DURING THE 1936 PGA CHAMPIONSHIP, being played at Pinehurst No. 2, PGA president George Jacobus and executive board member Ed Dudley summoned Fred Corcoran from the scoreboard he was running to a private room for a meeting that had been arranged by Richard Tufts, who now ran the resort he’d inherited from his father, Leonard.
“Fred,” Jacobus said, “I’ll get right to the point. Would you be interested in taking over the job of tournament manager for the PGA?”
Bob Harlow, the thirty-one-year-old Corcoran learned, had once more been relieved of his duties, owing to conflict-of-interest complaints that had dogged him since day one on the job. Likewise, Horton Smith was being dumped as the players’ representative on the committee in favor of Augusta head pro Ed Dudley.
The son of a Harvard Square tour guide and sports promoter who was credited with creating the first spectator program for a college football game, Fred Corcoran possessed his father’s enterprising hustle as well as his upbeat Irish charm. While staging and handicapping golf events around the Boston area as secretary of the Massachusetts Golf Association, he’d innovated such practices as using different colored numbers on the scoreboard to indicate a player’s status on the course, a practice soon adopted by tournaments everywhere.
Corcoran leapt at the opportunity to manage the tour and signed a one-year contract with the PGA on the spot, though he had no idea he was facing the resumption of the fierce behind-the-scenes war for control of the tournament circuit that had been simmering for years.
Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the winter tour’s first stop in 1937, he was collared by the displaced Horton Smith and others who were steamed that the popular Harlow had been shown the door. “He went after me like a prosecuting attorney,” Corcoran noted in his breezy memoir, Unplayable Lies, “digging at me with questions about my background and qualifications for the job that made me feel like I ought to go back to the gate and buy a ticket.”
Even as he settled into his job, a petition was being circulated calling for his ouster—reflecting an abiding affection for Harlow and a growing contempt among lesser-known players for the PGA itself, considering it a cabal of club pros who wished to simply tighten control over those who competed on tour week to week. Meanwhile, in the absence of exciting new talent that might rekindle the public’s interest, the game’s longtime headliners Hagen and Sarazen now only made appearances at major tournaments, and relied on lucrative private exhibitions to finance their baronial lifestyles.
Not surprisingly, it was the cool, levelheaded Henry Picard who gave Corcoran the reassurance he needed to survive his turbulent first week on the job, as the conflict threatened to explode onto the pages of the nation’s newspapers: “Fred, I don’t care what they say. You just do a good job and you’ll be okay with me. And that goes for the rest of the boys on this tour.”
The next week in Oakland, Horton Smith orchestrated a meeting between disgruntled players and the press, hoping to force a Corcoran resignation. This gambit backfired when reporters made clear they had no interest in possibly damaging the turnout in Oakland by publicizing the rift, and again the rebellion fell short. As Corcoran later told his friends in Boston, “I survived for another day but I needed something good to happen to save my head from the Hottentots. I knew it was only a matter of time before they came back.” His salvation came from an unlikely source. “Then something happened at Oakland that signaled the dawn of a new era in American golf—and took the pressure off me by focusing interest elsewhere,” he wrote in his memoir. “Sam Snead suddenly exploded onto the sports pages. The rangy and picturesque boy from the [mountains] of Virginia popped in with 270 to win the tournament. It was the greatest thing that could have happened to golf—and to me.”
The fuse of this sudden explosion was actually lit a month before when Sam made his second Miami Open and finished tenth, netting a paltry $108. This was where, on the range, 1931 British Open champ Tommy Armour pointed to a young player practicing diligently and asked Gene Sarazen, “Who is that kid over there with the crazy upright swing?”
“Name’s Byron Nelson,” Sarazen told him. “He’s out of Texas. Nice kid. He won the Metropolitan last summer and placed third at the Western.”
“Well, with that swing of his, he better go on back to Texas. He’ll never make it out here, that’s for sure,” remarked Armour, who would soon be named the new head professional at the prestigious Boca Raton Club. Within a few years of this, the Silver Scot would completely revise his opinion of Byron Nelson’s golf swing, calling it “the finest golf swing I have ever seen.” But that was yet to come. At that same moment, Ben Hogan was back home in Texas, settling into a new job at the Nolan River Golf Club in tiny Cleburn, wondering if his professional golf career was finished before it ever got started.
After he played poorly in the next event, in Nassau, Bahamas, Sam himself questioned whether he had the means to keep following the caravan, but a chance conversation with Henry Picard and Craig Wood bolstered his confidence. “I asked Henry if he thought I was good enough to head for California for the tournaments out there and he told me I’d have to place one, two or three to even make my expenses. I was pretty downcast about that because Dunlop hadn’t come through yet with the five hundred dollars they promised and I had only my puny earnings from Miami and some of the three hundred from finishing third at the Cascades Open. Then Wood said something that gave me a real boost. He told me I ought to give it a shot and if I ran out of dough, why, he’d help me get back home on his own nickel. Henry agreed to help out, too, and suggested I find someone to split traveling expenses with. That just made a world of difference to me.”
