by James Dodson
There’s no account of how long it took Ben Hogan to snag his first paying loop, and Byron had no memory of ever caddying with him, though he saw him frequently on the practice range. But by the spring of 1925 Ben had somehow acquired an old hickory-shafted cleek and a mashie iron of his own and was regularly competing in weekend caddie games on the range. In one game, players hit from one end of the practice area to the other, and whoever struck the shortest shot had to pick up the balls; in another, every competitor had to bet a nickel, and the longest driver won the pot. Unlike Byron, who was earning regular money on weekends by caddying for Judge J. B. Wade, Ben Hogan had no regular client, and because every scrap of cash was needed at home, he didn’t pitch pennies with the other boys whenever Captain Kidd or Harold Akey were out of sight. He spent his idle moments on the practice range, hitting balls. Whatever he learned, he picked up purely from mimicking more skilled players and beating his own rudimentary game out of the baked dirt on the range. “He would stay out there practicing till dark sometimes,” a member named Rawlings remembered in the 1960s. “Even practicing was harder for Ben. Byron lived just a mile from the club and members sometimes gave him a ride home. Ben would stick around and hit balls and walk home in the dark. I reckon it was six or seven miles home for him.”
In early 1940, in the glow of his first solo win at Pinehurst, Ben came out with the surprising revelation that he was naturally left-handed, but had switched to playing right-handed when his older brother, Royal, assured him no great champion had ever played from the other side. This transition apparently took place not long after Ben joined the caddie ranks at Glen Garden. “My brother would slap me every time he saw me use that right,” he told a reporter, adding that left-handed clubs were so scarce he was forced to learn with conventional clubs. Byron never saw evidence of this switch, though he did recall that Ted Longworth, Glen Garden’s affable head professional, repeatedly tried to fix Ben’s “hog killer” grip on the club. Others maintained that it was actually Longworth’s assistant Jack Grout—a young player with sizable tournament ambitions of his own and the future teacher of Jack Nicklaus—who finally sorted out young Bennie’s grip. At any rate, he learned early that if he shifted his left hand over on the club, adopting a “strong” grip on the shaft, and made a long and relatively flat swing with a strong cocking of the wrists, he could produce shots that matched the length of the larger boys. “That’s probably what kept me going,” he reminisced to Sports Illustrated in the 1950s. “I began copying the good players and I began hitting a much longer ball.… You learn to take care of yourself and how to think when you’re out on your own. I was too old for thirteen.”
“Mr. Hogan told me that once he figured out how to do this, he hit low-running drives that beat the other boys,” Sharon Rae remembered. “That’s how he learned to hook the ball and why, I guess, it caused him so much trouble later on. He told me he earned quite a few nickels that way, though.”
Byron didn’t need to play driving games for nickels. Within two years of his arrival, growing into a polite beanpole of a kid approaching six feet in height, he was regularly on the bags of Judge Wade and a member’s wife, May Whitney, who was close to Longworth. What impressed both Whitney and the head pro most about Byron was not only his diligence as a ball hawk, but also the devotion he exhibited to his family. Byron’s mother had a third child about that time and Byron convinced his mother to name the boy after Judge Wade—Charles Wade Nelson. He regularly attended with his deeply religious mother and, when he wasn’t either caddying or doing his chores, looked after Charlie. His daily chores included milking the family’s cow and goat before school and feeding their Leghorn chickens; he worked in his father’s ample vegetable garden in the evenings and hauled produce and fresh eggs around in a small wooden wagon, selling them to local stores and to Glen Garden’s chef. For a time, he also sold Liberty magazine and a hand cleaner called Hand Slick. Impressed by his personal industry and responsibility, Longworth invited Byron to work in his shop and showed him how to operate a buffing wheel to clean the rust off clubs, and how to replace broken or bent hickory shafts. Byron earned an extra three dollars a week and grew so skilled at reshafting clubs that Longworth invited him to work on his own hickory set before he went to play the U.S. Open at Oakmont in 1927.
