Following on from the reign of Bobby Jones, American domination of the game continued apace. Against this backdrop, Henry Cotton was a rare British hero and his Open victories were joyously celebrated. His 65 at Sandwich in 1934 was a record that lasted for 43 years. But this era is really defined by three American greats, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. Unlike Hogan and Snead, Nelson never won the Open, but his accuracy and control were astonishing given the baked-out courses of the time. He produced one of the game’s great achievements when he won 11 tournaments in a row, and 18 in all, in 1945.
Nelson retired early but Hogan was only just figuring out how to win. His dominance, and the level that American golf had reached, were exemplified in 1953 when he won all three of the majors he played in, including the Open at Carnoustie. Snead had a long and successful career, still topping the list of PGA Tour victories today, but never quite managed to capture the US Open. Meanwhile, as women’s professional golf really got going, its star was Babe Zaharias, an all-round athletic goddess who brought glamour to the game while also showing that women golfers could hit the ball with tremendous power.
Tommy Armour, born in Edinburgh and educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh University, remains the last Scottish-born player to win the US Open and the USPGA – and was the last to win the Open before Sandy Lyle 54 years later, and the last to do so in Scotland until Paul Lawrie in 1999. As a naturalised American who had played for Britain as an amateur and for his adopted country as a professional, the ‘Silver Scot’ was the last of a kind.
Yet he came to the game relatively late, since first came the First World War in which he lost the sight of an eye when his tank was hit by artillery. It was also said that he strangled a German soldier with his bare hands.
He was already a French Amateur champion when he went to America and then he turned professional in 1924. Within seven years he had become the third player to win all three of the major championships. Two of those victories came at two of the hardest golf courses then seen, in Oakmont and Carnoustie. The tougher it was, the more Armour enjoyed it. At Oakmont in 1927, he birdied the last to tie Harry ‘Lighthorse’ Cooper and then won a playoff the next day. In 1930 he won the one major which Bobby Jones could not enter, the USPGA, where he beat Gene Sarazen by one-hole in the final. Then, a year later, he won the title he really cherished, the Open at Carnoustie with a final round of 71, six better than the third-round leader Jose Jurado, of Argentina.
Some journalists, such as Bernard Darwin, marvelled at the strike Armour achieved with his iron shots, while others thought him an even better driver. His weakness was his putting, which developed into the ‘yips’. But when he was in contention, he was tough to beat, as golf writer Herb Warren Wind described in The Story of American Golf: ‘Whenever the Silver Scot played himself into a contending position, he always seemed to have that extra something that was the difference between barely losing and barely winning. He was singularly unaffected by the pressure of the last stretch. His hands were hot but his head was cool.’
Armour himself said: ‘It is not solely the capacity to make great shots that makes champions, but the essential quality of making very few bad shots.’ Good or bad, Armour, an inveterate waggler, certainly took his time over his shots, enquiring: ‘Whoever said golf was supposed to be played fast?’
After his playing career, he became a noted, and well-remunerated, teacher, often based at Winged Foot in the summer and Boca Raton in Florida in the winter. He wrote two well-received books. The first, How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time, was subtitled: ‘Hit the hell out of the ball with your right hand.’ His other tome was A Round of Golf with Tommy Armour. Charles Price summed him up as having ‘a dash of indifference, a touch of class, and a bit of majesty.’
Henry Cotton was simply ‘Maestro’. It had been a decade since the last home winner of the Open and there had only been two the War. Britain needed a new golfing hero and Cotton, the only multiple Open champion between the Great Triumvirate and Nick Faldo, fitted the bill.
Growing up in London and attending a public school, he might have been a classy amateur and ‘something in the city’. But while still a teenager he wanted to become a professional and JH Taylor, whom his father consulted, provided encouragement. He worked at a number of clubs but also practised for long, blister-inducing hours, including it was said, by moonlight at Rye. An early trip to America proved beneficial to his game and his image, as he was much taken with the Walter Hagen approach that ‘to be a champion, you must act like one’.