Picard’s confidence was justified when Sam met Johnny Bulla, a brainy Quaker minister’s son from Burlington, North Carolina, a natural left-hander who grew up caddying and honing his game by playing right-handed against some of the best young players of the Carolinas. Bulla was Sam’s junior by two years, but they shared a love of bass fishing and were kindred spirits. Their friendship blossomed quickly and only deepened as the years rolled on. Sam was soon calling Bulla “Boo Boo” for his tendency to blow important shots under pressure and moan about them later. Johnny Bulla, however, a dedicated reader of psychology and science magazines, believed he was on the verge of a major breakthrough, and he planned to be in Los Angeles when the winter tour started. He’d even already lined up a traveling partner—a homesick tight end from the University of North Carolina headed back to California to play football for USC. Bulla was only too happy to have Sam join them and divide expenses into thirds.
The three agreed to split oil and gas and lodging, and Sam volunteered that he had an uncle in L.A. who promised to put them up for the week. But when he proposed that he and Boo Boo split their tournament winnings, as well, his friend balked. “Don’t mean any offense, Jackson,” Bulla said, using the middle name he preferred, “but I don’t see how I can come out on the better end of that deal.” So off they went, staying in fleabag motels and living on roadside hamburgers. Every morning before they hit the road, the footballer made the golfers run a mile just to keep their legs limber. “Boo Boo hated that, but I wasn’t that far from high school football myself so it didn’t bother me much. That fella made all-American, too. But we had to squeeze nickels until the buffalo groaned,” Sam remembered. And though Bulla had rejected Sam’s offer to split earnings—one of worst decisions he ever made, he later admitted—he now suggested they have a standing five-dollar wager on every tournament, for a little extra motivation.
On the practice tee before the start in Los Angeles, Henry Picard offered to let Sam try out a new George Izett driver he’d spotted in his bag.
Made by a respected Philadelphia club maker, it weighed 14.5 ounces and had eight degrees of loft, an extra stiff shaft and a swing weight of E-5, basically unhittable by anyone short of a gorilla or a serious athlete. “The Dunlop driver I was using was so whippy I had a helluva time controlling my tee shots,” Sam explained. “But this club was something else. The harder I swung, the straighter it went. That club gave me more control than I’d ever had in my life. Pick said I should just take it along and use it. My driving improved right then and there.”
He insisted on buying it and paid Henry Picard $5.50 for the club that would make him the longest driver in the game, a club he used to win all of his major titles and, by Sam’s account, more than a hundred tournaments. “That act of generosity by Henry Picard,” he said, “could never be repaid because that wood was the single greatest discovery I ever made in golf and put me on the road to happy times.”
Another bit of good fortune awaited him in L.A. During an impromptu quarter-a-hole putting contest with fellow pro Leo Walper, Sam borrowed his upright knockoff of Bobby Jones’s famous “Calamity Jane” and nailed three long putts. Walper joked that he ought to buy it, and Sam had the money out of his pocket before Leo could change his mind. They made the exchange for $3.50. “You can’t believe what those two clubs did for my confidence,” Sam recalled years later. “Those are the two most important clubs in the bag by far, you know, and finding them when I did, first one then the other, was like I was supposed to win.”
Sam had an unshakable faith in such signs. In L.A., he picked up $600 in winnings and another five bucks off Johnny Bulla, who made nothing in the tournament. To make matters worse, driving north to the next event at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, Bulla cracked up his car and had to dole out $140 for repairs. “The way we figured it was one of us had to finish high in the money or we were finished,” said Sam, who opened the tournament with a 69 but was annoyed that the scorer had spelled his name Sneed. “My gallery consisted of my caddie and an old man who kept hobbling after me, coughing and snapping his false teeth when I was putting,” he said. After a third-round 69 tied him for the lead, the scorer finally spelled his name correctly—though few observers expected his luck to hold up.
Unaware that he’d taken the lead by the seventieth hole, a narrow “barrel” par-four where interlocking trees formed a canopy over the fairway, Sam became momentarily unnerved by the large gallery suddenly swarming around him and slugged his approach shot into the trees, dropping a stroke. After he recovered with a birdie at the home hole, he bolted for the locker room followed by a “mob” slapping him affectionately on the back.
A photographer wanted to take his picture but Sam superstitiously refused, believing this would ruin his chances of winning. He was heading for Bulla’s jalopy when Fred Corcoran caught up to him. “Where are you going, Sam?” he said, having spotted something appealing in him and taken him to breakfast earlier in the week. “You’ve won this thing, son. The press is waiting to speak with you inside.” The club’s banquet hall had been turned into an impromptu press room and Sam was asked to stand on a table and field questions fired rapidly at him from all sides.
