The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Read online

  More Praise for J. Michael Veron and The Greatest Player Who Never Lived

  “I was fortunate enough to know Bobby Jones, ‘Bob’ to his friends, so perhaps I derived an extra dollop of satisfaction out of The Greatest Player Who Never Lived. But if you have ever played just one round of golf, and appreciate clear, spare writing with a touch of To Kill a Mockingbird, you will love this book.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Skillfully written, Beau Stedman leaps off the pages and becomes one of the game’s greatest players.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “It is dual parts John Grisham and John Feinstein, a legal mystery with a golf backbone. I kept checking the front disclaimer to make sure the book was a fictional account. This book is a keeper.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Set aside a few hours and go cover to cover and you’ll feel the way Charley Hunter did after playing Augusta in Chapter 16—you’re in a zone and don’t want to come out of it.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “This book gives us history and mystery in the same dose. It had more turns than a 30-foot putt at Augusta.”

  —Seattle Times

  Also by J. Michael Veron

  The Greatest Course That Never Was

  For Melinda

  Preface

  I FIRST MET Charley Hunter when he was a student editor of the Tulane Law Review and was assigned to edit an article I had written. He was a pleasure to work with and offered numerous helpful suggestions that greatly improved my essay on conflicts of interest in class action litigation.

  While we were working together, Charley learned about my interest in golf and shared with me his discoveries about Beau Stedman. After my law review article was published, we stayed in touch, and I followed with great interest his efforts to bring Stedman’s story to light.

  Charley eventually asked me to tell that story, and this book is the result. I am grateful that he allowed me to be his amanuensis.

  Charley and I have stayed in touch since I completed this book. In fact, he called not long ago to inform me that he had won his first big case. It appears that he is headed for a sterling career as a trial lawyer. I suspect that we will hear more from him in the future.

  Acknowledgments

  I WAS INTRODUCED to Bo Links indirectly several years ago when I purchased Follow the Wind, a wonderful golf novel he wrote in 1995. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Bo’s tale of a young man who meets Ben Hogan and other greats of golf at a mythical club he discovers upon walking through a fog-filled portal in Lincoln Park Golf Course in San Francisco.

  Our formal introduction came a short time later, when the United States Golf Association invited us to share a podium to discuss legal issues in golf at an annual meeting of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. We soon discovered that we had much in common (one of the USGA staffers said we were so much alike that we could have been twins separated at birth), and Bo encouraged me to share Charley Hunter’s story with others. He also read the first draft of my manuscript and made many suggestions, all of which I found helpful. More than anyone, Bo made it possible for me to join the fraternity of golf writers, and it’s the best club I’ve ever belonged to. I am deeply grateful for his support and encouragement.

  Another individual who played a big role in making Charley’s story a reality is my faithful secretary Marilyn Haile, who transcribed the initial draft of this book from my dictation. She then helped me with revisions by teaching me to understand the mysteries of word-processing software. Through it all, Marilyn never complained that this was over and above her usual duties, and Charley and I are both grateful to her for helping me get his story right.

  Of course, none of this would ever have happened without the support of my family, who made it possible for me to have sufficient “quiet time” to get Charley’s story in print. They shared Charley’s belief that Beau Stedman deserved his rightful place in golf history, and they were willing to give up time with me in order to see it done. They know how much I love them and that I will make it up to them.

  Obviously, I am indebted to Brian Lewis, Lynne Johnson, Jennifer Lundahl, Danny Freels, Adam Rifenberick, Karmel Bycraft, and everyone else at Sleeping Bear Press, Inc., for their faith in me. I thought very carefully about whom I should entrust with Beau Stedman’s story, and they were the first and only ones to whom I submitted the manuscript of this book. I am pleased and proud to be with a publisher that has contributed so much to golf literature.

  Finally, my thanks to my friends and golfing buddies, particularly Robert Dampf and Dr. Charles Horn, who encouraged and challenged me to get Beau Stedman the recognition he deserved. There’s no telling how much of this book was inspired by the tales we’ve spun while walking the fairways together on Saturday mornings.

  1

  THE FUNNY THING IS, I didn’t even much like golf at the time. Oh, I had played often enough that I could keep up in a social game. I guess you could say that I played well enough not to embarrass myself but not so well as to embarrass anyone else, either.

  What my game really lacked was not so much talent but passion. My good shots didn’t inspire poetry, and my bad shots didn’t cause the searing pain that appeared to inflict those who took the game more seriously. I never broke a club, for instance. It’s not that breaking clubs is something I would have been proud of, but bad golf has to hurt you enough at some point or you won’t care to get better. I clearly didn’t care enough.

  Suffice it to say that the inner mysteries of the game had not yet revealed themselves to me at the time. Although I didn’t know it then, they were looming on the horizon, however, and my days of being content just nibbling on the outer edges of the game were drawing to an end.

