by James Dodson
Byron was bound and determined to try to find it. When a supportive club member, J. K. Wadley, offered to finance Byron’s return to the 1934 winter tour for half his earnings, he began working even harder on his game. “Hard as I practiced, I couldn’t seem to put four good rounds together. But I knew if I wanted to make a living out on tour—which was really where you learned the most about the game in those days—I would have to get better.” Without telling him, Louise had already spoken to her father about fronting him enough money to enter the Los Angeles tournament, where he once again failed to put together four good rounds and had to borrow money to go on to Phoenix, making only pocket change before arriving at Brackenridge Park in San Antonio for the Texas Open, the tour’s oldest stop. By then he was $660 in the hole and had barely enough left to finish in San Antonio and compete the next week at Galveston. “After that, I decided I would just go home and go to work to pay off all I owed Louise’s daddy.”
Playing off rubber tee mats, Byron shot 66 to earn the first lead he’d ever held in a professional tournament, and played well enough in the closing rounds to place second, pocketing $440. At Galveston, another runner-up result gave him an additional $300, and he raced home in his roadster to pay back his future father-in-law. With the leftover $100, he bought Louise a half-carat diamond ring. Just over a year later, during which Byron gave lessons and played in a number of invitational events around the Southwest, the couple got married in her parents’ living room.
After Christmas, with money they’d scrimped and saved, the newlyweds headed for California in the unheated roadster, Jack Grout hitching a ride with them and buying his share of the gas. They often drove all night. “Louise’s feet and legs would get cold,” Byron remembered. “Women didn’t wear slacks hardly at all then, and always dressed nice, especially when traveling. But cars had no heaters in that day and time, so we heated bricks in the oven before we left home in Texarkana and wrapped them in paper. Then she put her feet on them and wrapped a lap robe around her.”
He placed second at the Riverside Pro-Am, netting them $137. The next week at the San Francisco Matchplay Championship, he beat Lawson Little in the first round—“Honeymooner Beats Little” trumpeted a local headline, Byron’s first serious notice by the press outside his home state—and lantern-jawed Vic Ghezzi in the second before losing in the quarterfinals to Harold “Jug” McSpaden, an amiable pro known to play miserably one day and brilliantly the next. The $150 Byron collected was enough to get them to Tijuana for the greatly reduced Agua Caliente event, where he tied for sixth place, made $257 and began a friendship with the winner, Henry Picard, a polite, clean-cut New Englander who was entering his fifth season as head professional at the Charleston Country Club. Like Byron, he’d grown up with parents who emphasized optimism and personal integrity. “You’ll always be rated by the people you choose to be friends with,” Henry Picard’s father told him early in life, and that became the creed Henry lived by.
Five years his senior but likewise the product of a caddie yard, Picard also shared with Byron a fierce admiration of Bobby Jones’s swing and an interest in teaching the game to others. During the summer of 1934, at the prestigious North and South Open at Pinehurst, the veteran Al Watrous advised Picard that his swing was perhaps a little too upright, and the younger man listened because Watrous was a respected teacher, two-time Ryder Cupper and head pro at the prestigious Oakland Hills Country Club in Bloomfield, Michigan; moreover, he’d taken Jones to the final hole at the 1926 Open Championship before surrendering the Claret Jug. After working with Watrous, Picard won the Pinehurst event, a tournament players loved competing in because this beautiful resort village in the longleaf pines—even in the depths of the Great Depression—was a place dedicated exclusively to the game of golf. The Tufts, who owned the resort, treated visiting players and their spouses like royalty, putting them up in the beautiful Carolina Hotel and providing their meals for free. Pinehurst also boasted the finest practice range in the country, nicknamed “Heartbreak Hill,” which is where Watrous helped Picard with his swing.
In September, Picard played in his first Hershey Open in Pennsylvania and made a deep impression on its sponsors by shooting 67; chocolate magnate Milton Hershey promptly offered him a job at $5,000 per year, plus half of whatever he made giving lessons, with ample time off to play the winter tour. Picard enthusiastically signed on, picking up an extra $3,500 and free clubs—the same ones his hero Bobby Jones played—in an endorsement deal with Spalding.