He looked, according to Corcoran, like a deer caught in headlights. “The room was blue with cigar and cigarette smoke and Sam didn’t like that,” Fred recalled. “He was grumpy and uncomfortable. He wanted out.” When a kneeling photographer flashed his photograph, a startled Sam leapt from the table and rushed for the parking lot, advising everybody to keep away from him. The photograph went out over the wires hours later and wound up in newspapers across the country under headlines like “Country Kid Takes Oakland Trophy” and “Reluctant Star Runs Away from Field.”
Accustomed to being either ignored or condescended to by Country Club types, Sam was overwhelmed. But Corcoran recognized a promotional windfall when he spotted one, and scrambled to gather additional details from the colorful young Virginian as he fled the premises. Two days later down in Rancho Santa Fe, where singer and actor Bing Crosby was hosting his first annual “clambake,” there was a protracted rain delay, during which Corcoran showed Sam his photograph in The New York Times. “Mr. Corcoran,” Sam reportedly declared, “how come they got my picture in New York? I ain’t never been there in my life.”
This wasn’t exactly true, of course, though both men mention some version of the exchange in their memoirs. Just about everything that happened to Sam Snead in those days was subject to artful exaggeration—by the press or the man himself or the gifted image maker who would soon become his business partner.
From Corcoran’s standpoint, the timing simply couldn’t possibly have been better. As the country was just beginning to lift its head from seven years of relentless bad news, the reading public craved stories about underdogs who rose from Nowheresville to succeed against all odds. While the undersized but big-hearted Seabiscuit was heading for the ultimate showdown against the presumed invincible War Admiral, Sam Snead seemed almost too good to be true, a poor rube from the backwoods who struck it rich in California, like a character from a Frank Capra film, a real-life Mr. Smith in golf spikes. Even his name possessed a magical, all-American simplicity—easy to remember, hard to forget.
The enterprising Corcoran quickly turned Sam’s purported confusion about New York—which he’d passed through once, if not twice, before—to incalculable promotional advantage, feeding it to the idle pressmen at Rancho Santa Fe with various other enticing bits and pieces of his colorful Blue Ridge bio, somewhat indifferent to the purity of facts. He had “Slammin’ Sammy Snead” loving to play golf barefoot and hunting possum whenever possible, and learning to play the game while dodging moonshiners in the hidden retreats, using no more than a hickory nut and a stout swamp maple limb for a ball and club.
It didn’t stop there, either. When Sam mentioned to Jimmy Demaret that he’d made a practice green by sinking empty tomato cans in his family’s backyard, the affable Texan quipped that he probably was planning to keep all his winnings there, too, a joke that grew more truthful with each passing year. Corcoran nimbly wove his natural frugality and mistrust of banks into Sam’s rapidly evolving bio, because it resonated with millions of ordinary Americans who shared his beliefs. And the press ate up these folksy details and just about everything that Sam said, with his distinctive, wide-eyed drawl. Corcoran’s hokey moniker—Dan’l Boone with a driver—seemed even more relevant when Sam captured the rain-shortened Crosby and pocketed $1,000 before heading up to San Francisco for the Matchplay Championship. Years later, of course, Sam would confide to friends and his first biographer that he resented being portrayed as an ignorant hayseed, but it played splendidly at the time, giving the tour a little sparkle when it needed it most—putting him on the road to wealth and fame.
“My hillbilly background provided sports writers with plenty of grist, and Corcoran kept them well supplied,” Sam told writer George Mendoza in the 1970s. “I don’t think I was ever totally the rube they made me out to be, but they loved to hear about how I’d spend my time between tours back up at Ashwood with my folks.”
“No Hollywood scriptwriter could have invented Sam Snead; he was the real article,” Corcoran wrote in his own memoirs. “He had the flavor and tang of authenticity, plus the magic that promoters dream about, that extra quality that brings people to the ticket window waving their money. Sponsors all along the line were wiring and phoning. They wanted assurance Snead would play in their tournament. And I promised them delivery of the new sensation.”
Before the Houston tournament that closed out 1937’s Western swing, at the suggestion of George Jacobus, Corcoran officially signed on to become Sam’s manager and thus fanned the conflict-of-interest flames that cost Bob Harlow his job. Many fellow competitors, especially the lesser-known players, groused that Snead was suddenly given preferential treatment in the form of favorable tee times and other perks, including his pick of lucrative exhibition matches and endorsement deals. Indeed, before the year was out, though he didn’t smoke or drink, Sam’s name and likeness would grace Chesterfield cigarettes and National Bohemian beer, neither of which he consumed, not to mention Firestone tires and Gillette razors. He posed wearing Mexican sombreros and goofy straw hats, even put on overalls and had his picture taken pitching hay. The fact that he made no attempt to fraternize after hours with other players didn’t boost his popularity with fellow players.
