GOOD PLAYERS WIN GOLF TOURNAMENTS, goes one of the game’s simplest truths. Great players win major championships.
The North and South, the Western Open, the Metropolitan Open, and more and more the rapidly improving Masters were all considered just a notch below major status, titles any champion would be thrilled to claim. But they weren’t the U.S. Open or the PGA crown, and with Britain now at war, the Open Championship, golf’s oldest championship, was on hold and out of reach until further notice.
By the middle of 1941, the quality of American life itself was threatened by events that had already engulfed much of the world, and especially its closest ally. “There was kind of an eerie waiting that went on,” Byron recalled. “Everyone knew it wouldn’t be long until America joined the war against Germany, but we all tried to keep up normal life, so to speak, doing the things we’d always done.” For Byron, who owned two major titles, and perhaps more urgently for Sam and Ben, who claimed none, this meant focusing their concentration more intensely than ever on winning a major championship before circumstances altered their opportunities. “Once Britain was in that thing,” Sam remembered, “we all knew it was only a matter of time until even the tour got canceled. That put the hurry-up, let me tell you, in more than a few of us.”
By the start of U.S. Open week at Marvin Leonard’s magnificently groomed Colonial Golf Club in June of 1941, Sam had nearly fifty official and unofficial wins and had perhaps done more than any other single player to revive popular interest in the professional game. For him, winning a major championship would mean finally getting the monkey off his back and quieting the boo-birds of the press, some of whom openly doubted whether he could do so under pressure. Several influential sportswriters, most notably Grantland Rice, acknowledged the many positive effects of his yeoman popularity, but resented Sam’s occasional crude antics and apparent indifference to their criticisms, not to mention his mercurial mood swings. Many were all too happy to question his resolve and knock his reputation down a peg or two.
For Byron Nelson, collecting another major championship trophy would simply burnish his already sterling reputation with the general public and the press, not to mention his past and present associations with Ridgewood, Reading, and Inverness, deepening friendships he carried with him wherever he went. From his point of view, winning a national championship was secondary to his reputation as a working golf club professional. The familiar duties and settled airs of club life were key components of Byron’s personal happiness, in some ways the most enduring rewards of his career. As he confided to more than one friend, winning another major title would simply grant him the luxury of spending more time at home among friends and club members, doing what he loved best.
For Ben Hogan, finally, a major title would put even greater distance between himself and his carefully guarded childhood and the brutal years he’d spent struggling to master the game and coming up with little to show for it—nothing divided by nothing. “Ben’s greatest struggle, I think, was always hidden pretty deep inside him,” Byron remarked to a visitor to his ranch in the early ’90s. “Almost from the day I first met him he was in a hurry to win something significant. And once he won, despite those unfortunate things—and maybe because of them—I don’t believe there was anything that could possibly have stopped him.”
Sam returned to action in 1941 with a rested body and a refortified attitude, quickly posting impressive wins at the Crosby Clambake, St. Petersburg, St. Augustine, and the North and South before turning his flashy new Cadillac into Magnolia Lane. On the downside, the new Mrs. Snead, a homebody at heart, found long-distance road travel and the social swirl on tour entirely to her disliking—the tedious hours on the road every week, the uncertainty of the food and lodgings, the boredom of waiting with gossipy spouses while Sam performed his magic on the course. Audrey didn’t enjoy shopping or seeing the sights, and unlike her husband she wasn’t a terribly stylish dresser, her tastes running to plain, sensible well-made dresses that could be bought off the rack cheaply at Sears. As natural as the mineral hills she’d grown up in—in this respect much like her husband—the former Valley High valedictorian and farmhand manager wasn’t interested in social drinking or parties. Not surprisingly, almost from the beginning of their travels together, she made her displeasure known to Sam. The two sparred and argued, made up and moved on. “It was not a marriage made in heaven,” notes Snead biographer Al Barkow. “It wasn’t hell, either. It lived more or less in its anteroom—purgatory. It was a clash of fire and oil, of personalities that were, in some ways, too similar.”
“Audrey and me had been arguin’ since we were kids in the school yard,” Sam once addressed the subject with a laugh. “But she sure didn’t think much of life out on tour, that’s for sure. I wasn’t all that crazy about the travel, to tell the truth, though I do love drivin’ a car just about anywhere I go. I got a big kick out of rollin’ into a place where there was a big tournament, and bein’ on the road helped me get my mind set around that, thinkin’ about what I needed to do. But I think that’s maybe why she didn’t take to it at all. She wasn’t really part of it. Audrey was a woman who had to have something to do—and at home there was always that.” After months of mostly contentious travel, Audrey was homesick for Hot Springs and Sam was fed up with her refusal to go with the flow; they agreed she’d tend to things at home and think about starting a family while he took care of business on the road. As the East Coast portion of his schedule got going, Sam either went alone or invited his former traveling pals John Derr and Johnny Bulla along for the ride.
Byron, on the other hand, started slowly in 1941 and didn’t really pick up his pace until just before the Masters, when at the Seminole Amateur-Professional Tournament he collected $803 for placing first and at least three times that amount in unofficial dough in the event’s high-flying Calcutta. He also won at Greensboro by holding off the hard-charging reigning champion, Ben Hogan.