  The whole thing started on an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning in Atlanta. I had just finished my first year of law school at Tulane and had done the Hunter clan proud, finishing third in the class. This qualified me for an invitation to the law review and with it a good number of offers of summer employment with various law firms around the country.

  Making law review was a lot like making the homecoming court (or so I imagine). Each day, suitors sent notes through the mail, introducing their firms to the “top ten percenters” and telling us what a wonderful summer was in store for us if we would accept a date with them. The rush actually started after the first semester, when our first law school grades were announced and it became evident who the supposed “stars” of the class were.

  After briefly considering a couple of firms in New Orleans and one in San Francisco (where I couldn’t afford the housing), I finally settled on Butler & Yates in Atlanta. It wasn’t that hard a decision. For one thing, I wanted to get out of New Orleans for the summer and at least get above sea level where the air wasn’t so dense and sticky. Being from Birmingham, I knew enough about Atlanta to be comfortable with it. Also, I was a Braves fan, and the firm had good seats they promised we could use.

  The firm was about the right size, too. It was what I called my Goldilocks firm—not too big, not too small, but just right. It might take me the entire summer, but I figured that I would know just about everyone by the time I left for my second year of law school.

  Butler & Yates was a fairly old firm, but the lawyers who recruited law clerks were young and were more inclined to talk about the firm’s website than about its traditions. That’s why I didn’t know until that Monday morning, my first day on the job, that Bobby Jones had been a partner in the firm.

  That’s right. That Bobby Jones. The man many call the greatest golfer who ever lived. I knew enough about him when I learned about it to be impressed, but that was
about it. Certainly not as much as I know now. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The subject of Bobby Jones actually came up as a way of introducing me to my first project.

  You have to understand, there’s not much first-year law students can do as summer clerks. The first year of law school doesn’t cover much more than basic concepts of torts, contracts, criminal law, and procedure. As a result, first-year clerks are more window dressing than anything else. They can’t do more than the simplest research assignments. Maybe shuffle some papers or organize files. Run to the courthouse to file pleadings. Catalog documents being produced during discovery. That’s about it.

  For this reason, law firms don’t hire first-year students for what they can do; the real reason they hire them is to get a foot in the door to recruit them after graduation. Thus, in reality, the salaries paid first-year clerks are really seed money. So, when Charles Hunter showed up for work that first summer after just one year of law school at Tulane, the partners at the firm weren’t expecting much.

  Of course, no one admits this. They’re much too polite for that. Besides, there’s no need to risk offending the recruits with such candor. Unless they have IQs lower than mayonnaise, they’ll find out soon enough on their own.

  At least that’s what happened in my case. It didn’t take me long to realize how little I knew. I just watched what the lawyers were doing and saw that it was over my head.

  So when the firm went looking for ways to keep the otherwise worthless first-year clerks busy, someone came up with the bright idea that one of us could be kept occupied the entire summer cataloging what was left of Jones’s files. Not that they expected to come up with anything sexy; Jones had written several books during his lifetime sharing the great events of his life and his secrets about golf. When he died in 1971, his family and friends inherited a treasure trove of trophies, medals, and other memorabilia.

  The only things left at the firm were his legal files, which were protected from publication by the attorney-client privilege. Besides, they belonged to the law firm and its clients and could not be inherited by Jones’s survivors. At any rate, the public never really cared all that much about Jones’s legal work. It was his golf that interested them.

  Over the years, most of the files became scattered as other lawyers completed work that had been in progress when Jones withdrew from practice. Many clients, conscious of the value of anything with Jones’s signature, wanted their files and so took them from the firm.

  Fred Nathan, the partner who seemed most responsible for keeping us busy, tried to make my assignment sound important, but I saw it for what it was. Not that I minded; it would keep me busy, and it was not something I was likely to screw up. Just the ticket to get me invited back next summer—if I wanted to return. That, it seemed to me, would depend mostly on the number of Braves games I was invited to attend.

  Nathan was an interesting guy. He was reputed to be a genius at securities law and had allegedly spent virtually his entire career drafting, editing, and reading the fine-printed disclaimers contained in prospectuses (or could that be prospecti?) circulated as part of initial public offerings of stock. Nathan certainly gave the appearance of having suffered severe eyestrain for his labors; he wore glasses so thick they reminded me of Roy Orbison. If they had been tinted green, I would have expected to see the name of the town in which Coca Cola was bottled written in a circular fashion along their outer edges.

  At any rate, Jones’s remaining files had been put in boxes that were stacked in a single room just off to the side of the library. The room had no windows and bare walls that needed fresh paint—hardly a shrine to the man who retired at age 28 after winning the four major championships of his time all in one year. The drab, brown carpeting suggested that the room had once been used as an office or for conferences, but not recently. There was a small table with a computer. It had been loaded with a software program designed to organize document production in litigation. The indexing system was simple enough. I could easily use it.

  In the beginning, the work seemed pretty mundane. Jones had an office practice, which was less glamorous to me than litigation. Many of the files consisted of title searches, incorporations, and wills. Aside from his name, there was nothing there to distinguish Jones from any other good lawyer who had competently performed these same services.