For their part, Jacobus and Corcoran were willing to overlook all this sniping and focus instead on exploiting this golden opportunity. For the first time in nearly a decade, professional golf had a bankable marquee player. And during the fifteen years Corcoran managed both the PGA Tournament Bureau and Sam Snead, the value of the former jumped from $120,000 to more than $1 million and the latter became a household word and a very wealthy man. (During this same time, Corcoran produced similar windfalls managing the likes of Ted Williams and “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias.)
“Sam Snead was a dream come true for golf,” Corcoran confided to his former associates from the Massachusetts Golf Association. “But almost from the beginning it was Sam against the world. He didn’t make many friends among the other pros and the reporters who got under his skin, but the gallery gobbled him up.”
In 1937, Sam snagged five PGA victories, came in second place three times and third another five, earning $10,243 in official money (and close to twice that in side exhibitions and endorsement deals). The only man to win more, Lighthorse Harry Cooper, won seven tournaments and also took home the newly created Vardon Trophy for the lowest tournament stroke average, but bitterly complained that the hick kid he’d once beaten in a rain-soaked playoff back in 1935 at the West Virginia Open was commanding all the attention.
Byron Nelson got his first good look at this phenomenon in 1937 at the San Francisco Matchplay Championship, where he dispatched Sam three-and-two in the second round. “I’d heard a lot about Sam before I ever saw him swing a club,” Byron recalled. “For one thing, he came in with a lot of momentum from Oakland. Reporters were following him everywhere he went. I had to play well to beat him though I don’t remember much about our match. What I remember most was thinking what an absolutely wonderful golf swing he had. I’d never seen a better tempo. He was about my age yet he looked like he never worked at it at all.” Ironically, Henry Picard, who’d helped them both find their footing on tour, then eliminated Byron from the championship.
For all the excitement surrounding the long hitter from the hills, Byron was considerably more advanced at that point in terms of experience. He’d played in over two dozen tournaments, collecting important wins at the New Jersey Open and the Metropolitan Open in 1936, earning about $1,800, which barely covered his and Louise’s traveling expenses but certainly made him a player to watch.
Their difference of opinion regarding traditional club positions reveals a great deal more about their personalities and central ambitions. What Sam had in mind, despite his rough-hewn edges, was the living Hagen and Sarazen made off lucrative exhibitions, private matches, and endorsement deals, not giving lessons, keeping books, answering to the wishes of members, or running golf tournaments, and other club-related events. Though he maintained strong ties with the Greenbrier for decades, eventually becoming head professional and taking on some of these traditional duties, Sam’s focus never wandered too far from the developing PGA Tour he, Byron, and Ben would come to dominate for almost twenty years.
Byron was far more conventional in his belief that a good performance on tour first of all pleased his club members back home and might possibly capture the attention of a more prestigious club down the road. Like his friend and mentor Henry Picard, he loved the analysis involved in teaching the game to others, regardless of their skill level. By now his dream was to catch on with a top Eastern club, and this came true in February of 1937 when, after George Jacobus recommended him, he signed a contract with the Reading Country Club in Pennsylvania that guaranteed him an annual base salary of $3,750 and whatever he could make by giving lessons and running the shop. “It meant,” Byron remembered, “we would never have to borrow any more money from Louise’s folks.”
On a natural high from finally achieving one of his goals, just a week later he and Louise drove down to Augusta for the third Masters and splurged by checking into the pricey Bon Air instead of renting a modest room in a boardinghouse as they had just the year before.
His happy mood carrying over to the golf course, Byron opened with a sensational 66, his best score and a record by a Masters champion that would hold up for three years until Lloyd Mangrum bettered it by two strokes in the first round. Paired with wiry Paul Runyan during this brilliant opener, he hit every par-five in two, and the other greens in regulation. Runyan—who typically talked out loud to himself as he played—“C’mon, Pauly, hit the ball next time,” or “Quit messing around”—said to the press after the round that he’d never seen such superior shotmaking. In a tournament where a few veterans still carried the odd hickory-shafted club in their bags, Byron’s performance was a billboard announcing the accuracy of steel, a new swing, and even a new kind of player. Host Bobby Jones went out of his way to congratulate him.
Byron’s first Masters title didn’t come without a struggle. He shot 72–75 to lose his lead and in the final round found himself three strokes behind Ralph Guldahl at the turn. But his old friend put his tee shot into Rae’s Creek at twelve and was forced to drop a ball and finish with a double-bogey five. Byron, who was watching from the tee, then went straight for the flagstick with a six-iron, leaving his ball just six feet from the cup, and drained the putt to suddenly tie him for the lead. After Guldahl stumbled again at the dangerous thirteenth, making a bogey six, Byron told himself that “the Lord hates a coward” and went for the green with his three-wood, his ball finishing just off the green, and chipped in for an eagle three. His 32 on the back nine gave him a two-shot margin and the title. There was no green jacket then, but Jones himself presented a beaming Byron the winner’s gold medal.
