VALERIE HOGAN WAS WEARY of the road. “No, it’s not too grand an experience living in suitcases and traveling 18,000 miles every winter,” she told Arch Murray of the New York Post during the North and South Open of 1939. “It was a thrill at first but that’s long since worn off,” she said, describing how long days in a four-door sedan, drafty hotels, lumpy beds, and unpredictable diner food had begun to take their toll on her. The primary job of a “fairway wife,” however, was to “hide her boredom and mental fatigue from her husband at all costs, to keep smiling and encouraging him no matter what anyone says. A golfing wife,” she added, “has to be a combination of many things—nurse, masseur, comforter and whip-cracker—but most of all she has to be a psychologist. Your reactions to your husband’s moods are vital.”
Far more expansive than Ben had ever been with a reporter, perhaps because she’d once nurtured dreams of becoming a newspaper society editor herself, she explained to Murray that though she always preferred to await a tournament’s outcome in the clubhouse—reading magazines or simply knitting socks for her husband—she could always instantly determine how her husband had performed by his body language on the final hole, where she typically joined him. If his pace was brisk and his head up, “his jaw thrusting forward, why, that means he has had a good round.” Conversely, if his gait was slower and his gaze earthward “he’s probably shot 75.”
Toward the end of October, Murray checked in with the Hogans again and discovered that Valerie was “dreading closing up our snug little apartment” on the grounds of the Century Club and returning to the grind of hotels and highways for the 1940 tour, and that it was only the prospect of spending a month and a half “at home with family in Fort Worth” that made, if at all, the prospect tolerable. Ben, by contrast, was “bristling like a bulldog to get back at it, to attend a couple college football games and then head to Florida for the start of the winter season and the big swing out West.”
“I think this year is going to be the vital one for me,” Ben himself told Murray. “I have been knocking at the door too long now. I’m going to develop a finishing touch. I’ve had too many fellows in the trap, only to let them get away. That has to stop.”
As a new decade dawned, marking the tenth anniversary of his efforts to outrun the gremlins of self-doubt, something was changing inside Ben Hogan, or perhaps just visibly hardening. Everything from his dress to his public demeanor reflected this. His clothing tastes, shaped by his fierce admiration of Marvin Leonard, ran to businessman conservative, well-tailored trousers that had both zippers and buttons to prevent accidental openings, sweaters in muted shades of gray or dark blue, with a traditional white or check flat cap that was his evolving signature and wore well in the wind—more of a uniform than a fashion statement, something he never had to think about.
Already known to be extremely reserved socially, and occasionally curt with reporters, he had now deepened his cowl of concentration even further, often giving the impression of icy aloofness. Beyond his considerable technical refinements, he allowed a few years later, he finally learned to win by blocking out everything but his game—gallery, his playing partners, small talk of any kind, even the weather and leaderboards. Chain-smoking Chesterfields, he would plod down the center of the fairway to avoid having to see or speak to any spectators, his gray eyes sweeping the terrain ahead for any potential advantage or peril. In effect, he willed himself into a trancelike state of absolute mental isolation perhaps only a Hindu holy man could appreciate. His closest friend on tour, Jimmy Demaret, observed that the way Ben Hogan studied golf courses and silently picked them apart reminded him of a bird of prey at work, a gray hawk on the hunt—an appellation that seemed to fit.
A writer from The Saturday Evening Post once asked Demaret, whose wardrobe preferences ran to eggplant-colored pantaloons, screaming argyles, and canary yellow plus fours, if his buttoned-up friend Ben Hogan ever said anything on the golf course.
“Oh sure,” he breezily replied. “He likes to say, ‘You’re away.’ ”
“Seriously, Jimmy, Hogan seems so damn … unfriendly. How can you stand him?”
“Ben’s not a bad egg at all—if he happens to notice you. It’s not that he’s unfriendly. He just prefers to play golf alone most of the time, even when he’s your partner.”
During the three weeks over the holidays that Ben and Valerie stayed with Royal and his wife, Margaret, Valerie filled her days by lunching and shopping with her sister, Sarah, while he went to the Colonial Country Club every morning for a couple hours of practice on the range, lunch with Marvin Leonard, and a round in the afternoon with him and Royal. During the years Ben had been away up north, and elsewhere, Leonard had spared no expense to make Colonial the premier golf course in Texas and waged a tireless campaign to attract a national championship, at one point tracking down USGA president Harold Pierce at his home outside Boston, keeping him on the line for half an hour with promises of unprecedented crowds, fabulous playing conditions, and incomparable Southern hospitality, not to mention a huge potential windfall for American golf’s governing body. The USGA eventually submitted, designating Colonial as the first U.S. Open in the South for 1941. For years afterward, Marvin Leonard was ribbed by pals for making the most expensive long-distance phone call in Texas history.
The sight of a solitary Ben Hogan on the practice range at Colonial was becoming familiar to members. Tex Moncrief remembered asking him once why he spent an entire morning hitting nothing but wedges. Ben looked at him and tersely replied, “Because a good short pitch can almost always make up for a mistake.” But his calculations didn’t cease there. A year later, Moncrief spotted him hitting nothing but four-woods for an entire afternoon, pausing only for an occasional cigarette, Coke, or Hershey bar.
“Why four-woods, Ben?” the oil man asked him later in the bar. “You hit four-woods better than anyone in golf.”
He told him, “I lost a tournament last summer up in Chicago due to a poor four-wood shot. I don’t want that happening again.”
“The message I took away from that was that he intended to leave no margin for failure of any kind,” Moncrief recalled. “Ben didn’t practice swings. He practiced shots. He wanted no shot to surprise him. He wanted them all, by God, to be perfect.”
