American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Still, records show that Robertson and his shop assistants turned out 2,456 featheries in 1844 alone. Twenty-three-year-old Tom Morris—son of a local weaver, he’d taken to the game by batting a wine cork around the Auld Grey Toon, as locals called St. Andrews—had worked for Robertson since the age of fourteen, apprenticing in his shop for five years before becoming a journeyman salesman. By 1845 Morris was not only his junior partner but also nearly his equal on the links. The two steadfastly avoided playing a head-to-head match but frequently teamed up in big-money challenge matches against other leading professionals including Willie Park Sr. and the Dunns of Musselburgh. A famous match against Willie and Jamie Dunn with 400 pounds sterling at stake helped seal their reputations. Four holes down with eight to play, Morris and Robertson closed the gap and won on the final hole, earning the sobriquet “The Invincibles” among the golfing laity. News of the victory didn’t hurt their business one bit.

  In April of 1848, however, a man named Tom Peters stepped into Robertson’s shop to show him a new kind of golf ball he’d acquired from a local divinity student named Robert Patterson. It was hard and perfectly round, made from the hardened milk sap of the Palaquium gutta tree of Malaysia. Three years before, Robert’s father, Rev. Robert Adams Patterson, had discovered strips of this malleable substance used to pack a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu sent by a friend from the Far East. Being naturally thrifty, he boiled the material down and used sheets of it to resole his family’s shoes, but his enterprising son saw a potentially better use for the waterproof material. Young Robert used the softened gutta to make perfectly round golf balls he promptly went out and played with on the links. Then, after years of tinkering with the formula, his brother came up with a ball that flew farther and straighter and kept its shape much longer than the traditional featheries. Moreover, the newly patented “gutty” ball could be made and sold at a fraction of the cost.

  Peters declared that the day of the feathery ball was over, and Robertson—who’d introduced the use of iron clubs in competition, heads of earlier sets having been made of apple wood—agreed to give the new ball a try. He woefully hooked his first shot, perhaps intentionally, and reportedly dismissed the gutty ball with undisguised contempt.

  The problem arose when mild and mannerly Tom Morris teamed with a member of the R&A in a match in the summer of 1851, and used these controversial new balls. When he heard of this betrayal, an outraged Robertson confronted his longtime partner and fired him on the spot. A short time later, Morris was hired by the Prestwick Golf Club to lay out and maintain its new course and serve as club professional.

  Old Tom, as he was soon to be called, started his own equipment business, making clubs and balls and selling both featheries and gutties. He would also be instrumental in mounting the first Open Championship at Prestwick in 1860, a year after his fiery mentor, Robertson, had passed away, and himself captured the title four times from 1861 to 1867. By that time, the gutty was the preferred ball of better players, including his son, Young Tom Morris, who won his first of four consecutive Opens in 1868, a mere stripling of twenty who shattered scoring records and brought the game to new levels of brilliance and popular notice before his premature death following the sudden loss of his young wife and infant son while he was away playing a match.

  The reign of Allan Robertson and Tom Morris père et fils was over, but the durable gutty prevailed for another many years in competition.

  When J. H. Taylor, the current British Open champion, opened his locker at the Chicago Golf Club in early October of 1900, he supposedly found a complimentary tin of a new rubber-cored ball that was causing a major row on both sides of the Atlantic, the gift of a bicycle manufacturer named Coburn Haskell.

  Haskell, a mediocre but passionate golfer, had a brainstorm one warm afternoon while sitting on the porch of the Cleveland Country Club, chatting with the head professional. As he squeezed a handful of rubber bands, the story goes, a revolutionary idea took shape. For all its popularity, the gutta-percha ball had its flaws—principally a certain deadness if it wasn’t struck perfectly. Haskell contacted a friend named Bertram Work at the B. F. Goodrich plant in Akron, twenty miles south of Cleveland, and explained his idea of wrapping bands of rubber tightly around a solid rubber core, then covering it all with gutta-percha, thereby producing a much livelier golf ball. Work signed on and the two struck a deal to evenly split any proceeds from their innovation, which they patented in 1898. When the first “Haskell” was put into play a short time later, its superiority became immediately apparent.