“I still have that medal,” he wrote years later, “and when my playing career was over, I looked back and realized that this 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.”
Before the couple headed north to his new job in Reading, “suddenly happy as a pair of honeymooners,” according to Louise, Byron granted Atlanta newsman (and Jones writing partner) O. B. Keeler an interview in the players’ locker room on the second floor of Augusta National’s clubhouse. “Byron, I watched you play the back nine today,” Keeler told him, “and it reminded me of a piece of poetry written by Lord Byron when Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo.” Byron smiled and explained to Keeler that his mother was particularly fond of his poetry, which was why she gave her son the middle name of Byron.
The next day, he was surprised to see the Associated Press story headlined “Lord Byron Wins Masters.”
The name stuck.
Though it doesn’t show up in any record book, not long after Byron’s dazzling Masters, Ben Hogan’s luck began to change.
That spring, he and his extremely shy wife of two years moved into the twelve-story Forest Park apartment building where his mentor, Marvin Leonard, and wife, Mary, were living. This was considered one of Fort Worth’s better addresses for upwardly mobile couples, though in the Hogans’ case it was a threesome that included Valerie’s effervescent kid sister, Sarah Fox, who was working for a top dress shop downtown and moved in to share expenses and cooking duties. “I’ll let you in on a little family secret,” Sarah’s daughter, Valerie Harriman, once confided to a reporter. “My mother did most of the cooking and housekeeping at the apartment they shared because Aunt Val couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. This led to some amusing situations. Uncle Ben loved scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Aunt Val had no cooking skill whatsoever, so my mother would get up early and make Ben’s eggs just the way he liked them—allowing Valerie to serve them to him. He and my mother became very close during that time, though I’m not sure he ever caught on about the scrambled eggs.”
The toughest four-year stretch of Ben’s professional life was just ending, a dark period that included his second failure to make it on tour, his poorly paid work at Oakhurst, and the roadhouse gambling jobs he rarely, if ever, spoke about. But then he found a decent job working as the head pro at the tiny Nolan River Golf Club in Cleburne, sixty miles south of Fort Worth, a job Claude Fox most likely orchestrated for his daughter’s determined suitor. Though his salary was only $200 a month, Hogan augmented his work by giving lessons at three dollars an hour and living cheaply with his future in-laws, saving up every cent for a third assault on the tour. Meanwhile, on April 14, 1935, not long before Hogan decided to move back to Fort Worth for an office job his brother helped arrange at a petroleum company, he and Valerie got married by a Baptist minister in the front parlor of Claude and Jesse Fox’s house in Cleburne. Curiously, the Cleburne Times-Review described the bridegroom as “a well-known golf professional from Fort Worth,” making no mention of his brief but useful time in Cleburne, nor the fact that Royal and his wife, Margaret, were the only guests.
Ben skipped the ’35 tour entirely, saving money and playing only money matches around Dallas–Fort Worth, most of which he easily won. By early the next summer, both his personal finances and his game appeared to be in better shape. He qualified for the U.S. Open at Baltusrol and asked Valerie to come along for moral support. The Hudson roadster was gone, replaced by a roomier secondhand Buick purchased, in part, because Byron and Louise Nelson had a similar car. Valerie detested travel and was prone to car sickness on any trip beyond twenty minutes, but consented to accompany Ben to New Jersey. “I had gone with Ben’s mother to see him play an exhibition in Fort Worth,” Valerie remembered. “That was all the golf I knew. But now that he was going to play in the U.S. Open, I was excited about traveling with him.”
The first thing Ben did after getting settled in a motel two miles from Baltusrol’s front gate was to phone Byron, who was at nearby Ridgewood Country Club. The two couples had dinner together, and the next day, while the men practiced, their wives took a ferry across the Hudson to New York City; it was Valerie’s first glimpse of Manhattan. Arm in arm, they window-shopped for hours, Louise later told Grantland Rice, chatting up a storm. “Louise and Valerie liked each other right off,” Byron said many years later. “I think that particular U.S. Open created a pretty good friendship between the girls and even a better bond between Ben and me. We traveled a lot together after that. Louise and Valerie were always the glue in the relationship.”
Neither man distinguished himself on Baltusrol’s difficult Tillinghast-designed Upper Course. Hogan shot 75–79, Nelson 79–74; both missed the thirty-six-hole cut. So after Tony Manero closed with a brilliant 67 to shatter the old Open scoring record by four strokes and capture his only national championship, the Hogans and Nelsons took another ferry for dinner. Despite the disappointing outcome, the week had some pluses as well, especially for Valerie. Tony Manero’s wife, Agnes, a stylish and popular tour wife, had warmly befriended her and provided useful tips about the traveling life—which deeply impressed her and eased her fear of road travel. “Imagine,” she wrote her mother, before the couple headed home to Texas, “I’m a friend of a U.S. Open champion’s wife.”
