IN JANUARY OF 1937 I TIED FOR NINTH IN THE L.A. OPEN AND won $75. I wasn’t quite as happy with that sum as I was back at the Texarkana Open in ’32, I can tell you. Next, I tied for seventeenth at Oakland, out of the money, then I finished sixth at Sacramento and won $140. That was kind of the way it went. One week I’d do all right, the next they hardly knew I was there.
At the San Francisco Match Play Tournament, though, I met a fellow who’d just turned pro, a fellow my age from Virginia, name of Sam Snead. I played him in the first round and beat him 2 and 1, but even then, I figured he’d always be someone to contend with. What a smooth swing Sam always had—looked like he’d never worked at it at all.
I look at my scores for that winter tour, and they’re kind of interesting. Most of them are in the low 70’s, but then in the tournaments where I won some money, there’d be a 66 or a 68. So I was getting a little better and learning to play under different kinds of conditions in different parts of the country.
See, we’d start in California, play four tournaments there, then drive to either Houston or San Antonio (in ’37 it was Houston), to Thomasville, Georgia, then to Florida for four events there. Next, it was Charleston for their Open, and after that the North and South, which was always played at Pinehurst. This time I did better, finishing third and winning $500.
At this point, I’d played in twelve tournaments and had won about $1800—not a very good average, especially considering expenses. I was looking forward to getting back to my job at Ridgewood in April. I wanted to work on my game more and get closer to my goal of being consistent.
However, back in February, Mr. Jacobus had called and told me he’d been contacted by Stanley Giles, president of Reading Country Club in Reading, Pennsylvania. The club was looking for a head golf pro. Besides being club president, Mr. Giles was head of the committee to find a new pro, so he’d called George. He wanted a young man who gave promise of being a good player as well as a good teacher, someone who also knew how to conduct the business of a golf shop. In those days, running a shop well was more important to most clubs than whether or not the pro was winning tournaments.
Of course, all the time I was at Ridgewood, I wasn’t just working on my game, because no one could make a living playing golf then. You had to have a club job. So I was also learning how to be a head pro at a good club. I’d had a lot of good experience under George, and I was definitely interested in the Reading job, because the main reason for working for someone else at a fine club was to eventually get a club of your own. I’d done a lot of teaching and my game was getting better. In short, I felt I was ready.
So, with a good reference from Mr. Jacobus, I drove to Reading from Pinehurst, which was about a three-hour drive, and had an interview with Mr. Giles. I could see he really knew what he wanted in a golf pro. Somehow, I convinced him I could fill the requirements he had, so we signed a contract. It was about two weeks before the Masters in ’37, and I was guaranteed $3750 per year, plus whatever I could make from the shop and my lessons. That was considerably more than I was making at Ridgewood. It certainly looked as if we wouldn’t have to borrow any more money from Louise’s folks.
Naturally I was all excited about having a club of my own, so when I went to Augusta to play in my third Masters, I was high as a kite. That may be part of the reason why I played as well as I did. But I also had a practical reason for wanting to play well. I didn’t have any money to buy things for my shop at Reading. Ralph Trout was going to be my assistant there, and he would have my shop open by the time I got back from Augusta, so I needed to be able to stock it with new merchandise as quickly as I could.
With all the adrenalin flowing about my new job and playing the Masters for the third time, I managed to win it, with a great opening round of 66 and a great last round on Sunday. That 66 stood as the best opening-round score by a Masters champion for thirty-nine years, until Raymond Floyd topped me in 1976 with his 65.
Though the Masters was already considered a major tournament in the golf world in ’37, none of us had any idea it would get to be as popular as it is today. To think of all these people today trying every way to get tickets, when back then they maybe charged $3 and hardly had enough gallery to count—well, it sure is quite a change. And in most ways I think it’s good.
Getting back to that 66, though, it was the best I’d ever played any golf course in my life, tee to green. I hit every par 5 in two, every par 4 in two, and every par 3 in one, for 32 strokes. Add 34 putts to that—pretty average putting, really—and you have an easy 66. I was paired with Paul Runyan that round. He called himself Pauly, and I remember he’d talk to himself quite a bit. “Hit it, Pauly,” or “Pauly, you sure messed up on that one.” But I wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to him. I was concentrating real well that day.
We were staying at the Bon-Air Hotel then, a large hotel with a big foyer. The dining room was just off the foyer, and when I came down for breakfast that first morning, there was a lady in the foyer demonstrating a Hammond organ. She was playing soft, quiet music, mostly waltzes like “The Blue Danube.” I listened to her play for about thirty minutes while I ate, and never really thought much about it. But my rhythm was so good that day, I later thought listening to that waltz tempo might have had something to do with it. Funny, because I don’t really like organ music.
In the second round, I shot even par 72, and in the third, 75. I’d now lost the lead. In the fourth round, I was still faltering—shot a 38 on the front nine, leaving me three strokes behind Ralph Guldahl. Walking down to the tenth hole, someone in the gallery told me Guldahl had already birdied the tenth. That meant I had to birdie it too, or I’d be 4 back with eight holes to go. I put my second shot on the green about fifteen feet from the hole and made it. I was paired with Wiffy Cox, the pro at Congressional in Washington, D.C. When I sank that putt, he said, “Kid, I think that’s the one we needed.”
I parred 11, and next was the wonderful, difficult 12th hole, one of the most famous par threes in the country. Rae’s Creek runs diagonally across the front of the green—on television, it looks like it’s straight across, but it’s not. If the pin’s on the right, it plays one club longer. And with that Amen Corner wind, it’s always a tricky shot, no matter where the pin is.
Standing on the tee, I saw Guldahl drop a ball short of the creek, which meant he’d gone in the water from the tee. If he got on and 2-putted, he’d have a 5. Watching his misfortunes, I suddenly felt like a light bulb went off in my head, like the fellow you see in the cartoons when he gets a brilliant idea. I realized then that if I could get lucky and make a 2, I’d catch up with Guldahl right there. Fortunately, I put my tee shot six feet from the hole with a 6-iron into the wind, and holed it. So now I was caught up, with six holes to go.
The 13th hole is a very famous par 5. I hit a good drive down the center of the fairway, just slightly on the upslope. I saw Ralph fooling around on the front of the green, and learned he’d made a 6. There was water in a ditch that runs just in front of the green, and there were a lot of rocks in it. Once in a while, if your ball landed in the right place, you could play out of it, but that day, Ralph didn’t have any luck.
The green then had a real high left side, up on a ridge, making the left side much higher than the right. It’s been changed since then. The pin that day was on that high left side. Waiting to play my shot, I knew I’d have to play a 3-wood to reach the green. If I played safe and got on in three, I’d probably make a 5, or could even make a 4. That would put me in the lead by one shot, but I knew that wasn’t enough. So I said to myself, “The Lord hates a coward,” and I simply tried to make sure my ball didn’t go off to the right and into the water. I pulled it slightly, and it stopped just off the green, about twenty feet from the hole. I chipped in for a 3, which made me feel pretty good, because I was now three strokes ahead of Ralph.
I parred fourteen, then got on fifteen in 2 and three-putted for par. Guldahl had made a 4 at fifteen, and we both parred in after that, so I won by two shots, with a 32 on the back nine. That 32 did more for my career at that time than anything, because I realized my game could stand up under pressure, and I could make good decisions in difficult circumstances.
There was no green jacket then, but I got a great thrill out of winning, especially after leading, losing the lead, and finishing strong. The other thing that pleased me was having Bob Jones present me with the gold medal. He was the “King of Golf” then, so that was a real thrill. As I recall, Clifford Roberts and Jones made a few remarks each, and then presented medals to the first- and second-place players. And that was it.
I still have that medal, and when my playing career was over, I looked back and realized that was the most important victory of my career. It was the turning point, the moment when I realized I could be a tough competitor. Whenever someone asks me which was the most important win of all for me, I never hesitate. It was the 1937 Masters, the one that really gave me confidence in myself.
You know, in the early days of the Masters, it was the most enjoyable tournament to go to in the whole country, from the players’ point of view. The tournament was small enough, and with the smaller number of players, you got to enjoy a lot of wonderful Southern hospitality. Every year, several members would host an early evening party, with country ham and all the trimmings. Everyone felt free and easy, and we all had a wonderful time. There was a black quartet that sang each year. They’d go to wherever the party was, and that was the entertainment. They were mighty good. But as the tournament grew, it got too big for folks to have parties for all the players. It wasn’t done at all after the war.