Of the three, Ben appeared to have the firmest resolve to win even as rumors circulated that the tour might suspend play as war loomed ever closer. In March, Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act encouraged American companies to directly aid the besieged European democracies by selling, lending, or leasing critical war materials to the tune of $50 billion, the first step toward direct American involvement, and companies were already shifting to wartime mode, cutting back on consumer products in order to build reserves of rubber and steel. MacGregor, for instance, which Byron, Ben, and Jimmy Demaret represented on tour, had stopped manufacturing golf balls and clubs, converting its production floor in Dayton, Ohio, to making parachutes and aviation safety harnesses.
Almost overnight, there was a shortage of tournament-quality golf balls. For years Sam Snead loved to explain how, as the war effort deepened and material shortages led to rationing, he won several tournaments using the same golf ball for all four rounds; how he routinely scavenged lost balls from water hazards and often played with balls slightly out of round; how players sold or swapped excess equipment in the lobbies of their hotels. Another casualty of this period was the auto caravan that had defined the nomadic early tour. As gasoline and rubber grew noticeably scarce, many of the leading players, Hogan and Nelson among them, switched to traveling by train. Sam, however, stayed on the road.
In fourteen starts from January to June, Ben finished second six times and placed out of the top ten once. Teaming with his former critic Gene Sarazen, he lapped the field at the Miami Four-Ball and nearly defended his titles in Greensboro and Asheville. At the Masters, where he and Valerie dined with Bobby Jones for the first time, he had his best showing yet: fourth place. Byron, closing with a strong 70, finished second to Craig Wood, the likable Winged Foot pro and the first man to lead wire-to-wire. Wood, then thirty-nine, was perhaps the tournament’s sentimental favorite, having been runner-up to Byron at the U.S. Open in 1939 and suffering an equally tough loss to Denny Shute at the British Open six years prior to that, losing both times in a playoff. It was also Craig Wood who was victimized by Sarazen’s famous double-eagle blast at Augusta in 1935, losing that in the resulting playoff. The man who could most identify with losing a major in this manner, Sam Snead, opened with an untidy 73-75 and didn’t find his footing until a final-round 69 left him tied with Vic Ghezzi.
Even under the threat of war—and maybe because of it—professional golf continued to enjoy growing public support. The Masters set new attendance records that spring, suggesting to some that Bobby Jones’s boutique invitational had achieved “major” status. This continued a trend first seen in 1938, the year the governing USGA and PGA tour settled on a fourteen-club rule and more than sixty million rounds of golf were played, hundreds of public golf courses reopened, and more than half a million spectators turned out to watch some kind of golf tournament. Similar records were broken in 1940 and ’41. With the reviving PGA Tour featuring twenty-one official events, purses totaled $185,500 (of which Sam Snead took home nearly $20,000) and tour manager Fred Corcoran required tournament sponsors to guarantee at least $5,000 for a 72-hole event. In the years immediately prior to the war, the Cleveland Open’s $10,000 purse recalled the glory days of the late 1920s. At Augusta National, where not long before members were forced to pass the hat to keep the tournament alive, record gate receipts in 1941 confirmed not only that golf was on the upswing but also that Sam, Byron, and Ben were a primary reason why. Despite the loss of ten or so tournaments in 1939 and 1940 directly attributable to fuel and material rationing, professional golf bounced back in ’41 with an increase in purses across the board.
During America’s nervous early summer of 1941, as movie fans went to see Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and marveled at Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak and the Nazi juggernaut rolled east into the Soviet Union, Byron and Ben were naturally considered the favorites for the U.S. Open in their own backyard at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, followed closely by Sam, Jimmy Demaret, and Dallas native Lloyd Mangrum.
Despite a week of threatening weather, owing to Marvin Leonard’s persuasive hustle and personal magnetism every civic club and organization in Fort Worth was involved in pre-tournament receptions and evening lawn parties. Hogan arrived home after a frustrating fourth-place finish at the Goodall Round Robin in New York (where at Toots Shor’s he met Ted Williams, who when asked what shaking hands with Hogan was like tersely replied, “Bands of steel.”). At Colonial, Ben stayed well out of sight, avoiding the hoopla and lunching with Royal (who was now reigning Colonial club champion, a title he held for many years) in the men’s grill and working on his MacGregor Silver Scot irons in the workroom below the Colonial pro shop. Every afternoon following lunch, he and a caddie traipsed out to the ninth green for lengthy chipping and putting sessions, a privilege no other players enjoyed or even contemplated. Unlike many of the courses the tour played, Colonial boasted an expansive practice area, but the Hawk’s growing preference for isolation reinforced a strengthening perception among his peers and tour scribes that Hogan did things his own damn way and didn’t care what anyone thought about it.
With the press, Ben’s growing image problems stemmed from a couple of well-publicized incidents in 1940 where he skipped town after winning a tournament, denying local reporters the opportunity to interview him and earning the wrath of both Fred Corcoran and the local sponsors, who needed every shred of good publicity their tournament could get. “Frankly, I was so excited to get to the next tournament and see what I could do, I just forgot to stick around for the interviews,” Ben explained ineffectually. With a defensive edge that bordered at times on contempt and flat-out insincerity, he told one influential Midwestern columnist, “I sure didn’t mean to offend anybody. But I have a job to do and that’s winning golf tournaments.” The only thing Ben really needed, his pal Demaret reminded those who were offended, was more hours of daylight for practice.