Only the best hotels would do, and in a long career he spent time at Royal Waterloo in Brussels, in the south of France (with a golf school in Monte Carlo) and, once his playing days were over, at Penina, in the Algarve, where he designed the course. He performed exhibitions in music halls, including the London Palladium, and mixed easily with everyone he met. He helped set up the Golf Foundation, wrote ten books and became the first golfer to be knighted for his services to the game. He accepted the title but the official announcement did not come until after his death at the age of 80. Throughout he had the loyal support of his Argentinian-born wife ‘Toots’.
According to Henry Longhurst, there was a ‘magnetism about Cotton in Open championships which to me has never quite been equalled’. At Sandwich in 1934 he opened with a 67 and then added a record 65, with birdies at the last two holes. It was a score celebrated by the famous ‘Dunlop 65’ ball and was not beaten at the Open until 1977. Twelve shots ahead going into the final round, Cotton found his game had deserted him and ‘played in a cold sweat’. But a 79 still did the job and he was hailed a hero. Later that night at his hotel, he handed the trophy to Harry Vardon, who had not been well enough to watch the golf that day. ‘There were tears glistening in both our eyes,’ Cotton said.
Three years later at Carnoustie, against the might of the US Ryder Cup team, Cotton won again, with a 71 in the final round amid heavy rain, which to many observers was one of the best rounds ever played. Another majestic effort was the 66 he scored in the second round of the 1948 Open at Muirfield in front of King George VI; he went on to his third title at the age of 41. But for the War, how many more might there have been?
Longhurst wrote: ‘We often used to challenge him to take his driver from a bad lie on the fairway, simply for the aesthetic pleasure of seeing the ball fly away as though fired from a rifle. I remember once seeing him knock a shooting stick out of the ground with a one-iron at a range of 20 yards. We christened him the “Maestro”, and he deserved it.’
Lawson Little was the man who beat the man who beat Bobby Jones. He then went on to outdo Jones by winning the Amateur Championship of Britain and America in the same year for two years running. The ‘Little Slam’ meant winning 31 consecutive matches and most of them were not even close. Only three times was he taken the distance and only once was he forced into extra holes.
Little was the son of a doctor who was a colonel in the US Army, which meant a nomadic childhood until the family settled in Northern California. In 1929 he entered the US Amateur at Pebble Beach. This was the year the unthinkable happened and Jones lost in the first round to Johnny Goodman. But Goodman’s fortune was short-lived as he lost to the 19-year-old Little in the afternoon. The following year Little enrolled at Stanford, as did Tom Watson and Tiger Woods decades later, and in 1933 got to the semi-finals of the US Amateur, which earned him a place on the 1934 Walker Cup team at St. Andrews.
The Scottish galleries would have heard of Goodman, the last amateur to win a major when he claimed the 1933 US Open, but they were soon to find out about Little. He and Goodman won their foursomes against the established pairing of Roger Wethered and Cyril Tolley 8 and 6 before Little beat Tolley 6 and 5 in the singles. Moving to Prestwick, Little swept all before him, eventually thrashing James Wallace in the final 14 and 13 – having taken 82 strokes for the 23 holes played. Bernard Darwin said it was ‘one of the most terrific exhibitions in all golfing history’. Little returned home and won the US Amateur before repeating the feat the following year.
Bullnecked and barrel-chested, Little gave the ball a great thump with a draw and then relied on his touch around the greens and precise putting. He was helped with his pitching by carrying seven or more wedges. The estimates of how many clubs he sometimes carried ranges from 23 to 26 to 31. In 1938 the USGA imposed the current limit of 14 clubs, now the norm worldwide. His Army background contributed to his thorough preparations. He said: ‘I became saturated with the military idea that the more a soldier knows about the ground he fights upon, the better his chances for victory. Very well, why not regard a golf course as a personal battleground? Whenever I go into competition, my first concern is the battlefield. Or, to be more precise, the 18 battlefields.’
Little turned professional and won the Canadian Open but he only won eight times on the USPGA Tour, including a playoff victory over Gene Sarazen at the 1940 US Open. But his interest in golf waned after the War, and the promise of his professional career never lived up to the brilliance of his amateur achievements. He died aged 57 having had heart problems for some years and brain surgery in 1963.