Though no one could have imagined this at the time, these seemingly modest changes in the professional circumstances of a largely unknown club pro and an unknown pro would have a major impact on the modern game of golf.
Because of his solid if not scintillating play in the winter of 1935, Byron Nelson received a surprise invitation to Bobby Jones’s new event in Augusta, Georgia.
The year before, at the inaugural Augusta National Invitation Tournament, a Pinkerton survey of cars parked on the grounds indicated their patrons came from thirty-eight states and Canada, all because they wanted to see Bobby Jones play golf again. They filled the city’s two main hotels, the sprawling and elegant Bon Air Vanderbilt and the far more modest Richmond, plus every boardinghouse in town, and some slept in their cars. To no one’s surprise, the press turnout was the largest anyone had seen since the host’s triumphant Grand Slam; according to Western Union, reporters filed eighteen thousand more words than had been devoted the preceding summer to the U.S. Open. Contrary to Jones’s express wishes, most of them referred to it as “The Masters Invitational.”
Paired with Paul Runyan, 1933’s leading money winner, Jones found his hands trembling before the opening round and shot an untidy 76. Though he steadied himself well enough to finish thirteenth in a field as strong as any national championship’s held that year—notably missing only Gene Sarazen, who was fulfilling a commitment in South Africa that week—Jones later confided to his longtime friend and collaborator O. B. Keeler that he knew his competitive days were over. He was just thirty-two years old. The winner, Horton Smith, was a tall, boyishly handsome, exceedingly polite young man who went on to marry the daughter of one of Augusta National’s founding members and play in the event until he was sixty-three.
If the first Masters had made an indelible impression on sports fans, garnering more coverage than any tournament that year, the second made an indelible mark on history. At the par-five fifteenth in the fourth round, needing three birdies in the final four holes to catch Craig Wood, who was already in the clubhouse with 282, Gene Sarazen boldly elected to go for the green in two, prompting the forty-one-year-old Walter Hagen to shake his graying head with amusement. No more than a dozen spectators surrounded the water-skirted green, one of them Bobby Jones, who’d wandered out to watch this pairing—two thirds of the old triumvirate he had once commanded—come home. With his familiar lash that resembled a lurch, Sarazen struck a perfect four-wood that carried the water, skipped onto the green, and rolled softly into the cup for a double-eagle two. Sarazen finished in a tie with Wood and beat him by five strokes in the next day’s playoff. Grantland Rice, among others, hailed Sarazen’s miraculous “shot heard round the world” as something that gave the Depression-weary country a much needed lift—and certainly helped the struggling tournament, whose future was far from assured, stay afloat. But like the man who started it, Rice said, the Masters possessed a special magic.
Though Byron Nelson, owing to nerves and an erratic driver, finished ninth, his first Masters nevertheless proved life-changing. Impressed by how elegantly the young Texan played and comported himself, George Jacobus, the president of the PGA and head professional at the Ridgewood Country Club in New Jersey, pulled him aside and offered to hire him as his assistant, which Byron agreed to on the spot. “The job came with a little more money,” he remembered, “but its real value to me was that it took Louise and me to a respected club in the East, where most of the tournament golf was played in those days. Al
so, because George was busy organizing events it gave me a unique insight to see how the tour was developing. Things were suddenly coming together for us.” Battling a nervous stomach all week that caused him to skip a few meals, Byron still made sure to thank the host and crusty tournament chairman, Clifford Roberts, for inviting him to play. He also became friendly with Augusta’s new head professional, Ed Dudley, learning that Henry Picard had been his silent benefactor in securing the summons to Augusta. “I wasn’t a bit surprised to learn about that,” Byron said many years later. “Henry was always quietly helping other fellows out that way. He was as generous a man as I ever knew in golf and I made sure I thanked him, too.”
Before departing, very much in awe of these magnificent surroundings, Byron also confided to Dudley that he hoped to win the Masters “sometime in the next three years.”
“I’m sure you will,” the pro responded with a laugh.