Rather than lingering to savor his long-pursued success and express his appreciation to admiring fans and sponsors, Ben appeared to grow even more oblivious to the protocols of gracious winning and even less tolerant of interviews of any kind. If a question annoyed or bothered him, for example, he simply ignored it or, even worse, fixed the reporter with a brief stare that wire-brushed him into silence. If it irked veteran reporters that his answers to legitimate questions were often miserly and curt, Ben was aggravated that many of them frequently took unreasonable liberties by carelessly misquoting his carefully parsed comments or taking them out of context. The end result, in any case, wasn’t flattering. “He may be one of the best players in the game right now,” a sports columnist for the powerful Rocky Mountain News complained after Ben collected his check and vacated the Denver tournament before anyone knew he was gone, “but he’s certainly not making many friends where it counts—with reporters and fans.”
In fairness to Ben, he appeared genuinely surprised by the vigor of the criticism provoked by what he considered unintended slights—and by doing what he believed was the only thing he was placed on this earth to do: win golf tournaments. In his ultra-pragmatic mind, moreover, winning merely helped make up for years of repeated failure, and underscored the fact that he needed to win everything he could before it all came to a screeching halt, for whatever reason. This kind of dark fatalism informed Ben’s deep interior life and game much as it did his rival Snead’s. “When Ben’s around,” Sam famously quipped about this time, “you can almost hear his watch ticking.” As a world around them teetered on the edge of the abyss, both men were already fighting their own silent wars within.
Despite the large and enthusiastic crowds and lavish hospitality, the forty-fifth U.S. Open Championship failed to deliver the championship ending everyone hoped for. Fierce thunderstorms repeatedly halted play, flooding bunkers and greens and turning the fairways of Marvin Leonard’s relatively young course into a quagmire, prompting one New York wag to cheekily label this the “Fort Worth Stockyards Invitational.”
As crews fanned out under tumultuous skies and Leonard’s watchful eye to squeegee greens and bail out sunken bunkers, the pros played cards and grumbled in the locker room. Convinced his game was rounding into top form right on schedule, Sam was eager to steal a national championship from under the noses of the Texas mafia in general and Ben and Byron in particular, only to tromp through the mud to a poorly managed opening-round 76, which he never recovered from, finishing in a tie for thirteenth in the final standings. Byron’s campaign proved even more problematic. Staying with his parents on his new Denton spread north of town, shuttling into the tournament every morning by car and then encountering one rain delay after another, his tempo was hopelessly thrown off. He never found his comfort zone and finished in a tie for seventeenth place.
Of the three favorites, only Ben maintained anything close to his normal composure and focus. His sloppy second-round 77 came during the heaviest downpours but he finished the double-round finale with the lowest score for the 36-hole closing day at 68–70, a 289 total that put him in third behind Denny Shute and the eventual winner, Craig Wood—the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal week.
At least Wood’s success made for a poignant and compelling conclusion. Days before the tournament started, he pulled a muscle and feared his ailing back wouldn’t stand up to the pressure of an Open chase. A customized orthopedic back brace helped ease the searing pain but significantly constricted his golf swing. Only after Silver Scot Tommy Armour, fortified by nips from his hip flask, passionately urged him to carry on did Wood strap the brace back on and take his chances, expecting little or nothing in return. In fact, the pleasant New Yorker played masterfully, never missing a fairway over the final eighteen and finished at 284, giving the waterlogged fans of Fort Worth something to cheer about, and finally claiming a title that had eluded him for so long.
To anyone in search of a message, Wood’s dogged persistence and triumph over adversity spoke volumes about what it takes to win major championships. U.S. Opens in particular are endurance contests where the plodding tortoise often fares better than the bolting hare. Every time Ben crept a little higher up the final leaderboard of a major, as he did at Colonial that year, his confidence in his own abilities grew exponentially. “The greatest thing Ben had to finally overcome,” says Jackie Burke Jr., the Masters and PGA champ of 1956, who became a preferred practice partner and one of his closest friends on tour, “was the powerful insecurity he battled most of his life. There was no question he had all the shots by 1940—nobody was better prepared in that regard than Ben, frankly. But winning major championships requires a special kind of confidence few players ever acquire, and those who acquire it never seem to be able to keep it long. That’s what finally made Ben so unique. Once it finally came together, once he finally got those big hands of his around it, once he found that kind of confidence, hell, he almost couldn’t be beaten.”
Byron addressed the elusive topic in a conversation with Al Barkow some years later. “Is there a psychology for winning? I don’t understand the psychological function of the human mind sufficiently to answer that very well, except to say that winners are different. They’re a different breed of cat. I think the reason is, they have an inner drive and are willing to give of themselves whatever it takes to win. It’s a discipline that a lot of people are not willing to impose on themselves.”
A poignant footnote to Marvin Leonard’s one and only national Open underscores this point. Following the presentation of the trophy, during the drive back to his hotel in downtown Fort Worth with tour impresario Fred Corcoran, Wood found himself gazing out the window at a lighted driving range where patrons were beating balls into a clearing evening sky.
