AS HERBERT WARREN WIND put it in The Story of American Golf, 1953 was a year unlike any other, in some ways the equal of Bobby Jones’s remarkable Grand Slam year in 1930 and Harry Vardon’s 1920 farewell tour of America for the kind of rich human drama from which the game’s sustaining narrative would arise. “The story of the next three years—the last three years—is the story of [Ben’s] fortunes in six tournaments, three Masters and three Opens.” Though he remained maddeningly silent on his retirement plans, Ben’s near-triumphs in the only tournaments that now meant anything to him would punctuate his extraordinary career.
Beginning in April 1954, with the worldwide press unleashing every superlative imaginable on the heels of his triumph at Carnoustie, the last American athlete who somehow looked better photographed in black-and-white appeared as promised at Augusta National and played three brilliant rounds through the tsunami of excitement generated by unknown Billy Joe Patton only to wind up losing to Sam in a playoff.
As he later confirmed to Marvin Leonard and other intimates, this was one of his most frustrating losses. His concluding 75 was decidedly uncharacteristic, the result of his growing inability to pull the trigger on putts. But on the positive side of the ledger, in honor of his unique contributions, the Golf Writers Association of America unveiled the Ben Hogan Award at its annual gathering during Masters week, presented to the player who persisted despite serious illness or physical impairment. The first recipient, fittingly enough, was fellow Texan Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who was gamely battling cancer.
Following the Masters, perhaps sensing the sharp winds of change, Valerie Hogan’s faithful newspaper-clipping routine abruptly ceased, almost as if she knew her husband would never attain a greater glory. In fact, he would win just twice more in his career, teaming with Sam to take both the individual and team honors at the 1956 Canada Cup, followed by a fifth Colonial title in the spring of 1959. The U.S. Open and the Masters remained his primary objectives.
“After 1954,” said Mike Souchak, “every sighting of Ben was a special occasion, almost otherworldly to the younger players, who would always come around to watch whenever he was warming up or practicing. Many of the veterans did the same thing. Ben was living history, after all. We all sensed every time out could be his last. One thing I noticed, perhaps because of this, was that he grew a lot friendlier to people, even strangers who asked him for his autograph, especially kids. Ben loved kids. Most people don’t know this. A lot of kids began showing up at the Masters and the Opens about that time. Golf was becoming a popular recreational sport thanks to the excitement Ben and Sam and Byron generated. It didn’t hurt that you had a guy in the White House [Dwight Eisenhower] who loved the game and urged Americans to play. That combination really lit the fire in this country.”
As his game dwindled and his appearances grew rarer, Ben’s mind shifted to shaping his legacy in other ways.
Weeks after Ben lost the Masters playoff to Sam, a popular new Time-Life publication called Sports Illustrated borrowed unauthorized images of Hogan from Life and quotes from his peers to try to decipher the “secret” to his incomparable swing. Following the magazine’s launch on August 16, an outraged Ben phoned Time founder Henry Luce and threatened to sue unless he was offered a written apology and a fee of $10,000. The savvy Luce, sensing an opportunity to turn a defeat into a victory, made a counterproposal to purchase Ben’s book publisher, A. S. Barnes, and pay him $30,000 to either revise his best-selling Power Golf or perhaps do a new book altogether. By summer’s end, the terms for an entirely new instruction book were hashed out; Sports Illustrated staffer Herb Wind agreed to serve as Ben’s writing partner, and famed medical illustrator Anthony Ravielli was brought in to do illustrations.
More important to Ben, just days before he appeared at his hometown Colonial NIT in May of 1954, several hundred sets of clubs bearing his distinctive signature and crested emblem came off the assembly line at his newly refurbished West Pafford Street factory. Halfway through the tournament, however, he suddenly withdrew, offering no explanation. The reason, in fact, was his unhappiness over the quality of his clubs. Having taken hundreds of orders from leading pro shops, he made a bold decision to scuttle more than $150,000 worth of his new equipment on the eve of their release rather than allow what he believed to be inferior equipment bearing his name to reach the market. “He threw out castings and shafts and pretty well started from scratch,” one early employee remembered. “Mr. Hogan wanted nothing less than perfection.”
When his leading investor Pollard Simons angrily balked at this decision, Ben went to a Fort Worth bank and arranged to borrow half a million dollars on the strength of his own name. A group of investors that included Marvin Leonard, George Coleman, Paul Shields, San Francisco car dealer Eddie Lowery, Bing Crosby, and Dan Topping, owner of the New York Yankees, rallied to provide the necessary capital for the company to keep going. Leonard reportedly took the largest share.
If his business affairs were a bit more settled by the time he reached A. W. Tillinghast’s splendid Lower Course at Baltusrol in New Jersey for the fifty-fourth U.S. Open in June, Ben’s customary preparation routine and playing rhythm were clearly suffering. In yet another sign of how rapidly the times were changing, with ten former National Open champions in the field, this was the first to be televised nationally by NBC as well as the first where fairways were roped off to keep fans in control and out of the cameras’ view. Most lenses and eyes were trained on the reigning champion, but after a promising 70-71 start the Hawk struggled to a sixth-place finish and confided to Valerie that he didn’t know how many more U.S. Open efforts he could stomach. Though it was of no consolation whatsoever, Sam finished tied for eleventh place.
After his deeply satisfying victory over Ben at Augusta that spring, in fact, Sam’s own competitive edge also appeared to dull rapidly. He entered just six more events that year and won only once—the unofficial Palm Beach Round Robin—and was a distant twenty-sixth on the money list, his worst showing in nearly two decades. “To be perfectly honest,” he explained years later, “I was really questioning at that moment whether to keep playing tournaments or cut back the way Ben did. We weren’t spring chickens, both of us forty-two and counting. I had good deals with the Boca Raton Club and the Greenbrier that provided a nice income. It wasn’t the money that kept me coming back, no sir. It was that missing Open. The fact that Ben came out for just three events in 1955 kind of gave me some added motivation.”
Following a winter of steady practice in Boca Raton before the 1955 season, Sam increased his daily exercise regime and entered twenty-one events, winning three and climbing back to seventh on the money list, a year highlighted by his fifth Greensboro Open title and a respectable third just a week later at the Masters, only a stroke behind Ben, the runner-up. Even as Cary Middlecoff lapped the field by seven strokes, Sam and Ben commanded the lion’s share of attention, drawing record-breaking galleries.