Golf’s next great trio was Byron Nelson, Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, all born within six months of each other. Nelson and Hogan were both Texans and competed in the final of the caddies’ competition at Glen Garden in 1927. Nelson won narrowly and was the first to achieve greatness; Hogan only did after Nelson retired at the age of 34. Like Bobby Jones, Nelson had done everything he wished to do on the golf course. Like Jones, he had one of the greatest single seasons the game has seen. In 1945, Nelson created ‘The Streak’, winning 11 consecutive events on the USPGA Tour. The record at the time was four; only Hogan and Tiger Woods, with six each, have got more than halfway. Nelson won 18 events in all that year and finished second seven times.
Nelson was perhaps the first player to recognise that the big muscles must play the most important role in the swing. Not for him a wristy flick. ‘Nobody kept the ball on the clubface longer through impact,’ Ken Venturi told Golf Digest. ‘He could hook and fade it easily, but Byron could hit the ball dead straight on demand. That’s the hardest thing in golf.’ The USGA’s mechanical swing device for testing clubs and balls was named ‘Iron Byron’ in his honour.
At the 1939 US Open, Nelson hit the flagstick six times in the regulation 72 holes, each time with a different club: wedge, nine, six, four, one-iron and driver. During the playoff he holed a one-iron for an eagle two. He had already won the Masters in 1937, a two at the 12th and a three at the 13th making up six strokes on leader Ralph Guldahl. OB Keeler named him ‘Lord Byron’ that day.
In 1942, Nelson and Hogan were in a playoff for the Masters and Nelson played eight holes from the sixth in six under. He needed to – Hogan was only beaten by a stroke in one of the all-time memorable Augusta contests. In 1944 he won eight times but worried he had thrown away shots due to poor chipping and blips in concentration – the latter caused simply by playing too well! Nelson, the head pro at Inverness in Toledo up to 1944, upped his game and, despite claims to the contrary, faced all the top names of the time. ‘I don’t care if he was playing against orang-utans,’ said Jackie Burke. ‘Winning 11 straight is amazing.’
Another streak that no longer stands – beaten by Woods – is Nelson’s record of 113 consecutive times ‘in the money’. But in those days, only the top 15, perhaps 20, got paid, so it, too, is an amazing feat. After the 1946 season, Nelson had enough money to buy a ranch in Roanoke, Texas, where he and his wife Louise retired. ‘I finally had to admit I’d accomplished everything I’d set out to do in golf,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t scared of the pressure like some speculated. I was just tired and I’d achieved my goal. Once we’d given them the money and signed the papers and the ranch was ours, nothing else mattered.’
Nelson remained the finest gentleman in the game. He became a television commentator and mentored Venturi and Tom Watson, as well as hosting the old Dallas Open when it was named after him. Playing exhibitions with Venturi, he would always ask the course record and who held it. If it was the host pro, they would never break it. ‘He lives here, we’re only visiting,’ Nelson said.
The year after Byron Nelson won 18 times, Ben Hogan won 13 times. While Nelson’s best golf came during the War, Hogan’s came after it. He needed patience but had it in spades. He was, after all, the man who ‘dug it out of the dirt’. Plagued by a hook at first, he refined and refined his swing, until a fade was perfected. ‘I always outworked everybody,’ he said. ‘Work never bothered me like it bothers some people.’ He was the first to practise after a round, especially his best rounds. He simply kept getting better – until he was the best. There was talk of a secret formula he had discovered. If so, he wasn’t telling. His words were sparingly issued but he did bequeath the golfing world The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, his best-selling instruction tome.
Hogan had to scrap for everything in his life, at times barely being able to stay out on tour. But from his first major win at the 1946 USPGA, he won nine times in 16 appearances. It might never have got that far because in February 1949, on a foggy night, his car collided with a Greyhound bus. By throwing himself in front of his wife, Valerie, in the passenger seat, he saved both her life and his. He broke a collarbone, a rib, his pelvis and an ankle. A blood clot developed and almost killed him again. It was a year before he could return to competition, and winning the US Open at Merion in 1950 was the moment he most cherished. From Merion, to Carnoustie in 1953, he won six majors in eight appearances. In 1951, he won a third US Open in three appearances, on an Oakland Hills course that was so hard, only Hogan could handle it. ‘I’m glad I brought this course, this monster, to its knees,’ he said.