  The new ball flew twenty yards beyond the old gutty. Traditionalists both here and abroad quickly inveighed sharply against the new American golf ball—including Harry Vardon himself, initially dismissing them as “Bounding Billies” because they allegedly were difficult to control around the greens. But the swift acceptance by players forever in search of greater distance and any competitive edge guaranteed another major turning point in the game.

  This happened just as three players were becoming dominant.

  By the time Vardon and Taylor met at the Chicago Golf Club, they were the most famous golfers in the world. The reserved and dignified Taylor, a naturally quiet man prone to gnawing self-doubt, was nevertheless said to rarely yield a lead once he held it. He’d collected his third British Open trophy, the Claret Jug, just weeks before making this trip—in large part, like Vardon, to promote his own burgeoning business interests. Convinced beyond any doubt that golf had a bright future in America, he entered into a business agreement with a childhood friend named George Cann to start a club-making firm based in Pittsburgh. He’d also contracted Golf, America’s first magazine devoted to the game, to write a series of instruction articles. For this he was paid $2,000, a large sum for an athlete’s literary services.

  Vardon’s Open Championship run began at Muirfield in 1896, when he beat Taylor in a dramatic playoff; he then added back-to-back titles in the last two years of the century. His imperturbable grace and seemingly effortless swing made him the darling of America’s raw and largely uninformed sporting press. This was the age of yellow journalism, when sensational headlines, political scandals, and sex crimes dominated the biggest newspapers, the reporters often inventing colorful details and nefarious intrigue when the simple facts seemed bland and banal. So it comes as no surprise that the widely reported blood feud between Vardon and Taylor didn’t exist, neither of them paying spies to keep tabs on the other’s whereabouts and practice habits. They were actually close friends, and frequent traveling partners back home in Britain, fellow professionals who aimed to elevate the game’s stature within their own borders—and perhaps, however they could, in America.

  Their playing styles, on the other hand, couldn’t have presented a more striking contrast. Vardon’s high, soaring, and gentle fades always seemed to settle with uncanny accuracy somewhere within the vicinity of the flag, whereas Taylor’s low, right-to-left shots often ran along the fairway and invariably rolled onto the green, which proved particularly effective on a true links. There were personal differences, too. Taylor would visibly stew over a poorly executed shot whereas Vardon typically offered a faint nonchalant shrug and moved on. And while Taylor seemed tongue-tied when peppered with questions by members of the rowdy Yankee press, Vardon appeared to relish being in the spotlight. Indeed, aside from their friendship and mounting fame, perhaps the only thing they had in common was their stubborn devotion to the gutta-percha golf ball.

  In an attempt to eliminate the bumpy putting surfaces that were common to American courses of that era, the Chicago Golf Club used a special machine that brushed the grass to a velvety consistency. Taylor, who putted miserably in the opening morning round of the championship, gently grumbled afterward that it was like putting on the head of a lad whose hair had been combed in the wrong direction. Even so, with a 76, he jumped out to a three-stroke lead over his friend and rival, Vardon shooting a 79. After J.H. struggled that afternoon to an 82 to Harry’s 78, the
two greats had reversed positions but still led the tournament. The rest of a fairly decent American-born field was never taken seriously and was ignored by the press.

  Putting continued to bedevil Taylor over the concluding two rounds. Vardon extended his lead to four strokes in the third round and a seemingly insurmountable six by the start of the final nine. J.H. gamely nibbled away, however, and trimmed Harry’s lead to two strokes through seventeen, but the Greyhound struck one of his patented brassie shots on the home hole and finished with 313 to Taylor’s 315. Both, as predicted, were well clear of the field at the end. Dave Bell, a fine player from Chicago’s Midlothian Club, finished seven strokes back, though in most accounts his name was never mentioned.