The following summer, Ben chose not to try to qualify for the 1937 Open. By now the Hogans had saved $1,450, and Ben was ready to attack the tour again. “It’s now or never,” he told Valerie before they loaded up the Buick and headed for Niagara Falls, Ontario, for the General Brock Open, where Hogan began keeping a little black book of both expenses and results for the first time, much like the one Byron had kept since the start of his career. Ben calculated that his odds of winning were improved at this tournament, in part because he was driving the ball more reliably, but also because many of the better players had returned home to attend to their regular club jobs. Jimmy Demaret, for one, who was growing close to Ben about this time, saw a new confidence as the two warmed up on the practice range in Ontario. “I’ve got the secret of this game now,” Ben assured him. Demaret later wrote, “But if Ben found the secret at that time, he lost it again immediately. It was the same story, and a heartbreaking one, for the Hogans. Ben tied for eleventh in the General Brock, he came in ninth in the Shawnee Open, he placed ninth in the Glens Falls Open. And so it went.”
In fact, though Ben’s tendency to hook the ball in the heat of competition was still the main source of his undoing, the results of his efforts weren’t quite as futile as Demaret suggested. Before Glens Falls, he’d snagged seventh place at the St. Paul Open, followed by an encouraging third at Lake Placid—netting $600, enough to keep going. Moreover, he won the long-drive contest over tour player Jimmy “Siege Cannon” Thomson, pocketing another $50. A local newspaper columnist wrote of Ben, “Now he’s on the tournament trail and unless we are mistaken, that beautiful swing of Hogan’s should really soon take him places.” Valerie dutifully clipped the piece and pasted it into the new oversized scrapbook brought along for just such notices.
When the couple’s travel-worn Buick rolled into the parking lot of the $5,000 Hershey Open, Ben’s frustration was palpable. Henry Picard, the event’s gracious host and eventual winner, spotted it right away. “I’d never seen a player work so hard as Ben Hogan and have so little to show for it,” he recalled years later. “He reminded me of all the hard work I’d put in to get my game where it was, though in Ben’s case you could see there was something beneath the surface that was driving him along. I was never quite sure what that was but I liked Ben. He kept to himself but he had an air of dignity that appealed to me. He wasn’t afraid to work.”
A touring professional needed to earn about $3,000 a year on the expanded year-round circuit to cover expenses. After six months on the road, the winnings noted in the Ben’s black book amounted to just $1,164. They went home to Fort Worth to discuss whether there was enough left in the kitty to risk heading for California for the start of the 1938 West Coast swing.
Not surprisingly, it was Picard who once again came to the rescue. A few days after Christmas, he and former Glen Garden assistant Jack Grout were having dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, where not so long ago Ben had dealt cards and even moonlighted as a bellhop, when they spotted the Hogans sitting at a corner table. They walked over to say a friendly hello, and discovered they were having a disagreement over the approaching winter tour. Valerie wanted Ben to go, but Ben disagreed, citing their depleted savings. “I want him to go,” she told Picard and Grout in no uncertain terms. “I’ll just stay home and find a job.”
“In that case,” Ben said, “I won’t go. We both go or nobody goes.”
“All right. Let’s end this argument here and now,” Picard calmly proposed. “Ben, take Valerie with you and go out west and play. If you need anything, come and see me. If you run out of money, I’ll take care of you. You’ve got my word on that.”
Ben stared at him for a long moment. Years later—when he fondly recounted the story to his members at the Scioto Golf Club, where he was tutoring young Jack Nicklaus—Jack Grout liked to say he could almost hear the battle being waged inside Hogan’s proud and analytical brain. He wasn’t the kind of man to accept charity from anyone, but Picard was one of the game’s finest players and a model of everything Ben hungered to be—urbane, polished, a brilliant student of the swing, an unflappable and generous champion.
In a pure golf context, though neither man could fathom it at that moment, Henry was filling the same black void that Marvin Leonard had already addressed—an older, more accomplished man who recognized the decency and work ethic of a promising young player who simply needed someone to express confidence in him. In the end, Picard gave Ben something far more useful than money.
“Knowing that help was there helped me forget my troubles,” Ben confided in a rare moment of self-revelation years later when his first book of instruction, Power Golf, appeared. “The support and confidence Henry expressed in me in the summer of 1937 meant all the difference in the world.” The book, incidentally, was dedicated to Henry Picard.
So instead of giving up, the Hogans made a pact to head for California with their paltry savings and an emergency plan to sell the Buick, if necessary, and use the money for train fare home, at which point Ben would abandon his quest and find a better-paying club job or something in oil or finance.