In 1953, a year he owns in the same way as 1930 belongs to Bobby Jones, he played six tournaments and won five of them. Three were majors, the Masters by five strokes, the US Open by six and the Open by four – it would have been more but he hardly holed a putt all week. It was Hogan’s only appearance in Scotland and the man in the white cap, cigarette to hand, that glaring stare permanently in place, was adored by the local golfers, who were said to refer to him as the ‘Wee Ice Mon’ for his nerve under pressure.
Gene Sarazen said no one ‘covered the flag’ like Hogan, Jack Nicklaus that he was the greatest ever shot-maker. Pat Ward-Thomas wrote: ‘There is no doubt that Hogan came closer than anyone to eliminating the human element from golf. The swing he created was not beautiful. The tempo was fastish; it was remote from the lazy effortless grace of Jones or Snead, but there was about it a wonderful sense of precision, like an instrument of flawless tempered steel. He seemed immune to the pressures that destroy other golfers.’
Hogan said: ‘I think anyone can do anything he wants to do if he wants to study and work hard enough. I have got great satisfaction, as much as or more than anybody, in learning how to swing a golf club. There’s nine jillion things to learn. But what lay behind my new confidence after 1946 was that I stopped trying to do a great many difficult things perfectly because it had become clear in my mind that this ambitious overthoroughness was neither possible nor advisable or even necessary. All you needed to groove were the fundamental movements – and there aren’t so many of them.’
‘The only things I fear in golf,’ Sam Snead said, ‘are lightning, a downhill putt and Ben Hogan.’ However, Snead did stop Hogan claiming a fourth major in a row by winning an 18-hole playoff for the 1954 Masters. It was his seventh major victory, and his best, as well as his third green jacket – he had been the first to receive the famous garment when the tradition began in 1949.
When it came to the US Open, however, Snead never managed a victory. Four times he was a runner-up, including in 1947 when he was two ahead with three to play in a playoff against Lew Worsham but lost by three-putting at the last. Earlier, he had taken an eight at the 72nd hole in 1939, when a par would have put him in a playoff, and in 1940 he took an 81 in the final round when in contention. One year at a US Open, he said he was ‘so tight you couldn’ a’ drove flax seed down my throat with a knot maul.’
Snead hailed from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and first played golf amid the valley pastures by whittling the branch of a maple tree into a club. He played barefoot, but then from May to October no boy wore shoes in those parts. He started caddying at a local course, became an assistant and was then invited to play at the posh hotel the other side of the mountain, The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs. It was his break, and he was based at the resort evermore, eventually becoming the first player to score a 59.
Snead, or ‘Slammin’ Sam’, was the most athletic male golfer of the 20th century. He could kick his foot above his head and his swing was just a thing of beauty, bringing ‘tears of joy to the eyes,’ wrote Bernard Darwin. Ted Williams, the great baseball player and a friend of Snead, said: ‘Everybody who ever saw him swing a golf club knew they’d seen something to remember. Terrifically built with those shoulders, no hips, power in those legs. Sammy was strong and he was fluid.’
‘He has always been a long driver,’ wrote Henry Longhurst, ‘but he does not give the impression of hitting it hard.’ Peter Alliss said: ‘If anyone ever played golf in a more elegant way than Sam, I’d like to know who it was. He had everything: rhythm, balance, power, touch, skill, the most wonderful walk (almost to rival Sean Connery) and a wicked sense of humour, even if at times it might have been considered rather “bawdy”.’
Snead journeyed to St. Andrews in 1946 and on the train into the town he thought he saw an abandoned golf course. It was the Old Course. He won despite strong winds in the final round but never contemplated returning to defend the title having lost money on the trip. No one has yet won more than Snead’s 82 PGA Tour titles, collected between 1936 and ’65. There were countless other unofficial victories but he said he would give away half of them all just for a US Open. ‘Hardly anyone has meant so much to the Open,’ wrote Robert Sommers of America’s national championship, ‘as Snead, and certainly no one else captured – and broke – so many hearts.’