“Want to stop and hit a bucket?” Corcoran asked, giving a good Irish chuckle. “Just to keep the back loose?” He later explained that he’d been joking.
Wood needed only an instant. “Yeah,” he said, “let’s do that.”
To the surprise and astonishment of the range’s patrons, America’s new national golf champion got out, paid his money, and hit a bucket of balls. Perhaps Wood appreciated how fortunate he’d been, trussed up in a corset, to claim a prize the three hottest players in the game were desperate to win. Or perhaps he sensed, as he later admitted to close friends at Winged Foot, how quickly the magic of success arrived and vanished in American sports, like moonlight on the water. Today’s news wrapped tomorrow’s fish, particularly in tournament golf.
In any event, classy Craig Wood had finally won the events he’d long dreamed of winning, the Masters and the U.S. Open, both in the same year. Maybe, as he hit shot after shot into the pleated evening sky over Fort Worth, prompting bursts of vigorous applause from the lucky hackers gathered around watching this extraordinary impromptu exhibition, he had a premonition that this would be his final moment in the light of victory. He would return to his job at Winged Foot a deeply grateful and satisfied man, winning only two more times before his game abandoned him for good.
As for Ben, if there was a message in his brilliant closing rounds of 68-70 in fitful conditions over one of the toughest Open courses, his score of 289 would actually have won three previous championships and seemed to suggest he now understood how to finish off a major with a cold killer’s efficiency.
True to form, however, he took no consolation from his best Open showing to date. Within hours he was packing for a train ride up to the new Mahoning Valley Open in Ohio, where he took a third, then carried on to Toledo for Byron’s Inverness Four-Ball, where he teamed with Jimmy Demaret to run the table. After losing to Byron two-and-one in the quarterfinal at the PGA—whereupon Vic Ghezzi subsequently beat Byron one-up in a taut thirty-eight-hole final to claim the Wanamaker Trophy—Ben went on a tear to conclude the season, winning in Chicago and at his own Hershey event, in total claiming second place at five of the six remaining tournaments to finish as the tour’s leading money winner—with $18,734—and the game’s most maddeningly elusive star.
After Fort Worth’s Open, Byron went on a modest tear of his own, placing second at Mahoning Valley, and then winning George S. May’s inaugural Tam O’Shanter Open outside Chicago, whose first prize was a tour-best $2,000 check. Before returning to Texarkana to spend the holidays with Louise’s family, he captured opens in Ohio and Miami to earn $13,526 in official money.
That was just $650 more than Sam, yet because two of Byron’s wins came at unofficial events he wound up as second-leading money winner, producing a final standing of Hogan, Snead, and Nelson, one, two, three, in the money race, a perfect snapshot of each man’s psychological motivation. Sam likewise went on a post-Open run and collected victories at the Canadian and the Rochester Times Union opens followed by a blistering Henry Hurst Invitational, where he won by carding three rounds in the mid-60s.
That December, while tooling with his friend John Derr down to Miami’s season-ending tournament in his Cadillac, Sam confided that he believed his game was poised to finally end his biggest hex. “Despite the fact that Ben and Byron were getting as much or even more attention than he was, Sam felt his game had finally matured to the point where something like a Spring Mill disaster could never happen again. He was ready to claim a major—but the question that haunted everybody, and maybe Sam most of all, would there even be another major championship anytime soon?”
An answer of sorts came during their drive. “It was a beautiful Sunday and we were going down a week early so Sam could practice and enjoy the warm weather, having a great time talking about everything from baseball to women,” Derr recalls. “I think we were somewhere in Georgia and had stopped for gas. It was late in the afternoon. We had the radio on and suddenly the announcer was telling us that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t believe it. I remember Sam just listening and shaking his head. All he said was something like, ‘Them sorry sons-a-bitches.’ It was all pretty solemn after that, very little bantering. We got down to Miami and everything had suddenly changed. It was all about business but the war was on everyone’s mind. There was talk that the tour would shut down immediately. Nobody had a clue what might come next. Suddenly every shot, some guys figured, might be the last one in competition for a while. Sam was particularly concerned about that. He wanted that major championship more than anything and feared he’d been jinxed one more time—this time by the Japanese.”
Byron blistered the Miami Lakes course with three rounds in the low 60s to win with a total of 269. Ben and Sam both had three rounds in the 60s, with Ben finishing at 274 and Sam one back of that, a one, two, three conclusion that seemed to splendidly summarize the state of professional golf.
Despite America’s entry into the war, in 1942 the tour mounted twenty-one tournaments, with a collective purse of $116,000, before concluding in late summer at Byron’s Inverness Four-Ball in Toledo. President Roosevelt, a lifelong fan of the game and a solid mid-handicapper player when younger, urged Fred Corcoran to keep professional golf going as a morale booster.
Ben played in twenty-one events, Byron in twenty, Sam in fourteen.
