Chapter Six

THE DEATH OF WILLIAMS haunted Harvey for the rest of ’53. He never stopped missing his young friend.

But he managed the loss with the accepting perspective of a man who knew he had to adapt. He was nearing fifty. He had lessons to administer. He had a membership to satisfy. He had a notebook to maintain. He returned to his career because that was what he knew. Golf gave him comfort and routine. He needed both to feel complete again.

Harvey and his UT golf team won nearly every match they played that season, as well as another conference championship. Texas senior Wesley Ellis beat Don Addington of SMU that May in Dallas by eleven shots for the medal. The early 1950s represented a period of crushing dominance for Texas golf. Williams had won his Texas triple crown. The Longhorns had defended their conference title a year later, in 1951. Then along came the ’52 squad, one of the best ever built in Harvey’s career at Texas—and a team connected at the soul. The talent assembled for that team, which included two of Houston’s finest young players and a sophomore from Vernon who was shaped entirely by Harvey, assured the Longhorns of a conference trophy, either for the team or for a medalist, through 1954.

Texas and SMU, with its dominating Addington brothers from Lamar High School in Houston, defined college golf in Texas for the next three years, along with North Texas State in Denton, which won four consecutive national championships, from 1949 to 1952. The “Mean Green” played outside the Southwest Conference, but Harvey was well aware of Don January, Billy Maxwell, and the rest of the players groomed by North Texas head coach Fred Cobb. There simply was nothing like college golf in Texas in the early 1950s. And it was a time like no other for Harvey. His teams, forged of deep friendships and unwavering esprit de corps, brought a whiff of understated royalty wherever their black Ford team sedan carried them to compete.

There was Julian Oates of Waco, who came to Texas to play tennis for Harvey’s cousin. He won the individual conference championship twice for D. A. Penick and used his last year of eligibility to compete on the golf team. Oates suspected that his tennis coach, a golfer of some repute, encouraged Harvey to invite Oates to the qualifier on a wintry pair of days more ideal for a fireside game of checkers than two rounds of golf. Harvey never once considered postponing the qualifier, in which Oates finished second.

He won the conference medal.

Then there was Ed Turley of Beaumont. He made the team as a freshman, ceded to better players through his brief and unremarkable career as a collegiate golfer, and left the university with an abiding affection for the coach who treated him as an equal to the starting four. Turley kept the letter Harvey mailed him one September day, a single page of cursive with sweeping capitals: “Dear Edward,” it read. “I can take your application for a place in the athletic dorm at the University.” It was Harvey’s way of telling Turley he belonged.

There were Moncrief and Riviere. They were the comets of their classes, the best of the best. Bobby Moncrief came to Austin with a polished swing crafted on the privileged practice line at River Oaks. Bernard Riviere learned the game under Robbie Williams at Memorial Park, the municipal course designed by Harvey’s friend John Bredemus and the home of the Houston Open. The older brother of the future professional and golf-course architect Jay Riviere, Bernard was Don Addington’s teammate at Lamar, and he thought about joining his friend at SMU. But Harvey’s countenance and paternal manner convinced him that Austin was where he needed to be. He never once regretted his choice.

They arrived on campus with reputations as two of the most complete junior players in the state. Riviere came right from high school, but Moncrief played a year on the freshman team at SMU. Moncrief weighed less than 120 pounds. What he lacked in power he balanced with a tremendous short game, honed on the practice green and sand bunker between the caddie shack and tennis courts at River Oaks. He appeared one summer day at Austin Country Club while Harvey was watching one of his son’s cows graze near the barn.

“Mr. Penick, my name is Bobby Moncrief,” the small boy said. “I want to play golf for you.”

Harvey looked him over, up and down. He told Moncrief to wait. Harvey fetched a 7-iron and a 3-wood from his shop, returned, and told the youth to swing them for him. Moncrief did as he was told.

The coach needed nothing more. “I hadn’t seen Bobby hit a ball,” Harvey wrote years later. “But I had seen his swing and looked into his eyes. I could see he was a player.”