“He’d already qualified,” Byron remembered. “So we got right to work on those clubs. He’d select the hickory shafts out of the barrel of shafts we had, making sure each one was good and straight and strong. Then I’d work down the end of the shaft so it would just fit good and tight in the hosel of the clubhead. I’d drive the shaft in with a maul, and put a pin or nail through the small hole on the side of the hosel to hold it in place. He took those clubs with him to Oakmont and played pretty well. I felt real proud of him, and happy I’d been able to help with his clubs.”
A big thrill came later that summer when Longworth invited his cheerful shop assistant along to watch the semifinal match between Walter Hagen and Al Espinosa for the PGA Championship over at the Cedar Crest Country Club in Dallas. With no ropes to keep spectators apart from players, the fifteen-year-old Byron was able to tag along in the shadow of the great Haig. At one point during the back nine, Hagen paused and squinted into the sun, having trouble determining where to aim his shot, and Byron spoke up.
“Would you like to borrow my cap?”
The winner of eight major championships glanced over and smiled.
“Yes,” he said, taking the offered ball cap. “Thanks, son.”
Slipping it on, Hagen hit his approach shot to within eight feet of the cup, then handed the cap back to the friendly kid, thanking him again with a wink. Moments later, Sir Walter rolled in the birdie putt and went on to eliminate Espinosa on the thirty-seventh hole. The next day, Hagen won his fifth PGA Championship title, one-up over Joe Turnesa.
Many years later, a reporter asked Byron if he’d kept the cap as a memento or a souvenir. He laughed and replied, “You’d think I would have kept that cap, but I haven’t. I’ve never kept clubs or balls I won tournaments with or anything like that. Just not sentimental that way, I guess. But I wouldn’t mind seeing that old cap again.”
Every year at Christmas, Glen Garden staged its annual Caddie Championship, which many members regarded as the capstone of the season and the most entertaining event of the year. By tradition, caddies signed up to use members’ clubs and members not only volunteered to carry the bags of their favorite loopers but also made handsome side bets on their players and threw a lavish turkey dinner for all the boys afterward, complete with small gifts.
Despite his evening job selling the Star-Telegram at the train depot, and Mama Hogan’s firm insistence that golf was an idle rich man’s game that could never take him anywhere of value, Bennie Hogan had managed to carve out something of a niche for himself at Glen Garden by regularly caddying for Ed Stewart, perhaps Fort Worth’s most accomplished amateur player at that time, and for a boy about his own age named Dan Greenwood, a realtor’s son who often let him hit shots with his matched Spalding clubs as they went along the course; this violated one of Captain Kidd’s cardinal rules, but Bennie was willing to risk it since it gave him a chance to play with quality equipment. Even more important, one early summer morning in 1927 he began carrying the bag for a decidedly nonathletic new member who’d joined Glen Garden out of the blue on his doctor’s advice to get some fresh air and exercise before he dropped dead of physical exhaustion.
Polite and dignified, Marvin Leonard was thirty-two years old and already something of a retail legend when he took up golf. Having failed twice earlier in his career to run a general merchandise business in North Texas, at a time when most Fort Worth retailers were aiming to exploit the city’s new oil-driven wealth by catering to upscale buyers, Leonard and his brother Obie had decided to concentrate on selling a vast array of everyday commodities to ordinary folks from an unpretentious general store on Cowtown’s busy North Houston Street, almost in the shadow of the or
nate Tarrant County Courthouse.
Despite Prohibition, the Queen City of the Prairies was awash in speakeasies and flush with big-oil money, believed by many to be the most affluent city in Texas. At one point amid the frenzy of rising oil prices, petroleum speculators seized control of the lobby at the Westbrook Hotel (where Royal Hogan sold his newspapers before he headed off to his evening accounting classes) and chased out guests, pitching every piece of furniture and a large Greek statue into the street to make room for a makeshift trading floor. “Fort Worth,” according to historian Oliver Knight, “was drunk at the shrine of the oil goddess.”
The Leonard Brothers department store bucked the trend, specializing in basic goods and bargain prices, from slightly dented cans of condensed milk and surplus oranges, to roof nails or rubber work boots. Marvin and Obie Leonard acquired whatever commodities they could acquire by the cheapest means, typically from damaged freight or the inventory of a belly-up competitor, passing savings along to their growing ranks of devoted customers, stacking merchandise with a dash of imagination and wit that made their store something of an Old World shopping bazaar of cut-rate goods, a consumer cornucopia that tumbled exuberantly straight out the front door into the teeming streets of Cowtown—“laundry soap to range wire,” as Marvin himself once explained to a reporter, “razors and cheese, cabbage and canned peas.”
