hawk” was in town to play a round of golf.
The exhibition began at 1:30 P.M. Hogan wore a gray alpaca sweater with muted tan trousers and the extra Hogan spike in the center of the sole of his right shoe. The small man with the cutting dark eyes seemed to be in a pleasant state of mind as he performed his repertoire of shots on the practice range, starting with his wedges, finishing with his driver. He noticed a dark-haired young woman he appeared to recognize and invited her to participate. Betsy Rawls, the reigning state amateur champion, smiled coyly. Absent golf shoes and golf glove, and using Harvey’s driver, she laced a shot downrange that drew robust applause from the hometown crowd. Then another. Then another. “Good ones, too,” noted the golf writer for the Sunday American-Statesman.
The theatrics were only beginning. On that spring afternoon in Austin, spectators saw a jovial, even mischievous, side of Hogan.
The match began at two o’clock on the first hole at Lions. Without letting anyone in on the joke, Hogan staggered through the wall of spectators, then feigned a wobble, as if he had ordered one too many mimosas with breakfast. He doffed his cap when introduced on the crowded tee and replaced it crookedly on his head. He teed his ball unsteadily. He stumbled to his knees. “What’s wrong with Hogan?” gasped someone in the gallery. “Why, it looks like he’s drunk,” offered someone else. Hogan rubbed his eyes, squinted down the fairway, and tripped backwards. He persuaded himself into position to swing.
He took an exaggerated lash at his ball—and missed. The Hawk grunted loudly. No one spoke. No one knew what to think. Hogan clumsily knocked his ball from the tee with a backhanded swipe. His caddie scurried to replace it. Hogan took his address again, teetering on his heels. He topped his shot.
Harvey, Hopkins, and Williams hit theirs down the fairway. The group trudged to Hogan’s ball, which he sliced like a once-a-month player trying to reach the moon. His hat fell off this time. He replaced it, sideways. On the green, he slapped his first two putts twenty feet past the cup. He holed his third for a score no one dared calculate.
Silence.
Hogan fetched his ball, scanned the stunned spectators surrounding the green, and smiled.
“Okay, partner,” he said to Harvey. “It’s up to you on this hole. I’ll do better from now on.”
This was a new Ben Hogan. Harvey had always admired Hogan’s intensity and focus, but he appreciated his wry sense of humor just as much, so he laughed too. Harvey clucked when his partner ripped a sublime drive to the center of the fairway on the next hole. He sensed a shift in the mood. This was no U.S. Open, Colonial Invitational, or even Sunday afternoon Nassau. But it was golf against someone else. The game was afoot.
“Harvey,” Hogan said as they walked down the second hole, “I flew over a lake coming in here. Which way is that lake?” He also wanted to know which direction was west. Someone pointed south, to the Colorado River, which they could not see through the trees. But Hogan now knew one truth about Lions: how the greens broke. Slopes, Hogan understood, always lean toward the low point of the land, or west, all other conditions being equal.
Hogan and Harvey were tied with the amateurs through two holes. Then Hogan birdied the third, giving the professionals a 1-up lead. The spontaneous vaudeville production continued later when a movie camera whirred at the top of Hogan’s swing. In competition such a distraction would elicit a hard, accusing stare. This time Hogan merely grinned.
Hogan was Hogan now. He shot 3-under 32 on the front half. He birdied the tenth and eleventh to dip to 5 under par. A bogey on the back nine gave him a 4-under 67, and with Harvey’s 2-over 73, the professionals beat the amateurs, two and one.
“The Fort Worth ace was impressed with the Austin Municipal, classing it one of the best public courses he’s played,” Morris Williams Sr. wrote for his American-Statesman readers the next morning. “It’s so good, it makes you think you’re not in Texas,” Hogan said as he worked his way down a line of autograph seekers extending admission tickets for him to authenticate. Decades later, when Harvey included a chapter about the exhibition in his second book, he recalled with clear fondness the humanity Hogan shared with Austin that afternoon. “Few people remembered the result of the match,” Harvey wrote. “But everyone that day remembered Hogan on the first hole. They talked about it for years.”
Harvey continued: “The rest of the way, Ben played that charity match as if it were the U.S. Open,” he wrote, which was true. “The college boys beat us 1-up,” which was not.
Maybe he forgot. Maybe that’s how he remembered it. Or maybe he recast the truth because he wanted the world to know how good his boys, Hopkins and Williams, really were. Especially Williams. Because the world never would.