So were the rest of those charmed Longhorns of ’52.

The team won twenty-nine matches that spring and plowed through the conference tournament. Circumstances were different now for the varsity. The game was bigger, their sport more esteemed. They carried canvas bags with TEXAS stitched on the side. They played nicer courses. Even the competition to make the team had toughened, to the point that five-time Houston City Junior champion Preston Moore, possessed of as assured a pedigree as Moncrief and Riviere, failed to qualify in every attempt he made.

Moore learned the game under Willie Maguire, the early Austin Country Club professional who had left years before for Houston Country Club, and later Dick Forester, the assistant to Jimmy Demaret at River Oaks. Moore had met Harvey at a qualifier for the national Jaycee tournament, and he instantly was smitten with the loving handshake, the care in his voice. “He had a way about him,” Moore said. He could go anywhere to play golf in college. He chose Texas.

No better junior had ever stepped to the first tee at River Oaks. The club, which thought it knew a future ambassador on the professional tour when it saw one, even granted Moore a complementary membership. But he wilted at the qualifier to play for Harvey at Texas. “I choked,” he said. “It meant so much to me.” Nevertheless, Harvey embraced Moore as if he had won every time he teed a ball. He wanted to surround himself with young men like Moore, who devoted so much to making the Longhorn team. “He never told me this, but I got the feeling that it hurt him more than it hurt me,” Moore said in 2013.

“He never said that,” Moore added. “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t acknowledge failure.” But Harvey did acknowledge his affection for Moore. He referred to him as one of his college players, despite never having made the team, for the rest of his life. Moore, who rose to become the chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce under President George H. W. Bush, referred to Harvey as the teacher who made the biggest difference in his life.

Moore knew Moncrief and Riviere from the junior circuit in Houston. The three of them became Harvey’s acolytes and devotees of his methods—they cheerfully shared their enthusiasm with whoever would listen. They would describe his unusual algorithms: teaching the swing with the image of a bucket of water, teaching the grip with a common yardstick, teaching a mental trompe l’oeil with three words: take dead aim. The boys would explain how that message meant everything—when they invested completely in it, they often played the golf of their dreams.

“He had this way about him,” Riviere said. “If you listened carefully, you got some gems.”

Moncrief noticed that Harvey accepted blame for his team’s failures so his boys wouldn’t have to. He thought about how, before every out-of-town match, a telegram arrived. It would read, “Take dead aim,” and be signed, “Harvey.”

Moncrief noticed also how much the thirty-four USGA rules of golf mattered to his coach. One afternoon, after a home match at Lions against Oklahoma, Moncrief confessed to Harvey that he had lost, 1-up, because he had called a penalty on himself on the seventh hole. Harvey put his hand on Moncrief’s shoulder and said, “That was exactly the right thing to do.” Moncrief left the course with the pride of a winner.

But his affection and admiration for Harvey prevented Moncrief from telling him, after his sophomore year, that he was leaving school and the golf team. Moncrief had been caught having another student take a test for him in a history class. He fled to Houston. “I was so embarrassed, I didn’t go see him,” Moncrief said. “I felt like I had let him down, that everything he had taught me I had violated.”

Moncrief never wrote Harvey, never called or visited him in Austin, until years later.

When he showed up, Harvey greeted him with the same gentle handshake Moncrief remembered from that day at the club, when Harvey was minding Tinsley’s cow. “It was like I’d never been gone,” he said.

Unlike Moncrief, Moore, and Riviere, Joe Bob Golden had no prior reputation when he entered the freshman-team qualifying tournament in the spring of 1951. He had no competitive experience outside of Vernon in North Texas, where he played on his ragtag high school team. Harvey granted six players a place on the freshman team. Golden finished seventh. But one of the six qualifiers was deemed ineligible, opening a place for Golden, who suddenly found himself surrounded by players expected to win in the Southwest Conference. He was filled with pride. He was haunted by doubt.