Because the tournament was so small then, there were only a couple of hotels in Augusta. It was a small town and didn’t have much going on the rest of the year. So even then it was difficult to find a place to stay. It wasn’t too long before people began renting out their homes to pros and others who might want to entertain friends, customers, and so forth during Masters week.
Louise was there all week. She wasn’t at the medal ceremony afterwards—wives were never included in such things then. But she was at the course, and up around the clubhouse. Wives then didn’t follow their husbands much. Most of them didn’t play golf at all, and the women dressed up more then than they do now, so it was difficult to walk such a hilly course.
Many people have wondered how I got the nickname “Lord Byron.” Well, O.B. Keeler was a sportswriter for the Atlanta Journal and also for the Associated Press. He had one stiff knee but still went out and watched the play so he would know what questions he wanted to ask—he didn’t just wait in the clubhouse for players to come in and talk to them afterwards. After I won in ’37, he interviewed me in the upstairs locker room that the pros used during the tournament. Things had kind of quieted down by then, and he said, “Byron, I watched you play the back nine today, and it reminded me of a piece of poetry that was written by Lord Byron when Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo.” We did the rest of the interview then, and the next day, the headline in his article for the Associated Press read, “Lord Byron Wins Masters,” and the nickname stuck. Oddly enough, I was sort of named for Lord Byron, who unfortunately was not an admirable man and drank himself to death at a very young age. But my grandmother Nelson had liked Lord Byron’s poetry, and she named my father John Byron. I was named John Byron, Jr. when I was born, but dropped the John and Jr. when I was twenty, and I’ve had good luck ever since then.
It wasn’t too hard going off to Reading after that great week in Augusta. All we’d had in Ridgewood were our clothes, no furniture or anything, so all our personal belongings were in our car. Since I’d left Ridgewood in the fall of ’36 and played the winter tour in California, then the spring in Florida and the Carolinas, we hadn’t been back to New Jersey. But when George Jacobus heard the news, he called to congratulate me. It sure was good to hear from him and realize I’d come quite a ways from when I first arrived in New Jersey just two years before.
My first impression of Reading was quite a bit different, since by now I’d been to New Jersey and New York. It was a bigger city than Texarkana, of course, but not anything like Ridgewood. Reading sits in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, southeast of the Appalachians, and that means coal mining country. The roads were narrow and hilly, so the traffic was pretty slow. The weather was different, too—lots of lightning storms, which took some getting used to. Besides the coal industry, there were several large textile mills in Reading, including Berkshire Mills.
The people were more reserved than at Ridgewood, mostly Pennsylvania Dutch. But once they decided to take you in, they were very warm and hospitable. They loved desserts, and I remember we’d go to play bridge of an evening at someone’s home, and afterward they’d have what amounted to a full, heavy meal, complete with several desserts. I’d really have to watch it not to gain weight.
I have to admit, at first we weren’t very impressed with Reading, but once we got to know the people and their ways, we had a very good time. In fact, when we left for Inverness in ’39, it was the first time Louise had cried over such a thing since she’d left Texarkana. Mrs. Giles, the wife of the club president, was especially nice to Louise and me. She’d have us over to dinner and they’d play bridge with us several nights a week, and my, she was a good cook. She was quiet, easy, didn’t play golf but did all the usual housewifely things and did them very well. Mrs. Giles died in the summer of ’92, at the age of ninety-nine, and I was fortunate to have had a good visit with her two years earlier.
The Reading clubhouse itself was done in English Tudor style, and was quite impressive. The course was fine—not as good as the Tillinghast design at Ridgewood, but very adequate. It had small greens, and while not really hilly, was quite rolling. I found out quickly that I wouldn’t have as much time to play and practice, because my responsibilities were quite a bit different from Ridgewood, since I was the only pro and did all the teaching. One big difference was that Reading had no practice range or practice bunkers. I used to use the bunker on the ninth green, next to the clubhouse, for my sand practice. Mr. Giles was kind enough to give me permission to do that. But he was the only one I ever had to get permission from—I never had to go to a committee or anything like that.
They had to replace the sand in that bunker at least four times while I was there because I practiced so much. I got to where I could hit the ball out and deliberately spin it back in. And Mr. Giles used to get me to demonstrate that shot to his friends.
A few days after we arrived, Mr. Giles called me and said, “I’ve got a Rotary Club luncheon this afternoon, and I want you to go with me and give a talk.”
“Give a talk?” I said, scared to death. “Mr. Giles, I don’t know anything about giving a talk. I’ve never done anything like that in my life.” I started crawfishing any way I could, trying to get out of it. But he said, “All you have to do is tell them how you won the Masters.” I replied, “I shot the lowest score.” He laughed and said, “Here’s how we’ll do it. You’ll get up and tell them everything you can think of about how you won—the shots you hit on the last nine, and all that. Then when you run out of things to say, I’ll be sitting right next to you, and I’ll ask you questions and keep it going.” So that was what we did, and it worked out fine.
Since that day, I’ve given more “talks” than I could count, and now people tell me what a good job I do. But if it hadn’t been for Mr. Giles, I don’t know that I’d ever have gotten started.
Another story about Mr. Giles concerns his golf, not mine. He was the most consistent 83–85 shooter I ever saw. He just never varied hardly at all above 85 or below 83. He had a good short game, and he was pretty good with his irons, but never could hit a wood very well—especially off the tee. He’d hit this little old pecky slice about 150 yards down the fairway every time. Just never could play his woods very well at all.
Well, he’d watched me play for quite a few months at Reading, and one day he told me, “Byron, if I could drive like you, I’d eat your lunch.” I just looked at him and smiled a little and said, “You think so, Mr. Giles?” He said, “I sure could. If I had your drives, I’d just beat you all to pieces!”
I thought about it for a few days, then I called him. “Mr. Giles, I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day, and I’ve got a game worked out for us. We’ll each hit our drives, then we’ll switch balls, and play to the hole.” You could feel him smiling into the phone. He said, “I can’t get there quick enough!”
So he got a couple of his buddies and we played. But he didn’t know he was playing right into my hands, because my long irons were about the best part of my game right then. I have to admit that playing his drives, I was on parts of the golf course I’d never seen before, and my score went up a few strokes. But his score didn’t come down quite enough, so I beat him.
He couldn’t believe it. We played that way two more times, and he never got below 77, while I never went above 75. After the third match, he’d had enough, and he told me, “If I’d been a betting man, I’d have bet a thousand dollars that I could beat you using your drives!” And $1000 then was a lot of money, so I was glad he didn’t bet it. He was a good sport about it, though.
The biggest surprise about Reading was the number of row houses. Being from the wide-open spaces out West, I was used to freestanding homes, so it was a little difficult, getting used to living that close to our neighbors. We rented a corner row house from a family named Corbitt. John Corbitt was the local Studebaker dealer, and he and his family moved out, come June, to their summer home on the Schuylkill River, where it was much cooler.
Since we’d arrived the first of April, we lived in the Berkshire Hotel until May 1. While we were living in the hotel, waiting for the Corbitts to move to their summer home, Mrs. Giles practically adopted us, realizing it was difficult for both of us, and especially for Louise. Then, after we moved into the Corbitts’ home, Mr. Giles kept us in fresh cut flowers the entire time we were there. One of the best things about living in the Corbitts’ home was that years before, they had befriended a young Polish Catholic girl, Josephine Brynairski, who lived there and did the cooking and housekeeping. Her room was on the third floor, and Louise and Josephine became very good friends during our time in Reading. Josephine also had a job as a waitress in a fine restaurant in Reading, so her cooking was very good, too.
The Corbitts would move back to town in mid-September, but we didn’t leave for Texarkana till a little bit later. So back we’d go to the Berkshire Hotel for a few more weeks. On the first floor of the hotel were the offices of the Reading Auto Club, of which Mr. Giles was president, in addition to his floral business. So I got to see quite a bit of him during our hotel stays.
At Reading I got to teach players at all levels. One family, the Lutzes, was especially interesting. Mr. Lutz owned one of the leading mortuaries in Reading and had three young children—a son, Buddy, ten years old and two daughters, twelve and fifteen. Mr. Lutz was a pretty fair businessman golfer who loved to play and wanted his children to play too. He came to me one day and said, “If you can teach them to play, Byron, I’ll buy each of them a set of clubs plus pay for all their lessons.” That was certainly a good incentive for me to work hard with those children.