Before the season-opening Los Angeles Open, tour manager Fred Corcoran staged a long-drive contest inside the Los Angeles Coliseum, where Ben gave a preview of his new power, accuracy, and determination by placing second with a 255-yard blast that netted him $150, which he used to take Valerie out to the Brown Derby restaurant and a screening of Gone With the Wind that evening. When a Los Angeles reporter spotted the couple and asked Ben about how a slight 140-pound fellow who stood only five-foot-seven could hit a golf ball so unearthly far, Hogan merely looked at him and remarked that someday players his size would be hitting the ball over 350 yards. The reporter laughed, but Ben didn’t. He wasn’t joking at all. Byron Nelson, meanwhile, won the accuracy portion of Corcoran’s contest, nailing three 225-yard drives directly between the goalposts.
Neither man did particularly well in the opener. Ben finished in a tie for eleventh, pocketing just seventy-five dollars, while Byron opened with a sloppy 75 and withdrew. A week later up in Oakland, Ben blazed to a second-place finish and Byron once again withdrew. At the San Francisco Matchplay, Byron briefly found his game and finished fifth. But the next week at Phoenix, he withdrew for the third time in four weeks.
In his memoirs, Byron confesses to being a little nervous early that year, happy about his new contract with the Inverness Club in Ohio but disappointed over medical tests that indicated he was sterile—probably as a result of the typhoid fever, or the mumps, he’d suffered as a boy. Both Nelsons were eager to start a family, and Louise was immensely dismayed. Almost immediately, and encouraged by Valerie Hogan, she began to try to convince her husband that they should adopt a child. Byron wrestled with the issue for months before deciding that adopting was too “risky” and, given their nomadic lifestyle, probably not fair to any child. “If I had it to do all over,” he told a reporter in 1994, “I probably would have adopted that child. Louise sure was eager to do it. It was one of the few things we disagreed on. I’ll always regret she never got to be a mother. And I’m sure I would have enjoyed being a father.”
The two-car caravan resumed. After Phoenix, the Nelsons in their new Studebaker President and the Hogans in their aging maroon Buick headed together down the highway for the Texas Open at Brackenridge Park in San Antonio. En route they always stopped at a place in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for homemade tamales. Plucky Louise and shy Valerie enjoyed staying together in inexpensive motels and eating in roadside diners because they had so much in common, including a desire for children. Valerie and Ben had discussed this as well, but he was firm about not wanting children in the foreseeable future. During their stop in 1940, however, the mood was considerably lighter, and the couples inquired about taking some of their favorite tamales home to Fort Worth with them, only to learn from the waitress that the tamales came from a can and were made by the Armour Meat Company of Fort Worth. “All four of us just looked at her,” Byron recalled. “Then at each other. Somehow, those tamales had suddenly lost their appeal, and we never ordered them again.”
Perhaps it was an omen of sorts, for something else began to change later that week.
Despite heavy downpours that turned Brackenridge’s thin turf to muck, requiring the use of rubber tee mats, both Hogan and Nelson played brilliantly, each carding all four rounds in the 60s. As Ben waited out Byron’s finish in the locker room, smoking a cigarette and rubbing liniment into an aching left hand, several players congratulated him on winning the Texas Open. Ben would have none of it, perhaps remembering what happened so long ago at the Glen Garden caddie tournament. “I hope he gets a 66 and wins, or takes a 68 and second so there will be no playoff,” he told a reporter from the San Antonio Express, as if expecting the worst. Then he brightened a bit. “But if he wins, there’s no one I’d rather lose to than Byron, for he’s one of the best friends I’ll ever have.” Moments later, Byron birdied the seventy-second hole for 67, a record-tying 271 that left him all square with Ben.
Both men agreed to appear on a radio show in downtown San Antonio to generate local interest in their playoff. When asked about the quality of Ben’s game—a pair of closing 66s had gotten him here—Byron smiled and replied, ever the ambassador, “Anytime you can tie or beat Ben, it’s a feather in your cap, because he’s such a fine player.”
The two men were sitting side by side in the small studio. When the interviewer looked to Hogan for his response, an unsmiling Ben thought for a moment and said, “Byron’s got a good game. But it would be a lot better if he would practice. He’s too lazy to practice.”
It was probably meant as a joke, a gentle poke in the ribs between old friends, though few outside the locker room knew Ben Hogan had a sense of humor. But the comment stung Byron, he admitted years later, partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He didn’t practice nearly as much as Ben, without question, but not out of laziness. Rather, he’d completed his five-year transformation plan a bit earlier than expected, and his swing mechanics had evolved to a point where everything worked so beautifully and fluidly that some had begun calling him “The Robot.” Tommy Armour was now on record as saying Byron’s was the finest golf swing ever, and Gene Sarazen and Henry Picard agreed. His drives and long irons were by far the straightest and most accurate on tour, at moments machinelike in their precision, and his short game was fast approaching the level of Paul Runyan’s. Only his inconsistent putting remained a problem. Otherwise, Byron saw absolutely no point in wearing himself out by practicing a swing that already displayed remarkable consistency. As he explained to Louise, too much practice might even compromise the great progress he’d made.
The other reason the remark bothered Byron was far more private in nature. From their early days together in Captain Kidd’s caddie yard through their shared struggle to establish a toehold on the tour, Byron had always been the soul of encouragement, a friend reaching back to help another along. And though the two never spoke of it, he was one of the few people who knew something terrible had happened early in Ben’s life, having heard whispers about Ben’s father—a tragedy Valerie Hogan herself wouldn’t learn of until she and Ben had been married almost a decade.