The Hawk’s private war for major acceptance began at the season-opening L.A. Open, where he carved a magnificent four-iron shot to the final hole and sank a clutch birdie putt to tie long-hitting Jimmy Thomson, and then beat him in the playoff, the first of his career and an excellent omen. Sam placed third, Byron sixth. The battlefield shifted to Oakland, where Byron cruised to a five-stroke victory. Next came San Francisco, where Ben and Byron dined with Francis Ouimet’s pie-faced Brookline caddie, Eddie Lowery, who’d migrated to California and had done exceedingly well in the car business. Here Ben nailed down his second win despite the brief maddening return of a hook that had him aiming well right of most fairways, according to Byron; Sam finished second.
On they went to the Texas Open, where a weak putt on the final hole kept Sam out of the playoff between Ben and the eventual winner, Chick Harbert. The next week, at the rain-shortened New Orleans Open, Sam lost a playoff to Lloyd Mangrum, then went home to Hot Springs for a brief rest before driving to Florida and winning the St. Petersburg Open and St. Augustine Pro-Amateur back to back. In between he nearly won the fifth Seminole Amateur-Professional, an unofficial event that had golf’s richest Calcutta; in 1939 the club gained unwanted national headlines for a wagering pool that topped $48,000. In Ben’s second Seminole appearance, he became better acquainted with another invited guest, George Coleman, a future Oklahoma state champion he’d first met back at the lavish Agua Caliente in 1932 when both men had mostly lint in their pockets. Born to wealth the same year as Ben, Coleman had already made his first fortune in oil—an elegant, beautifully spoken man who would develop close friendships with both Byron and, especially, Ben, who fell under the spell of everything he saw at Seminole and grew to regard George Coleman as a brother. Founded with little fanfare by millionaire E. F. Hutton and his cronies in the snake-infested mangrove jungles of Juno Beach shortly before the stock market crashed in 1929, the club was ultra-discreet and dedicated to personal privacy, the ultimate sporting retreat for prosperous men and their guests, offering a golf course widely hailed to be designer Donald Ross’s finest work.
Its patrons numbered Pulitzers and Vanderbilts, wintering Hollywood movie stars, barons of Wall Street and occasional British royalty, and its elegant pink-stucco clubhouse, designed by society architect Marion Wyeth, featured a swimming pool where some members originally preferred to swim in the nude and—more important—a simple but magnificent wood-paneled locker room that would eventually become the envy of private clubs everywhere. Everything about the course pleased Ben’s increasingly critical eye, especially the daunting uphill sixth, a par-four that turned slightly left to right and whose sliver of a heavily bunkered green required a flawless approach shot. In time, Ben told his good friend Henry Picard—destined to become Seminole’s sixth head professional in 1956—that it was his favorite hole in all of golf. Byron himself went on the record to call the place “Just about the finest club I have ever seen, full of very warm and friendly people.” In the 1942 tournament, Ben finished third, three strokes behind Sam and four ahead of Byron.
Beginning the important Carolina swing and tuning up for the Masters, with dogwoods struggling to bloom along the fairways of Pinehurst No. 2, Ben and Byron opened the North and South Open Championship with sterling 69s, with Sam just a stroke behind. By the time four thousand spectators ringed the seventy-second green in a chilly spring twilight, to no one’s particular surprise it was Hogan who had mounted a blistering ten-under assault during the final thirty-six to beat his top rivals, Snead and Nelson. One, two, three … again. A Charlotte sportswriter wondered if professional golf was a three-horse race, noting it was only a question of when—not if—the tour would cease operations.
Days later in Greensboro, former New York Yankee slugger Sam Byrd slipped past all three to win, though Ben claimed second place. At the next stop, the Land of the Sky tournament in Asheville, Ben made up for what he considered a poor finish at Greensboro by lapping the field at the posh Biltmore Forest Golf Club, another of his cherished Donald Ross courses, and winning for the third time in a row.
The Masters of 1942 would be last played before it, too, was shut down in a time of worldwide crisis—and surely among the most memorable. Ben, Sam, and Byron, the tour’s leading money winners, were naturally the favorites. Many have even posited that this was the moment when the Masters, featuring the first live radio broadcast by NBC, achieved its major championship status. The bucolic setting in the lush grounds of a former horticultural nursery, and the sweet familiarity of a tournament guided and shaped by the enduring presence of Bobby Jones, attracted more and more national attention with the advent of every spring, especially from weary sportwriters slogging home from spring training baseball. “For many of us it was a genuine reprieve from our regular duties covering baseball,” John Derr says, “and a chance to rub elbows with the royalty of golf. Cliff Roberts made sure the reporters were treated like patrons, a strategy few other tournament directors picked up on until well after the war. I don’t know if ’42 was the year it became a major event in most minds, but it was surely well along that road in a hurry. That’s why nobody wanted to see golf stop.”
And this year, like a gift from the gods meant to carry for the war’s duration, the Masters provided a championship for the ages, a nip-and-tuck scrimmage between Byron and Ben that saw the latter take on twenty-eight putts in the second round, amid a wild and swirling wind that shredded virtually every other score in the field. “Best managing I ever did out there,” he calmly explained in the locker room. “I mean manipulating the ball, allowing for wind and roll. You had to do that in that wind.” Despite Ben’s impressive 68, Byron led him by three strokes as they headed into the weekend play. Sam opened with a sloppy 78, complained of a bad back and never recovered enough to figure better than seventh. As the Augusta Chronicle reported, in the strange final round Byron seemed to have only bad luck and Ben nothing but good luck. Yet Byron arrived at the final two holes of regulation needing just two pars to beat Ben, who twenty minutes before had coolly dropped a six-footer to narrow the lead to a stroke and posted
280.