Now Buddy was a total beginner, but he caught on quickly, and his twelve-year-old sister was coming along pretty well, too. I started her with just a 7-iron and graduated on up, and she was getting the ball airborne all right. But the older girl, I never could get her to progress at all. This went on for quite a while, as the children were taking a lot of lessons because it was summer and they were all out of school. Well, Mr. Lutz came out one day and asked, “How are my children doing, Byron?” I told him, “Mr. Lutz, Buddy and your younger girl are doing quite well, but I haven’t made any progress at all with your older daughter, and I feel ashamed.” He smiled at me and said, “Do you want me to tell you what the problem is?” I said, “I sure do, because maybe I can correct it.” He answered, “No, I don’t think you can because it’s your blue eyes—that’s all she ever talks about!” I was amazed, because I’d had no idea anything like that was going on in that young girl’s mind while I was trying to teach her how to play golf. So that was the end of that, but I did sell two sets of clubs, anyway, and in all the teaching I’ve done, that was the only time anything like that ever happened.
Obviously, when it came to women, I still had a lot to learn, and my next lesson in this area came from Ann Metzger, a lady in her mid-forties who was married to a dentist at the club, Dr. Paul Metzger. I had been working with Mrs. Metzger a little while and making some progress, but not getting her to do the things I really wanted her to do. I felt bad about it because she was nice and her husband was a pretty good player. Mrs. Metzger was a rather buxom lady, and one day she saw Louise and told her, “Louise, I’ve been taking a lot of lessons from your husband, and we’re not getting very far. I wish you’d explain to him how we women are made, because I get in my own way and that’s why I can’t swing the way he wants me to!” So Louise gave me the message, and the next time I saw Mrs. Metzger I said, “I’m going to change my procedure today. From now on I want you to stick your back end out further, bend over a little more, and take your arms out a little further away from your body.” She looked at me and said, “Louise must have talked to you,” and I said, “Yes, she did.” Fortunately, I was able to help her a lot after we’d gotten around the anatomy question, so to speak.
As the only pro, I was more restricted on how many tournaments I could play in, as well as not having as much time to practice and play at the club. I only had one boy in the shop to clean clubs on weekends. Fortunately, I didn’t need to do much teaching on weekends, because that’s when most of the men played. Also, we had “doctors’ day” on Wednesdays. I remember Dr. Mike Penta, who was such an avid golfer that he took lessons from me twice a week—at sunrise. And there was Dr. Metzger and his wife, Ann. They were both good golfers. She followed me in all the local tournaments I played in, and walked down the fairway with the other folks in the gallery. When I’d get a little tense, she’d get up alongside me and just say, “Smile.” That’s all. And of course, when you smile, it relaxes the muscles in your face, and somehow it would help me relax with my game and play better, too.
My second win that first year at Reading was the International Match Play Championship in Boston at Belmont Springs that fall. Actually, though the Masters was considered more important and the Belmont Match Play doesn’t exist anymore, I won quite a bit more money for that—$3000, according to my records. After qualifying with 141, I played John Levinson; he was a left-hander, but quite good. That match had kind of a strange ending. I was one down going to eighteen, and I hit a long drive down onto a gravel road that crossed the fairway. A spectator picked up my ball and threw it backwards several yards onto the fairway. The rule was that you could get relief from the gravel and drop back, but the official naturally and correctly ruled that I had to drop it myself, which I did. I ended up making par, while Levinson bogeyed. I then eagled the first extra hole to win the match 1 up. That seemed to help my game all of a sudden come together, and I went on to beat Frank Walsh 1 up, Lloyd Mangrum 2 up, Charlie Lacey 5 and 4, Harry Cooper 5 and 4, and Henry Picard 5 and 4 in the final. I remember it was one of the few times Dad Shofner ever got to come and see me play, and he became interested in watching Ralph Guldahl, who was known for being a slow player. Mr. Shofner told me later that it took Ralph five full minutes to play a shot. Anyway, I was very happy to win with Dad Shofner there, because by now, he knew for sure he hadn’t made a mistake loaning me that money in Texarkana.
The funny thing about the whole tournament was that I hadn’t planned on playing in it at all. Harold McSpaden, who was the pro at Winchester in Boston, had called and begged me to come; he even let Louise and me stay with him and Eva. I hadn’t been playing very well and was awfully busy at the club, but I decided to go anyway. Like I’ve said before, you just never know. . . .
Also, I was medalist in the PGA Championship qualifying at Pittsburgh Field Club, which back then was played at the end of May. I was determined to qualify, because I’d missed by one stroke the year before. Then I kept going—beat Leo Diegel, Craig Wood, and Johnny Farrell before losing in the quarterfinals to Ky Laffoon, all of which netted me $200. The course had very high, very dense rough. I drove the ball straight most of the time, but when I got in that rough, I used a small-headed wood called a cleek, with extra lead in the head, to play out. I’d bought it specifically because of the rough there, and most of the other players had one like it.
It was a 36-hole qualifier—eighteen in the morning, eighteen in the afternoon. The course was interesting. You drove off the first tee into a valley, then played the entire course in that valley till the 18th. The fairway going up to the 18th green was so steep, there was a rope tow for the players to use, and by the time we’d played thirty-six holes, we weren’t too embarrassed to use it, either. The photo that was taken of me for being the medalist in that qualifier is a good one, if I do say so, and it’s when we still were wearing shirts and ties to play. I often wonder what it would be like for the boys today, playing in those kinds of clothes and conditions.
To back up a bit, it wasn’t too long after the Masters that I learned I had been chosen for the Ryder Cup team. Boy howdy, was I excited. I’d never even been outside the United States before. I didn’t think it was possible that the dream I’d had just two years before at Ridgewood could be coming true already. The PGA of America picked the team then, and they didn’t keep any long-term, detailed records like they do now. They didn’t pick anyone who wasn’t playing well, naturally. But of course, if you won a major, that did have some effect on their decision, and so I was selected.
There were a few on our team who’d never played in a Ryder Cup before—myself, Snead, Ed Dudley. So we were inexperienced to some degree, and we also knew that the Americans had never beaten the British on their own soil before. But Walter Hagen would be our captain—that really was a thrill.
First, though, I had to see what I could do in the National Championship—what everyone now calls the U.S. Open. I did much better than in ’35 and ’36—finished tied for seventeenth, according to my black book, and won $50. The tournament was at Oakland Hills in Birmingham, Michigan, a very tough course. Naturally, I wasn’t thrilled with my performance, but I already had my mind on the trip to England.
Toward the end of June, Louise and I rode to New York with Mr. and Mrs. Giles, and met all the other fellows and their wives there. The PGA threw a big party for us before we left on the USS Manhattan the next day, June 24. I was kind of worried about the crossing, because I was a poor sailor. I’d only been out on a small boat on a lake once or twice in my life and it disagreed with me. Even swinging on a porch swing could make me queasy. So I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the trip.
But as it happened, the ocean was smooth as a millpond the entire six days out. The captain himself, a veteran of twenty years’ sailing, said he’d never seen it that calm. That made me feel quite a bit better, having that ocean trip go so well. The trip back was another story.
When we arrived in England, we were met by the British contingent—the Royal and Ancient representatives. Our accommodations were comfortable but not luxurious, adequate for the team and their wives, six of whom went along.
There’s nothing as exciting in golf as playing for your country. In the first matches, we played a Scotch foursome, alternating shots. One player would drive on the odd holes, the other on the evens. Hagen had paired Ed Dudley and me against Henry Cotton and Alf Padgham, the reigning British Open champion. Hagen came to me before the match and said, “Byron, you’ve got a lot of steam, a lot of get-up-and-go. And Dudley needs someone to push him. So I’m going to put you two together. You can get him fired up.”
We were unknowns in England, so the headline in the paper the next morning said, HAGEN FEEDS LAMBS TO THE BUTCHER. Well, we did get steamed up over that. I drove against Cotton all day, and on the par threes, I put my ball inside his every time, and we ended up winning the match. The next day, the headline read THE LAMBS BIT THE BUTCHER. It was a great thrill to win, especially against a player like Cotton.