“I think Ben had some resentment about their early years together, due to Byron’s early success,” Sam Snead once told a writer in Hot Springs. “And I always heard that Ben really wanted that job up at Inverness that Byron got. Tournament golf will only magnify that sort of thing. Some fella you think is your best friend one day, well, you’d cut his throat and he yours the next day to have half a chance of winning a golf tournament. It’s just the nature of the game. Nothing personal.”
Maybe so. But in Ben’s case, everything was personal. And something palpably began to cool in their relationship. While their wives would remain close until Louise’s death in 1985, their own friendship would never be the same again.
The next day, Ben arrived two hours before their tee time and went through his comprehensive warm-up routine in his usual cocoon of unapproachable silence, pointing to shift a caddie equipped with a catcher’s mitt and a bucket, a human target, around the range. Byron arrived an hour later, admitting that he hadn’t slept very well. His stomach was acting up, as it often did in playoffs. Neither man, judging from their body language and expressions, appeared terribly happy.
The playoff, Ben’s first as a professional, began at one o’clock on Monday, February 12, under low gray clouds, with an estimated two thousand spectators—having paid an extra $1.50 for admission—swaddled in wool overcoats and gray fedoras. They witnessed Ben leap ahead by one stroke only to fall back by the turn. By the fifteenth, he’d regained momentum and a one-stroke advantage, but here his tee shot landed in a muddy divot, and his approach came out heavy and landed in a small stream fronting the green. His bogey squared the match, then Byron struck a beautiful iron shot onto the sixteenth green and drained the birdie to go one-up. Both finished with workmanlike pars, leaving Ben at 71 and Byron at 70.
They took off their caps, and shook hands, and briefly posed together for a photograph, Byron looking more relieved than victorious, Ben smiling through his gritted teeth.
Asked what he planned to do next, Byron replied, “Drive home to Fort Worth and rest a bit.” He added that several players from the canceled Ryder Cup team had a match against a group of top Texas pros at a charitable exhibition on Wednesday.
“How about you, Ben?”
“Houston,” he replied tersely, then headed for the locker room to collect his things.
“You can’t blame Ben,” Byron commented to the reporters after he stalked away. “He’s been close more than anyone lately.”
One of them followed Ben to his car and discovered that some of Byron’s equipment had been loaded into his trunk. He was taking extra shoes, balls, and clubs on to Houston for the Western Open, where Byron would collect them.
“That’s awful decent of you, Ben. Not every guy would do that for the guy who just beat him out of an important tournament.”
Ben gave him a withering look. Loyalty meant everything to Ben Hogan—and whatever else was true, he knew few souls on earth had befriended him as loyally as Byron Nelson had over the years. “Really?” he asked. Then he softened. “Well, we’re friends.” Another pause. “It’s just a golf tournament. There will be others.”
By mid-March, the PGA Tour seemed to belong exclusively to one James Newton Demaret, who’d dropped out of junior high to help his disabled house painter father support nine children and found his way to golf through humor and a hardscrabble Houston caddie yard. Two years older than Ben, Byron, and Sam, Jimmy didn’t begin to find his game until 1938, at which point he began dressing like a human peacock and shooting the lights out. Johnny Bulla remarked that before Demaret came along the tour resembled an undertaker’s convention, and Ben Hogan said devil-may-care Demaret was the most underrated player in history—his talent overshadowed by his showmanship, loud clothes, practical jokes, and reliable quotability. “This man played shots I haven’t even dreamed of,” Ben once said. “I learned them. But it was Jimmy who showed them to me first.”
“Get out and live, you’re dead a long time” was sunny Jimmy’s prescription for the good life. Bing Crosby, a frequent playing partner, claimed Demaret was the funniest guy he ever knew who didn’t have a script. “He was a wonderful guy,” according to Sam Snead. “I never met anyone who didn’t like Jimmy—except when he was beating you like a rug and making it look easy.” Ben said the two met in Houston early in their careers and developed an almost instant rapport. Though their friendship struck some as wildly improbable—the dour tour loner who preferred shades of gray and the court jester whose bright pantaloons and friendly antics gave golf its most colorful star since Walter Hagen—they became an almost invincible four-ball team. In retrospect, it’s not difficult to fathom why Ben was drawn to him. In many ways, Jimmy Demaret was a living and breathing personification of what he himself wished to be—Hennie Bogan.
After claiming a playoff win over Toney Penna at the Western Open in his hometown, “The Houston Hurricane” won in New Orleans and St. Petersburg to top the money list and bring his stunning early-season total to six victories in six tournaments. For the moment, he fascinated the press every bit as much as Sam Snead, curiously absent so far this year, was used to doing. After playing in the Seminole Golf Club’s popular Latham Reed Amateur-Professional Tournament, a private pro-am where a winning player carted home at least 10 percent of a mammoth Calcutta pool, Demaret took a break from the action and returned home to play his trumpet and rest his game before the Masters, now only a month away.
Byron finished second in the opens at St. Petersburg and Thomasville, Georgia, won several hundred dollars at his first Seminole Amateur-Professional, and then swung through Texarkana to pick up Louise, his game suddenly purring as smoothly as all eight cylinders of his sleek Studebaker President. By March 16, when they arrived in Pinehurst for the North and South Open and checked into Richard Tufts’s elegant Carolina Hotel, the Hogans had been comfortably ensconced there nearly a week, Ben practicing for hours daily on Heartbreak Hill, and playing several practice rounds on No. 2, identifying preferred angles and danger spots on the course, leaving a trail of Chesterfield stubs in his wake. He had even lunched with Donald Ross, the course’s famous designer and tournament host.