  The other clerks thought I was nuts when I complained, especially Ken Cheatwood. Of all the law clerks, he was the most instantly likeable. Cheatwood had just completed his first year at Emory (which just appeared to be the law school that Jones was attending when he passed the bar). Before that, he played college golf at Oklahoma State and then spent several years bouncing around the mini-tours. After deciding, in his words, that “you can’t play games all your life,” he took the LSAT and surprised himself by scoring in the 97th percentile.

  Because he was originally from Georgia, he applied to Emory and was accepted largely on the strength of his LSAT score and despite what he described as a decidedly indifferent college transcript.

  It seemed odd to me that Cheatwood claimed to have been a poor student in college. He was not only bright but intellectually curious as well. Not many players amass a collection of golf literature like he had; that was usually something golf historians and librarians did.

  After I had gotten to know him well enough to know it wouldn’t offend him, I asked him about it.

  “I still had a lotta growing up to do when I was in college. Collecting books was fun because it was about golf. More do it than you realize. From what I understand, Ben Crenshaw has an awesome golf library. Besides, studying economics or political science was too much like work. I figured I was gonna be on tour in a couple of years anyway, so what was the point? So I basically hung out at the fraternity house or with the golf team. Mostly just played gin rummy and drank beer.”

  Because of his background, Cheatwood had also grown up with the Jones mystique and chided me for not appreciating my good fortune.

  “For God’s sake, Charley, don’t you realize what you have?”

  I didn’t bother to respond because I knew he was about to answer his own question.

  “You’re getting an inside look at the greatest player who ever lived. He won every major championship of his day. Then he won ’em all in one year. That’s when they first called it ‘The Grand Slam.’ He beat the greatest pros in the world, and he was an amateur. When he played overseas, the British bookies made him even-money against the field.”

  “I haven’t found much of that so far,” I protested weakly.

  “How much have you looked at?”

  “I’ve only gotten through a couple of boxes,” I admitted. “There must be a hundred or more.”

  Cheatwood shook his head. “You’re looking at history, Charley. There’s bound to be some great golf stuff in there somewhere.”

  Cheatwood’s prophecy came true less than a week later. That’s when I first learned about Beau Stedman.

  2

  AFTER ALMOST TWO weeks of indexing half-century-old real estate transactions and what-not, I was thrilled to come across a box of files containing something different. At last, here were some files that were more of a personal nature, even though they were set up to look like law firm files. This may have explained how they escaped the attention of Jones’s survivors, who had long since taken possession of all of his personal papers and correspondence.

  They weren’t as neatly organized as the other files, however. In fact, after looking through them for the better part of the day, I began to believe that maybe Jones himself maintained these files rather than a secretary. Lawyers are notoriously poor file managers, and from the looks of things a lawyer had put this file together. Some of the file labels seemed unrelated to the contents. The more I read, the more curious I became. What were these files, anyway?

  Many of them contained old press clippings of tournaments in which Jones competed. By all accounts, however, Jones was reputed to be self-effacing. He was no
t likely to retain his own press clippings.

  My curiosity inspired, I began to read each clipping. There is something about reading contemporaneous accounts from the past that makes the events come alive in ways that historians cannot recapture. The style of the day comes through in the writing. Sitting there in my little office, I had my own private window into the early part of the century.

  It was apparent from reading these accounts that Jones was an extraordinary player. He entered few tournaments outside of golf’s major championships, which at the time were the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open, and the British Amateur. In the Opens, he was competing against professionals who played year-round. Yet Jones remained an amateur who practiced law full-time and really only played golf from April to October.

  Apparently, Jones played little if any golf over the winter. Each spring, like so many other amateur golfers, he would dust off his clubs and begin to prepare for the coming golf season. The only difference was that, while other amateurs prepared for their member-guest or club championship, Jones was warming up for a summer of world-class competition.

  He often didn’t play in a single tournament until the old Southeastern Open in Atlanta, which was held only a few weeks before the U.S. Open. Other than that, he might play in the Southern Amateur or one or two other regional events, but that was his only competition before playing in the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open, and (schedule permitting) the British Amateur. In view of how little competitive golf Jones actually played prior to these major championships, his sterling record in the major championships becomes all the more remarkable. Even so, Jones was considered to be as likely as not to win virtually every time he teed it up.

  Jones was a prodigy who first came to prominence by playing in the U.S. Amateur in 1916 when he was only 14 years old. Throughout his teen years he compiled a remarkable record, winning numerous amateur championships. And he did so while studying engineering at Georgia Tech, English literature at Harvard, and law at Emory. After several near-misses—and after learning to curb a temper that often betrayed him in competition—Jones followed a second-place finish, one stroke behind Gene Sarazen, in the 1922 U.S. Open with his first national championship in 1923 by winning the U.S. Open at the age of 21.