The weather for the matches was fine except for the last day, when it turned terrible. Cold, windy, drizzly. And pros weren’t as welcome at these clubs as they are now. We were just barely allowed in the locker room, and our wives weren’t allowed in the clubhouse at all. There they were, standing outside, freezing, all six of them huddled together, trying to stay out of the wind, when the mayor’s wife saw them. She had enough compassion to invite them all into the clubhouse, and because she was the mayor’s wife, no one could say no to her. Then she served them some 200-year-old port, and they warmed up quickly after that. They said later they’d never tasted anything as good as that port in all their lives.
Fortunately, despite the bad weather, we held on to win, 8 to 4. It was the first time we’d ever defeated the British on their home ground. It made all of us feel proud, especially since we weren’t used to playing the type of golf courses they had at Southport and Ainsdale.
The next week, we went north to Scotland for the British Open at Carnoustie. The gallery walked with us there, just like in the U.S., and in the first practice round, I was walking along with my driver under my arm, when a fellow accidentally tripped me. I landed crooked because of having the driver tucked under my arm, and hurt my back pretty bad. In fact, I didn’t think I’d be able to play at all. But the local people found me someone like a modern chiropractor, and he worked on me quite a while, using some strong liniment, and I was okay in a couple of days.
Carnoustie was a very different course from what I’d seen before. In the driving areas, even if you were a long hitter, you’d have to go right or left to avoid the bunkers in the middle of nearly every fairway. The bunkers had high lips, too, but at least they were clearly visible from the tee. And there was this small creek, called a “burn,” that wandered through the course.
Carnoustie used to be one of the seven courses in the rotation for the British Open, but some years ago they had to take it out, because there simply wasn’t room for all the people and the cars and so forth, golf had gotten so big. I understand they’re trying to do something about that now, because it’s a fine course and it would be good to see the Open played there again.
It was normal Scottish weather, cold, windy, and damp. In the third round, it turned worse, but I shot a 71 and came from way back to third place, with Cotton in the lead. The final round I shot 74, finished fifth, and won $125. Our boat tickets came to $1020, plus I’d lost a month out of the summer in the shop with both the Ryder Cup and the British, so you can see why we didn’t play in the British Open much back then. The PGA did cover some of our expenses, but I lost $700–$800 out of my own pocket. For the same reasons, the British players weren’t able to play in our Open much, either.
Those British galleries—they were much different from Americans. They really knew their golf, and they’d applaud only for a really marvelous shot. If you hit an iron or chipped up eight or ten feet from the hole, they wouldn’t make a sound. But a difficult pitch or a long iron to within a few feet or inches, they’d really appreciate that.
All in all, we had a very good time, and we were elated when we climbed back on that boat. It was a good thing, too, because the crossing coming home was bad. Most of the passengers stayed in bed nearly half the trip, it was so rough. And if we hadn’t won, it would hardly have been worth it.
The food on our trip was also very different from what I was used to, and I’m afraid I can’t say it was very good. There was a lot of mutton and a lot of thick porridge. About the only things I liked were the tea and cookies.
There was an even bigger party for us when we returned to New York, and though it had been a great experience to play in the Ryder Cup and the British Open, we were sure glad to get back to our home in Reading and return to a more normal life. I played very few other tournaments that summer, because I’d lost so much time out of my shop with the Ryder Cup trip.
An interesting sidelight to my time in Reading was the change in how club members saw the club professional. Louise and I played bridge and went to parties at the homes of several of the members. This was kind of a transition time for club pros, because up till then they were considered more in the lower working class. But we had quite a busy social life in Reading, and made many good friends during our stay. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I’d won the Masters before I arrived and the Open a few months before I left.
One of my more interesting experiences as a teacher at Reading was with a young lady named Betty Pfeil. Her mother made an appointment for me to give Betty a lesson, and before I ever met Betty or her mother, several people had told me that Betty had the makings of a good player if someone could teach her not to overswing.
Well, Betty and Mrs. Pfeil came out for the lesson, and I watched Betty swing for a good forty-five minutes, talked to her a little about this or that part of her game, but never mentioned anything about overswinging. When I was done, her mother asked me why, and I said, “Mrs. Pfeil, Betty doesn’t overswing. She’s extremely supple, and she doesn’t lose the club at the top or move her head, so she’s not overswinging.” That seemed to give Betty more confidence in her game, and she went on to be quite a good player. Won the Pennsylvania State Amateur several times, I believe.
Another fine woman player I became acquainted with while I was at Reading was Glenna Collett. She lived in Philadelphia, and though she was several years older than I, she liked to watch me play, so she’d come see me in quite a few local tournaments. I got to see her play quite often, too, and she was the finest woman golfer I’d ever seen at that time. Now, she couldn’t have beaten Babe Zaharias or Mickey Wright or the good modern women pros, but she was a fine player, with a beautiful swing—and no one can argue with her record. In Glenna’s day, it was still “ladies’ golf,” not women’s golf as it became later and is today, and the ladies then didn’t have the strength or the distance they developed later on.
In the fall of ’37, I was invited along with Denny Shute and Henry Picard, who had played with me on the Ryder Cup team, to go to Argentina to do a series of exhibitions and play in the Argentine Open. Louise and I went back to Texarkana before the trip, and I worked steadily on my game. There was no one around to bother me and I wasn’t working there, so I had the practice area all to myself most of the time. I shagged balls for myself, and just kept refining my swing and working on my short game. Don Murphy, the pro who had come in after me, would come out sometimes and we’d talk about the golf swing. He taught pretty much what I was doing. He continued there till he retired a few years ago, and now is pro emeritus. A good man.
We were in Texarkana for about a month before we flew to Argentina. Folks today would find this hard to believe, but it took, by actual count, seven days to fly there. We flew a combination of DC-3’s and PBY’s—planes that would land and take off on water. We’d start early each day and stop about the middle of the afternoon, because none of the airports or water landing areas had any lights or radar.
With those PBY’s, when we’d take off, they’d have a speedboat go out ahead of us and create a wake for us to take off on. And you’d land between these floating logs they’d anchored on the water. It wasn’t the most enjoyable thing, believe me. In fact, looking back on that trip, I’d say aviation has improved since then even more than golf!
The worst part of the trip down was going through the mountains. That was something, flying through the Andes in a cabin that wasn’t pressurized, at 23,000 feet or more. The plane was dipping and shifting in the wind currents like a blue darter looking for a bug, and we had to take oxygen through these tubes you held in your mouth. Denny Shute got terribly sick, but it didn’t seem to bother me much at the time. Years later, when I began to fly for ABC and found I would just about get the shakes every time, I realized that experience in ’37 really had affected me. I finally had to go see a hypnotist—Dr. Charles Wysong, brother to Dr. Dudley Wysong, whose son now plays some on the Senior Tour. His office was in McKinney, Texas, and he cured me in about a half-dozen sessions. I’ve never had any more trouble with it.
Anyway, the airline had made advance hotel reservations for us, which helped. The mosquitoes were so bad that the beds had mosquito netting all around them, or we never would have gotten much sleep. A Mr. Armstrong of Armour Meat Packing Company had arranged the whole trip; he also made sure our meals were set up ahead of time. I believe he was the head man for Armour in Buenos Aires. We had very good food in Argentina, and as you might expect, wonderful steaks much of the time.
It took us a week to get there. We were there a month, and spent another week getting back. We were paid our expenses plus $1500—and nothing for the two weeks of travel time. We played in a couple of small tournaments, the Argentine Open and another match play event. I didn’t negotiate the greens very well—they were stiff and wiry—so I didn’t score well at all.
One interesting thing happened during one of those exhibitions—a plague of locusts. The air was so thick with them that every time you swung a club, you’d kill six or seven of them and have to wipe off the club before you could hit again. Kind of upset your stomach, really. You could hardly see for all the locusts in the air, plus you’d crunch dozens of them under your feet when you walked. We played three holes before they finally called a halt, and we had to wait about three days till the wind switched directions and the bugs flew off somewhere else and let us play. We have a photo of it, and it’s amazing—people can’t believe we even tried to play under those conditions.
One other note: I got the first case of hives in my life down there. Thought it was the stress of traveling or something, but a doctor determined that it was the avocados with hot sauce I was eating every day. He told me to quit eating them, and the hives cleared up. But I’ve never had any trouble with avocados since then, so maybe it was the hot sauce—who knows?