Though outwardly calm, Ben was desperate to break what he thought of as the ultimate contender’s curse. Over the previous year he’d racked up no fewer than a dozen top-five finishes and half a dozen runner-ups. A popular story holds that he had only thirty-six dollars in his pocket and was so frustrated by his inability to punch through and finally win that he was on the verge of abandoning the tour. Perhaps, but his spirits were sufficiently high to place a long-distance phone call on the eve of the tournament to his friend Jimmy Demaret in Houston and waggishly thank him for staying home that week to attend to club business—proof, in fact, that he did possess a sense of humor.
Byron brought Ben an unexpected gift—a new MacGregor driver with a stronger True Temper steel shaft and fourteen ounces of swing weight. The moment Ben wrapped his oversized hands around the grip, he knew the club was ideal for him. Ironically, as an amused Byron revealed to friends a few months later, he brought two essentially identical drivers to Pinehurst and Ben had chosen the one that he himself liked—a familiar pattern in their relationship. At any rate, Ben took the new driver straight to Heartbreak Hill, pounded balls for hours, and over dinner that evening offered to buy it. True to form, Byron told him to save his money; the driver was his to keep.
John Derr, the new assistant sports editor for the Greensboro Daily News, drove down to watch his friend Snead play and arrived just in time to see Hogan—turned out in gray slacks, dark green sweater, white shirt, navy necktie, and signature white linen cap—tee off the next morning, splitting the fairway with a 270-yard blast. A seven-iron shot to twelve feet and a putt that banged the back of the cup yielded an opening birdie—setting a tone for what was to come. “I was there primarily to see how Sam did in the tournament,” Derr recalls, “and the other buzz surrounded Byron. The crowds were there to see those two slug it out, but after I watched Ben play there was something about him that I couldn’t take my eyes off. He betrayed absolutely no emotion but there was something about him that was like an animal let out of a cage. I’d never seen anything quite like it.”
Ben holed a bunker shot on the eleventh and finished with an impressive 66, tying the competitive course record established one year before by Harry Cooper. “His precision was painstaking,” notes Pinehurst historian Lee Pace. “On one putt of an inch, he went through all the footwork and positioning of a ten-footer.” He didn’t miss a single fairway and led by three over Paul Runyan. “There’s something about this new driver that fits me like a glove,” he said afterward in the locker room. “I tell you, I’ve never driven the ball better.”
A second round of 67—again, he hit every fairway—widened his lead over Sam Snead and Johnny Revolta to seven. But the aging Gene Sarazen, an unapologetic fan of Byron’s, had seen it all before. “He’s never won before, and he won’t win this time,” he predicted. “Hogan’s been out front before. But someone will catch him.” When this filtered down to Ben, he vowed to prove him wrong. And as John Derr had noticed, there was something different about the tournament leader. Perhaps he’d finally fulfilled his own prescription for winning—to get so far out in front nobody could catch him. Perhaps the golf gods simply decreed it was time for all that humiliating failure and slavish dedication to perfection to at last pay off.
Whatever the case, on the final day, a chilly overcast Thursday, Ben under-clubbed several times in the morning round and stumbled to 74 but then redeemed himself in the afternoon with sterling iron play and putting that brought him home in 277, eleven under par, clipping two strokes off Vic Ghezzi’s tournament record. Sam fired a brilliant closing 67 to finish second, Byron a workmanlike 70 for third—something that didn’t escape John Derr’s notice. “It was perfect symmetry and a glimpse of the immediate future,” says Derr. “Though nobody could have appreciated the larger symbolism at that moment, the three greatest players of their age finishing one, two, three in a tournament many considered a notch below the U.S. Open in stature, in a place that made a rightful claim to be the Home of Golf in America. It still gives me goose bumps to think about.”
As usual, Valerie Hogan joined her husband for the final walk up the eighteenth fairway. “Don’t pinch me,” she told Derr and others scribbling in their notebooks. “I’m afraid I’ll wake up. Ben has been close so many times, only to see one fatal shot crumble all his hopes. He’s never given up trying, though, even in his darkest hours.”
The new North and South Open champion disappeared into the locker room to comb his hair and wash his hands and gather his wits, accepting the congratulations of Byron and Sam before appearing at the winner’s ceremony, where he was presented with the trophy by Donald Ross himself and his earnings in crisp new fifty-dollar bills. Wary of carrying so much cash with him, he asked instead that a check be drawn and sent ahead to a bank in Greensboro.
On the porch of the resort later, Ben drank a glass of milk and talked to a group of reporters with surprising candor, explaining with visible relief, “I won one just in time. I had finished second and third so many times I was beginning to think I was an also-ran. I needed that win. They’ve kidded me about practicing so much. I’d go out there before a round and practice, and when I was through I’d practice some more. Well, they can kid me all they want because it finally paid off. I know it’s what finally got me in the groove to win.”
John Derr raced home though the chilly spring darkness to file his story for the morning edition of the Daily News. When the first copies of the paper came up from the composing room around midnight, he was horrified by the headline—“Hagen Wins Pinehurst North and South.” He bolted downstairs to correct the mistake.
“What? It’s not Hagen?” the foreman snarled at him above the din of the presses. “Well, who the hell is Hogan?”
In a matter of a days, the world would know the answer to that question.