In Los Angeles, he failed to finish in the money. Sam Snead won the second Crosby Clambake, where Ben placed eighth and earned seventy-five dollars, just enough to cover room and board for the week. A week later, at Pasadena, he made another sixty-seven dollars for tenth place; Henry Picard won, and Byron placed third, making $350.
On the drive up to Oakland, even Valerie’s confidence in Ben began to waver. They had only $100 left—just enough to get home to Texas if they left right away.
“No, honey,” Ben told her. “We made a deal to go as far as Oakland. If we don’t make any money there, I’ll sell the car and we’ll go home, and I’ll never mention golf to you again.”
On the morning of the first round, he walked out to their car in the parking lot of their inexpensive hotel and found the rear end of their Buick resting on cinder blocks, thieves having made off with the tires. Reportedly he threw up his arms and marched back into the hotel, informing Valerie they were finished. “Nonsense, Ben,” she told him. “We’ll just find someone to give you a ride to the golf course and worry about the tires later.” Afterward, in several interviews, Ben downplayed the incident, claiming he’d forgotten the precise details, undoubtedly in no rush to relive the most agonizing moment of his career, staring his darkest demon—abject failure at the one thing he believed he could succeed at—right in the face. As Valerie later explained to her sister, Byron and Louise happened to be staying in a hotel only a few blocks away, so a single phone call solved the immediate problem. Byron picked Ben up and drove off to the Sequoia Country Club while Valerie arranged to have the tires replaced. Days later, she told her sister, the new Masters champion offered Ben a loan. Though he declined, the gesture meant a great deal to Valerie, who suspected that it was Louise’s idea.
Years later, Sam Snead recalled standing with some other young pros when they saw Ben outside the clubhouse, looking anguished and lost. If Sam’s memory can be relied upon, this was the first time the two had the occasion to speak to each other.
“What happened, boy?” someone asked, and he pounded his fist against a brick wall, groaned, and declared, “I can’t go another inch. I’m finished. Some son of a bitch stole the tires off my car.” He then looked at Sam, the new darling of the press. “How bad can things get?”
“He was as close to tears as that little guy can get,” Sam remembered.
Whatever Ben’s particular motivation was that week—a fear of more nothing divided by nothing or a sheer desperation that focused his attention as never before—he placed sixth and won $285. “We thought we were rich,” Valerie said.
“It was the biggest check I’d ever seen in my life,” Ben told Ken Venturi in the famous 1983 TV interview, his voice catching at the memory of it. “And I’m quite sure it was the biggest check I’ll ever see.”
The modest windfall paid for new tires and carried them on to Sacramento, where he earned $350 for a solid third-place finish.
Several weeks later, seemingly out of the blue, the head professional of the Century Country Club, one of suburban New York’s finer private clubs, offered Ben a position as the club’s assistant professional. His pay would be $500 a month plus anything he could earn giving lessons. After learning that Henry Picard had wholeheartedly recommended him, Ben signed on enthusiastically.
Two months after that, Ben played in his first Masters. Like Byron before him, as he later told Sarah Fox, the moment he walked onto the grounds at Augusta National he felt a special affinity for the place. Perhaps, also like Byron, he was initially a little overwhelmed by the grandeur and significance of the club Bobby Jones had built. He finished in a tie for twentieth place, well out of the money, but expressed his deepest gratitude to Henry Picard, who won the title, beating the ever-present Ralph Guldahl by two strokes.
Of all the promising young pros refining their games with steel shafts that particular warm spring, Guldahl was by far the most polished—and ultimately perplexing. The affable, stoop-shouldered Texan—who began his pro career the same day as Ben in 1932—had progressed so rapidly he needed only a short birdie putt to beat the amateur Johnny Goodman by a stroke on the final hole of the 1933 U.S. Open at the North Shore Country Club. Instead he made bogey and finished second. Despite a personality so devoid of excitement and color that even natural promoters like Harlow and Corcoran were hard pressed to generate stories that made him seem interesting, his combination of finesse and power made him the leading threat of a new wave of Texas gunslingers that included Houston’s Jimmy Demaret, Ray and Lloyd Mangrum, Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan.
In 1935, following a forty-first-place finish at Oakmont, still just twenty-three years old but suddenly missing his putting touch, Guldahl fared poorly in other tournaments that year, and returned home to Dallas and informed his mother he was through with competitive golf. He tried selling cars, among other odd jobs, but eventually drifted back to a local nine-hole course and began working on his game again. After his young son, Buddy, developed a sinus problem, Guldahl moved his family to the dry California desert, where he played in a few events but won nothing of significance. While there, however, he met the movie executive Robert Woolsey and the actor Rex Bell and accepted their offer to stake him enough money to play in the inaugural True Temper Open in the spring of 1936, where he won $240 and followed up with an eighth-place finish at the U.S. Open. Just weeks later, his putting touch returned and he won the prestigious Western Open—considered a major title in those days—and finished the year with the best stroke average on tour, 71.65. After Guldahl’s wild flurry of closing birdies cost him the Masters in 1937, he went on to beat heavily favored tour rookie Sam Snead by two strokes at the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills. After returning to form, he would win two more Western Opens in succession and defend his Open title by an impressive six-stroke margin at Cherry Hills in 1938.