Jimmy Demaret had an impish sense of humour and once spread the story that Sam Snead, who did not trust the banks, hid his money in tomato cans buried in his garden. Someone believed the tale and Snead arrived home unexpectedly one night to find the would-be thief digging up his lawn. Bob Hope called Demaret the funniest amateur comedian in the world. He once said: ‘Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at them.’ Demaret was also a talented singer and occasionally performed at a friend’s nightclub in Galveston when not on tour. He also appeared in an episode of I Love Lucy on television.
The son of a carpenter and painter, Demaret thought the dull clothes worn on tour ‘made it look like a funeral parlour out there’. Single-handedly, he changed all that, wearing lavender, gold, pink, orange, red and aqua trousers, and yellow, emerald, maroon, plaid, checked, striped and polka-dot sport coats. ‘If you’re going to be in the limelight,’ he said, ‘you might as well dress like it.’ If it was Bing Crosby who popularised the pro-am format, it was Jimmy Demaret who made it worth playing with a pro.
‘Jimmy Demaret enlivened the tour with his colourful clothes, a bright smile, and a uniquely splendid playing style,’ Al Barkow wrote in The History of the PGA Tour. ‘He walked up to the ball with a kind of short, rhythmic dance step, the club twirling in his hands, took a very narrow open stance and hit a lot of left-to-right cut shots.’
But Demaret was not to be underestimated. He won 31 official titles and was the first person to win the Masters three times. His first title in 1940 included a back nine of 30 in the first round, a record that stood for over 50 years. When he won in 1950, playing the last six holes in two under while runner-up Jim Ferrier played them in five over, the top ten included a who’s who of the game: Snead, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Lloyd Mangrum, Cary Middlecoff, Lawson Little and Gene Sarazen. In his three Ryder Cups, Demaret won all six of his contests.
A Texan just a couple of years older than Nelson and Hogan, he was an unlikely friend of the dour Hogan. They often paired together in fourball competitions. ‘He was the most underrated golfer in history,’ said Hogan. ‘This man played shots I hadn’t dreamed of. I learned them. But it was Jimmy who showed them to me first. He was the best wind player I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Hogan thought that if Demaret would just practise, he would win every tournament he entered.
Demaret and Jackie Burke together set up the famous Champions Golf Club in Houston. Burke told Golf Digest: ‘He played by feel and instinct, and he had a lot of imagination and guts. There was never a guy who was more fun to be around, or a guy who enjoyed being who he was, more than Jimmy.’
Dentistry’s loss was golf’s gain. Cary Middlecoff had followed his father and two uncles in training as a dentist, which was enough for his colleagues on tour to call him ‘Doc’. A fine amateur player in Memphis, who had never had a proper lesson, Middlecoff won the North and South Open in 1945 while playing alongside the great professionals Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen in the final round. Two years later, having given up the chance to play in the Walker Cup, Middlecoff turned professional. ‘I know I would never be happy practising dentistry without knowing for sure if I were a good player or a great one,’ he explained later, ‘and dentistry is too confining ever to offer me that opportunity.’
Middlecoff gave himself two years to make the grade or fall back on the family trade. In 1949 this ‘happy refugee from sub gingival curettage’, as Herb Warren Wind described him, won the US Open at Medinah. He went on to prove he was a great player, rather than just a good one, by winning the 1955 Masters by a then-record seven strokes, and a second US Open in 1956 by holding off Hogan and Julius Boros. From the mid-1940s to the end of the 1950s, only Hogan and Sam Snead won more titles on the PGA Tour.
A tall man who could hit the ball vast distances, he sometimes struggled with the short game and his temper. Once at a US Open at Oakmont he got so mad at himself, and a late starting time, that he smashed a ball onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which bisects the course, and stormed back to the clubhouse. He was also a very slow player, picking up Tommy Armour’s mantle. In the playoff for the 1957 US Open, which Middlecoff had reached with a pair of 68s the previous day, his opponent Dick Mayer used a camping stool while Middlecoff played. Mayer won by seven shots.
For someone to whom the game seemed to come easily, and who proved himself under the highest pressure, there was hesitancy over which club to hit, as well as a super slow backswing which ground to a halt at the top. Robert Sommers wrote: ‘Middlecoff was a mass of nerves. He was at once the fastest walker and slowest player on the tour. He moved along with quick, impatient strides, but once he reached the ball, he studied the shot for long and aggravating periods. He’d pick one club, then go back and pick another. He’d address the ball, then step away. Once over the ball, he’d set the club, then peek down the fairway, set the club, peek again. Endlessly. He chain-smoked. He fidgeted restlessly. He drove the gallery and the other players mad.’ His colleagues joked that he gave up being a dentist because no one could keep their mouth open long enough.