Two months later, Sam launched a quiet assault on the fifty-fifth U.S. Open at San Francisco’s beautiful Olympic Club, and one of the most formidable fields ever. Known for his quick Open starts, he commenced with an uncharacteristic 79 but fought his way back in round two with a brilliant 69 that left him just four off the lead held by Tommy Bolt and Harvie Ward, the sensational amateur out of North Carolina. “This place isn’t a golf course,” Sam quipped to a reporter following his impressive comeback. “It’s a beautiful graveyard by the sea.” His third-round 70 nudged him into second place behind former champion Julius Boros.
Yet once again, though, he was destined to be a forgotten man in the mist at Olympic, once more overshadowed by Ben and an unknown professional from Davenport, Iowa, who tied him with an eight-foot birdie putt on the final hole, forcing a playoff Ben dreaded more than anything.
At thirty-three, Jack Fleck was a journeyman pro who’d promised his wife that after this final shot he would give up a life on tour that had produced largely only frustration. A gangly, quiet fellow who listed a driving range back home among his primary club affiliations, he’d made his best finish on tour that year in Baton Rouge, an invisible tenth place, and unlike every other professional in the field he didn’t have an equipment deal of any kind. On the other hand, the player he admired had given him a special gift—the second set of Hogan clubs ever used in competition.
Several weeks before at the Colonial, figuring the worst that could happen was simply a snub by his hero, Fleck brazenly showed up at the Hogan factory on West Pafford and introduced himself to the boss, explaining this was his do-or-die season. Impressed with his guts and honesty, Hogan gave him one of the first newly retooled sets of irons and woods and refused to take a penny. The only other set of Hogan clubs in play at Olympic that week was used by their maker.
The cruel and indifferent gods of the game decided that Fleck would deny his benefactor a record fifth U.S. Open. The Ben disciple, who prayed all week and claimed that an angel visited him while he was shaving at the modest El Camino Motel, went on to beat Ben in what is broadly considered golf’s greatest upset. When Fleck, who looked shell-shocked, tapped in his final putt to win their playoff by three strokes, Ben Hogan came forward amid a sea of clicking cameras, removed his flat linen cap and shook hands with this sweet-natured man who would soon fade back into obscurity, playfully fanning his red-hot Bulls Eye putter. Later, at the awards presentation, with his face washed and his graying hair neatly combed, Ben’s voice cracked when he said, “I’m through with competitive golf. I came here with the idea of trying to win. I worked harder, I think, than ever before in my life.” He explained that he could no longer put Valerie through this grinding ordeal but left the door slightly ajar for another U.S. Open down the road.
“From now on,” he added, “I’m a weekend golfer. I want to play for the pleasure of it because I want to be around the fellows and I want to be around golf.”
It was his long-awaited retirement announcement. And with that he vanished.
“He’ll be back,” declared Tommy Bolt, disappointed at finishing third, just out of the playoff. “Ben needs this the way most of us need air to breathe.”
For his part, Sam once again made a hash of the critical final round, spoiling an otherwise spectacular championship with a costly final 74. A 69 would have placed him in the playoff with Fleck and Hogan, and as his biographer Al Barkow laments, “What a playoff that would have been.”
Three weeks later, two days before Ben’s forty-third birthday, Life magazine’s cover pictured him mid-swing under the bold headline “Ben Hogan Tells His Secret,” and promised that inside the game’s most mythic star “finally reveals the mysterious maneuver that made him a champion.”
In fact, there was nothing remotely mysterious about it. As collaborator Herb Wind noted in the article and stressed decades later, the slight cupping of his left wrist at the top of the backswing was a technique that had been used since the days of Old Tom Morris and, accompanied by the weaker grip first shown to him by Henry Picard, was simply meant to open the clubface and thus “make it impossible” to close at impact and produce a “lethal hook.” This revelation was illustrated by a nine-shot, freeze-frame sequence of the star’s legendary swing. The public ate it up, with copies vanishing from the newsstands in record time.
Though the precise terms were never disclosed, Ben was reportedly paid $50,000 for this modest exegesis, the happy result of his tough negotiations with Henry Luce that led to his collaboration with Wind on Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, the first serialized excerpts of which appeared in the pages of Sports Illustrated beginning in March 1957. The book appeared soon after and became an immediate best-seller.
That same year Marvin Leonard purchased two hundred rolling oak-shaded acres a mile or two from where Ben and Valerie Hogan were building a house in a prestigious neighborhood just off Roaring Springs Road in west Fort Worth. Robert Trent Jones was hired to design a golf course at this club Leonard planned to call Shady Oaks, his own private getaway from the more public Colonial.
To no one’s surprise, Ben was the first member, and he also drove Jones crazy by constantly tinkering with his layout. Upon completion, Shady Oaks’s beautiful clubhouse featured a large round table by the large window in the men’s grill, where Ben and his closest friends and invited guests would have lunch together every day, five days a week, for the next thirty-seven years.
After the high drama at Olympic, Ben’s next appearance would be at the centerpiece of events that would reshape the landscape of golf. Naturally, it involved his old friend and rival, Byron Nelson.
While touring the Northwest doing a charity exhibition in late 1952, purely at the suggestion of Eddie Lowery, Byron showed up at the National Amateur in Seattle to follow a promising young player named Kenny Venturi, whose father was the starter at San Francisco’s public Harding Park course. After the polite, soft-spoken Venturi was eliminated in the first round of match play, the cattle rancher proposed that they play a round at the San Francisco Golf Club, where the youngster fired 66, and expected the legend to praise his game. Instead, Byron told him, “Kenny, Eddie said he wanted me to work with you, and if you’re not busy tomorrow, you come out early because we’ve got six things to work on right away.”
“But Byron had a way of putting things across like a Sunday school teacher,” Venturi remembered. “Everything he said had a ring of absolute sincerity and truth. Naturally I agreed. It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Not only did I make friends with the finest gentleman golf ever produced, but I found a teacher who understood the golf swing better than anyone ever had. He also stressed how important it was to be the best you could be in anything you chose to do. The way you handled yourself in this world, and what you left behind, was really what mattered to Byron Nelson. That impressed me from the beginning.”