What might seem dangerously close to a boast was, in fact, a pure and simple reflection of Byron’s high regard for his host and the tournament he would come to admire above all others.
Later that summer he played in his first U.S. Open, at Oakmont, where the Nelsons rented an inexpensive room in a local parsonage. The night before the first round, over supper, Byron told Louise he planned to buy a new driver. A little later, while doing her needlepoint, she told him, “Byron, we’ve been married over a year. I haven’t bought a dress or a new pair of shoes or anything for myself in all that time, but you’ve bought four new drivers, and you’re not happy with any of them. It’s one of two things. Either you don’t know what kind of driver you want, or you don’t know how to drive.”
The truth stung. But the next morning he took his Spalding driver to the Oakmont pro shop and shaved some wood off the toe and heel to round off the face of the club, leaving a slight bulge, a design idea he’d been toying with since his discussions with Penick and Henry Picard; prior to this, driver faces were generally flat. His performance, alas, wasn’t memorable—a disappointing thirty-second and miles out of the money, due to poor chipping and putting on Oakmont’s fierce greens. One positive aspect, though, was the noticeably straighter drives, partly thanks to the bulge, a revolutionary concept Byron would popularize and soon incorporate into MacGregor drivers, an innovation every club manufacturer quickly adopted.
Perhaps even more important, Louise’s commonsense observations also led to an epiphany in his thinking. As he prepared for the winter tour in 1936, Byron was ready to invest precious money on a new set of clubs when Louise again intervened. “Byron, honey, why don’t you quit kidding yourself? It just can’t entirely be the clubs. Your trouble is you!”
“Louise had hit it right on the nose,” he wrote years later in Golfing Magazine. “I had been afraid to admit this very truth to myself. But I couldn’t argue against her. My immature and false sense of pride had prevented me from putting the finger on myself. I resolved to let the club makers worry about my clubs and to concern myself with my own use of the implements.”
Right then and there, he decided he had to either abandon the tour or commence a comprehensive investigation of both himself and the game. He chose the latter, systematically analyzing the swings of the leading players, including “Lighthouse” Harry Cooper, Horton Smith, Ky Laffoon, Denny Shute, Paul Runyan, Gene Sarazen, Craig Wood, Walter Hagen, and his friend Henry Picard. “I studied all of them, trying to figure out what each swing had in common with the other. The time I wasted in trying to reshape clubs and in confused practice, I now put to purposeful experimentation.” And whenever he grew frustrated by what would turn out to be a five-year quest to perfect his own swing, Louise assured him it was only a matter of time before it all came together.
The game of golf would never be the same.
Finally, the third card was turned over.
Late in the summer of 1936, flush with $75 from winning the West Virginia Open in a playoff, Sam Snead took the train to New York and briefly got lost in the crowds but managed his connection to Pennsylvania for the $5,000 Hershey Open. “Except for that crazy trip down to Miami the year before with Gleim in his rattling old Ford, where he refused to let me borrow his driver, I’d never been anywhere to speak of,” he later recalled, carefully avoiding any mention of his mysterious outing on Long Island. “I looked at Hershey as a chance to see the big guns I’d been reading about in the fish wrappers, to see if I stood any chance up against ’em.”
For years he told of walking up to the first tee, where four well-dressed players were starting a practice round, and asking if this was the course where the Hershey Open was being played. A short, soft-spoken man with kind eyes looked him over, smiling at the sight of the eight golf clubs in his scuffed-up canvas bag. “It is, kid,” George Fazio told him. “Go change your shoes and you can play a round with us.”
Following a miserable start—hitting two drives out of bounds and topping a third into the water in front of the tee—Sam settled down and, not counting the three mulligans granted on the first hole, finished with an eye-opening 67. When word spread about a “long-hitting hillbilly on the premises,” the club’s new head professional came out to have a look for himself. Henry Picard instantly saw something in Sam Snead he liked—a natural swing that was as graceful as wind in the fescue.