Ben and Clayton Heafner fired matching first-round 69s to lead the Greater Greensboro Open, a tournament scheduled to finish with thirty-six holes on Easter Monday. But a spring snowstorm dumped three inches on the course on Easter itself, postponing play until Wednesday. “Let’s ski it off,” Sarazen blithely proposed. During the three-day delay, Ben stayed quietly out of sight at the O. Henry Hotel reading newspapers and putting on the carpet in his guest room, and playing bridge with Valerie, Byron, and Louise. His second-round 68 included three birdies and no bogeys, at which point the tournament shifted out to the elegant Ross-designed Sedgefield Country Club and he continued his assault on the field, posting 66-67 to finish at 270, a tournament record, nine shots ahead of Craig Wood. Byron finished third. “It was easy to see we couldn’t catch that fellow, the way he is playing,” Johnny Revolta remarked to reporters afterward. “You can’t beat perfection.” The Greensboro victory guaranteed nobody would ever confuse Ben Hogan and Walter Hagen again.
But redemption didn’t stop there. Ben and Val’s travel-worn Buick trailed Byron and Louise’s Studebaker through a heavy fog to Asheville for the Land of the Sky Open, played over three mountain courses and ending at the lush Biltmore Forest Country Club where Bobby Jones honeymooned in 1925. After thirty-six holes, Ben and Lloyd Mangrum were one stroke back of Guldahl, with Byron just one back of them. The challenging Biltmore Forest course—another Ross gem—suited Ben’s exacting eye in every respect. He later said it was among his favorite courses on tour. It didn’t hurt that its elegant, wealthy, and refined membership treated him like he was one of their own. Not surprisingly, he closed with 69, which beat Guldahl by three strokes. In the clubhouse afterward, slightly chilled from his afternoon’s work, he drank a cup of hot tea, posed for photographs with members, and told a man from the Asheville Citizen, “You wait and prepare so long for something like this to happen. I don’t want it to end. Every time out I feel like I can win now.” Byron, who finished seventh, made a point to congratulate his friend and urge him to keep it up. “Those wins couldn’t have come at a more important moment for Ben,” he recalled decades later. “Because they led up to the Masters, Pinehurst and Greensboro were tournaments everyone wanted to win, and Asheville was like icing on the cake. That Ben won all three in such a quick and decisive manner identified him as someone special, a player to watch.”
In winning three tournaments over twelve days, Ben Hogan played 216 holes at thirty-four under par, a historic blitz none of his better-known rivals had accomplished. Prior to Masters week, the Hogans drove to Richmond so he could play an exhibition match at the venerable Country Club of Virginia, where he gave his first extensive interview. Choosing not to correct a reporter who asked about “growing up in Fort Worth,” Ben explained how much his widowed, hardworking mother had sacrificed in order to buy him his first real set of golf clubs one Christmas. Beginning in Richmond, he doubled his exhibition fee from $250 to $500, and as a further indication of having arrived on Easy Street he agreed to do a national magazine ad for Bromo Seltzer.
By the time they reached Augusta, however, he was emotionally drained by his sudden success and all the resulting hoopla. Seemingly overnight, professional golf had a spectacular third new star, a workaholic nobody knew much about. Wherever Ben went, notebooks and microphones were poked in his face. He tried to be cordial and polite, mostly savoring the long-overdue recognition for all his hard work. In fact, he handled his explosive debut far better than Sam had his own “Sneadomania.” He never fled in terror or shoved past overzealous fans, for instance—not yet, anyway. Besides, he’d had plenty of experience watching gracious winners like Picard and Byron perform in the spotlight. It was his turn now.
Madison Avenue was pursuing him as well, and a New York ad agency was eager to convince him to endorse certain brands of razor blades and beer. Though Ben personally preferred Schlitz, he signed a deal worth $3,000 with Rheingold. More tellingly perhaps, leading players who’d heretofore given him a fairly wide berth—Toney Penna, for example, or the increasingly imperious Gene Sarazen—now made it a point to speak and even chat up the hottest player in the game and welcome him to the winner’s circle. The Squire’s recent comments in Pinehurst still rankled him, of course, as did other swipes going back to his insistence that tour wives had no place on the circuit—a dig, Ben thought, about Valerie’s steadfast presence—and his reflection on Ben’s practice routines: “They exhaust me. With that swing of his, he won’t last out here much longer.” Still, he had finally risen above these absurd pronouncements by a man he’d admired early on and in some respects styled himself after.
His greatest opponent, however, his own self-doubt, had been soundly beaten. And though he would go on to become the top money winner for 1940, with $10,655 in earnings, capturing the popular Goodall Round Robin and finishing in the top five six more times before the season ended, succeeding Sam and Byron to win his first Vardon Trophy for the season’s lowest scoring average, he perhaps paid too dear a price at the Masters, a victory he needed to draw even with Byron and keep pace with the emerging Texas mafia of Guldahl, Mangrum, and Demaret. Instead, he closed with a 74 and a disappointing ninth-place finish. The rested and red-hot Jimmy Demaret, to nobody’s particular surprise, won the tournament by four shots over Lloyd Mangrum and five over hard-charging Byron. When Ben congratulated Jimmy in the locker room afterward, his colorful friend snapped open a cold beer and cheekily toasted him back, adding with a grin, “It was nice of you to take the week off and let me win one, Ben.”
A very good thing came Ben’s way that week, however, when Henry Picard pulled him aside and confidentially explained that he had just accepted the top job at Cleveland’s prestigious Canterbury Country Club, doubling the $5,000 salary he’d been receiving at Hershey. The timing was perfect. Hershey was hosting the PGA Championship later that summer, and Picard was the reigning champion. “They’re interested in either you or Snead as a replacement,” he told Ben. “But I’ve told them you’re the right pick. I think they’ll listen to me.”