In 1956, on the eve of Bing Crosby’s Clambake at Pebble Beach, not long after the Seminole Golf Club made Ben Hogan an honorary member, Byron and Louise turned up at a cocktail party thrown by George Coleman at his home on the Peninsula, where another guest was his longtime friend Eddie Lowery, who rose to fame as Francis Ouimet’s hustling caddie and later made a fortune with the most successful Lincoln-Mercury dealership west of the Mississippi, a three-showroom extravaganza that not only allowed him to invest in the upstart Hogan Golf Company but also to employ both young Venturi and Harvie Ward as floating salesmen, enabling them to compete on the national amateur stage.
In 1948, Edward Harvie Ward from tiny Tarboro, North Carolina, had knocked off an overconfident Frank Stranahan in the North and South Amateur Championship in Pinehurst, where he was hoisted onto the shoulders of his jubilant and rowdy Zeta Psi brothers from Chapel Hill, prompting an irked Stranahan to tell him, “If you couldn’t putt, you’d be just another pretty fraternity boy.” After his new boss Lowery arranged for him to begin working with Byron, he went on to win the British Amateur at Prestwick in 1952, beating Frank Stranahan six-and-five in the scheduled 36-hole final. Known for his brilliant touch with a hickory-shafted putter he’d found in the locker room of his father’s golf club back home, and a playing style that was as silky as the cashmere sweaters he liked to wear, Ward demolished Bill Hyndman nine-and-eight in 1955 to capture the first of his consecutive U.S. Amateur titles. Many considered him the most promising golfer in the country—possibly the next Hogan, as one national magazine put it.
Complicating matters for Lowery and both his protégés that winter evening, however, was a cancer growing inside amateur golf. This stemmed from a state and federal investigation that commenced following a widely publicized fixing scheme at New York’s Deepdale Golf Club, where a pair of artful sandbaggers had waltzed off with thousands of dollars in the annual big-money Calcutta. Within weeks, while the USGA debated what to do behind closed doors, the scandal spread like wildfire. High-rollers everywhere suddenly found themselves being chased by state and federal tax authorities, especially those who spent lavish amounts on golf to entertain clients or woo customers and claimed those costs as deductions. (The tax code was maddeningly fuzzy on these matters.) Inevitably, Eddie Lowery, who didn’t hide his liberal spending habits in golf and was underwriting the careers of Venturi and Ward, soon fell under suspicion in California.
Though certain ultra-private clubs like Seminole chose to simply ignore the growing controversy and still held their big-money games, among those who were seriously worried about appearances was Bing Crosby, who canceled his tournament’s popular Calcutta in 1956, leaving Lowery—a guy who loved to make a bet—looking for a little action to fill the void.
Accounts vary on how one of the greatest competitive four-ball matches of all time came together. Byron remembered that not long after everyone sat down for dinner, Lowery and Coleman fell into a gentleman’s friendly debate over Eddie’s contention that his employees Ward and Venturi could beat anybody in golf.
“Anybody?” Coleman asked.
“Yes,” said Lowery. “Anybody.”
“Including pros?”
“Even pros.”
Byron remembered that Coleman looked Eddie straight in the eye and said, “In that case, I’ll take Nelson and Hogan.”
This both surprised and pleased Byron—a match with his oldest rival against two of his own protégés.
“I’ll do it if Ben will,” he told them.
“What do you want to bet?” Coleman asked the car dealer.
“Five thousand,” Lowery suggested. Coleman revised it downward to fifty dollars.
They phoned Ben at Bing’s house and he agreed to skip a practice round at Pebble Beach and meet a few miles away at the Cypress Point Club. But he booked a tee time at Pebble anyway, purely as a diversionary tactic. According to Venturi, he didn’t want the press or public to know that he and Byron were playing against amateurs, though Byron recalled that several hundred spectators caught wind of it and showed up to watch. Venturi’s memory aligned with his mentor’s, though Harvie recalled only a small cluster of folks at the start—Cypress members and friends of all four men. Whatever the truth of the matter, “The bet was down to just five or ten dollars,” Byron said later, “far more about pride than money.” Moreover, both Lowery and Coleman played along.
After Venturi rolled in a twelve-foot birdie putt on the final hole to potentially tie the match, Byron supposedly said, “Knock it in and we win, Ben.” In the popular mythology surrounding the event his partner reportedly studied his final putt and mumbled, “I’m not about to be tied by a couple damn amateurs in front of all these people,” though Ben’s closest friends all dismissed this as totally out of character. Byron didn’t hear this remark, though Ward and Venturi later recalled it. In his re-creation of this legendary match, writer Mark Frost relates that hundreds of fans hurried out to watch as it went along, culminating in a gallery worthy of a major championship at the final green, Ben’s worst nightmare. Whatever the precise facts, the more important detail is that he took scant time to size up his slightly uphill ten-foot putt and, using a putter borrowed from the club pro shop, knock it into the heart of the cup for the winning birdie.
Cumulatively, the players were twenty-six under par, an extraordinary total that included twenty-seven birdies and an eagle. Just three holes were halved with pars. Ben tied his own course record at Cypress Point with a stunning 65; Byron had 68. Venturi and Ward finished with 69 and 70, respectively. And when they took out their wallets to pay off their wager, whatever it was, the Texans waved them away. One account has Coleman and Lowery canceling the bet on the spot.
Within twenty-four hours, the story was already spreading like an urban myth through the shops and watering holes on the Monterey Peninsula, and out into the wider world. The principals briefly considered a follow-up match, but it never evolved. Ben, according to Byron and Harvie, was uninterested.
“Ben and I talked about it, off and on, for several years,” Venturi says. “Coming when it did, at the start of my playing career and the end of his, what happened at Cypress Point was deeply meaningful to us both. People have never stopped asking me about it. Whatever else can be said, I don’t think the world will see anything quite like that again.”
Wondrous as it was, the postscript to this otherworldly four-ball was merely the opening act of a much larger drama involving all four players, one that would force a sea change in America’s perception of the game.
Weeks later, at the first Masters ever televised, in his second appearance there, Venturi took the first-round lead and established a new amateur record with a 66. The next day, playing with three-time champion Jimmy Demaret, he shot 69 to equal his mentor’s record for the lowest score through thirty-six holes, and Byron was the first to congratulate him. Despite heavy winds that caused him to shoot 75 on Saturday, Venturi entered the final round with a four-stroke lead—instantly evoking fond memories of Billy Joe Patton.