Coming off a terrific winter season—the leading money winner, he had five victories including big wins at Atlanta and the respected Metropolitan Open—Picard was proof that a club pro could satisfy his members and still have a glorious tournament career. And as a disciple of Alex Morrison, whose A New Way to Better Golf (1932) accommodated the advancing steel shaft technology by advocating principles radically different from those of Harry Vardon and the renowned English swing teacher Ernest Jones, “Pick” was also obsessed with the quest for the “modern golf swing.”
Among other things, Morrison—the first teacher to use both still and motion photography to analyze his pupils’ swings—proposed that the less flexible but more reliable steel shafts needed to be powered by the large muscles on the left side, specifically the left leg, hip, shoulder, and arm, with the left wrist “squaring up” at impact and accelerating through the shot’s finish. He also advocated a natural “rolling of the feet” that encouraged a full release and delivered maximum power at impact. Finally, he stressed the importance of maintaining posture and balance to keep the swing that remained on plane and more upright than what was needed with the conventional hickory-shafted clubs. The story goes that Morrison once kept his weary protégé Henry Picard on the practice range for forty-three hours, hitting only seven-iron shots to begin to master these new moves.
Picard practiced so hard the summer of 1935 that his hands actually blistered and bled, though he soon saw his work deliver victories. And on this occasion, he encountered a swing that already incorporated many of these same ideas. “The first time I saw Sam Snead hit a ball from the fairway at Hershey,” he recalled in the early 1990s, “I was taken aback. I thought that was perhaps the finest golf swing I’d ever seen, maybe even better than Jones’s. It was so natural and fluid. The only flaw I saw was his footwork. Sam stayed back on his right foot a little more than he should have. And once I mentioned this to him, well, there was no stopping him. Sam became a true believer in the rolling action of the feet. He didn’t quite realize it at the time, but he had it all.”
Picard won his own tournament that September, and he gave Sam Snead some crucial nonswing advice. “In the tourney,” he told him, “you’ll be paired with Craig Wood. Wood represents Dunlop Tire and Rubber Company, one of the big ball-makers. I think he’s considering you for Dunlop.”
Sam shook his head, confused. “Considering me for what?”
“I mean, son, he may want to sign you up as a Dunlop representative. They’ll pay you to play their clubs and balls.”
“My God,” Sam gasped, having only heard locker room talk of gravy trains like this.
“Now don’t let Wood know I told you this,” Pick w
ent on, adding that Wood was also an influential member of the Ryder Cup team. “Just do all you can to impress him.”
In the tournament, Sam routinely outdrove him, and Wood was as long as anybody out there. At one point, embarrassed to find his ball fifty yards behind the lanky Virginian, he demanded to know who his teacher was.
“I never had a lesson in my life,” Snead told him flatly and truthfully.
“What’s the best you’ve ever shot in a round?” Wood demanded.
“At the Greenbrier on the No. 1 course I had a 61 not long ago. But I three-putted the eighteenth hole.”
Following Snead’s fifth-place finish, Wood offered his “discovery” a deal worth $500 a year and two dozen balls a month, plus a new set of Dunlop clubs—simply to represent the company on tour.
“I was reaching for a pen before he stopped talking,” Sam remembered. “My life savings at that time, if I hocked a few things, amounted to $300. With $800 I could risk going on the PGA circuit.”
When Gene Sarazen first glimpsed Snead in the third round of this same Hershey Open, striking one three-hundred-yard drive after another and splitting his shirt at the seams in the process, the veteran walked back to the clubhouse and ordered a cocktail.
“I’ve just finished watching a kid who doesn’t know the first thing about playing golf,” he told another veteran. “But let me tell you something. I don’t want to be around when he learns how.”
6
SAM VERSUS THE WORLD
DURING THE 1936 PGA CHAMPIONSHIP, being played at Pinehurst No. 2, PGA president George Jacobus and executive board member Ed Dudley summoned Fred Corcoran from the scoreboard he was running to a private room for a meeting that had been arranged by Richard Tufts, who now ran the resort he’d inherited from his father, Leonard.
“Fred,” Jacobus said, “I’ll get right to the point. Would you be interested in taking over the job of tournament manager for the PGA?”