Golden asked his new coach for help. He wanted a golf swing he could believe in. Harvey invited Golden to the club, where he could watch him more closely on the range, and scattered a few practice balls at his feet. Harvey said nothing as Golden, a freshman trying to show the poise he did not yet have, took his stance.

Harvey never mentioned to Golden that he rarely gave this kind of intimate, wholesale lesson to a player on his teams, because so few needed or wanted one. He chose not to reveal that most of his players appeared in Austin with tournament-ready mechanics. Nor did he tell Golden how much he typically learned from his players, how he often wrote in his notebook a move or adjustment advocated by a teacher from another club that he learned from one of his players. Instead, Harvey just watched Golden hit practice shots until he thought he had an answer that might help.

Harvey thought a lot that day about the length and tempo of Golden’s swing. He wanted it shorter and slower, more repeatable, especially under pressure. He also wanted Golden to put away his driver. But if Golden shelved his driver, what else would he use?

“Come on to my house and let me see if I can’t find you something,” Harvey told Golden.

The two of them went to Harvey’s home on Penick Drive. Harvey clawed through a barrel of clubs in a closet and returned with a Jimmy Thompson brassie, the equivalent of a 2-wood in the modern era. It was typical of Harvey to steer his players away from their drivers for a short period of time. He considered the driver one of the three most important clubs of the fourteen available, but he also thought players should earn the option of using it only after many hours of persistent practice. Most players, Harvey said, would play better golf if they used a fairway wood instead.

Golden used the Jimmy Thompson brassie for his entire freshman season and also shortened his swing. He earned a place as a sophomore on the varsity team, which won the conference with Riviere, Moncrief, Wesley Ellis, and Lee Pinkston. Two years later, Texas took the conference championship, and Golden won as an individual, beating teammate Roane Puett by a shot. He shot 68-69-71-70. Harvey allowed him to use his driver.

“Harvey made me the player I was,” Golden said more than fifty years later. “He had me slow down my swing. He had me hitting a three-quarter shot with every club in the bag.” Harvey trusted Golden so much that years later, after a stint as an intelligence officer in the air force and a return to Texas for law school, his old coach hired him to travel with the golf team from tournament to tournament, part chaperone, part chauffeur, part mentor, part extension of Harvey himself. “He was the greatest teacher in the world,” Golden said. He meant the compliment well beyond golf.

Golden went on to a long and distinguished career as a jurist in a town of eight thousand in East Texas. He was known as a compassionate, committed, and sensible judge—a reflection of Harvey, but with a gavel. Golden kept a placard on his desk in the Jasper County Courthouse, where he supervised cases in the First Judicial District until his semiretirement in 2008. The placard read: KINDNESS . . . PASS IT ON. He chaired the judicial probation board. He served cake and ice cream to delinquents who completed their sentences. He rarely wore judicial robes, not even when, in 1999, he presided over the trial of one of three white men convicted of dragging to death a black man named James Byrd on a rusty chain before dumping his remains in front of an African American church and driving to a barbecue.

Golden played golf long and well enough to teach his children what he had learned from Harvey. He took both of them to Austin when he had taught them all he could. His daughter Kate was about thirteen, Golden recalled, when they arrived at the country club and found Harvey in a golf cart, collecting range balls and wearing a wire range bucket on his head to protect him from the incoming. He stopped and watched Kate Golden hit about a dozen balls.

“Kate, that’s all I need to see,” Harvey said. “You’re going to have people telling you what to do, showing you how to swing. People will want to give you tips. What I want you to do is say, ‘Thank you.’ And then go right back to what you’re doing.”

Kate played golf at Texas. Her brother Joe played at Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdoches. “I knew that he would teach them the right way, and I wanted them to learn all about Mr. Penick,” Golden recalled. But the lessons he arranged for his children had to do with so much more than golf. “I just wanted my kids to know him,” Golden said.