We played about four exhibitions a week, plus those other tournaments, then flew to Rio de Janeiro, heading home. We stopped to give an exhibition in Rio, but I was tired and homesick, so I came on home. It was a great homecoming. Louise was always glad to see me come back when I went off to play in tournaments, but this time, with me being so far away for six weeks and her worrying about me flying and all, she was happier to see me than I ever expected.
The whole effect of the trip was so negative, really, that a few years later I turned down an offer to go to South Africa and play with Bobby Locke. Sam Snead went instead and got beat fourteen out of sixteen matches, but he was paid $10,000 and they gave him a real nice diamond. Louise didn’t want me to go, of course, but she said later that she wouldn’t have minded having that diamond.
You could say that 1937 was a whirlwind year for me, with my first Masters win, my first Ryder Cup, first British Open, my win in the International Match Play Championships, and the trip to Argentina that fall. So it’s no wonder that I only played in a couple more tournaments by the end of the summer, not doing particularly well in either one. The first was in Miami, and from there, McSpaden and I went on to play in Nassau. It’s interesting to note that our trip there and back was paid for. That was long before the PGA developed the idea of not accepting expenses or appearance money, which I think is a good idea and has been good for the integrity of the game all the way around.
Before we left for Texarkana that fall, Mr. Giles drew up my contract for renewal. He didn’t say anything about a raise, so I told him very politely that I felt I had earned one, that I’d done a good job in the shop and had played well for the club. He agreed, and without another word, he raised my guarantee from $3750 to $5000. That wasn’t salary, you understand. It was simply that if I didn’t clear $5000 from my shop, club care costs, lessons, clothing, clubs, balls, etc., then the club would make up the difference. Fortunately, I had no trouble meeting and even surpassing that guarantee each year, due to increased play and more lessons. I was fortunate in that there was very little cash involved, as nearly everything was charged to each member’s account. Also, the club paid Ralph Trout, my assistant, so I didn’t need to worry about that. In 1939, I didn’t get another increase; it stayed $5000, but once again, I wasn’t worried about making it. Naturally, if you didn’t make your guarantee, the club wouldn’t be very happy with your performance if they had to pay out a lot of money. It was more of a protection in case you had a lot of bad weather or some such thing. Still, that raise surely was some good news to take home to Louise that night.
My winnings in ’37 were $6,509.50, and my caddy and entrance fees were a little over ten percent of that, $712. I did get a $500 bonus from Spalding for winning the Masters, but not anything else that I remember. I ranked seventh on the money list, which was by far the best I’d done yet.
In 1938, I played in twenty-five tournaments and won two of them. Finished well in several more, but I wasn’t burning up the course anywhere. I did play in the second Crosby Pro-Am, at Rancho Santa Fe in California. My partner was Johnny Weissmuller, the movie “Tarzan” and Olympic swimmer. Originally, you know, the amateurs played without any handicaps at all. We didn’t do very well, as I recall, but Weissmuller sure was fun to play with.
Another amateur who played in that tournament was Eddie Lowery, who had McSpaden as his partner. Eddie had been Francis Ouimet’s caddie in the U.S. Open in 1913. He told me once that he’d had to play hooky from school to do it. He would hide out until just before the round started, because they had truant officers in those days, and they were tough. But they didn’t bother him after he got on the course. I’d met Eddie before, but spent quite a bit of time with him that week, and it became the start of a wonderful, lifelong friendship. Eddie was also the one who started me working with Kenny Venturi and Harvie Ward.
One of the most interesting stories that year was the weather during the San Francisco Match Play Tournament. The wind was blowing so bad that there were hurricane flags up out on the bay, but we played anyway. I led after the first qualifying round with a 77, if you can imagine that. I don’t believe they’d play in weather like that now, and I’m glad. It really was scary, and dangerous.
In ’38, I won a little money in most of the tournaments I played, had a good mini-streak of two out of three wins in Florida that spring, and then finished fifth at Augusta. Maybe I didn’t win the Masters because they weren’t demonstrating the Hammond organ this time. It wasn’t a bad year at all, but it would have been hard to equal ’37 anyway, and I didn’t expect to.
Ben Hogan had turned pro two years before I did, but he was a late bloomer. He had trouble with hooking the ball too much, and it took him quite a long time to get that under control. So it took him a long while to make it on the tour to stay. He’d come out for a while, run out of money and go back to Fort Worth, come out again, go back to Texas, and so on. He grew quite discouraged at times, but I could see that he had not only talent, but a kind of dedication and stubborn persistence that no one else did. I encouraged him to keep at it and keep working on his game, and he did all right, finally. Ben practically invented practice, because back then, most clubs didn’t even have a practice area, but Ben would spend hours working on his game wherever he could find a place to practice, and it’s a great part of the reason he was so successful.
But it did take a while before he was on the tour to stay. In the early days of the Masters, they had a Calcutta pool, and in 1938, I was there at the party because I was the defending champion and Mr. Roberts asked that I make an appearance. So Ben Hogan’s name came up, and no one bid on him at all. They were about to put his name in a pot with a couple of other players when I decided to buy him, and I gave $100. The next day, Ben saw me and said, “I hear you bought me in the Calcutta pool last night for $100.” I said, “Yes, Ben, I did.” He said, “Could I buy half-interest?” So I agreed and he scrounged around and came up with fifty dollars. But he didn’t play very well at all and finished out of the money, so at least I only lost $50.
In the ’38 Masters, I was the defending champion, of course, and in the first round, by tradition, I was paired with Bob Jones. It was the second big thrill I had in golf, as far as playing with the legends was concerned. At that time, Jones always played the first round of the Masters with the defending champion, and the last with the tournament leader. He was very nice to play with, talked just the right amount, and encouraged me. He shot a 76 that day, and I had a 73, but it was quite a while after he’d quit playing publicly, and he was really serving as the host of the tournament more than as a player.
When he became too ill to play a few years later, he gave me a great honor by asking me to play the final round in his place, which I did from 1946 until 1956, when Kenny Venturi was the leader. Then the committee decided that since I had worked closely with Kenny, it would be unfair to the other players to have me paired With him, and they put Snead with him instead. After that, they changed to putting the leader with whoever was closest to him, like they do now.
On that spring tour I recall something else pretty unusual happening in a tournament at St. Petersburg, Florida—I whiffed one. That’s right, flat missed the ball. It was in the last round, on a par five, and I drove over to the left side of the fairway, right in front of a nice, five-foot-tall palm tree. When I took a practice swing, my club just barely touched the leaves, so I figured I was okay. But when I took my 4-iron back and started down, the club hit a leaf just hard enough to kind of grab on to it, and I swung right over the top of the ball—never even moved it. No choice but to knock it out in three, and I hit my approach close enough to make my putt for a fairly unusual five.
One interesting thing about the North and South Open, which was always held at Pinehurst. For the money we were making, it was a very expensive place to play, since about the only hotel was the Carolina Inn, where you had to dress for dinner every night—black tie, the works. We never actually stayed there until ’39, and they put all the golfers on the ground floor. Naturally, as we came in after our rounds, we’d be talking about how we’d played, and first one and then another fellow would come out of his room, and pretty soon we’d all be standing out in the hall, talking about golf. It was really fun. Louise and I felt we were living high on the hog in those early days at Pinehurst.
But in ’38, I really was even busier at the club than I had been the year before, so I couldn’t play in as many tournaments as I had at Ridgewood, particularly if they were very far away. One I did play in was the Cleveland Open, when a fellow named Babe Ruth played. After watching him, I thought it was good he played baseball and not golf, because I don’t think he’d ever have made a good golfer. But the gallery loved seeing him.
The U.S. Open in ’38 was at Cherry Hills. I finished fifth and won $412.50, but my clearest memory of that tournament was the rough. It was very inconsistent, and one time, I know it took me two shots to get out of it. Tough course. For the last thirty-six holes I was paired with Dick Metz, who was leading the tournament at the time. But he started leaving every approach shot short of the green, and leaving every putt short, too. I liked Dick very much, and felt sorry for him, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help him. He had a terrible score and finished way out of contention.
The PGA was at Shawnee Country Club in Shawnee on the Delaware, Pennsylvania. Fred Waring, the wonderful bandleader, owned the course. He was also involved in the Waring Company, and as a result, all of the players were given a Waring blender. Quite a newfangled gadget at the time. Unfortunately, it was one of those times when I got hot too early. I beat Harry Bassler, a pro from California, 11 and 10 in my third match, but lost steam after that and got beat in the quarterfinals by Jimmy Hines, 2 and 1.