  By any measure, Vardon’s grand exhibition tour of America, capped by his victory, was an unqualified success. Wherever he went, vast and adoring crowds turned out to study his stylish technique, whether at the Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Boston (where an impressionable seven-year-old caddie named Francis Ouimet from Brookline saw him hitting balls into a net) or down in remote Pinehurst where more than three thousand spectators materialized in the heat of a longleaf wilderness to watch him play on a Donald Ross course that was more sand than grass. During his visit to New York, Wall Street suspended business so traders could attend an exhibition match at one of the country’s first public courses. The Greyhound was feted by mayors, photographed with beauty queens, presented with the keys to a dozen different cities. In eighty-eight matches, competing against local club champions and head professionals who knew their courses like the back of their hands, he lost only once and set scoring records on half the courses he played.

  The warmth of America and open personality of Americans charmed and relaxed Harry Vardon, prompting him, in light of a dry and unhappy marriage back home, to seriously consider immigrating with his brother Tom (also a fine player and club professional at Sandwich) to the States. In clubhouses where no professional had ever set foot, Harry was not only an honored guest of the membership but was treated as a first among equals and a conquering hero.

  He suffered but one disappointment—the Vardon Flier he so tirelessly promoted was a commercial flop. The gutty was soon as extinct as the feathery, given the Haskell ball’s mounting success in major championships and popularity in everyday play. Its gutta-percha cover was replaced by balata, and the patterns and dimples on its surface were now stamped by machines, not by hand. Coburn Haskell’s basic design proved to be a revolutionary advance in golf, persisting until the 1970s and becoming known as the “modern ball.”

  Against the surging popularity of the Haskell ball, the Vardon Flier sunk like a stone, but that was Vardon’s only failure.

  In every other respect, Harry Vardon’s barnstorming in 1900—enhanced by J. H. Taylor and his own promotional efforts—helped to alter the perceptions of a game and the sports consciousness of a nation. Within a year, more than two hundred new golf clubs had been organized and close to one million Americans had taken up the game (many using an overlapping grip the press mistakenly attributed to Vardon, who actually picked it up from a top amateur named Findley). Golf in this country had never experienced such a surge of growth and popularity.

  Eleven years later, at the Chicago Golf Club, Johnny McDermott of Atlantic City finally picked the British lock on the United States Open, becoming the first homebred professional to win the national championship, a feat he would successfully duplicate at the Country Club of Buffalo in 1912. Watching closely from the gallery that week was a cocky unknown assistant club pro from Rochester named Walter Hagen, who had recently turned down a baseball contract to play with the Philadelphia Phillies.

  With two Opens under his belt, the brash and chesty McDermott openly boasted that he would happily take on all comers—including the great Harry Vardon, J. H. Taylor, and a surging James Braid, a Scotsman who since 1901 had collected five Claret Jugs and narrowly missed claiming two more. During these years, in a brilliant series of foursome matches staged across England and Scotland, Vardon and Taylor played Braid and Sandy Herd of St. Andrews, and when a Lincolnshire newspaperman described the three Open winners as the “Great Triumvirate,” the Fleet Street press snatched up the phrase and ran with it.

  In part because of McDermott’s challenge, but also because he harbored deep affection for Americans, Vardon was finally persuaded to make another tour—this one with his friend and fellow professional Edward “Ted” Ray—for the U.S. Open at Brookline, America’s oldest country club.

  By now, however, things had changed. Shortly after winning the British Open in 1903, scarcely a month after the R&A chose not to ban the controversial Haskell ball in its Open Championship, Vardon had returned to his new post at the South Herts Golf Club in the London suburbs to rest and recover from a tournament that had visibly aged him. Within a fortnight, while playing a casual round with members, he suffered a massive lung hemorrhage that sent him to a Norfolk sanatorium for months. Tuberculosis was the diagnosis. Fleet Street insisted he’d picked it up on his American tour.

  Though his beautiful swing and tempo were intact, Vardon was slow to recover his championship form. His hand visibly shook over putts, for instance, and his stamina waned in the closing stages of rounds. Perhaps for this reason alone, the first decade of the new century belonged almost entirely to James Braid, who in 1910 passed both Vardon and Taylor in Open totals with five. But the Greyhound finally came charging back in 1911. Amid swarming crowds at his brother Tom’s club at Sandwich, Harry found his old magic and beat the formidable Frenchman Arnaud Massy in a thirty-six-hole playoff, hoisting a fifth Claret Jug himself. American newspapers heralded this victory as if one of their own had come back from the dead.