The country club planned a special dinner for Harvey and Helen in the fall of 1953, to observe his thirtieth year as its head professional. Governor Shivers attended and posed for a picture with Harvey, who wore a size-too-big suit with enormous lapels. The city established September 5 as Harvey Penick Day in Austin, certified by the hand of the mayor, C. A. McAden.

“Whereas, it is deemed altogether fitting that the signal example of Harvey Penick as a citizen, a friend, and a sportsman, who has won and held the hearts and admiration of all Austin citizens who know him, should be recognized in an appropriate manner,” the proclamation read in part. Club officials enthusiastically endorsed a $3,000 bonus check.

 

The torrential teams of the early 1950s and the ’54 twin conference championships for Texas represented the last true dynasty for Harvey as a college golf coach. The churn of managing the team, compounded by his work for the Texas section of the PGA, which had him traveling all around the state for teaching seminars, began to wear on Harvey.

His energy waning, Harvey was beginning to feel his age. He wanted to keep coaching out of loyalty to the university, but he also wanted to loosen the ever-present tugs on his time. He began to contemplate an exit. But he wasn’t ready yet.

His team finished sixth in conference in 1955, beating only Baylor in the league of seven teams. Davis Love Jr., his driven player from Arkansas who wore alligator shoes and lived for the sport (“He didn’t study,” said Turley, “he didn’t date, he was consumed with golf”), finished third individually. But Texas rarely celebrated a third-place finish in any sport, especially not for a team accustomed to championships.

It was an aggravating year altogether for sports in Austin. The football Longhorns won four games. The basketball team won four games too. The baseball team finished fourth in conference. Only Harvey’s cousin saved the university from wholesale chagrin. D. A. Penick and his reliable tennis team won their eighth straight conference trophy.

Away from campus, at the humming grounds of Austin Country Club, Harvey continued to thrive. He now had an assistant, a young man from Robstown named Charles Ranly, who supervised the shop while Harvey was teaching for $2 a lesson. “He showed me what to do, and I was always there,” said Ranly, who later bought his own golf course in North Texas. “I loved it. I never missed a day of work.”

When Jack Burke Jr., the son of Harvey’s mentor, won the Masters in 1956, Harvey noticed his putter, which was manufactured in Alabama. He instructed Ranly to order a dozen to sell at $9.50 apiece. They sold out in two weeks. Harvey placed another order. Then another. He stocked his shop with Spalding irons and Wilson Staff persimmon woods. He sold Titleist and Maxfli golf balls with balata covers, the kinds the tour players spun on soft bentgrass greens.

Harvey was evolving into the modern PGA professional: teacher, manager, customer service specialist, part-time agronomist, full-time merchandise consultant. Harvey preferred teaching above all. But this was 1956. Golf was booming, with more than 6,000 courses in the United States. The jobs of its 3,798 professionals were broadening to meet demand, and Harvey had to adapt. So he adapted with the kind of loyalty and good cheer that had made him, by his fourth decade as a presence at Austin Country Club, an icon.

Powerful golf people trusted Harvey. The unassuming professional from Austin never inserted himself into the emerging national golf scene, but he held great influence, especially among people who had a stake in the careers of the students who learned under Harvey. He was the remote intersection through which important roads coursed.

For instance, in the summer of 1955, L. G. “Plug” Osborne, director of the professional golf division of the Wilson Sporting Goods Company, the Chicago-based manufacturer that supplied high-grade clubs to tour staff, including Betsy Rawls, was growing concerned about Rawls. Osborne corresponded regularly with Harvey, and he wrote to him on June 24, wondering if Rawls had been “listening to some bad advice along the tour.

“To be perfectly frank with you, and I hope you will talk to her about it if you ever get a chance, I am a little afraid she lets Betty Hicks influence her to [sic] much,” Osborne continued. Rawls had objected to that suggestion, Osborne acknowledged, but he wondered if she was being truthful. The company had a great deal riding on her success. Osborne wanted to ensure that Rawls remained on the path to greatness that so many predicted she would achieve.