As Augusta tradition dictated, Byron played in the final pairing of the tournament with the third-round leader. To avoid any embarrassment that might arise if his own pupil became the first amateur to win the Masters, Jones and Roberts asked him to step aside in favor of Sam, who was fresh off his sixth win at the Greater Greensboro Open the week before. Not unlike Ben, however, Sam intensely disliked playing with amateurs and made his feelings known immediately by giving his impressionable partner the cold shoulder. After all, he was still chasing glory himself—just off the lead when the final eighteen began, in quest of a fourth green jacket that would draw him closer to Ben in major titles. If he couldn’t manage to win the U.S. Open, he told friends back home in Hot Springs, he at least planned to own the Masters.
When Harvie Ward finished his final round, he learned from Byron that Venturi was crumbling before the gallery’s eyes on the back nine, further shades of Billy Joe. Harvie bolted back out, hoping just the sight of him might bolster his friend’s fortunes. Instead, marshals threatened to eject him after several failed attempts to get inside the ropes, and Venturi staggered home with a horrifying 80 that included four three-putts and left him a stroke out of the lead held by the eventual winner, Jackie Burke. To his mentor’s credit, despite a few inaccurate articles that portrayed him as a sulky sore loser, Venturi in fact handled the collapse with grace and humor, though it would forever haunt him much as the U.S. Opens did Sam. For the record, Sam finished tied for fourth and Ben tied for eighth.
Less than a month later, after visiting Ben’s factory in Fort Worth to be fitted for new clubs and returning to San Francisco, Ward was confronted by reporters who informed him that Eddie Lowery had been indicted by a federal grand jury for tax evasion. Chief among many disputed charges was $11,000 designated as a “loan” to Ward that appeared, on the surface at least, to fully cover his travel expenses to the National Amateur, Masters, and the British Amateur and Open. The implications were profound, and potentially devastating to a player who supposedly symbolized the golden amateur ideal. Though Lowery and his attorneys passionately maintained it was all above-board and legitimate, the federal indictment claimed it amounted to a gift that should have been declared as such and taxed, not written off as a business expense. To some in the press, charming Harvie Ward suddenly appeared to be gaming the amateur code of ethics.
In fairness to Lowery and Ward, prior to the widening Deepdale and other well-publicized Calcutta scandals, the rules governing how amateurs’ expenses got paid were politely overlooked in the general interest of promoting strong amateur play. Any number of emerging collegiate stars, for instance, could give examples of supportive patrons who assisted them financially. Otherwise, they argued, only wealthy players like Frank Stranahan could afford to play at its highest levels of competition. As Mike Souchak once noted with irritation, “This was the worst best kept secret in golf—we all had people who helped us along. Were they trying to violate the amateur rules of the game? Hell no.”
Five months after his collapse in Augusta, Venturi was eliminated in the third round of the U.S. Amateur at the Knollwood Country Club outside Chicago but loyally stuck around with Byron Nelson to watch their mutual friend Harvie Ward beat Chuck Kocsis five-and-four to claim his second consecutive U.S. Amateur title. For the moment at least, the firestorm around his boss’s tax problems seemed to abate. Back home in San Francisco, there was a lavish party for the new national champion, and when asked if he might turn pro the way his old Atlantic Coast Conference rival Arnold Palmer had recently done, especially given Eddie Lowery’s ongoing troubles, Ward gave his best Zeta fratboy smile and repeated his oft-stated intention to remain an amateur. He was, after all, approaching thirty, the age when Bobby Jones won his Grand Slam and retired from competition to make instructional films, a move that ironically resulted in his amateur status being lifted by the USGA. Whatever else is true, Harvie envisioned himself playing amateur golf into a comfortable dotage, purely for love of the game, the personification of the gracefully aging amateur champion, perhaps rewriting the record books along the way.
“Besides,” he’d fatefully quipped to his good friend Richard Tufts shortly before his life took a wholly unexpected dark turn, “unless your name happens to be Hogan or Snead there really isn’t any big money in golf. Why do you think Byron got out to raise cows?”
In the wake of recent events, Tufts—the incoming USGA president and grandson of Pinehurst founder and something of a father figure to Ward—had been charged with restoring amateur golf’s tarnished image. In The Amateur Creed, a slim manifesto that laid out in elegant patrician prose the values of golf played for healthy competition and fellowship rather than money, Tufts expressed growing concerns about the rampant commercialization of the game, as reflected by his controversial decision in 1951 to end the professional segment of the popular North and South Open after the pros demanded a major pay boost. It goes without saying that Dick Tufts never envisioned this cleanup job would help destroy the career of the player he loved like a son.
Meanwhile, determined to prove his Masters success was no fluke, and perhaps nudged by Lowery’s deepening crisis, Venturi turned pro in the autumn of 1956, following the lead of Arnold Palmer, who turned pro only weeks after his National Amateur win in 1954. Three months into the new year, Venturi finished thirteenth in the Masters but caught his stride by early September by winning back to back the St. Paul Invitational and the Miller Open in Milwaukee. In the latter, he withstood a furious late charge by none other than Sam, the bane of his Masters quest, who again apparently attempted more gamesmanship as they strode to the ninth tee of their final round by asking, “You ain’t chokin’ again are you, boy?” Reportedly, Venturi calmly replied, “I’ll show you choking,” and closed the deal by winning not only his second tournament in a row, but also claiming Golf Digest’s Player of the Year award. Following this encounter, so the story goes, Sam told other veterans not to mess with the young San Franciscan.
By this point, Venturi’s pal Harvie Ward was in a state of disintegration. After a pitched battle against Sam at the Masters—where Sam slipped past Ward to wind up second to Doug Ford, though Ward again finished as low amateur, in fourth, his best finish yet in either a Masters or an Open—fallout from the negotiated settlement of Eddie Lowery’s troubles detailed in the newspapers proved too much to bear for Richard Tufts and the USGA. Within days, Ward was summoned by Joe Dey to answer questions about his expenses.
He consulted with a couple of high-powered lawyers but ignored their advice and appeared without benefit of counsel before the executive committee at a club in suburban Chicago, just days before the U.S. Open commenced, believing he would be vindicated if he truthfully answered questions and apologized for any mistakes in judgment he might’ve made in an otherwise sterling amateur career. In a nutshell, Ward maintained that the $11,000 loan was justified by the work he did selling cars for his boss at these golf functions, simply an advance against his salary so he could invest some money in the stock market.