Within a few years of opening its doors, Leonard Brothers moved to a larger space farther up North Houston Street and kept expanding, fast becoming a retail destination for the working-class and farm families. Many consider Marvin Leonard the inspiration for Arkansan Sam Walton and others who saw the vast cut-price general store as the future of retailing. “Going to Leonard Brothers was like going to another world,” Ben Hogan once remembered, “some place you liked to be, almost like home.” Leonard Brothers was even famous for its fabulous window displays at Christmastime, and by the summer of 1927 Marvin and Obie were in the throes of further growth, taking over an entire city block. Marvin’s doctor specifically prescribed golf, assuring him that “it will do you a world of good.” Though he certainly could have afforded to join posh Rivercrest Country Club, he chose Glen Garden instead, bought a starter set of clubs from Ted Longworth, and took a few golf lessons, displaying an erratic and loopy swing he diligently attempted to refine. Like many late beginners, he had a tremendous desire to improve and began regularly showing up at dawn for a quick nine holes before work. In summer, Bennie Hogan arrived early, too, eager to get a loop in before Danny Greenwood or Ed Stewart showed up. One morning in late June, Marvin Leonard found him. “I’m not much of a player yet, son,” Leonard apologized in advance, “but I’d be glad to have you go along.”
“That’s okay, sir,” Ben told him. “Maybe I can show you something.”
So off they went together, the runt caddie and the genteel storekeeper—an unlikely yet perfectly matched pair. Leonard had a soft spot for underdogs and kids; his own childhood had been a difficult one, and hard work had yielded first failure and now success beyond his wildest dreams. Something about the kid’s inward solemnity reminded him of himself—though he had no inkling that he would soon become the father figure desperately needed to fill the cindered hole left by Chester Hogan’s suicide. In Leonard, Hogan would find the decent, widely respected and transformative role model he needed to peer beyond the unremitting struggle of his past and present circumstances. Over the next thirty years—paralleling his own miraculous rise from a nobody to the most admired figure in golf—Ben Hogan (or maybe Hennie Bogan) would study men of means and substance like Marvin Leonard with the exactitude of a Swiss watchmaker, noting how they spoke, dressed, interacted with subordinates, and performed their jobs and ran their business affairs, with no detail too minor to take note of—especially the effect they had on others. His preference would be for extremely accomplished men who wore their success lightly, conveying an ease and social grace he secretly dreamed of attaining. In the fullness of time, both men would become legendary figures in their chosen and mingled worlds of commerce and golf, but the similarities went much deeper than that. Each valued honesty and personal friendship as among life’s highest ideals, and each eventually married a pretty if emotionally needy woman who required constant attention and hid her social frailties from the world at large, a lifelong burden their devoted husbands carried with great dignity and composure. But that was still far down the fairway.
In the beginning, there was just ragged golf on a warmly flaring Texas morning and the two of them chasing the game and getting acquainted. Leonard never forgot those early days; they formed his fondest impressions of the game, and in time filled his imagination with greater possibilities. “Every morning I got up in time to be at the course about sunup and play nine holes,” he explained many years later to a reporter who cornered him at the Colonial golf tournament he’d created at the beautiful club he’d founded on the banks of the Trinity River in Fort Worth. “Then I would go home and eat a big breakfast and sail off to work feeling like a new man. Golf not only saved my life, but it restored my health and gave me a new interest.”
Ironically, about this time, Star-Telegram office manager Clyde Milliken began noticing a curious pattern in Ben Hogan’s work habits. Whenever it rained, the kid was faithfully at his platform at the train depot selling papers to beat the band, but when it was sunny, he was nowhere to be found. Milliken soon discovered that on such days his teenaged news hawk was out at Glen Garden caddying and practicing, so he presented him with an ultimatum—golf or his job. Ben chose golf. Clara Hogan, when she heard the news from Royal, was neither pleased nor surprised. Golf, she predicted, would lead him nowhere fast. “Golf is nothing. And nothing divided by nothing,” she liked to say, “is nothing.”