Runyan and Snead made it to the finals that year, and Runyan used a 4-wood to Snead’s 6-iron and put his ball inside Sam’s every time, nearly. He was already being called “Little Poison” then, and beat Snead 8 and 7. We didn’t have match play tournaments very often—usually in the PGA Championship and a few other events. Even then, tournament organizers were realizing it was hard to predict whether the so-called big names would make it to the finals, and that really affected their ability to sell tickets and make money, or even break even. My own match play record was good, but it should have been better. I had quite a few early matches with what I would call less experienced players, but felt I had to play hard in those matches to keep myself fired up, and I’d peak too early. In the PGA at Pomonok in ’39, for instance, I beat Dutch Harrison 10 and 9 in the semifinals, but I must have used up all my good shots, because I lost to Picard in the final on the 37th hole. Still, I was tenth on the money list that year, and got some sort of a bonus from Spalding, plus balls and equipment. Not a great year, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
1938 was also the year I got started in the golf shoe business. While McSpaden and I were at Pinehurst playing in the North and South, we got to talking with Miles Baker, a salesman for Field and Hint, who made wonderful men’s street shoes. Miles was from Kansas City and a good friend of Jug McSpaden, and he liked golf. Lots of times he would arrange his schedule so he could be where the tour was. We saw him at quite a few of the tournaments. Anyway, this evening we were complaining to Miles about the sorry state of golf shoes. The soles were so thin you could feel the spikes almost right through the leather. And of course, when it rained or we had to play on a wet course, the shoes wouldn’t hold up at all.
So we were telling Miles all this, and we said, “You make such excellent street shoes—‘Dr. Locke’ and ‘Foot-Joy.’ Why couldn’t you make good golf shoes, too?” Miles asked us what we wanted, so we told him. We felt the sole needed to be thicker, and the shoes needed to be broader across the ball of the foot. A little while later, he had us come up to Boston to the factory there, and they made special lasts for us. Then they made up one pair for each of us to try—mine were British tan and brown with wingtips, and McSpaden’s were white buck.
When we came out to the golf course in those new shoes, the players had a fit. “Where’d you get those shoes?” everybody was asking. So all of a sudden Field and Flint was in the golf shoe business, and McSpaden and I each received a 25-cent royalty per pair for quite a few years.
I shot my highest score ever, 434, in a tournament that year of ’38, but I tied for third and won $950. For some reason I don’t recall, we played 108 holes at Westchester, for a purse of $10,000. Guess they wanted to make sure the fans got their money’s worth.
Toward the end of September in 1938, McSpaden and I went to do an exhibition in Butte, Montana, on our way to the Pacific Northwest. Louise came too, and we were to fly into Butte, but in those days you didn’t fly very quickly. We took off right after playing in Tulsa and made a lot of stops; by the time we reached Butte it was about midnight. What was worse, though, was there was a snowstorm and we couldn’t land, so we flew on and landed at Missoula. Then we caught a milk train from Missoula back to Butte that stopped at just about every little station to load five-gallon milk cans into the baggage car. It was terribly cold, but fortunately, there was one car that had a little old pot-bellied coal stove, and that’s how we kept from freezing. The seats were just straight down and up with no padding, so they weren’t very comfortable. We got to Butte about two and a half hours later and went straight to bed. When we woke up there was snow on the ground, but the man in charge said we still were going to play. At the golf course, thank goodness, there were just patches of snow, so we put on a clinic and then went out to play. Believe it or not, quite a few people had come out for this, but not being used to the cold weather, we were about to freeze. I finally noticed one man in the gallery who had on a beautiful, warm-looking down jacket. I said, “That sure looks good—I’d like to have that on me about now!” He said, “Well, I can’t give you this one, but I’ll send you one—what size do you wear?” Sure enough, he did send me one just like his, and though I don’t get to wear it much here in Texas because we have such mild winters, it does come in handy once in a while.
That fall, we returned to Texarkana and Louise’s folks’ place. We’d been married over four years now, and we were beginning to wonder why we hadn’t had any children. So Louise went to her doctor and was tested, and the doctor said there wasn’t any reason he could find why she couldn’t get pregnant. My turn was next, and that was when they discovered the high fever I’d had with the typhoid had made me sterile. Louise was very disappointed, naturally, and I was, too, but she took it very well, didn’t brood about it, though it made her sad for quite a while. Some time later, she wanted to adopt a child, but I wasn’t in favor of it. We had to travel so much, and it wasn’t like it is on the tour now, with nurseries and special arrangements for babies. You almost never saw a tour player’s children at any tournament, unless it was being played in his city. It was just too much trouble, driving from city to city as we did then, to have children along and try to bring them up that way.
The other problem was I’d seen so many adopted children who just didn’t turn out right, for one reason or another. I was very reluctant to take that sort of a chance, and after a while, Louise gave up the idea and turned her energies instead to her nieces and nephews. I guess that in all our fifty years of marriage, that was the one regret she had. This may sound strange, but I never particularly regretted not having any children, except for Louise’s sake, because I always wanted to please her and make her happy. She was a wonderful wife in every way, and I know she would have been a wonderful mother, too. As it turned out, when we moved back to Texas and settled in Roanoke in ’46, we spent so much time with Louise’s nieces and nephews that we almost felt we’d helped raise quite a few of them. That helped Louise tremendously, and I enjoyed it, too.
In 1938, though, we spent the fall in Texarkana, with me practicing quite a bit and Louise enjoying being with her family. We lived at her parents’ home, since they had a spare bedroom. It was good to be free of the responsibility of running a club for a while, because it gave me more time to concentrate on my game. Really, those times in Texarkana were about the only vacations we had while I was on the tour.
I didn’t do anything spectacular in California those first weeks on tour in ’39. Probably the most interesting thing I did was play in a pro-am at Hillcrest in Los Angeles with Chico Marx. He was very animated and funny, though he didn’t say much. When he signed the scorecard, he wrote, “I enjoyed it—bet you didn’t.” But I did tie for seventh in L.A., finished eighth in Oakland, and lost the first round in the San Francisco Match Play tournament. Then I tied for second in the Crosby Pro-Am, and was third in the Texas Open at San Antonio. In that Texas Open McSpaden and I played a practice round against Runyan and Ben Hogan, and McSpaden shot a 59. I helped four shots, making our best ball 55. Not everyone knows that the Texas Open is one of the oldest on the tour. Only the Western, the PGA, and the U.S. Open have been going on longer.
The next tournament in ’39 was the Phoenix Open, and that was when I finally woke up. I won by twelve strokes. Mind you, that was a 54-hole tournament, so I had to be playing good to be leading that much after three rounds. I shot 64 in the Pro-Am, then 68-65-65. All that work for $700. Believe it or not, it snowed so much in Phoenix Friday and Saturday that we couldn’t play either day, and had to play thirty-six on Sunday just to have a tournament at all. The two 65’s I shot that Sunday were the record for one day for quite a few years.
I let up a little bit after Phoenix, and didn’t play particularly well for the next couple of months. One thing of interest, though, was the Thomasville tournament in Georgia. The course was Glen Arven, and it had the oddest finishing hole I ever saw. It was a par 5, and horseshoe or U-shaped, so the green was no more than a hundred yards from the tee. The area within the “U” was considered out of bounds, and that wasn’t so unusual, but they had a local rule that said you couldn’t even cut across that out of bounds area. If you hit your drive to the right spot to try and go over the “U,” they could rule your ball O.B., even if it landed on the green. Kept us all honest, I guess.
It’s also interesting to realize that there was often quite a bit of difference in the purses among various tournaments, much more so than there is now. Most had a purse of $5000, and occasionally one would offer $10,000, but there were still quite a few of $3000 or less. And even the $10,000-purse events didn’t pay everyone who made the cut—mostly only the top twenty places or so. We still played in every one we could get to, though. Obviously, we weren’t playing just for the money sometimes, more for the fun of it and the chance to keep working on our games.
Back then, you learned to play winning golf by playing on the tour. None of us had college degrees or any other kind of jobs other than club jobs, and we hadn’t had all the training that the young men and women have today on their tours. We had what I guess you might call on-the-job training. It was tough at times, but life was good, too.
In St. Petersburg that spring, I played with Frank Walsh, whose brother became president of the PGA some years later. Frank was a pretty good player himself, but had some odd ideas. For one, he always believed that good players carried their clubs in their left hand. Jimmy Demaret was the only one I knew of who did, and he was a pretty good hacker, but I never really noticed anyone else doing that consistently. Guess I had my mind more on my own game.