The tribunal lasted for a full day, including testimony from Lowery and personal letters requesting leniency from a host of corporate leaders and politicians, all of whom regarded Ward as a shining example of amateur golf at its best. Some bluntly warned of a chilling effect if this charismatic young man were sanctioned for inadvertent mistakes. Dick Tufts sat silently throughout the proceedings, without meeting Ward’s gaze.
In the end, it was Tufts’s own misfortune to have to inform his protégé that the committee had unanimously decided that he’d violated his amateur status by being paid to travel to two U.S. Opens, three U.S. Amateurs, two British Opens, and three Masters. His standing was temporarily revoked, rendering him ineligible for the 1957 Amateur, though he was encouraged to apply for reinstatement in 1958.
“I walked out of that hearing room numb from head to toe, with a real burr up my ass,” Ward recalled years later. “I simply couldn’t believe what had happened to me. I never saw it coming and decided, unfortunately, that golf needed me more than I needed golf.”
“I never felt Harvie got a fair shake at all,” Byron agreed decades later. “The timing was very unfortunate. They were obviously eager to end certain bad practices and send an important message to other young players coming along in the game. But I don’t think anyone could possibly have guessed what the consequences would be. I’d hoped Harvie would just accept the decision and move on. But he chose another path entirely, I’m afraid.”
Within months, Ward began a long downward spiral that would end in a rambling life of booze and women and declining skills until his determined fourth wife, Joanne, cleaned him up in the early 1990s and he reclaimed a life in Pinehurst—“the only place,” as he told friends years later, “I ever felt truly at home.” Serving as director of golf at clubs both there and in Orlando, Ward blossomed into a splendid teacher and a wise elder of the game, working with a host of promising young players, including Payne Stewart.
In a much broader impact, the chilling effect Byron Nelson and others foresaw surfaced when a stream of top collegiate stars feared they might also face the same kind of inquiry and turned pro, sending a flood of talented young guns into the professional ranks, effectively thinning the ranks of amateur golf in America.
Fifteen years after this sea change ruling, Herb Wind visited his old friend Dick Tufts at his cottage beside Pinehurst No. 2 shortly before his death, and found him still grieving over the Harvie Ward affair, as it came to be called.
“He told me it broke his heart—his very spirit,” Wind told me in 2001, three years before Ward passed away from liver cancer. “And it certainly changed the state of golf forever. I mean, at that very moment, you had Hogan and Snead and Byron coming to the end of their remarkable reign but amateurs like Billy Joe Patton, Ken Venturi, and Harvie making a great case for the validity of amateur golf. But taking into account what happened next, the year after Harvie Ward was sanctioned, Arnold won his first Masters and suddenly everyone wanted to be him.”
Following his heroic efforts at Olympic in 1955, Ben Hogan made only two significant runs at the fifth U.S. Open title he craved.
The first came in 1956 at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, when he put together four outstanding rounds over the rugged Donald Ross track and needed only two pars in the last two holes to tie Cary Middlecoff, already fidgeting in the clubhouse.
Once again, though, his putter froze over a thirty-inch putt on the penultimate hole. “I had my watch on him,” John Derr remembers. “He stood over the ball for at least sixty-six seconds, an eternity, and finally made a terrible little stab at the ball. You could see he was in pure agony.” He made bogey, followed by a par on the final hole, coming up a stroke shy of a playoff. He confided to reporters that he felt relieved and furthermore that this would be his last U.S. Open. Sam, also facing the verdict of time, finished tied for twenty-fourth.
On a far happier note, at the next Masters, Byron made his debut as a color commentator, paired with veteran announcer Chris Schenkel, behind the sixteenth green. Cliff Roberts had calculated that Byron’s incomparable understanding as a competitor and former champion would be enhanced by his tasteful refusal to make any commercial references to crowd size or the money list or even a player’s current rank on tour, all major taboos in the image-obsessed mind of Augusta’s fabled majordomo. Though no particular moment stood out from that first nervous telecast—this was the year Doug Ford slipped past Snead and Ward to win—Byron’s relationship with Schenkel would prove invaluable to his career, and Byron soon became the first player to work full-time on TV.
Ben’s uncharacteristic 75-76 caused him to miss his first cut in thirteen years at the 1957 Masters, Byron’s first in the booth, and—seemingly true to his word—he chose not to enter the U.S. Open at Byron’s old stomping ground at Inverness, where reigning champ Cary Middlecoff lost in a playoff to Dick Mayer. His mind was absorbed by growing his equipment company and the challenges of moving into his new house on Canterbury Drive, not far from the Shady Oaks Golf Club’s simple front gates. The next year, however, unable to completely let go of the dream of an elusive fifth, he ventured to Perry Maxwell’s beautiful Southern Hills in Tulsa, where his protégé Tommy “Thunder” Bolt won his first major championship and Ben got paired in an early round with the newcomer and eventual runner-up, Gary Player. After their round together, the story goes, Ben congratulated Player and predicted that the hardworking South African would soon win on the American tour. Player thanked him and explained that he maintained a strong exercise and dietary routine.
“How much do you practice?” Ben abruptly asked, and when Player told him, he simply shook his head.
“It’s not enough,” he said, then walked away.
Among the first to view the Hogans’ new four-thousand-square-foot dream house, a classic buff-colored brick ranch, were the Nelsons, who dropped in for supper with Marvin and Mary Leonard one evening in early 1958. The years of rivalry had caused the friendship that once existed between Ben and Byron to fray at the edges, but their wives remained in touch and relatively close. Though they enjoyed distinct different orbits in the Dallas–Fort Worth area—Louise maintained a broad range of friends and an active church life out in Roanoke while Valerie’s narrowing world continued to revolve around her husband and a few social friends from Shady Oaks and Rivercrest Country Club—they occasionally talked by phone and more than once met for lunch and a bit of shopping in Dallas.
After they were given a tour of the beautiful home with its polished hand-laid pecan floors and stark white interiors—the basic color Valerie Hogan associated with “all things French”—Byron casually wondered why the spacious residence contained no guest room. “Because if we have a guest bedroom,” Ben told him, “someone will want to use it.”