A back injury ended his career in the early 1960 but he took to television commentary and wrote a highly acclaimed instruction book, The Golf Swing. He said: ‘Nobody wins the Open. It wins you.’ And: ‘Anyone who hasn’t been nervous, or hasn’t choked somewhere down the line, is an idiot.’
‘Wee Jessie’ was how she was known, but there was nothing small about her golfing achievements. Jessie Valentine dominated women’s amateur golf for more than two decades in a career interrupted by the Second World War. She won the British Ladies three times and the Scottish Ladies six times, a record only beaten when Belle Robertson reached seven. She played with both Joyce Wethered and Babe Zaharias, and many Ryder Cup stalwarts such as Dai Rees and Eric Brown. In 1959 Jessie became the first woman to be honoured for her services to golf when she was awarded an MBE.
Jessie was the daughter of Joe Anderson, the first professional at Craigie Hill in Perth. Naturally, she grew up playing at the club. Her first success came in 1933 at the British Girls Championship, though her father’s reaction was: ‘Is that all?’ She won the national titles in New Zealand and France and made the first of her seven Curtis Cup appearances at Gleneagles in 1936, holing a long putt to tie the overall match. She won her first British Championship in 1937 and took the Scottish version in each of the next two years.
In the 1950s, her success continued. Twice more she won the British title, while she also lost in the final on two occasions, in 1950 to the Vicomtesse de St. Sauveur (nee Lally Vagliano), one of France’s greatest players, and in 1957 to Philomena Garvey, of Ireland. Four more Scottish titles followed and in 1955 she became the first Scottish golfer to win the British and Scottish titles in the same year.
In the Shell Encyclopedia of Golf, Valentine is described thus: ‘Like the majority of outstanding women players, she has always been good with all her woods. The control of her strokes with the irons is where she has always excelled, and in this department of the game, particularly on seaside courses, with unequal lies and stances, she has a mastery few women have equalled.’
At the age of 45 she relinquished her amateur status and took over her father’s sports business and designed golf equipment for women. In 2002 she became an inaugural member of the Scottish Sport Hall of Fame. Shortly before her death at the age of 91 in 2006, the Craigie Hill website said: ‘Jessie Valentine has brought the good name of Craigie Hill to the eyes of the world’s golfing public more than any other name connected with the club. Jessie’s achievements are only exceeded by her modesty and approachable friendliness and the club is enhanced by her honorary life membership.’
Patty Berg was a pioneer in the area of women’s professional golf. She reckoned she gave over 16,000 clinics, which inspired countless thousands to take up the game. She was also the driving force behind the Ladies Professional Golf Association offering women professionals a similar circuit of tournaments as the PGA Tour did for the men. Plus, on the course, she still holds the record of 15 major titles and won over 80 tournaments as an amateur and professional.
Golf only came into her life after quarterbacking the neighbourhood football team, winning on the athletics track and becoming a speed skating champion. But her family were members of Interlachen and her father, Herman Berg, was her first coach. As a 17-year-old she lost to Glenna Collett Vare in the final of the US Amateur at her home course and was a runner-up again in 1937 before winning the next year. Her 28 amateur titles include three Titleholders Championships won as an amateur. One of the first big events for professionals, Berg won the Titleholders four more times among 57 victories as a professional. She also won the Western Open, another of what the LPGA has designated a ‘major’ of the era, seven times behind 1941 and ’58, and won the inaugural US Women’s Open in 1946.
She turned professional in 1940, the year after the death of her mother. Her father had subsidised her amateur career but she could start repaying him once she had signed with the Wilson sporting goods company to hold clinics all over the country. She was a natural show-woman – five foot, two inches, curly red hair, freckles, blue eyes and a smile always in place. ‘I loved doing clinics and exhibitions,’ she said. ‘I did three a day but I could have done them all day and all night.’
