The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Read online

  The difference is significant. Games governed by time simply do not allow for meditation on their “inner meaning.” Instead, they reward the side that “hustles” the most, meaning the side that plays at the most furious pace. A wide receiver who pauses to reflect on the beauty of a well-manicured playing field is apt to be hammered into next week by a linebacker.

  So, I reasoned, if this wasn’t some out-of-body experience for which there existed a psychological reason, perhaps it was an out-of-mind experience caused by spiritual forces. However, I wasn’t any more of a philosopher than I was a scientist; I had majored in English literature in college. There was nothing in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Wallace Stevens’s poetry that helped me here.

  Cheatwood wasn’t much help, either. First of all, he had shot 80 that day, which for him was a terrible score, and he wasn’t in much of a mood to talk about my 69. By all rights, this should have been his 69 instead of mine, and we both knew it. Eventually, though, he came around.

  We talked about it one day at lunch. We had gone to a deli about three blocks from work that served an awesome tongue sandwich. It was our third trip that week, but Cheatwood had yet to try the tongue.

  “I can’t help but think where it came from.”

  “You eat flank steak, don’t you?”

  “But it doesn’t look the same cooked. I can still tell there’s a tongue between those two slices of bread. It’s just my nature. I guess I’m not the adventurous type. For me, eating tongue is like hitting driver with out-of-bounds left and water right. I’ll hit three-iron every time.”

  After ordering a Reuben, he turned once again to what was now a familiar topic. “What was your lowest score before that 69?”

  “I once had a 74. A couple of 76s. Nothing better than that.”

  “Well, not many people improve their best score by five strokes, but it does happen. You sure picked a helluva time to do it.” He looked off. “Just like I picked a helluva time to shoot 80. The last time I did that in Q-School, I had too many Apollo 13 shots. Signed up to take the LSAT the next day.”

  I wrinkled my nose in confusion. “What’s an ‘Apollo 13 shot’?”

  He sniffed. “That’s where you lose your ball on the dark side of the moon.”

  I laughed appreciatively.

  Turning serious again, he said, “All kidding aside, Charley, I’m happy for you, but I’m so jealous I could spit.” He was smiling as he said it, but I knew he was telling the truth.

  I checked around, and my friend was right. Shooting a score that much below your previous best was a rare thing, but it did happen on occasion. My 69 was very unusual, but it was not a one-of-a-kind experience.

  I played again that very weekend on a nice daily fee course in Marietta called Timber Creek, mainly to see if the magic was still there. Some of it had lingered, but it was clearly fading. I shot 76. While it was six shots below my handicap, it was a long way from 69.

  But an experience like that is hard to forget. I continued to think about it virtually every day. Law students are taught to be analytical, and I was having difficulty letting go of this.

  As every good player knows, golf is a game of feel. You have to feel the swing, not think your way through it. Thinking produces tension, and tension is a golfer’s greatest enemy.

  A lot of golfers (myself included) have great difficulty accepting that simple fact. We spend our golfing lives obsessed with the mechanical details of the golf swing—encouraged by the monthly promises of “miracle cures” contained in each new issue of the major golf magazines. Unwilling to accept that there are no Hadacol golf remedies, we run from swing theory to swing theory.

  We read Percy Boomer, Ernest Jones, and Tommy Armour. We memorize Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons. We study Jack Nicklaus’s Golf My Way. We watch Hank Haney’s videos. And we buy David Leadbetter’s swing aids. We respond to every infomercial that promises an overnight solution for our lack of ability. When it’s all said and done, however, our handicaps are the same.

  In talks with Cheatwood, and in the various books I was reading, I learned that a common thread in the approach taken by good players is to avoid any mechanical thoughts while on the golf course. The place for mechanical thoughts is on the range, where old habits can be discarded and new ones ingrained. When playing in competition, most good players think only about where they want the ball to go. They work on staying confident and loose, knowing that their chances of executing the golf swing well are best if they are relaxed.

  I have heard this described in a number of ways. Some players say they stay “out of their own way.” Others talk about visualizing each shot by imagining they are watching themselves in a movie. Still others speak of the benefits of a preshot routine that gets them into a quiet state of relaxation. Listen to enough pro golfers, and you get the feeling that many of them can’t really tell you why they are so good at this maddening game. Perhaps the best distillation of feel came from Sam Snead, who said he just tried to swing “oily.”

  As usual, Cheatwood had his own way of putting it. “You can play swing, or you can play golf.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You ever play basketball?”

  “A little.” The truth is, I hadn’t been all that good at sports. Lots of desire, but not nearly enough footspeed.

  “When you took a shot, did you think about where your elbow was?”

  “Of course not.”

  “No one does. But put a golf club in their hands, and the same guy starts pondering pronation and supination in the middle of his swing. That’s okay on the range—if you know what you’re doing. But once you step on the golf course, all that matters is where the ball’s going. So why think about anything else?”