“I always got the feeling,” Byron mused later, “especially as the years came on to us both, that Ben was perfectly happy to withdraw from life. I’m not just talking about just public life, either. Except for his occasional trip out to a tournament and his annual spring visit to Seminole, everything in his life became centered around his office and Shady Oaks. It’s my understanding from mutual friends that the increasing privacy may have actually mellowed him a great deal. I believe that is true. But his only real comfort seemed to come at home, especially over at Shady Oaks, where he could practice all day long and nobody would bother him.”
Indeed, out of the glare of constant media scrutiny, Ben developed a highly structured routine that defined the rest of his life: at his desk on West Pafford by eight o’clock sharp every morning, lunch with his Shady Oaks cronies at the big round table overlooking the eighteenth green, an hour or two of practice at his favorite spot out on the course’s back nine, then it was back to the office. By this point, he was getting several hundred letters a week, from invitations of every kind to letters from players seeking sponsorship and advice. Autograph seekers wanted his distinctive signature, and a budding generation of teachers inspired by his best-selling instruction book—golf’s new swing Bible—wanted a personal connection with the game’s most iconic star. Some of them received brief, courteous, and quaintly formal replies. Others he ignored.
During Masters week in 1958, Augusta National named the footbridges that spanned Rae’s Creek in honor of Ben and Byron. Henceforth, in a gorgeous stretch of the course that Herb Wind poetically christened “Amen Corner” that same year, golfers moving to the twelfth green would cross the gently arching Hogan Bridge commemorating the Hawk’s record-breaking total of 274 in 1953. Leaving by the thirteenth tee, they would walk over the Nelson Bridge, which memorialized his first Masters win in 1937, the first major title of his remarkable career.
Notably absent from these proceedings was Sam, who had one more green jacket than either of them. His partisans, considering the bridge dedications a snub, could point out that he’d won more tournaments in his career and his popularity and colorful style had done much to elevate the Masters’s profile during its most challenging years. He was even on record as saying that, given the chance to win just one major championship, most players would choose this one.
These arguments, however, cut little mustard with Jones and Roberts, the determining deities behind the bridge dedications, both of whom felt that the less-dignified aspects of Sam’s private life disqualified him for a similar recognition. “There’s no question,” says a longtime Augusta member, “that some of Sam’s poorer social judgments hurt him tremendously with Jones and the rest. That’s too bad. Sam was an American original and together with Ben and Byron he put a very human face on professional golf, including the Masters. Masters lore would be nothing without Sam Snead.”
In the end, playing long and well was Sam’s best and final revenge. That year alone, he entered fifteen tournaments, finished in the top ten in twelve and won two in playoffs, his own Greenbrier Invitational and the successful defense of the Dallas Open, an event that would come to play a defining role in the rest of Byron’s life. And in a run for the ages that lasted another seven years, he entered at least a dozen tour events every season and won eight more times, concluding with a record eighth win at his beloved Greater Greensboro Open in 1965, at fifty-three the oldest winner in the history of the tour.
Ben Hogan’s Last Hurrah came at the U.S. Open of 1960, a year of momentous change that began when four well-dressed black students sat down to be served at a segregated Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina—sparking a nonviolent protest that would transform America’s laws and racial attitudes and result in the election of a young, vigorous president, himself a golfer. In between the signposts of cultural change, the contraceptive pill was officially introduced, NASA launched its first communication satellite, and the first Playboy Club opened for business in Chicago.
If John F. Kennedy symbolized the nation’s youthful anticipation of the future, so did young and brash Arnold Palmer, whose personal charisma and go-for-broke playing style unleashed the longest and most significant period of sustained growth in golf history. Not overlooked in all the fervor of “Arnie’s Army,” a phrase inspired by hand-lettered signs held up by soldiers from nearby Camp Gordon who manned the scoreboards at Augusta National that year, a gray and limping Ben attracted the largest galleries of the week and briefly rediscovered his putting touch, heading into the final round a stroke out of the lead at 213, tied with a group that included Billy Casper, Ken Venturi, Julius Boros, and Dow Finsterwald.
“The very idea that Ben Hogan was once again near the lead was enough to rattle probably everyone in the field, I guess, except Arnold,” recalls Casper, who began his own run about this time, and went on to score more victories than anyone else in the 1960s. “Ben was a guy I’d watched and copied for years. People thought I was pretty boring because I never showed much emotion when I played. But that was the effect Ben had on me. He changed how most serious golfers approached the game. That same face is seen on most great players today. I look at them and I can’t help but see Ben Hogan.”
He faltered on Sunday, though, with a 76, which still gave him a respectable sixth-place finish. Sam won the new par-three tournament but finished eleventh, a stroke ahead of a beefy Ohio State junior named Jack Nicklaus, the reigning U.S. Amateur champion. And the charismatic, chain-smoking Palmer beat Venturi by a stroke to claim his second green jacket. In many ways, with his quick, easy, telegenic smile and playing style, Arnold was every bit as entertaining as Billy Joe Patton had been, and suddenly the public couldn’t get enough of him.
Eight weeks later, at Denver’s Cherry Hills Country Club, the game’s golden past, thrilling present, and glorious future all converged on the sport’s toughest stage. Mike Souchak, carrying a famous Jesuit prayer in his money clip for good luck and fresh off a putting lesson from Jackie Burke, shot 68 to seize the early lead while Palmer, who’d attempted to drive the green on the short downhill opening hole, finished four strokes back. Ben, suffering from headaches he attributed to the thinner air, and playing with the assistance of an oxygen canister, posted a woeful 75, while Sam made his customary decent start at 72. By the end of the second round, however, Souchak’s 67 gave him a new thirty-six-hole record and he seemed to be running away with the championship.
For sheer blood-pumping drama, Saturday’s double round proved to be the equal of Merion in 1953. The most intriguing pairing was Hogan and Nicklaus, who strangely enough had a mentor in common; as a young assistant at Glen Garden, Jack Grout may have straightened out Bennie Hogan’s “hog killer” grip five and certainly encouraged him to take a shot at the early tour out west. Decades later, the same man helped young Jack Nicklaus shape his game. The aging legend and the future one went off at nine sharp and Nicklaus later remarked with unreserved awe that Ben put on a shotmaking exhibition that reminded fans of why he was the greatest of all time, hitting every green in regulation, three-putting none of them, and dropping two birdies for 69 that put him right in the heart of the fray.