As for Sam, he finished eighth in Augusta, one ahead of Ben, and pocketed just $200 for his trouble.
If Ben’s excuse was simple exhaustion, Sam’s problem was more complicated—an unexpected slump brought about by the strain of his giddy three-year ride to the top of the earnings list, and the challenge of living up to the fame and homespun personality that the media drummed to the public week after week. When in a good mood and performing well, he seemed to be a natural-born showman. But the truth was, he was as much of a loner as Ben—sharing an almost identical wariness of people in general and of big banks, smooth talkers, and in particular the inquisitive press. He, too, made his own travel arrangements, and allowed only manager Fred Corcoran to negotiate his lucrative commercial deals and exhibitions. “Nobody had helped Sam coming up,” his longtime friend Lewis Keller says, “so Sam really wanted—or should I say trusted—nobody to help him. He preferred to do everything himself, from managing his money to driving to tournaments.”
In a word, Sam was all too human. Beginning with his disappointment at the U.S. Open in 1937, followed by 1939’s debacle, his larger-than-life personality appeared at times to vacillate between euphoria and gloom, depending on events. For example, in 1938—his sophomore season, when he seemed to win everything in sight—he was the picture of country charm and pure folk wisdom until Guldahl, his nemesis at Oakland Hills, eclipsed his brilliant closing 68 at Augusta and beat him by a stroke to win the ’39 Masters, at which point Sam’s mood blackened and he stormed past fans and reporters alike as he fled Magnolia Lane. He later apologized to Roberts and Jones, but the display of poor sportsmanship left a lingering bad taste in both their mouths.
“Early in his career,” says John Derr, “Sam became convinced he was up against a lot more than either Ben or Byron or anyone else out there faced—including a golf establishment he didn’t think liked him much, players who were jealous of his quick success and genuine fame, and maybe even the Fates themselves. He made a few relatively minor mistakes attributable to youth and inexperience that were amplified by his brutally honest personality. Sam could never hide his emotions. Being a diplomat wasn’t in his nature. If he was having a great time and enjoying himself, you absolutely knew it. If he was in a bad mood, stewing about a bad break or how he played, you knew that, too. In that respect Sam was the exact opposite of Ben, who locked up everything inside.”
Critics pointed to his lack of grace following the eight-and-seven thrashing administered by Paul Runyan at the PGA Championship at Shawnee-on-Delaware in late ’38, for instance, as well as his disqualification for marking a wrong scorecard at the North and South and a lackadaisical U.S. Open effort at Cherry Hills that offended sponsors and prompted some veteran players to question whether Walter Hagen should pick him for the ’39 Ryder Cup. There was also his indulgence of lucrative private exhibitions, his continuing refusal to fraternize after hours, and, finally, his appalling self-destruction on the final hole that allowed Byron Nelson to win the ’39 U.S. Open. That failure seemed to signal something more problematic than a mercurial personality: a tendency to choke when the stakes were highest.
To add salt to the wound, he met an attractive young woman out west and proposed marriage after the ’38 season wound down. She briefly considered his offer before marrying a wealthy Arizona physician instead. This devastated Sam, according to his closest friends back home, which was directly reflected in his uneven play in 1939. He balmed his angst by helping himself to a string of attractive alternative candidates who showed up at sponsor parties and tournament shindigs, and increasingly on the course itself. “Oh, Sam led the league in pretty gals,” uxorious Paul Runyan remembered with a quick laugh. “There always seemed to be one waiting for him wherever he went. They saw Sam as something between a star and Joe DiMaggio. And he could literally charm the pants off them.”
It all added up to a young man struggling to reconcile his native instincts with the rigors of fame and constant exposure. Like most athletes, Sam loved performing well for the crowds. Success brought out his better side and fueled his natural sociability, elevating both his mood and charm. He’d horse around with players and fans alike, roll his eyes and make funny expressions for the photographers, happily sign autographs, and spin hilarious stories about characters back home that crackled with folksy wisdom. But let the round go sour or a hapless reporter question a particular shot or, worse, the state of his game, and Sam Snead went cold and wanted to get the hell away from the scrutiny, the pesky questions, the pressure of being golf’s biggest draw.
At Toots Shor’s in New York not long after America entered the Second World War, the story goes, Red Sox slugger Ted Williams—who’d just finished the season batting .406—was ribbing Sam about his sport being so much easier than baseball because a golf ball, instead of going eighty miles an hour, was hit while perfectly still, sometimes on a tee. “That may be,” Sam drawled smoothly for the eavesdropping reporters, “but I have to play my foul balls.” At one point, though, he pulled Williams aside and asked how he handled the high expectations and fickle judgments of the press, the pressure of fans, and his own growing fame. “Hell, Sam, they’re just doing their jobs,” Williams told him with a grin. “Some better than others. Just ignore ’em and go fishing.”
“That easy, huh?”
“Hell no. But it works for me.” Probably the best-known athletes in America at the time, they became good friends and regular fishing and hunting pals.
Following the disaster at Spring Mill, Sam went home to the Virginia hills, where he always found succor and perspective roaming the woods and streambeds of Bath County’s rugged high country, an unexpectedly fortuitous move since this turned out to be his mother’s final summer. Laura Snead died suddenly in early 1940, when her son was already taking a beating in the press. “After [almost] five years as a circuit pro,” Sam recounts in his memoirs, “I’d won close to thirty opens, from San Diego to Miami, but not one national title. The papers called me a choke artist, a cheese champ, a ‘mystery,’ and a ‘hex-haunted hillbilly.’ One syndicated writer claimed I was Shoeless Joe Jackson of the links—Jackson never being quite able to edge Ty Cobb for the batting title.”
