Best Show in Sports

Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Golf Book

BY: Dave Anderson

Life is not dated merely by years. Events are sometimes the best calendar.

~Benjamin Disraeli

I had been playing golf for nearly three years, playing it decently for a city kid on scruffy city courses, but not that well and not that often. To me, pro tournament golf was something else entirely.

In those years before network television, pro tournament golf was something I only read about in newspapers or saw in newsreels in the Loews Bay Ridge Theater in Brooklyn, not far from where the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would be built a decade later. Sam Snead, Ben Hogan and Jimmy Demaret usually were the pros in those newsreels -- a quick tee shot, a quick putt and a voice-over saluting the winner of the Masters or the U.S. Open. Those newsreels made it feel as if the big names of golf were on another planet.

But a day or two after Ben Hogan won the 1950 U.S. Open, having limped around Merion on legs battered in his Cadillac's 1949 head-on collision with a Greyhound bus on a foggy Texas highway, I read that he was about to play in the Palm Beach Round Robin at the Wykagyl Country Club in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City.

I remember thinking, "I've got to see this."

The tournament was named for the Palm Beach clothing company, not for the posh Florida playground of the rich and famous. But in its time, the Palm Beach Round Robin was a big tournament, the only stop on the PGA Tour in the New York area except for the rare arrival of the Open or the PGA Championship. And now Ben Hogan, who had just won the Open, would be playing in a first-round foursome with Sam Snead, Jimmy Demaret and Jack Burke, Jr.

I had just finished my junior year at Holy Cross College. For nearly a decade I had been sitting in the centerfield bleachers at Ebbets Field to see Dodger baseball games, and in the balcony at Madison Square Garden to see Knicks and college basketball, Rangers hockey and AAU track meets. Going to sports events was something I would do (with a typewriter or a laptop) for the rest of my life. Now with Hogan in town, it was time for me to attend my first pro golf tournament.

Not that it was around the corner. I lived in Brooklyn. I had to get up at 5:30 A.M., walk four blocks to the subway, take the Fourth Avenue local to 59th Street, ride the Sea Beach Express all the way to Times Square, take the shuttle to Grand Central Terminal, board a commuter train to New Rochelle in Westchester County, then hop on a bus up North Avenue to Wykagyl. The trip took more than two hours, but it was worth it.

As I remember, it was cloudy that morning as Hogan, Snead, Demaret and Burke hit balls on the practice tee, then stroked a few putts on the practice green outside the pro shop. As famous as those four golfers were then, over their careers they would become even more revered, winning a total of twenty-two majors (Hogan ten, Snead seven, Demaret three, Burke two). And here they were in the same foursome, up close and personal. There were no fairway ropes then, only half-moon ropes around the backs of the tees and the backs of the greens. You could walk along the fairways with the four golfers and their caddies if you wished. And that morning there weren't more than one hundred spectators following that foursome. On the par-5 6th hole I clearly remember standing only a few yards from Hogan as he drilled a 3-wood toward the elevated green. On the par-5 10th hole I remember Snead, after a big drive, smoothly smashing a 3-wood up the hill toward another elevated green. I remember Demaret's lime slacks and his wristy pitch shots. I remember Burke's boyish good looks and his velvety putting stroke.

I don't remember exactly what they shot (after all, fifty-eight years have transpired) but I know Hogan was over par, 73 or 74. But he was excused. Mentally, he was not grinding the way he had at Merion. Just seeing him was enough, seeing that tanned serious face and that tight controlled swing. And after the round, he autographed my $5 admission ticket.

On my way home, I realized that being a spectator at a pro golf tournament was better than at any other sports event. You were next to the golfers along the fairway and around the tees and greens. You could see them smile or frown, sometimes hear them talk. At other Palm Beach Round Robins and other tournaments, I remember Lloyd Mangrum addressing other golfers as "pro." And for more than half a century, I went to pro golf tournaments, usually as a sportswriter but occasionally as just a spectator. You seldom can get as close to the golfers now, but for a spectator, a pro golf tournament will always be the best show in sports.

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