Palmer finished his morning round seven strokes back of Souchak, with fourteen players between them, and was seemingly out of it. Stewing, he stalked off to get a cheeseburger and a Coke and bumped into Bob Drum, who’d covered his rise from the amateur ranks for the Pittsburgh Press. The veteran reporter was chatting with Venturi, Bob Rosburg, and Fort Worth reporter Dan Jenkins, speculating on what it would take to win. Arnold suggested that a 65 would put him at 280, then declared, “Two eighty always wins the Open.”
Drum snorted and shook his head. “Two eighty won’t do you a damn bit of good.”
Palmer stormed out and hammered a few warm-up drives to the back of the range before he was summoned to the tee. Moments later, he lit another L&M and lashed his ball onto the green.
Ben had gone off with Nicklaus just ahead of him. Steadied by a bowl of chicken soup, ginger ale, and an aspirin, picking up where he’d left off in the morning—oblivious to everything but one shot at a time, one fairway after another, nearly picture-perfect golf, in full command of the game at forty-seven years of age, shades of the great Harry Vardon himself.
For Ben Hogan, the last reach for glory came on the seventy-first hole of the championship, the dangerous, moat-fronted par-five seventeenth hole. A little after five in the afternoon, now tied with the young Turk who’d miraculously made up those seven strokes and was waiting on the tee directly behind him, Ben struck what he believed was a perfect wedge to the scary front pin and saw his ball land six feet from the flag and spin back, pausing for an instant on the slope before trickling into the water. The vast gallery, estimated at 25,000, released a sustained groan.
Marty Leonard, Marvin’s daughter, standing just outside the gallery ropes, covered her face in horror, then watched as Ben removed his handmade English golf shoes and socks, waded into the moat, and lashed his ball onto the green in an explosion of mud and water. Moments later, he two-putted for a bogey six that dropped him back into a tie with Nicklaus for second place. “He was still only one back,” Marty Leonard recalled, “but I think all hope went out of him at that very moment.”
He trudged up the eighteenth fairway with his head lowered ever so slightly, the telltale sign of her husband’s mental state Valerie Hogan had perfectly described decades before. He was lost in the swirl of his own thoughts, after having made a calculated gamble far more typical of the man in the following pairing who’d taken his place atop professional golf. Attempting to cut the corner of the dogleg par-four eighteenth, he knocked his tee shot into the lake and finished with an uninspired triple-bogey, staring blindly at the ground the entire time. Grim-faced but still gracious, he shook hands with the brilliant young amateur he’d been paired with, wished him well, and left the green, barely acknowledging the long standing ovation.
Twenty minutes later, Arnold Palmer tapped in for the miraculous 65 that gave him his first—and only—U.S. Open Championship. By that point, Ben had already spoken with reporters and refused to second-guess his decision to go for the pin on seventeen—a moment, friends say, he would nevertheless spend the rest of his life replaying in his mind. By the time the new king of golf was talking on the phone with his appealing young wife, Winnie, back home in Latrobe with their infant daughter—“Hi ya, babe! Guess what? We won!”—Ben was being driven to the Denver train station. Years later, in the TV interview, he conceded to his friend Ken Venturi that the fateful shot at seventeen still haunted him. “There’s not a day that passes that doesn’t cut my guts,” he said simply.
Safely ensconced back in his daily routines, Ben Hogan would not be seen again in public until the 1961 Masters, sadly finishing tied for thirty-second place with Byron. Sam, who nearly took Greensboro the week before the Masters and claimed the Tournament of Champions later that summer, finished fifteen places ahead of his greatest rivals.
By this point, Ben mostly had business on his mind. Earlier that year he had sold his equipment company to the American Machine and Foundry Corporation for an estimated $5 million, enabling him to bring forth a number of technical innovations including the first significant advance in shaft technology since the introduction of steel shafts. Now among Fort Worth’s wealthiest citizens, he stayed on to run things.
The Apex shaft, as it was called, was expanded to five different flexes and soon became the standard of the industry. “The game,” as Ben said in his advertisements, “is all about feel.” When a curious reporter asked how his company tested clubs, he answered, “We have a testing machine here—me.”
As living legends, however, Ben and Sam waged one last public battle for supremacy, which would have splendid repercussions for the game. It came at the Houston Country Club in the spring of 1965, when both men agreed to appear on Shell Oil’s popular Wonderful World of Golf, hosted by Gene Sarazen and Jimmy Demaret, a series that began in 1961 and lasted nearly a decade.
The show was the creation of a visionary TV producer named Fred Raphael, challenge matches played between veteran stars going head-to-head on famous courses around the world, after which one or both would give a brief lesson. The first show, appropriately enough, featured Byron Nelson and reigning U.S. Open winner Gene Littler at the Pine Valley Golf Club, with $3,000 going to the winner and half that to the loser. With cameras mounted on a station wagon, it took two full days to film the full eighteen-hole match and Byron eventually came out on top, shooting 74 to Littler’s 76. The episode was broadcast on Byron’s fiftieth birthday the next February. In effect, it was his last tournament.
The Hogan-Snead duel at the Houston Country Club was one of the most memorable installments. True to form, Ben showed up several days before the start of filming and studied the comparatively modest course from one end to the other, leaving nothing to chance. Likewise true to himself, Sam didn’t show up until the night before filming, fresh from a lucrative exhibition in the Bahamas, relaxed and spinning his saucy tales.
Impressively, Ben hit every fairway and green en route to a 69 that beat Sam by four strokes, prompting Gene Sarazen to proclaim, a bit far-fetched under the circumstances, that the match was “the finest round I have ever seen.” This brief, magical appearance was made even more special by the lesson Ben gave at the end, conveying a few of the fundamentals from his best-selling instruction book. For his part, Sam playfully shrugged off the drubbing by telling to a wire reporter afterward, “The real reason I can’t seem to win an Open is that Ben won’t really retire.” On a more serious note, he expressed his belief that Ben Hogan was the finest player in the history of the game, bar none.