  I couldn’t keep it quite that simple. But I did finally realize that I needed to recapture what I was feeling rather than what I was thinking when I shot the 69. That brought me back to alcohol and lack of sleep. It had produced a pleasant tiredness that overcame the tension I usually felt because of my fear of failure. Instead of lashing at the ball, I was too tired that day to do anything other than turn away from it and turn back through it. Rather than trying to hit the ball far, I was just trying to make contact.

  I remembered reading stories from touring pros who posted great scores in tournaments when they were feeling too ill to care about anything but getting through the round. They found it difficult to conjure negative swing thoughts when their greatest fear was losing lunch in front of the gallery.

  That suggested something to me. While being distracted by a fear of bad results was often disastrous on the golf course, being distracted from thinking about bad results was something else again. Maybe that explained how John Daly could win two majors in the midst of personal struggles with alcoholism and divorce. Perhaps for some, the golf course was the only refuge from negative thoughts and feelings.

  However, I wasn’t fully satisfied by any of that. I wanted to believe that there was something more to my miracle round. I wasn’t ready to go so far as to say that God decided I should break 70 at Augusta, but I did think there was some connection between my inspired play that day and my summer sojourn into the world of Bobby Jones and Beau Stedman. Maybe I had so deeply immersed myself into their lives that some part of them had become part of me.

  If I ever wanted to find that wondrous state again, I had to understand it better. Perhaps I would find some answers when I knew more about Beau Stedman.

  18

  BY NOW, THERE were only three weeks or so left in my summer internship. I began to grow concerned about whether I would eventually find the answers to my growing list of questions about Beau Stedman. As I surveyed my cell, I still had a number of boxes to inventory.

  The going had gotten slow in the last week or so. I had gotten bogged down in several boxes containing business files. There was nothing in them about Stedman, and it took me a while to get them all indexed and entered in the inventory.

  I was just about to take
my first break of the day one morning when I suddenly came upon a couple of files that put me back on the scent. Like the earlier files that pertained to Stedman, these were poorly organized, as if Jones himself rather than a secretary had maintained them. Various papers were simply thrown together rather than organized in sections or in chronological order as the law firm files typically were put together.

  Among the papers were notes in a handwriting I recognized to be Jones’s. They were the most curious entries I had yet to find in this entire improbable saga.

  On one aging sheet of paper torn from a legal pad were the following notes:

  Beau at the Invitational

  1935 (1st rd) 71

  (2nd rd) 68

  1936 (3rd rd) 70

  1938 (2nd rd) 66

  1939 (1st rd) 69

  (2nd rd) 73

  1940 (2nd rd) 67

  (4th rd) 69

  1941 (3rd rd) 71

  1946 (1st rd) 70

  1947 (3rd rd) 71

  1949 (2nd rd) 68

  1950 (1st rd) 71

  1951 (3rd rd) 64

  I could not believe what I was reading. Had Stedman played in The Masters? If so, how did he pull it off? And why were the scores only for one or two rounds?

  I averaged all of his scores. It came to 69.14.

  It was a staggering number. I doubted that anyone in the history of the tournament had done as well. Still, it appeared that numerous scores were missing. Maybe Jones was recording only Stedman’s good rounds.

  I was having difficulty making sense of this new discovery. At lunch, I ran over to the downtown branch of the public library. I was becoming a familiar figure there, as it had a well-stocked section on golf, especially about Jones, Augusta National, and The Masters. I found one that gave a year-by-year history of the tournament, including the scores of every competitor.

  I checked for Stedman’s name even though I really didn’t expect to find it. It wasn’t there. I then looked for some of the names he had used in the past. They weren’t there, either.

  Maybe he used a new name, I thought. I had brought the file with me, and I opened it to the page with Jones’s notes on Stedman’s “Invitational” scores. Although many of the names of the competitors were unfamiliar to me, I couldn’t find a match for the scores that Jones had recorded.

  I then decided that Stedman must not have competed in The Masters after all. Maybe Jones’s notes were a reference to some other invitational tournament. Perhaps I had incorrectly assumed that his use of the term “Invitational” referred to The Masters because I knew that Jones had preferred to call his tournament the Augusta National Invitational.

  Still, the possibility of Stedman competing at Augusta was intriguing, to say the least, and made me realize how well-suited he was for Augusta’s course. From all accounts, he had the perfect game for Jones’s dream course. He was extremely long off the tee and had a deft touch with the putter. Jones couldn’t have designed a more user-friendly track for Stedman.

  But entering Stedman at Augusta would have been reckless, to say the least. During the years listed in Jones’s notes, the tournament grew in stature and visibility by leaps and bounds. Thanks to Jones’s charisma, Sarazen’s double eagle, the beautiful setting, and the all-star cast of players, The Masters had caught the media’s fancy.

  For one thing, sportswriters found sipping mint juleps on the veranda of the clubhouse under the shade of its beautiful trees to be a most pleasant diversion. Jones knew that making the media comfortable was the most certain way to assure that his tournament received excellent coverage, and he provided all the amenities.