Like the Wethered siblings before her, she charted every score and shot she played. That drive to succeed must have helped when her knee was broken in a car accident in 1941. She was in bed for five months and it took 18 months of operations and rehabilitation before she could play again, a comeback immediately rewarded with her second Western Open in 1943.
In 1950, Berg was the first president of the LPGA, having persuaded Wilson and promoter Fred Corcoran to back the venture. Berg was one of the stars, winning the money list three times but another was Babe Zaharias. Babe took all the headlines but Mickey Wright said: ‘Babe couldn’t carry Patty Berg’s golf clubs. She is the consummate perfect golfer for a woman, which shows in the fact she could still swing the club as beautifully, and with all the class, in her sixties as earlier in her career.’
In 1951, Berg led a team of American women professionals, including Zaharias, to take on British male amateurs at Wentworth. Trailing 2½-½ after the foursomes, their lunch table was quiet until Berg got up and announced: ‘All those who expect to win their singles, follow me.’ Zaharias added: ‘C’mon, follow Napoleon.’ They swept the six singles to win 6½-2½.
Asked if there was anything she didn’t play, Babe Zaharias replied: ‘Yes. Dolls.’ Mildred Didrikson, as she was then named, played, or rather excelled at, basketball, tennis, swimming, diving, bowling and baseball – she hit so many home runs she was nicknamed ‘Babe’ after baseball star Babe Ruth and the name stuck forever. At the trials for the 1932 Olympics she entered eight events, won six and set four world records. At the Los Angeles Games themselves she was restricted to three events and won gold medals in the javelin and the 80m hurdles, while she matched the winner’s new world record in the high jump but was demoted to the silver because her futuristic Western Roll technique was not yet legal. Grantland Rice, a senior sports writer of the day, wrote she was the ‘Ultimate Amazon and the greatest athlete of all mankind for all time.’
Then came golf. ‘I took a fling at many other sports but when the golf bug hit me it was fatal,’ she said. She won her first amateur event in 1935 but was barred for being a professional in other sports. The sixth of seven children of Norwegian immigrants, she was from a poor part of Texas and needed to earn a living so took her place on the exhibition circuit.
She was to change the women’s game. ‘Until Babe came along,’ said Patty Berg, ‘women were all swing and no hit. She put power into women’s golf.’ An athlete and a supreme competitor, Babe also knew she had to learn how to play the game – she had out-hit Joyce Wethered in their 1935 exhibitions but been comfortably outscored. ‘My formula for success was simple: practice and concentration. I was determined to play the game well, or not at all.’
After marrying wrestler George Zaharias, the ‘Crying Greek from Cripple Creek’, Babe went through the lengthy process of restoring her amateur status. During a run of 27 wins from 28 events, she won the US Amateur in 1946, never going beyond the 15th hole, and the British Ladies the following year at Gullane, where she lost only four holes. Enid Wilson wrote that she ‘moves like a ballerina, as though she does not have a bone in her body. She is so fit that sheer joie de vivre prevents her from being motionless. Unless I had been at Gullane, I would not have believed it humanly possible for a woman to hit a golf ball as far as she did.’
Babe turned professional again and was the star of the new LPGA circuit, winning one in four of the events she played. Her greatest triumphs were the three US Open titles but the greatest of all was the one in 1954 when she won by 12 strokes a year after overcoming cancer. The disease returned and she died two years later at the age of 45. ‘Honey, I ain’t going to die,’ were her last words to her husband.
President Eisenhower opened his remarks that day talking about Babe. Patty Berg said, ‘She was a great friend and the greatest woman athlete I ever saw. She died before she could see the result of all the doors she opened. It was very sad, a tremendous loss.’
Louise Suggs was the third star of the women’s game in America along with Patty Berg and Babe Zaharias when the LPGA was born. Inevitably, they were the main contenders, so much so that Suggs said it was like watching ‘three cats fighting over a plate of fish’. She was a far more reserved character than Berg or Babe, whom Suggs seemed particularly to resent for the way her knack for publicity overshadowed everyone else. At least on one occasion Suggs had the satisfaction of beating Zaharias into second place in the 1949 US Women’s Open by a massive 14 strokes, still a record for the championship.