“You have been wonderful to her and I guarantee you she appreciates it very much,” Osborne wrote. “She thinks you are about the best guy in the world and I am not so sure she isn’t right.”

Though Rawls won only one tournament that year, she would win three more in 1956. The next season looked promising for the Phi Beta Kappa who never quit. Meanwhile, back in Austin, the golf team finished third in 1956. Harvey’s service to his club and the Texas section of the PGA, however, was neither third nor second to anyone else teaching golf in Texas. The section named Harvey the “pro who did the most for the section” at its annual meeting in Houston. As Morris Williams Sr. noted in his Sunday Austin American-Statesman golf column, “The honor could have been bestowed in 1946, or in 1936, or even in 1926. For Harvey has been around the Texas golfing scene for a long, long time.”

Buck Luce, a former player at Texas and one of the men who saw Jimmy Demaret establish the course record of 60 at the Hancock site in a friendly game with Harvey, hired Wesley Ellis in 1956 as his assistant at Greenwood Country Club in River Vale, New Jersey. Ellis had played for Harvey’s conference championship teams in 1950, ’51, and ’52. Luce credited his old coach with shaping Ellis and many other former Longhorns now spreading his teaching ideas on ranges throughout the country.

“Wesley is another product of the greatest professional in the game,” Luce wrote in a letter to a friend. “Harvey is such a great credit to the game. Much has been said of the fine [amateur] players he has turned out, yet very little has been said about some of the fine professionals that he has turned out and is turning out.”

Others in the game, including those who wrote about it, also acknowledged Harvey’s considerable influence—even his legacy, which by his fifty-first birthday had begun to carry the weight and heft of an entire career. “Penick is one of an old and vanishing school of golf pros who moved up from caddy, to shop to teaching,” Tom Davison of the Houston Post wrote in 1956. “He has probably developed more championship golfers in this state than all the other Texas pros combined.”

One of those championship golfers, Betsy Rawls, the object of concern for Harvey and others just two years before, roared into the summer of ’57 like the wavy-haired freshman consumed with perfection Harvey had met in the fall of 1946.

Rawls won the Tampa, Lake Worth, and Peach Blossom Opens. She finished a shot behind Jackie Pung in the U.S. Women’s Open that summer at historic Winged Foot Golf Club, but Pung was disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. Pung had been playing that Saturday with Harvey’s friend Betty Jameson, who was out of contention early. Both players made bogey six on the par-5 fourth hole. Both of them also, mistakenly, recorded a par 5 on the scorecards they were keeping for each other. Neither discovered the error when they were checking their cards later.

The ruling left an indelible cloud over the grounds: “You will probably never see an unhappier group of people at a golf championship,” the august golf writer Herbert Warren Wind noted from Mamaroneck, New York. Even officials from the USGA, which had enacted the regulation the year before, regretted the decision. The USGA and Winged Foot members took up a collection promptly after Pung was disqualified. They raised more than $2,000 on the spot.

Pung was circumspect after the announcement. “Winning the Open is the greatest thing in golf,” she told the gathered golf press. “I have come close before. This time I thought I’d won. But I didn’t. Golf is played by the rules, and I broke a rule. I’ve learned a lesson. And I have two broad shoulders.” Pung did not disclose the fact that Rawls had edged her in her last close brush with the U.S. Women’s Open championship, in a playoff in the summer of 1953 at the Country Club of Rochester.

Rawls modestly and somewhat reluctantly accepted the trophy at Winged Foot. The circumstances were imperfect. But she had her fourth major championship. More than that, she was winning with regularity again.

Her fifth and final victory that year came in Reno, Nevada. She occasionally wrote to Harvey from hotels in tournament cities, and when the LPGA dropped into Texas for the Betty Jameson Invitational at Brackenridge Park or the Dallas Open at Glen Lakes, she would try to fit in a quick drive to Austin to see him. All of his women players did.