“That stuff really began to get under my skin about 1940 and ’41,” he recalled in the ’90s. “I went home to Virginia and started looking at land to buy, trying to put it all behind me. I went hunting and fishing and tried my damn best to ignore it. But it was always there. I couldn’t pick up a paper without seeing something about myself, somebody saying this or that was wrong. Some of it was fair criticism, but it rattled me good, causing me to start pulling out whatever hair I had left in my head. My doctor told me he thought I might have myself a nervous breakdown.”
“Sam doesn’t kick away tournaments because he isn’t trying,” O. B. Keeler felt obliged to write in his syndicated newspaper column. “And he doesn’t really choke up, the way some people claim. No one can say he isn’t a money player with plenty of heart. His basic trouble is his failure to allow for trouble. He lacks imagination. Snead doesn’t recognize the traps in front of the brook or the clump of trees in the dogleg. He doesn’t consider the gamble involved when he blithely ignores them. He just steps up and socks the ball, and the next minute he’s in a lie where a crowbar wouldn’t help him.”
Coming from Bobby Jones’s Boswell, this analysis stung, too—mostly because it was absolutely, indisputably correct.
Under this kind of pressure, it’s hardly surprising that 1940 was his weakest full year on tour, prompting some to speculate that Sam might simply be a flamboyant flash in the pan. After all, despite his finishing third to Byron and Ben at Pinehurst, he won only three tournament titles, all coming late in the season. But Sam had more on his mind than his deepest slump ever.
In early August 1940, the same year his mother died, Sam suddenly took the plunge and married Audrey Karnes, a large-boned country girl whose wit was as sharp as an ax bite. They’d more or less dated since junior high back in Hot Springs, and his longtime friends took his marriage to Audrey as evidence that he was seeking the comfort and stability of home, but tactfully waited for his mother to pass away before proposing. Reportedly Sam’s mother was no fan of the Karnes clan, who managed a farm owned by Homestead president Fay Ingalls, Sam’s old foil. Audrey, the family’s youngest child, cooked for the farm’s field hands and worked part-time as a maid at the resort. Graduating two years behind Sam, she’d been valedictorian of her class. A commonly told story, however, holds that Laura Snead feared that a strain of mental defectiveness ran through the Karnes family and might adversely affect any children they produced.
Her adamant objections only briefly delayed her youngest child’s quest for marriage, children, and a stable home life to counterbalance his demanding public life. Days after their marriage at the Hot Springs Methodist church, refusing to reveal any honeymoon plans, Sam and Audrey climbed into his new Oldsmobile and headed for Niagara Falls, which was conveniently near the site of the Canadian Open. On their way there, the newlyweds got lost, drove in circles for half a day and spent their first night as man and wife in a cheap motel in Cumberland, Maryland. “We’ll still get there in time,” Sam assured her.
“What for?” Audrey tartly demanded. “For the falls or to see you tee off in the Open?”
It was a relevant question that revealed something about both their natures—the groom’s restless desire to get back to the game he was expected to dominate, the bride’s natural wariness of sharing her husband with countless strangers. Sam was so rushed and rattled by the time they reached Toronto that he appeared on the first tee wearing street shoes instead of golf spikes. The large gallery howled, assuming the country bumpkin was at it again. To make matters worse, the players ribbed him ruthlessly about having spent all his vital juices on husbanding. The press had a field day.
“If there’d been any way to leave,” Sam later said, “I’d have taken it.”
While Audrey raced back to their hotel for his shoes, he played the first three holes in his stocking feet, slipping several times. Once his spikes arrived, he was in and out of bunkers and stabbing at putts en route to a 72 that was under the circumstances fairly remarkable. According to the Toronto Star, “Shoeless Sam, the Bashful Bridegroom, the winner of the Canadian Open two years ago, is a 25–1 shot not to repeat, after arriving with a new wife and playing with all the pep of a sleepwalker.” But he buckled down and played the last thirty-six holes nine under par to win, earning a small bit of redemption. “For once, the other fellows had nothing to say about it,” he told Audrey.
The newlyweds immediately drove to Hershey for the 1940 PGA Championship, Henry Picard’s finale as host professional. The early headlines, however, belonged to Walter Hagen, five times the champion, who found a bit of his old spark and advanced through the first two rounds of match play before being edged out 1-up by Jug McSpaden.
Ben, playing with his newfound confidence, easily pressed on to the quarterfinal, where Ralph Guldahl narrowly beat him. A significant consolation was that he was hired as Henry Picard’s replacement. Sam had also interviewed for the post but later insisted he never really wanted it. Under the terms of Ben’s new contract, he would be handsomely compensated with a base salary of $10,000, and required only to make periodic appearances at the club—terms almost identical to Sam’s arrangement with the Greenbrier, which had slightly upped his pay to keep him on the premises. He wasn’t obliged to give lessons to members or run the shop, merely to represent the Hershey family’s good name out on tour. This made Sam and Ben among the first to enjoy this kind of sweetheart deal, which over the next decade became commonplace on tour, as Vegas hotels and Florida resorts began signing up celebrated professionals, hoping to feed off their success.
Sam, still hot under the collar from his honeymoon adventures, soundly defeated Jimmy Hines and Gene Sarazen, then thumped McSpaden five-and-four to reach the PGA final against none other than Byron Nelson.