A weak approach shot at seventeen, however, left Byron buried in the bunker with a fried-egg lie that cost him a bogey on the swift and grainy Bermuda green. He now needed a birdie on eighteen to win. Unfortunately, attempting to steer his drive close to the inside of the dogleg to give himself a better angle at the steep uphill final green, he pushed his ball into the trees on the right and found it sitting atop a heavy clump of grass and pine needles. Gripping down on a five-iron, he miraculously hooked a shot through a narrow gap and somehow coaxed it onto the putting surface, ending fifteen feet from the cup. Minutes later, his birdie attempt lipped out, producing a sharp gasp of disappointment from the crush of spectators wedged around the green. Byron tapped in for par, removed his cap and smiled, clearly showing the stress of the day. The Monday playoff would begin at two-thirty, patrons learned.
That night at the Bon Air Vanderbilt, Byron slept fitfully, and the following morning Ben knocked on his door and, discovering his old friend and rival in a pale and unsteady state, offered to postpone their match. Byron thanked him but declined. Later that summer, he confided to close friends at Inverness that just like Bobby Jones, his stomach sometimes caused him distress before a critical match. His hero’s cure was a steaming bath and several fingers of good corn whiskey, preferably well-aged bourbon, whereas Byron opted for a bland chicken sandwich and a cup of warm tea, hoping to keep that down until his nerves settled. More than nerves were on edge, however. During the train ride from Asheville to Augusta with Louise and his good friend Jug McSpaden, the two men calculated that by banking $100,000 in winnings each could live comfortably off the interest and never have to tour again. Still harboring secret hopes that Byron might change his mind about adopting a child, Louise made no attempt to mask her growing disaffection for life on the road, reserving travel now primarily for major events like the Masters and the U.S. Open. Though Byron owned the farm where his parents lived in Texas, the couple constantly talked about finding a place all their own and putting down more permanent roots. Louise favored a certain neighborhood in Dallas; Byron, who was thirty years old that spring, and approaching the end of his prime by the standards of any other sport, pictured a spread out in the country near his folks in Denton. Ever since childhood, he’d dreamed of owning a ranch.
The fatigue many had perceived in Byron’s gait and facial expressions was largely psychological. In the heat of competition, he rarely smiled, prompting some to conclude that, as it had with Jones, tournament golf was becoming a great burden to bear. And in fact, his happiest days were spent teaching at Inverness, performing exhibitions, interacting with members, and playing challenge matches with friends and promising young players. The tension of a major championship only exacerbated his nervous stomach and made him privately yearn for a simpler life, the sooner the better.
Testifying to the significance of this playoff for the coveted Masters medallion of 1942—the signature green jacket wouldn’t be introduced until 1949 (the year Sam captured his first Masters)—at least twenty-five touring pros hung around to see Hogan and Nelson decide the matter, among fifteen hundred spectators who skipped work to follow the action. “Here for all intents and purposes were the two best players in the game,” Henry Picard explained years later, “and I don’t know anyone who wanted to miss it except perhaps Sam Snead. I don’t recall seeing Sam there. I suspect he cleared out fast. He didn’t need to be reminded what the three of them were chasing.”
From the outset, Byron played like a man who’d been throwing up all night. He opened with a towering slice into the pines that required him to poke the ball back into the fairway with a putter held in his left hand, resulting in a double-bogey against Ben’s par-four. Several times he paused and blew his nose. But on the par-five second hole, he struck a rousing low-iron shot onto the green and just missed making eagle. Both men birdied. After five holes, however, he found himself three down.
Among his many graces, Byron Nelson always possessed an almost magical talent for escaping disaster. On the par-three sixth, he laid his tee shot ten feet from the cup and smoothly rolled home the birdie as Ben missed left and made bogey, losing two strokes of his lead. Then, on the long par-five eighth, Byron unleashed a 280-yard drive and carved a spectacular three-iron shot to six feet, canning his second eagle opportunity to take the lead by one. On the downhill tenth, Ben missed the green and made bogey to go two down. At the par-three twelve, in the verdant heart of “Amen Corner,” Byron nearly holed a seven-iron and tapped in for a birdie that placed him three up with six to play.
But Ben, who’d never beaten him in a playoff, refused to give up. Banishing all thoughts of Glen Garden and the Texas Open from his mind, he kept coming like a trained killer, silent, methodical, his bright gray raptor’s eyes seeing only the beautiful green battlefield ahead of him. He drained a clutch fifteen-footer at the fourteenth to cut Byron’s lead by a third. On fifteen he made another birdie while Byron three-putted for par. The lead had shrunk to one.
Ben had the honor at sixteen but pushed his tee shot into the right-side bunker, staring at it disbelievingly for several seconds. Byron then struck one of the finest clutch shots of all time, dropping his ball thirty inches from the cup. He missed the short sloping putt but Ben made bogey from the sand. The lead was now back to two.