My next big target that year was the North and South Tournament at Pinehurst #2. I hadn’t yet played as well there as I felt I should have, and I was hoping to do better this time. I played very steady, nothing really very unusual, shot 280 and won by two strokes. They say when you’re playing well, you get a lot of breaks—or another way of putting it, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But on the seventeenth hole in the last round, I really did have a bit of luck—both good and bad.
The bad part was my tee shot buried in the face of the right-hand bunker on a fairly steep upslope with the pin cut on the right side. The good part was I holed out for a 2, and that birdie ended up being half of my two-stroke winning margin.
The reason I say I was fortunate was that I didn’t putt very well through the entire tournament. In fact, after it was over, R.A. Stranahan, the president of Champion Spark Plug in Toledo, Ohio, and the father of Frank Stranahan, who later became a fine golfer, came to me in the locker room and said, “You made a liar out of me.” Surprised, I said, “How did I do that?” And he replied, “I said no one could putt poorly and win this tournament.” So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t have to putt on the seventeenth. Mr. Stranahan was around golf a lot, involved in various golf organizations, and an avid golfer himself. To give him credit, he was right—it was very unusual for someone to putt poorly and still manage to win.
The North and South was a very important win for me, since it was considered a major at the time, and I felt very good about being able to win despite very average putting. I was very happy to have achieved another goal of mine, and the folks at Reading were, too.
In defense of my putting, though, the greens we played from city to city were so inconsistent that we mostly concentrated on getting our approach shots close enough to the pin that we wouldn’t have to worry about putting much. Very few of the pros worked a whole lot on their putting. Made more sense to work on your irons or your chipping.
I played all right the next two weeks, finishing tenth at Greensboro and seventh at the Masters, then skipped Asheville, the Met Open, and the Goodall Round Robin. Not because I had to be at the club, but because I had been given another wonderful opportunity to advance in my career as a club professional.
Cloyd Haas, president of the Haas-Jordan Company in Toledo and a member at Inverness, had gone to George Jacobus, my good friend at Ridgewood, and told him Inverness was looking for a new pro. George told him about me, and also suggested he speak with Ben Hogan up the road at Hershey Country Club. Mr. Haas did exactly that, and I guess he liked the way I combed my hair better or something. Anyway, he invited me to come up to Inverness, which I did the next week, and I signed a contract with Ralph Carpenter, president of the club and of Dana Corporation, to come to Inverness in April 1940.
I would be paid $3600 in salary—basically about $600 a month for the time I’d be there, plus I got all the profits from the shop. The club paid the caddiemaster, Huey Rogers, and either all or part of assistant pro Herman Lang’s salary. Even then, though I was playing well and winning money most of the time, I wasn’t thinking about making a living on the tour. I knew I needed that club job to survive.
My Inverness contract was again an improvement over what I was making at Reading, but also a lot more responsibility, larger membership, and a well-known championship course. As you can imagine, I was flying pretty high. I also signed an endorsement contract with MacGregor in June 1939. Tommy Armour was the pro at Boca Raton, and his clubs were the main ones MacGregor was making then. We pros were all at Boca at the time for a meeting, and afterwards I went to Tommy’s pro shop and picked out a set of his irons, called “Silver Scots.” Two weeks later, I won the Open with those irons and kept them quite a while—at least till I had MacGregor make some with my own name on them.
The Open that year was held at Philadelphia Country Club, which at that time had two courses: Bala Cynwyd in town, and the Spring Mill Course out in the country, where the tournament was to be held. I felt I was playing rather well, hitting my irons great, and in the practice rounds, I scored close to par. It was normally a par-71 course, but the USGA wanted to make it more difficult, and changed two of the short par fives into par fours, which made it a par 69—about the only time such a “short” course has been an Open site. One of the redesigned holes was the eighth, and the other was the twelfth. This was in the days before clubs would spend money to change a course just for a specific tournament.
You might be interested to know that despite a par of 69, those par fours were far from easy. They were 480, 454, 453, 449, 447, 425, and 421 yards, so you know we were using those long irons a lot.
I was very nervous in the first round and played poorly for the first seven holes. The eighth was a long par 4, slightly uphill. I hit a good drive and a 2-iron on the green and almost birdied it. On the 9th I hit a long iron to within eight feet of the pin and made it, which encouraged me. I really did hit my irons well, though I never holed a chip or pitch the entire time. In the four regulation and two playoff rounds, I hit the pin six times with my irons, from 1-iron to 8-iron.
We played thirty-six holes the last day, and I was paired with Olin Dutra, who’d won in ’34 at Merion. We were both well in contention. My friend from Texarkana, J.K. Wadley, was following us, and also knew Olin. After our first eighteen, he offered to buy us lunch. Dutra ordered roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes and all the trimmings. I said, “I’ll have the same,” and Mr. Wadley said, “No, you won’t.” He ordered for me—a chicken sandwich on toast with no mayonnaise, some vegetables, iced tea, and half a piece of apple pie.
That afternoon, it was hot and muggy. Dutra played badly, and I shot a 1-under-par 68, which got me in a tie with Denny Shute and Craig Wood. That taught me a good lesson, not to eat too heavy a meal before going out to play, and I’ve abided by it ever since.
I was very fortunate to get into that playoff. Snead, who was worried about Shute playing behind him, made a poor club selection on eighteen. He thought he needed a birdie to win when he only needed a par, but he ended up with an 8, so he missed both winning and getting into the playoff.
In the first playoff, Shute struggled to a 76, while Craig and I tied at 68. On the last hole, Craig was leading me by a stroke and tried to reach the green at 18 in two, but hooked his second shot badly, and hit a man in the gallery right in the head. The man had been standing in the rough to the left, and the ball dropped and stayed there in the rough, about thirty yards short of the green. The fellow was knocked out, and they carried him across the green right in front of us while Craig waited to play his third shot. Of course, his ball would have been in even worse trouble if it hadn’t gotten stopped, but that didn’t make Craig feel any better. He hit a pitch shot then that left him with a six-footer for birdie, while my ball was eight feet away. I would putt first.
As I stood over my ball, suddenly the thought popped into my head of all the times when we were playing as caddies at Glen Garden and we’d say, “This putt is for the U.S. Open.” Now I was really playing that dream out, and it steadied me enough that I sank my putt. But Craig left his just one inch short, so we were tied.
That meant another 18-hole playoff in those days, and the committee asked us before we played that afternoon whether we would be willing to go to sudden death if we tied again. We both said, “No, we’ll go a full eighteen.” They weren’t real happy to hear that, because the folks working on the tournament had to get back to their jobs, and of course the members wanted their course back. But we both felt the same way, that we didn’t want to win based on just one or two holes. So they agreed.
On the second playoff, I hit a bad second shot at the first hole and ended up in the deep right bunker, but I got up and down all right. On the second, a long par three, we had to use drivers, and had to carry the green. I pushed mine into some deep rough, while Wood’s tee shot landed on the green. I got out with my sand wedge and saved par, and Wood two-putted. The next hole I birdied while Craig parred, and on the fourth, I hit a good drive, then holed a 1-iron for an eagle, while Craig made another four.
When I was lining up to play my second shot, I wasn’t thinking at all about holing out. But I’d been striking my irons so well, had just birdied the third hole, and I felt I could hit this one close and make birdie again. Sure enough, the ball went straight up to the green and straight into the hole like a rat. There were a lot of folks in the gallery, and they whooped and hollered quite a bit, though they were still quieter than the fans are now. You know, when you’re on the golf course and hear the spectators cheering, you learn quickly that the applause for an eagle is different from a birdie, and of course it’s even louder for a hole in one. No matter where you are, you can tell by the applause just how good the shot was. What you don’t want to hear the gallery do when you’re playing is give a big groan—because that means you just missed a short putt.
Anyway, as I walked off the green, I remember thinking very vividly, “Boy, I’m three strokes ahead now!” But I knew it was no time to turn negative or quit being aggressive. I knew I had to continue playing well. As it happened, I then bogeyed a couple of holes but so did Craig, and that three-stroke lead proved to be my winning margin, 70 to 73.
Harold McSpaden—who was really the best friend I had on the tour—walked along with me through both of the playoff rounds, helping me get through the gallery and just being there. Naturally, he didn’t say anything, but his presence and support sure were a big help to me.