Byron had spent most of the summer settling into his new job at Inverness, and had basically been out of action since the U.S. Open in June, when he placed a respectable fifth and Lawson Little nipped past the still dangerous Gene Sarazen in a playoff to claim the title. The caravan then brought him home to the Inverness Four-Ball, where he sentimentally teamed with Walter Hagen, who found the event so grueling he simply skipped playing the back nine in their last two rounds. “You can handle the boys,” he assured the host pro, who as a kid had once lent him his cap to block the brutal Texas sun, and then headed back to the clubhouse for a toddy. Byron and his famous partner came in dead last, but Byron naturally savored the experience.
Unlike Sam and Ben, Byron viewed his club job as his main priority. Inverness had 350 golfing members who demanded the attentions of a full-time professional, and he was only too happy to provide it. He loved teaching players at any level, and believed a self-taught instructor was the best kind. One of his first pupils there was a hotheaded, club-tossing teenager named Frank Stranahan, whose daddy ran the Champion Spark Plug Company; despite a shaky start in their relationship, Stranahan went on to become the world’s leading amateur player for a time. Moreover, Byron enjoyed the give-and-take with members and viewed Inverness as his own version of Nirvana. Among other things, he innovated the practice of stocking Foot-Joy golf and street shoes in his shop, and convinced a member who owned an umbrella company to manufacture ones that could withstand the awful conditions golfers often played through. For several years, even after he was internationally famous, he visited leading department stores wherever he went, picking up $25 for every sales call he made plus a royalty from every golf umbrella or pair of Foot-Joy shoes that got sold.
Louise appreciated the settled life in Toledo even more than her husband did. Like Valerie Hogan, she was tired of life on the road. “I was very busy at Inverness and extremely happy,” Byron recounts. “I did enough traveling during the winter in California and the Southeast that by the time the Masters was over, Louise and I were happy to get back to Toledo and spend the relatively cool summers there.”
A month before the PGA at Hershey, he warmed up for the championship competing in a series of better-ball matches with his club’s finest players. During this same interval he purchased a fifty-five-acre farm near Denton, Texas, not only to establish residency for tax purposes, but also to provide his parents and siblings with a comfortable place to live. His father was running a feed store in Handley and his younger brother, Charles, was preparing to follow their sister, Ellen, off to college. Byron picked up the tab on it all. Supporting the family who had always supported him was always high on his list of priorities.
He won several matches at Inverness, largely because his game didn’t need much tuning up. When he reached Hershey, his drives were as straight and his irons as crisp and sharp as they had been earlier in the year. There was no trace of a layoff.
During his semifinal match against the tediously deliberate Ralph Guldahl, Byron—one of the quickest players ever—found himself struggling to stay patient and focused, but also a little unsteady on his feet. Beforehand, in the locker room, he’d thrown up his breakfast—a story that in time was broadly circulated and contributed to the idea that Byron, like his hero, Bobby Jones, was often queasy before a big match. In fact, such nervousness did increasingly assert itself with a churning acidity in the pit of his stomach.
The previous year he’d been runner-up, as his opponent, Sam, had been the year before, so in a sense 1940’s PGA was a battle between two bridesmaids. Each had his ardent supporters on hand in Hershey, and over the first eighteen holes of their final match, Byron took a two-up lead. But Sam fought back in the afternoon to square things and take a one-up lead by the thirty-fourth hole. When Sam just missed his twenty-foot birdie attempt there, Byron made a two-footer to square things again with only two holes to play. On the next hole, a shortish par-four, Sam again put his approach inside twenty feet and Byron carved a magnificent wedge to within two feet again; Sam’s putt lipped out, prompting a chorus of groans from his followers, and Byron coolly tapped in his birdie to take a one-up lead to the final hole, a long par-three.
Teeing up quickly, Byron made a smooth pass with a three-iron and finished ten feet from the cup. Sam, using the same club, pulled his shot slightly and watched his ball trickle off the green into a grassy collar. A few minutes later, his pitch came up short and he then narrowly missed his par effort, leaving Byron a careful two-putt for his first PGA Championship. At the presentation of the Wanamaker Cup, he reached over to offer a gracious hand to Sam, who shook and grinned. His left hand, however, firmly held the handle of the trophy he so desperately wanted to win. It was a telling moment—the first head-to-head outcome in a major that involved this great triumvirate.
A week later, just up the road in Scranton, Sam edged out Byron to capture the Anthracite Open.
Three months later, to close out the year, Byron fired three rounds in the 60s to beat Clayton Heafner by a stroke and won the Miami Open, where Ben Hogan finished third.
Days after Miami, a syndicated columnist from New York flew to Fort Worth to interview Ben in the members’ grill at the Colonial Country Club, where Marvin Leonard’s staff had already begun preparations to host the 1941 U.S. Open.
“How do you assess this year?” the columnist asked 1940’s leading money winner, and Ben seemed more cordial and relaxed. He declined to talk about his past but had no problem addressing the season just ended. He complimented Byron and Sam and singled out his good friend Jimmy Demaret for particular praise. Excepting Sam, he explained, they’d all gone deer hunting in northern Texas only weeks before. The reporter later observed that he had a hard time picturing the three of them—the silent Ben, the genial Byron, and the outlandish Jimmy—together in the woods. Byron bagged a buck, however—and got socked with an eighty-dollar fine for not having a hunting license. “The year was very gratifying,” Ben summed up, finishing his Coca-Cola. “But I’ve set my sights on winning major golf tournaments, and I still haven’t done that.” He thought for a moment and added, just so there was no confusion about the matter, “Until I manage to win a major tournament, I really won’t be happy.”
And with that, he excused himself and headed for perhaps the only place that made him truly happy—the practice range.