That’s how they arrived at the final green, greeted by a rising tsunami of appreciative applause from a gallery that included their contemporaries and a large contingent of young men already in uniform. Both had left their approach shots in the deep bunker fronting the green, and both played fine explosion shots to eight feet. Byron putted first, his ball stopping just shy of the cup, and he tapped in for bogey. Ben took only a moment before rolling his par putt home, cutting the final margin, once again, to a single shot: Ben 70, Byron 69.
They removed their identical flat linen caps, made by the same Times Square hatter, smiled cordially and shook hands. All over again, Ben was the soul of gracious in defeat. Up the slope in the applauding gallery, their wives exchanged long, tearful hugs, Louise knowing all too well how painful this was for Valerie. It was Glen Garden and the Texas Open writ larger than ever.
A few minutes later, Alfred Bourne, the head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and a prominent Augusta member, playfully signed the winner’s check for $1,500 on the champion’s back. Someone in the press reminded Byron that, prior to the match, he’d promised to reveal his secret to playing Augusta National—assuming he won.
“Always shoot for greens,” he said, visibly relieved to have it over with. “Try and avoid the bunkers. And never go for a dangerous flag position.” This was his own version of “course strategy.”
“How do you think you did today against Ben?” he was also asked. Byron took a moment to answer.
“Except for the first hole,” he said gently, perhaps attempting to soften the blow for his long-suffering friend and rival, “I think that was the finest round I ever shot.”
For Sam and Ben, redemption of a kind came within weeks.
A week before the start of the PGA Championship at the Seaview Country Club outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, Sam drove to Norfolk to enlist in the navy. “My thinking there was that they might station me right there, close to home, where I knew a good number of folks and some of the better golf courses,” he laughingly explained years later. “But I guess that was pretty naive thinking.”
At the time, he told several recruiting officers, including, he claimed, an admiral who turned up to have their photos made with him, “The PGA Championship is next week up in New Jersey. They’re planning to cancel play until this thing is over and I’d like one more shot at a title. Will that be a problem?”
“Oh, we’ll give you a pass for that, don’t you worry,” one of them assured him. “You just go ahead and sign.”
Something, however, told Sam to wait. “I thought about my wife, Audrey, and about the three thousand dollar purse and the two thousand dollar bonus from Wilson [if he won], and I decided the rest of the boys could handle Tojo all right for just one more week.” He asked if his induction could be delayed a week, and the brass reluctantly agreed. It turned out to be perhaps the wisest—and most challenging—decision of his playing career.
Though other top stars were signing up to serve as well, the most competitive field of the year began grueling match play in the final week of May on the relatively short but demandingly tight composite course that drew from Seaview’s Bay and Pines eighteens, layouts to which Donald Ross, Howard Toomey, and William Flynn had all contributed design work.
En route to the thirty-six finale, Sam beat Vic Ghezzi, red-hot Sam Byrd, an aging Willie Goggin, PGA president Ed Dudley, and ever-dangerous Jimmy Demaret, who playfully advised Sam not to wear his sailor’s cap in his match against Corporal Jim Turnesa, who was on leave from the army’s nearby Fort Dix and had brought along a throng of seven thousand GIs to cheer him along. “This crowd isn’t exactly pulling for you,” Dudley had remarked to Sam earlier in the tournament. The hostility, Sam later learned, stemmed from a rumor circulating that he’d attempted to dodge his enlistment—and that it was the navy only doubled the offense, hence Demaret’s joke.
Turnesa is quite a story himself, one of the seven sons born to Vitale and Anna Turnesa, who’d immigrated from Naples, Italy, to Elmford, New York, in 1904. All the boys became prolific golfers, creating perhaps the game’s most storied family dynasty. Phil, Frank, and Doug became outstanding teaching professionals. Joe, Mike, and Jim migrated from the amateur ranks to the tour in the 1940s and early ’50s, between them winning dozens of events, reaching the final of every major championship, having played on both the Walker Cup and Ryder Cup teams. With help from his older brothers, the youngest Turnesa, Willie, attended the College of the Holy Cross and went on to have an amateur career that rivaled Bobby Jones’s. Upon hearing that he’d won the U.S. Amateur at Oakmont in 1938, the story goes, the patriarch Vitale supposedly declared, “Why shouldn’t he win? All he does is play golf!”
Jim, short and trim and unusually quiet by nature, the second youngest, born the same year as Sam, reached the final by eliminating Dutch Harrison and Jug McSpaden, and then the country’s two hottest players, Ben and Byron—all of which produced an avalanche of sports headlines from just up the Hudson that immediately transformed Jim Turnesa into a star and poster boy for the American GI.
On the eighth hole of their Saturday double-round match, Turnesa dropped a fifteen-foot birdie putt and Sam missed his. On the thirteenth, he drained a thirty-five-footer that electrified the troops, then followed up by holing a sensational bunker blast on the sixteenth that set them off even more explosively. Sam appeared shaken, in part because on several holes friendly soldiers kicked Turnesa’s wayward drives back into the fairway, but also because the openly partisan gallery raised such a ruckus and razzed Sam so fiercely that at one point Dudley had to step in and request them to calm down or risk being “invited” to leave the grounds. Turnesa himself attempted to quiet the crowd, and afterward Sam quickly pointed out that Turnesa was a true gentleman throughout.