“Everyone in Texas knew Harvey” by that time, Rawls explained. “It was the first thing you asked another Texas golfer. Do you know Harvey? People from West Texas, South Texas and Houston, they all knew him. He was the reason there was a great bond between Texas golfers on the tours. You’d mention Harvey, you’d always smile and tell stories.”

In addition to his stewardship of the golf team, the 1950s represented the apex of Harvey’s wide, paternal influence on the LGPA circuit. Betty Jameson continued to contend, but she was nearing retirement. Rawls won thirty titles that decade. Her most dominant season came in 1959, when she won ten times, including two major championships. Harvey found reasons to be proud nearly every week he opened the Sunday American-Statesman to check the golf agate.

He had no way of knowing, of course, that his reach was about to deepen even more.

Early in the summer that saw Rawls return to form and win at Winged Foot, a mother loaded her seventeen-year-old daughter into the family car for a 450-mile trip from Jal, New Mexico, to Austin. It was the first of many hot drives across the flat plains of Texas that Dama Whitworth and her young daughter Kathy would make to see Harvey.

The small town they left that morning had given all it could to Kathy. The youngest of three sisters, she came to golf late, having been occupied for much of her childhood with roaming the property her grandparents homesteaded, chasing calves around the barn, and swimming with her friends in shallow ranch tanks. Life for the Whitworth girls orbited the four sacred entities of small towns: church, family, school, and neighbors, whose kids went to the same school and probably the same church. Their father operated a hardware store. Their mother volunteered with the local Democratic Women’s Club and kept active at the First Baptist Church. They lived in a small frame house on South Fourth Street.

The community of 2,675, a speck on the bleak and brittle flatlands near the Texas border, thrived on cattle ranches on the outskirts until the late 1920s, when the El Paso Natural Gas Company appeared, bringing in a new batch of jobs. Jal had none of the big-city attractions that kept kids occupied in faraway places such as Austin. But it did have a nine-hole golf course.

Whitworth first played there at the invitation of a friend whose family had a membership. She borrowed her grandfather’s clubs. She flailed down the scorched fairways and cottonseed greens, chopping at a little ball that never behaved the way she willed it to. She lost count of her strokes. She felt foolish and inept. She wanted to go sit down inside one of those green fiberglass shelters, handy for the rain that rarely fell, with her head in her hands. She also learned that day what she wanted to do with her life.

“Oh my God,” Whitworth said later. “I was just so bad. I couldn’t believe it was so hard.” From that day, she shaped her entire life around golf.

Morris and Dama Whitworth joined the Jal Country Club for their daughter, who rarely chased calves anymore or swam in the tanks at the ranch. They paid Dode Forrester, who gave lessons at the country club in Hobbs, New Mexico, to teach her the foundations, including the powerful firing of the hips she often credited for the snap in her swing. The Whitworths eventually retained Hardy Loudermilk, the professional in Jal, who detected a potential in his new student that was both thrilling and rare on the plains of eastern New Mexico. Loudermilk decided to call Harvey. “I’ve taken her as far as I can,” he told his friend in Texas.

Harvey agreed to meet Whitworth, as he would have done for any committed player recommended by a fellow professional, especially one he respected as much as he did Loudermilk. Whitworth and her mother arrived at the country club and entered Harvey’s shop, which seemed to the girl like a cave, with a picture of Bobby Jones on the wall and a small photograph, angled on Harvey’s rolltop desk, of Tommy Armour sitting on a bench. Harvey suggested they go outside.

He liked Whitworth the moment he watched her handle a golf club. They started, as Harvey always did, on the practice green. He admired her intuition there, how every putting stroke seemed calibrated, in both speed and direction, to the correct path to the hole. Harvey examined her grip. He was unimpressed. But he wanted to see her take full swings before deciding what he wanted to say and exactly how he wanted to say it.

Harvey surveyed his five-foot-nine pupil as she emptied a bucket of balls on the range. He knew this much from his purview: Whitworth was strong and built for golf, all levers and torque and quick-twitch fiber. She was big for her age, overweight even. But she used her mass like a catapult. Harvey sensed he could turn a good player into a great one in Whitworth. But she had to invest in him.