  Following an exhibition tour comparable to that of 1900, Vardon and Ray arrived in Brookline for the U.S. Open, whose field boasted Taylor but also Johnny McDermott and young Walter Hagen.

  After fifty-four holes, the favorites Vardon and Ray were tied at 225. The only real surprise was that a young local kid was also at 225. Francis Ouimet, twenty years old and the Massachusetts Amateur champion, was unknown outside the Boston area. He’d grown up right across the street from the country club where he’d caddied for years and now found himself tied with two of the finest players in history. Nobody gave him any chance whatsoever against such legends.

  What happened next changed the history of golf in America. Defying the odds and common sense, Francis Ouimet tied Vardon and Ray in the final round, then beat them by five and six strokes respectively in the eighteen-hole playoff. An ecstatic gallery lofted the heroic young amateur on its shoulders and celebrated for days.

  Gracious in defeat, after hailing young Ouimet’s historic achievement, the Englishmen set sail for home. Less than a year later, the Great Triumvirate—tied at five Opens apiece—would reconvene in high British summer at Prestwick, the Open’s birthplace, for another shot at immortality. Both Taylor and Braid widely acknowledged that Vardon ranked first among them, and in fact he beat his old friend by three strokes, and the younger Scot by ten, becoming the first man to hoist the Claret Jug six times, a record that still stands ninety-five years later. But with the outbreak of World War I only weeks away, the R&A suspended the British Open Championship until further notice.

  The Great Triumvirate’s glorious run was over.

  Meanwhile, back in the States, one giddy Boston editorialist confidently predicted that thanks to Francis Ouimet’s astonishing triumph, the day would not be too distant when America produced its own great triumvirate. This story continued to reverberate throughout the country, to the rolling farmlands of central Texas and even the deepest hollows of Virginia’s rugged Blue Ridge Mountains—penetrating the heartland of an awakening nation where, in due course, three remarkable young men—born just months apart in the wondrous year of 1912—would indeed fulfill that bold newsprint prophecy.

  2

  THE POWER OF THREE

  IS THERE ANY SIGNIFICANCE to the fact that t
he three greatest players of their era, and perhaps the entire twentieth century itself, were born on three consecutive days of the week, three months apart from each other?

  Sam Snead thought so. “One time Ben Hogan come up to my tournament at the Greenbrier and I was showin’ him around town and we got to talkin’ about how we each come up in golf,” Sam once explained. “Ben didn’t let out much about himself, you know—people got the impression he was just unfriendly that way. But this time we got to talkin’ and I learned we’d been born about the same time in the same year, except I was born in spring and he come along in late summer. Later I learned Byron Nelson was the same age. He was born sometime that winter, see, which mean we come along one, two, three. That’s kind of how we got known out on tour, too, Byron first, then me, then Ben. He didn’t put too much stock in that but my mama thought numbers were important, if you know what I mean. And so do most golfers.”

  Across the ages, in every known human society, the number three holds an uncommon power in human affairs, a symbol of balance and divine fullness. It’s frequently a sign of transformation and perfection itself.

  In all of nature there are three stages of existence: birth, life, and death. Time itself represents a triad: past, present, future. In the Bible, three magi come from the East seeking the newborn Jesus, who three days after his crucifixion is resurrected. Not surprisingly, Christianity organized itself around the concept of a Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But the number also dominates other ancient cultures and religions as well. In Egypt, for instance, it was regarded as the purest articulation of the cosmos, best symbolized by the three great pyramids of Giza. The Greeks believed man’s life was shaped by three Fates, three Graces, and three Furies. In Chinese, three represents absolute harmony, a symbol found prominently displayed on the walls of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Across medieval Europe, symbols of three graced the shields of Templar knights and cropped up repeatedly in everything from Shakespeare’s plays to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, meant to entertain but instruct in the ways of the world—three little pigs, three bears, three witches, three wishes.