Suggs was the daughter of John Suggs, a pitcher for the New York Yankees who settled in Atlanta and became the manager of a golf course in Lithia Springs, Georgia. Her dad showed her the fundamentals of grip and stance and then told her to ‘keep slamming the ball’. So she did and was later nicknamed ‘Miss Sluggs’ by Bob Hope. She played often with Bobby Jones and in 2007 was awarded the USGA’s highest honour, the Bob Jones award. She said: ‘Being a native Atlantan I admired and respected him immensely, and I even patterned my own game after him. To be honoured with this award is the ultimate accolade I could possibly receive.’
Suggs also played with Ben Hogan, who said: ‘We won a pro-lady event and seeing her fine shot-making, to me her later victories were the logical result. Her swing was a beautiful thing – so smooth and rhythmic, so soundly joined together – she was bound to be a winner.’
Her amateur career included a Titleholders and two Western Opens, both of which she would win again as a professional, and the 1947 US Women’s Amateur and the 1948 British Ladies title. She was the second American to win the British, a year after Zaharias, then she turned professional and became one of the 13 founder members of the LPGA. She won 55 times as a pro and her 11 major wins place her third on the LPGA’s list behind only Berg and Mickey Wright. She won a second US Women’s Open in 1952 and the LPGA Championship in its third year in 1957.
Her winning run ended in 1962, the last year she played the tour full-time, following a dispute with the LPGA about a standard fine of $25 imposed for entering a tournament and not turning up. She was later reconciled with the organisation she helped so much in the early days and she has raised the American flag at recent Solheim Cups. For over 50 years she was based at Sea Island, and among her grateful clients there were the future President George HW Bush and his wife Barbara.
‘Louise was a very talented golfer, without question one of the best players we ever had,’ said Betsy Rawls. ‘She had one of the best swings, was one of the best putters and a great competitor. I always liked her and enjoyed her. She is an interesting person, very intelligent, and if she feels comfortable and appreciated, she is fun to be around.’
It was a leap of faith for a woman to turn professional in the post-War era, but Betsy Rawls must have been unique in doing so after collecting a degree in physics at the University of Texas. There is a marvellous photograph in Liz Kahn’s history of the LPGA which shows Rawls, arm resting on a suitcase, reading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. A little light reading, indeed.
‘Although I always read a lot and was interested in other things, all I wanted to do was play golf, think about it and practise,’ Rawls said. ‘It’s not necessarily a good thing to be so totally absorbed because it’s very narrow and limited, but winning makes it all worth it. Nothing can make you feel quite as good as winning a golf tournament.’
Rawls assured her place in history by winning the US Women’s Open four times. Only Mickey Wright has matched that feat. She also won two LPGA Championship and the Western Open twice, among 55 professional victories. In 1950 she was runner-up at the US Open as an amateur and then she turned professional and, as well as becoming one of Patty Berg’s apprentices on the exhibition circuit, won the national championship in her rookie season. ‘Winning my first US Open didn’t seem so important at the time,’ she said. ‘I thought if I didn’t win that one, I could always win the next. My biggest thrill was the LPGA in 1969 because by then I wasn’t sure I could win again.’
She had taken up golf at the age of 17 and when she got interested she went to see Harvey Penick, the legendary coach and the head pro at Austin Country Club. Penick charged her $1.50 for the first lesson and then never charged her again – he never did accept payment from his star pupils. He remained Rawls’s only coach. ‘Harvey reduced golf, as he did life, to a few sound, irrefutable, worthwhile principles,’ she said. ‘He was always a refuge from the complexities and emotional traumas of the tour. To come back and see Harvey was to become refreshed, to become inspired and to be able to put things in perspective once more.’
Rawls mucked in, doing all the jobs the players did to get the LPGA going, acting as secretary, president and tournament committee chair. ‘The players made the pairings, kept statistics, set up the course, did a lot of hard work. Sport is selfish, but off the course you completely changed your way of thinking so that it was for the good of the organisation. The players today don’t know how easy they have it.’
After her playing career, Rawls became a tournament director for the LPGA, then ran the LPGA Championship. In 1980 she became the first woman to serve on the rules committee at the men’s US Open. Kahn, who got to know Rawls well in her later life, wrote: ‘She is a shy woman for whom I feel much warmth and affection. I enjoy her mind and her company.’