“Most people don’t want to hear that,” she said. “Because it’s so hard to change.”

Whitworth and her mother stayed in Austin for three days. Harvey met her each morning at the club, prescribed a drill or single thought, and left her alone while he attended to his other duties. Then he came back. Another drill. Another thought. They rebuilt her golf swing stage by stage, like the concrete steps that led to the new clubhouse on Riverside Drive.

Harvey gave Whitworth a molded grip so she could memorize the position Harvey wanted her hands to assume on the club. At night, she sat on the bed in front of a mirror in her hotel room, cradling the molded grip, absorbing the sensation. She closed her eyes and concentrated. She believed in Harvey. She thought a lot about the humility of Loudermilk, the professional back in Jal, who accepted his own limitations and deferred to Whitworth’s best interests, an act that led her to Harvey. She felt pulled toward him. She felt centered. “I wasn’t going to question anything,” Whitworth said.

She returned home with restless conviction. She won the New Mexico State Women’s Open that year in Farmington. She won it again in 1958. She was barely getting started.

She enrolled at Odessa Junior College, but full of restless plans, she quit early. She wanted to play with the LPGA Tour, whose stars, including Mickey Wright and Betsy Rawls, scheduled frequent exhibitions in Amarillo, Lubbock, or Pecos, Texas. Whitworth often joined them. She could play with those women. Whitworth confided to Wright that she thought she was ready, but Wright tried to persuade her to wait. To spend another year with Harvey.

Whitworth was unconvinced.

She formed a syndicate with her father and two Jal businessmen, who agreed to finance her career for three years. They offered to give her $15,000. She averaged eighty strokes a round as a rookie, earning a little more than $1,200 in twenty-six tournaments.

Whitworth limped home to Jal and cried. Her father told her to spare him her tears.

His daughter heard the message. She returned to the tour, camped on the range, and watched Wright, Patty Berg, and Louise Suggs, trying to parse their swings, from waggle to impact to finish. Whitworth started playing well. She was having fun. She lost in a couple of playoffs, but she was playing well enough to get there. “There were times when I came close to winning,” she said. She sent a bottle of champagne to South Fourth Street in Jal. She instructed her parents to pull the cork when she won her first tournament.

“I still marvel at how all this started, how lucky that was,” Whitworth said, describing that first encounter with Harvey in 1957 at the country club. “When you look back on it, it’s like fate. It seemed preplanned.”

Harvey, meanwhile, attended to his notebook in the rolltop desk. He planned lessons, gave them, sat through church with Helen, fed the stock, cleared mesquite on his farm, watched the agate in the Austin newspapers for golf scores, played a little, hoped for rain, and spent time with his children, Kathryn and Tinsley, when they came home for a visit. He started reading a new magazine series that ran in that year of ’57 in Sports Illustrated.

The series was written by Ben Hogan, Harvey’s old Texas friend and former Texas Cup teammate, with the most famous golf writer in the country, Herbert Warren Wind. It was called “Ben Hogan’s Modern Fundamentals of Golf.” It struck Harvey as too complex for the average player but essential for the championship contestant to absorb. The series featured illustrations of panes of glass, swing planes, theories about intricate ballistic kinesiology, and the like. It changed the way a lot of people thought about the golf swing. It changed nothing about Harvey.

Harvey still believed, as much as he ever had, in the simplicity of imagery, gentle direction, incremental advice, and small words. He wanted to strip the swing to its most primitive essentials. The grip. The stance. The position of the body. When those three elements were aligned, the ball almost always went where it should.

Harvey had been watching golf shots for more than four decades. He only prescribed what he believed to be true, and truth rose from exposure. Harvey sought small measures. He found fact in buckets of water and weed cutters and three words that applied to anything in the human experience—take dead aim. He admired and respected Hogan in profound ways. But there was only one Hogan.