Evidence that his mother might be wrong came that Christmas at the club’s annual nine-hole Caddie Championship, when Bennie surprised everyone by shooting 39, two over par. He had the event sewn up until Byron Nelson sank a thirty-foot putt on the final hole to tie him—though years later Byron insisted their score was actually 40.
No matter. Captain Kidd declared a playoff and everyone marched back to the first tee with drinks and cigars in hand. The two young competitors shook hands, and Ben reportedly told Byron, “Well, good luck. I didn’t think you could make that putt.”
He probably meant no offense by his remark; was merely stating the unvarnished facts as he saw them—an evolving Hogan personality trait. And to be fair, he had to feel somewhat slighted by the fact that he’d achieved his first success of any kind only to have Glen Garden’s golden boy rob him of the outright win at the last instant. To compound matters, both boys believed this was a sudden-death playoff. So when Bennie scored a four to Byron’s six on the first hole, he assumed he’d won for a second time. Eager to keep the drama going, however, several Byron supporters firmly insisted on a full second nine, so they played on and Byron eventually drained another long putt on the final green to register 41 and a one-stroke victory. In a little ceremony, each player was presented the gift of a new golf club. Byron, Caddie Champion for 1927, received a small silver cup and a brand-new mashie, while Ben was given a driving iron. “Well, I already had a five and Ben had a two,” Byron explained years later. “So we traded clubs.”
After this, members recalled, everyone went into the clubhouse for dinner and Christmas celebrations—all except for Bennie, who melted away into the dusk. “I felt I had my party,” he said later, “when I tied Nelson.” Given Byron’s social ease and sunny farm-boy charm, it’s easy enough to see why members lavished their affections on the more popular young man, and why—like a Charles Dickens character peering through the frosted glass at the festivities within—his greatest rival would be unable, for the moment at least, to shake the feeling that he was naturally inferior, a boy who was always destined to stand outside in the cold.
Within months, Byron was working longer hours for Ted Longworth and playing a regular amateur circuit at the clubs around Fort Worth
. Moreover, every spring Captain Kidd was asked to nominate a deserving caddie for a junior membership, which came with full playing privileges, and Byron was an easy choice in 1928. “He’s the only caddie who doesn’t drink, smoke, or curse,” the pragmatic Scot summed up, conveniently overlooking Ben. “I think he should have it.”
As a new junior member with a little spending money in his pocket, Byron soon won a junior match-play tournament at the Katy Lake Golf Course, beating another former Glen Garden caddie named Ned Baugh, and suddenly found himself invited to play at the better clubs of the Queen City on weekends. He was introduced to the area’s better players—including a gangly soft-spoken young man from Dallas named Ralph Guldahl who slaughtered him the first time they met in a friendly caddie match, and a pair of seasoned brothers, Ray and Lloyd Mangrum, also from Dallas—and his game rapidly progressed. Some Glen Garden members believed Ben Hogan’s game matched or exceeded Byron’s by this point, but only Byron enjoyed the enthusiastic support of club members, many offering to drive him to weekend matches and pay his entry fees at a time when there were few restrictions on such things in amateur play.
As Byron’s interest in golf grew, the attractions of school waned. “Math and geometry really confused me,” he allowed. “I liked history and English well enough, but when I began playing hooky from school just so I could play golf my parents got very concerned about it and we had a serious discussion. Very few people I knew went on to college in those days. Formal education wasn’t as important as it is today. I managed to convince them that the smart thing for me to do was to drop out of high school and get another job to supplement my daddy’s income. I don’t think my mother liked that idea much, but she eventually let me go ahead. She made me promise I would keep on reading books and learning as I went.”
Sixteen-year-old Byron spent the summer hunting for work and mowing greens with a single-reel push mower every morning at dawn at Glen Garden. That autumn, through a member named Cecil Nottingham, he found a job as a file clerk for the Fort Worth–Denver City Railroad office, sorting and filing freight bills. Nottingham, both a sympathetic boss and a golfer, let him work on his game anytime the pace of office work slowed. But this arrangement lasted only about a year, since shortly after the stock market crash in October 1929 Nottingham was forced to let his favorite employee go.