After the program went off the air in 1969, the producer dreamed up a new one in which stars of the past would compete in a three-day, fifty-four-hole best-ball affair. The Legends of Golf, as it was called, couldn’t have enjoyed better timing. “The country was in a nostalgic mood,” notes Al Barkow, who served as a writer along with Herbert Warren Wind. “Major league baseball was having its Old Timers Days, and Fred Raphael thought, why not a golf Old Timers Day?” The producer recruited Jimmy Demaret to help sell the show to his longtime tour mates.
As eager sponsors lined up, ultimately producing an initial purse of $400,000 that guaranteed every participant a $50,000 payday, the first phone call he made was to Sam, who agreed to play. When asked later why participation in a show that featured aging golfers well past their prime had any appeal to him, he gave one of his patented catfish smiles and explained simply, “I frankly didn’t need the money. But there are other guys out there who did. I played for them.” This comment earned Sam a lot of gratitude and respect from his former colleagues, many of whom were just scraping by.
In hopes of luring another old friend out of retirement, Demaret prevailed on Jack Burke—his co–founding partner at Houston’s beautiful Champions Golf Club, which hosted the Ryder Cup of 1967 with Ben serving as nonplaying captain—to personally contact him at his office in Fort Worth. Apparently Ben listened to Burke’s pitch before telling him he had no interest in a bunch of has-beens playing golf for a meaningless title.
But others jumped at the chance, including Paul Runyan. “Do you realize,” he told Demaret, “I can finish last and win more money than I ever won in any tournament I ever played in?” He’d been the first money winner of the tour in 1934, with a total of $6,767. “The Legends of Golf was a godsend to the players who made the game what it had become by the end of the 1970s,” says Al Barkow. “Like manna from heaven. The public loved it.”
In 1978, at the Onion Creek Golf Club in Austin, Texas, a dozen teams teed off in the first tournament. Two years later, featuring a new sponsor, the event expanded into the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, with sixty-six-year-old Sam and his partner Gardner Dickinson defeating Peter Thomson and Kel Nagle by a single stroke at thirteen under par. The TV viewing audience was impressively large, indicating the public’s interest in these players.
As a direct result of this show’s success, the PGA Tour established the senior tour in 1980, and acknowledged the vital role Sam Snead had played in its creation. During this same span of time, as if to emphasize the point, from 1963 through 1980, Sam won six PGA Senior Championships, five World Senior Championships, and a pair of Legends of Golf titles with Gardner Dickinson and another with Don January.
“Without Sam Snead,” January told a gathering in Texas some years ago, “there would never have been a senior tour. He gave it instant credibility and made people come out and watch us play. For this reason alone, a lot of guys who never appreciated the antics of Sam Snead will be forever grateful to him.”
Like Ben, Byron declined to participate in the rapidly evolving senior events, principally because he already had two full-time jobs.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, his active church life and cattle ranch continued to prosper and demand a great deal of his attention. For a while, he and Louise reportedly considered becoming foreign missionaries. In 1963, however, after doing his TV work at Augusta and picking up some important broadcasting tips from John Derr at a tournament in Las Vegas, he signed a contract with ABC Sports and became the first player to do full-time commentary, starting out in the booth with Jim McKay at the PGA Championship at the Dallas Athletic Club where Jack Nicklaus captured the first of his Wanamaker trophies, then moving on to work with Chris Schenkel for nearly two decades.
His most cherished memories in this role, he later said, included Ken Venturi’s heroic march through the wilting heat at Washington’s Congressional Country Club to win his lone U.S. Open in 1964, Lee Trevino’s sudden emergence at Merion in 1971, and Nicklaus’s brilliant one-iron at the seventy-first hole of the Open he won at Pebble Beach in 1973, all of which he commented on in his distinctive, flat—and highly audible—West Texas accent. During a tournament at the Firestone Country Club, after describing the severe break on a putt facing Billy Casper to his viewing audience, Casper drained the putt, turned, and wryly thanked Byron for helping him read the putt. Following this amusing incident, broadcast booths all featured Plexiglas screens to mute commentator voices.
“I think the fellows appreciated what I had to say,” Byron said of his surprise career that provided him with the largest income of his life—allowing Louise to really decorate their modest home for the first time. “Among other things, I tried to speak honestly about the quality of a shot without being harsh or judgmental. Golf is the hardest game of all to master, in my opinion, and I always wanted the audience and the players to know how much I respected them.”
He was finally appointed nonplaying captain of the Ryder Cup team in 1965, leading a strong squad that included Venturi, Palmer, Casper, Boros, January, Littler, Dave Marr, Tommy Jacobs, and Tony Lema to Southport’s Royal Birkdale, where they defeated a formidable home team, 19½ to 12½. Inspired by the first-class preparations seen at the Atlanta Athletic Club during the previous match, Britain’s hosts treated spectators and visiting press to the first tented village on a golf course, a five-star treatment that set a new standard for the biennial classic. Not to be outdone, when the Ryder Cup came to the Champions Club in Houston two years later, hosts Burke and Demaret rolled out an even bigger welcome mat, arranging lavish dinners, entertainment, and royal treatment for the wives—all under captain Ben Hogan’s perfectionist gaze.
In the late summer of 1965, a spectacular private club called Preston Trail opened for play seventeen miles north of downtown Dallas, a true player’s course that Byron had a major hand in shaping along with Ralph Plummer, a talented Texas architect (and former Glen Garden caddie). After Byron did radio commentary for the Dallas Open the next year, a group of dedicated business philanthropists called the Salesmanship Club of Dallas approached him with a novel idea—to rename the tournament the Byron Nelson Classic and move it to Preston Trail. Following some gentle arm twisting by a Who’s Who of local business and religious interests, he agreed. He was impressed with the organization’s camp for troubled boys and its other charitable works in the Dallas area. Following a gala opening, this was the first tour event to use a player’s marquee name, and almost overnight the Nelson event became the working model upon which most PGA Tour tournaments operated. In the early days, the Byron Nelson Classic raised more than 80 percent of all money donated to charities by professional golf, prompting tour commissioner Deane Beman to study the excellent performance of the Salesmanship Club.
“It really became the best thing that has ever happened to me in golf,” Byron told a visitor to Fairway Ranch in 1994, visibly emotional. “As surprising as this might sound, I rank that golf tournament even above my Masters win in 1937 or my eleven in a row in 1945. When I look back on my life,” he added, “that will be the thing I’m proudest of accomplishing—because it helps so many people.”
In his own humble way, Byron was saying, helping others was truly his Last Hurrah.