Mr. Giles, my boss and friend from Reading, was there with quite a few of the members, so you might say I almost had my own gallery. George Jacobus was there too, and was nearly beside himself with excitement. He said to me afterwards, “You remember, Byron, we talked about this, and I said, ‘You’re going to be the National Champion one of these days.’ ” I was kind of in a trance for a few days before I fully realized I was indeed the U.S. Open champion and had accomplished another dream.
After I got back home, the members of all three clubs—Berkleigh, Galen Hall, and Reading—gave Louise and me a wonderful party. They presented Louise with a large silver bowl that had her name engraved on it. Then they gave me a handsome, solid gold watch by Hamilton, engraved on the back “Byron Nelson, Winner U.S. Open 1939–40, Members of Reading Country Club.” I still have both of them. They also gave me a Model 70 Winchester 30.06, a mighty fine rifle. That was arranged by Alex Kagen, a member at Berkleigh, who owned a sporting goods store and had once asked me if I hunted. When I told him all I had was a shotgun, he came up with the idea for the Winchester. I used it every time I went hunting, and kept it until just recently, when I sold it to my good friend, Steve Barley.
So there I was, the U.S. Open champion, with a contract I’d signed two weeks before to go to Inverness, just like when I signed the contract to go to Reading one week before I won the Masters. Some people would say I needed an agent to help me capitalize on my wins, but hardly anybody had one in those days. Hagen was the only one I knew of who did—a fellow named Bob Harlow, the golf writer who started Golf World magazine.
Shortly after the Open, Ben and Valerie Hogan came to visit and stayed a week. We practiced a lot and played some. I had to work, of course, but Ben played a couple of times with Mr. Giles, and he really enjoyed getting a chance to play with Ben, who was playing much better by then.
As it happened, my next tournament was the Inverness Invitational Four-Ball, which involved seven two-man teams. It was an interesting format, where you scored only plus or minus over seven rounds and four days of play. I was paired with McSpaden, and we tied for first at plus 6, then lost on the first playoff hole. This was my first real chance to see the course and the club where I’d be working the next year, and I enjoyed myself.
One week later, I won the Massachusetts State Open. McSpaden wanted me to come play in it because he knew the course real well, and because we were such good friends. I went, and in the last round, Harold and I were battling it out pretty tight. Along about the middle of the last nine, there was a long par 3 with a bunker on the right. I pushed my tee shot into the bunker and holed it from there. That kept me going good and I won by four shots. I won $400 plus $250 appearance money. There weren’t many events that paid appearance money then, and I’m glad the PGA stopped it, but it sure did come in handy back when most of us were just barely making ends meet.
The PGA that year was at Pomonok, Long Island. The World’s Fair was in New York, and my mother came to see me play and see the fair, too. It was the only tournament she ever saw me play in. I beat Chuck Garringer, Red Francis, John Revolta, and Emerick Kocsis—brother to Chuck, a wonderful amateur who still shoots better than his age—to get to the quarterfinals. Then I went up against Dutch Harrison, and either I was playing awfully well or he was way off his game, but after the 26th hole, I was 9 up, and as we came to the 27th hole, Dutch said to me, “Byron, why don’t you just birdie this one, too, and we won’t have to go past the clubhouse.” I thought it was a good idea. As it happened, I did birdie, and beat him 10 and 9.
In the finals, though, I had my hands more than full with Picard. I was one up coming to the last hole, and Picard laid me a dead stymie. It was a short par 4, and I had pitched to three feet. But Picard’s shot stopped twelve inches from the hole directly in my line, and since we were playing stymies, you didn’t mark your ball or anything—the other fellow had to figure out a way to get over or around you and in the cup. Unfortunately, I didn’t make my shot go in, and we tied.
Picard won on the first extra hole, but there’s a little story connected with how it happened. This was the first tournament ever that was broadcast on radio. It was just short-wave, and it was done by Ted Heusing and Harry Nash. Ted Heusing was an excellent broadcaster who my good friend Chris Schenkel admired a great deal, and Harry Nash was a fine golf writer for the Newark Evening News.
On that first extra hole, Picard hit his drive into the right rough, and Ted and Harry were riding in a sizable four-wheeled vehicle, right close by. They didn’t see where Picard’s ball had landed, and drove right over it. The officials ruled that he should get a free drop, which was only right, and he put his next shot twenty feet from the hole and made birdie to win.
I took the next week off, missing the tournament in Scranton, to make sure things were in order back at the club and to practice some for the Western Open, another major I had my sights set on. It was at Medinah #3, and I drove exceptionally well—seldom ever got in the rough at all. I won by one shot, and it meant even more to me because the trophy had been donated by my friend J.K. Wadley.
Though the North and South and the Western Open aren’t considered majors now—the North and South doesn’t even exist anymore—you knew then which ones were more important because the golf club companies would award bonuses for them. I got $500 from Spalding that year for the Western, which was always considered somewhat more important than the North and South because it drew from all around the country. The other was always played at Pinehurst, and a lot of the players from the western part of the country didn’t go. Another reason the Western was ranked higher was that the tournament contributed money to the Chick Evans Scholarship Fund, which added prestige and publicity. Evans, an excellent golfer, was always there, too, and his name meant a lot of good things to golf. He’d won the Open himself, and had been a caddie like most of us, so I felt really good about winning the Western.
The next regular tour event I played well in was the Hershey Open several weeks later. The tournament was sponsored by Mr. Hershey himself, who was the president of the club and a very nice man. Par was 73. I was 5 under and leading going into the fourth round, and paired with Ed Dudley and Jimmy Hines. We came to the 15th hole, where you’d drive down the fairway and over a hill. Well, I drove right down the middle of it, but when we got to the place where my ball should have been, it was nowhere to be found. There wasn’t any confusion about it, because my golf balls had my name imprinted on them, and everyone there had seen mine go absolutely straight down the fairway and disappear over the hill.
I had no choice but to go back and hit another ball. But with that two-stroke penalty I ended up in fourth place. Afterwards, I was talking to the press in the locker room and told them what had happened. Fred Corcoran was managing the tour then, and always trying to get publicity, so he got all the papers he could to pick up the story.
About ten days later, I received an anonymous letter stating that the writer’s guest and friend at the tournament, a young woman who knew nothing about golf, had picked up my ball and put it in her purse. After the tournament, as they returned to New York on the train, the woman opened her purse and showed him the ball she’d found on the course, and the gentleman realized then what had happened. Since these were the days before gallery ropes, people walked all over the course in front of you and in back of you and right alongside you. The young lady had apparently been walking across the fairway at the bottom of the hill after I drove, saw the ball lying there, and simply picked it up.
The letter was postmarked from the New York Central Post Office, and the man included money orders totaling $300—the difference between third prize in the tournament and fourth, where I finished. The money orders were signed “John Paul Jones”—clearly fictitious. I never did find out who did it, but whoever it was, it was a nice thing to do.
I guess I got a lot of media attention for that time but it was very little compared to what goes on now. I was glad for the attention, but since I hadn’t talked to the press much after beating Lawson Little in San Francisco in ’35 and winning the Masters in ’37, it took some getting used to. I was even being interviewed on radio now, though we always had to go downtown to the station to do it.
I’ve always been fortunate with the publicity I received, and have had very little inaccurate reporting. Might be because I was always a little on the shy side, and didn’t really talk very much or very fast, so the reporters couldn’t get much wrong. I’d have to say, overall, that I enjoyed the attention. After I won the Open especially, people in the gallery would say, “Boy, you’re sure hitting your irons good,” or some such thing, and that would encourage me. Then I’d try even harder, because I didn’t want to let them down.
With three majors to my credit, 1939 was definitely my best year so far. My official winnings were $9444, making me fifth on the money list. My stroke average was 71.02, good enough to win the Vardon Trophy, which was an added bonus.
The year I’d have in 1945 was a little more unusual, but with the quality of the tournaments that I won—three majors—and the way I played, 1939 was right up there with ’45. And naturally, I had no idea what would happen in ’45 was even possible. No, at that point, I was simply looking ahead to the winter tour and wanting to do my best for the folks at Inverness the next spring.
So Louise and I packed up and went back to Texarkana, where I practiced and played some with my friends or with the pro there, Don Murphy. Looking back on the whole year, I was more than satisfied with my accomplishments.