“Though Sam and soon Byron were getting all the attention, Guldahl was the best player in the game,” says Open historian Robert Sommers, “all because of a hundred-dollar stake by two men who had faith in him.” Not surprisingly, his success attracted more Hollywood types, including the reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, a fine golfer, who once phoned Guldahl before playing in a club event just to chat about bunker shots, downhill putts, and how to play in the wind. After Hughes won the tournament, a check for $10,000 turned up in the pro’s mailbox.
Despite the noticeable improvements in Ben’s 1937 performance, Guldahl was enjoying the kind of breakthrough success he could only dream about. When the Hogans rolled back into Fort Worth to visit his mother and spend the holidays with her parents down in Cleburne, their travel-worn Buick had an additional 3,600 miles on its odometer and bald tires.
Yet there was plenty to be happy about that Christmas. Back in September, once again fate and Henry Picard seemed to conspire to give Ben a much needed boost up. When the U.S. and British Open champion Tommy Armour broke a bone in his hand and announced he had to scratch from the Hershey Round Robin Four-Ball, a star-studded affair that included the tour’s top sixteen money winners, Picard penciled in a pleasant but largely unknown named Vic Ghezzi into Armour’s slot to partner with Ben Hogan. He also advised his boss Milton Hershey to pay close attention to the way Hogan conducted himself, both on and off the golf course.
“He’s overdue to start winning tournaments,” Picard told him, “and he’s a self-made guy who lives clean and works harder than anybody out here.” Hershey, both a Quaker and a self-made man himself who’d failed three times before he found the magic formula for making a fortune in chocolate, liked the sound of that and made a note to see how Hogan fared against the best players of the day. The bookies weren’t impressed with the Hogan-Ghezzi pairing, however, ranking them dead last at the outset, the odds 200–1. But the pair startled everyone by firing a blistering 61 best-ball total in the opening round and continued the assault until they were fifty-three strokes under par for 126 holes of play. Only the team of short-game wizard Paul Runyan and the game’s popular new star Sam Snead came close to matching them.
Despite Sam’s success, Ben’s shared triumph at the Hershey Four-Ball was quite possibly the most important win any player achieved that year, for it proved his relentless work ethic was beginning to pay off.
As Ben and his long-striding partner approached the final green of Mr. Hershey’s tournament that September afternoon, their winners’ checks all but in the bank, trailed by a gallery of some four thousand people, Ghezzi raked his fingers through his sun-streaked hair and waved to spectators. Ben, on the other hand, kept his head down, his handsome angular face devoid of emotion, his eyes sweeping over the surface of the final green as they approached—almost as if, on the threshold of what he’d dreamed about for so long, he half expected to discover it was only an illusion.
Earlier in the year, while still out west, he’d expressed his frustration to Valerie about his inability to close the deal coming down the stretch—admitting he still allowed his nerves or something in the gallery to distract him. She had stared at him with her sweet brown eyes and said in an almost childlike manner, “Well, Ben, maybe you just need to find a way to ignore the gallery completely and focus only on your next shot. Maybe you should concentrate harder and forget all of that.” A simple piece of advice. Yet years later Ben credited his wife with giving him the key that unlocked his greatness. “Before she said it so plainly, I seemed to think about everything else out there except what I had to do at that very moment.”
At Hershey, he had finally succeeded in doing what Valerie had suggested—blocking out the world at large, including many bitter disappointments both on and off the course, and concentrating on shot by shot. “If we’d lost,” a relieved Vic Ghezzi afterward confided to Jimmy Demaret, “I’m quite certain he would have jumped out a window.”
As it was, he pocketed $1,100 after making thirty-one birdies—six more than anyone else in the field. Milton Hershey was the first to congratulate the now broadly smiling Ben. “I heard from Henry that you were the man to watch this week,” he said. “And Henry was sure right about that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hershey,” he replied. “I’m glad I didn’t let Henry down—or you, either.”
Hershey patted him on the back. “Maybe we should stay in touch,” he said.
“Yes sir. I’d like that.”
In 1938, the year many social historians believe America finally began to emerge from the economic gloom that had defined the decade, Ben Hogan finished thirteenth on the tour’s official money list with $4,794. His friendly Glen Garden rival and sometime traveling partner Byron Nelson, with two victories, made only slightly more. With eight victories that included the Canadian Open title, Sam Snead dominated the headlines and made Fred Corcoran smile, owing to the largest spectator turnouts in years.
But as Ben Hogan later described it, this was the turning point of his life.