After twenty-three holes, however, Sam was three down and struggling to maintain his composure. A twelve-foot par save on the next hole, which Turnesa bogeyed, narrowed the lead to two. By the twenty-eighth hole, Sam had drawn dead even and noticed Jim taking several extra waggles, a subtle sign he was beginning to feel the pressure of the moment. After missing the green at the thirtieth hole, Turnesa missed an easy par putt to give Sam the lead, producing a chorus of boos and grumbles. A short time later, on the short thirty-fifth hole of play, suddenly “feeling as confident and loose as I ever felt in a finish,” Sam struck a beautiful seven-iron shot that flew 160 yards and dropped into the cup to close out the championship like a bolt of lightning.
He stood for a moment in the buttery late-afternoon light, a broad smile spreading across his handsome features. He reflected that upon winning his first major championship—the most important title of his career, he always claimed—he uncharacteristically heard neither the cheers nor the catcalls from the gallery. “It ended so damn fast,” he quipped, “I almost forgot to notice.”
At the presentation ceremony, he congratulated the game’s newest star and wished him well. Six years later, Turnesa would finish second to Ben Hogan in the same major championship, then finally claim it himself in 1952, a lovely story of one man’s persistence.
But for now it was Sam Snead’s golden moment, his long-awaited redemption. He playfully kissed the Wanamaker Trophy and held it up to a large ovation from a crowd including many soldiers whose minds were apparently changed by the strength of this dazzling finish by golf’s most colorful star, and they weren’t the only detractors his victory finally silenced. For once, the press couldn’t heap enough praise on his impressive come-from-behind win in enemy territory.
On Sunday morning, Sam woke up the new PGA champion and would remain so for the war’s duration. “I never had a better feeling in my life,” he remembered. “The only thing that brought it down some was the fact that golf was pretty much done for the time being. None of us had any idea when it might come back—or even if it would.”
On Monday morning, he drove back to Norfolk and signed his enlistment form, officially making him a seaman first class in the Special Services of the United States Navy.
Sam—deep in the rigors of basic training, though treated as something of a VIP—wasn’t granted a furlough for the Hale America National Open that was held three weeks later outside Chicago at the pretty Ridgemoor Country Club. The tournament was a one-time affair, co-sponsored by the Chicago District Golf Association and the USGA, meant to serve as a fund-raiser for the Navy Relief Society and the United Service Organization, and designed to heighten public enthusiasm for buying war bonds. Millions of fans failed to grasp that it was a replacement event for the officially suspended U.S. Open Championship.
To help drive home the point that all Americans needed to chip in and do their part, newly commissioned Captain Robert Tyre Jones Jr., fresh from intelligence training in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, showed up in his new Army Air Corps uniform to play a practice round with Ben Hogan. Because of a painful varicose vein condition, Jones had actually been classified 4-F—meaning he was physically unfit for service—but argued persuasively that a legendary sportsman in uniform might do wonders for recruitment. Following his practice round, he remarked to PGA president Ed Dudley and Charlie Bartlett of the Chicago Tribune, “I have never seen anyone who works as hard at this game as Ben Hogan does. He is remarkable and an inspiration.”
In a well-publicized pre-tournament charity event, Ben allowed his red-hot Spalding putter to be auctioned off, netting $1,500 for navy relief. The gesture was seen as one of tremendous generosity and patriotism—though it maybe wasn’t as altruistic as it appeared on first glance. Back home in Fort Worth, he’d been trying out a new center-shafted model whose head was made from a melted-down doorknob. On the threshold of enlisting himself, he had already decided this would be the putter to carry him into postwar tournament action, if and when the tour resumed.
After opening with a mediocre 72, he shellacked the field with 62-69-68 to cakewalk to the tournament’s title, winning $1,200 in war bonds and a “victory” medallion nearly identical to the bronze medal presented by the USGA to its national Open winners. For the record, Byron played well, too, finishing seven strokes back in fourth place.
In the locker room afterward, Ben appeared uncharacteristically happy and approachable—almost as if he believed he’d actually won the U.S. Open. Reporters discovered that he, in fact, believed exactly that—that he’d finally won a major. When asked if he considered this his major breakthrough, Ben blinked hard at the questioner and replied without hesitation, “Yes. I think given the quality of this field it’s a major championship.” Whereupon he gave a wintry little smile and added, “At least I feel that way. Don’t know about you boys.”
The reporters laughed. Most of them, it turned out, didn’t share Ben’s opinion of the Hale America Open and its ersatz bronze medal, and neither did the blue sports coats of the USGA. For many weeks, however, a gentlemanly debate was waged in the pages of America’s newspapers. Ben’s own growing ranks of fans were multiplying, and many of them regarded the Hale America as a legitimate major, and wrote letters to the USGA demanding that it be recognized as such. But in the end, the win counted only as a standard tour victory.
In early August, after many of his contemporaries had signed up to serve in some capacity or another, Ben was unable to let go of the reins and finished fourth in the Canadian Open, and then won the Rochester Open on his way back to Fort Worth. This pushed him to the top of the money list for 1942, a $13,143 total that just edged out Byron Nelson and Sam Snead—a powerful glimpse of the postwar world to come.