  To this day, The Masters offers an experience for the media that surpasses the other major championships in golf. Its field starts less than half the number of players as the other majors. As a result, there is far less information to assimilate and compress in dispatches back to the home office. The pace, therefore, is less hectic.

  April in Augusta also happens to be a wonderful time of the year, which further adds to the experience. Armed with an unlimited budget, the agronomists on staff at Augusta National seem to have remarkable powers in forcing the azaleas to bloom right at tournament time, not a week before or after. This sometimes requires icing the beds of the plants if the weather is unexpectedly warm before the tournament, but it has always seemed to work.

  It also helps that The Masters is the only major championship that is contested at the same site year after year. Members of the media are able to reserve the same house each year and can look forward to familiar surroundings rather than a strange hotel room. They get to know the best bars and restaurants in town and, better still, the best bartenders and waiters. For many members of the Fourth Estate, Augusta is their Capistrano.

  All of which meant that sneaking Stedman into the tournament unnoticed would be virtually impossible. While the U.S. Open may have been too bustling for the media to scrutinize some driving range pro from Paducah, Kentucky (unless, of course, he shot 66), the small field at Augusta meant every player would receive at least some measure of media attention. Even though Jones insisted that the field include a fair number of amateurs whose names were unfamiliar to all but a few of the sportswriters who converged on Augusta for the tournament, the job of a reporter was to ask questions. With the scores Stedman was apparently shooting, he was not going to come and go without someone cornering him. Using an alias might buy him some time, but sooner or later someone would check out his story—and blow his cover.

  Then there were the other players. It was hard to imagine Stedman on the course driving the ball 300 yards and putting well enough to shoot the scores he did without his playing companions taking notice. Players always check out the competition, and Stedman’s scores were likely to put him squarely on their radar screens.

  It just didn’t make sense. Stedman could not have played at Augusta this often without being discovered. Or could he? If anyone enjoyed a lifelong romance with the media, Jones did. None of them was likely to risk being excluded from the annual party at Augusta by displeasing him or Cliff Roberts. If either Jones or Roberts suggested that a competitor be left alone, there would be few questions asked.

  In those days, it was accurate to refer to the group covering Augusta as a sportswriting fraternity. There was a sense of congeniality and professionalism that prevailed among its members, from Grantland Rice on down, and the details of players’ personal lives were considered off limits.

  Not that sportswriters didn’t gossip, of course; that was a big part of the fun. But there was an unwritten rule against publishing such personal information. In short, this was long before the age of trash-talking and tabloids. And no institution was ever more effective at damage control than the Augusta National Golf Club.

  In the end, I realized that it wasn’t so implausible for Jones to make a place in the tournament field for his special friend and that, if anyone could pull it off by getting the media to look the other way, Jones and Roberts could.

  That still didn’t explain why the only record of Stedman’s scores was Jones’s handwritten notes.

  19

  NOT ALL OF JONES’S efforts to pair his friend with other golf champions produced a match. At least that’s what I discovered in some papers that included correspondence between Jones and Robert H. Tutwiler, a friend who apparently owned an interest in The Greenbrier in Virginia.

  I knew something about The Greenbrier, as my family vacationed there once when I was in high school. Nestled among the Blue Ridge Mountains, The Greenbrier was established at the site of a mountain spring believed to have great medicinal powers. It was also, for a time, the summer home of General Robert E. Lee. The resort features a spa, tennis courts, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, and, of course, golf. In fact it has lots of golf, 54 holes in all.

  The nearest town to The Greenbrier is White Sulphur Springs, Virginia. A pretty fair player by the name of Samuel Jackson Snead grew up in the mountains not far from there. Snead’s record i
s legendary. He won a total of 81 PGA Tour titles, more than anyone else before or since. He won The Masters three times (defeating Ben Hogan in an 18-hole playoff in 1954), the British Open on his first attempt (at St. Andrews, no less) in 1946, and the PGA three times.

  According to a media guide from the PGA Tour (Cheatwood’s golf library continued to amaze me), Snead also won the Canadian Open three times and the prestigious Western Open twice. In virtually every poll taken on the subject, Snead comes out on top when voters are asked to describe the one player with the most classic golf swing.

  Nineteen twelve was a vintage year for golf champions. It produced Snead, Ben Hogan, and Byron Nelson. Other than when Jack Nicklaus was born, no other year can claim to have introduced the world to more major golf championships.

  Snead was, of course, a country boy. But he was no country bumpkin. Although he cultivated that image, Snead was far wiser than he let on. A magazine article celebrating Snead’s 85th birthday described him as a man who grew up poor and never wanted to be poor again. He managed his money carefully, and he made lots of it hustling golf.

  Snead maintained a relationship with The Greenbrier for many years. He was affiliated with the resort in one way or another over his entire career and was a regular presence there. He enjoyed going out on the courses at the resort, introducing himself to guests, and asking if they would like him to play a few holes with them.

  The guests were understandably overwhelmed at the prospect of playing golf with Sam Snead and never refused his invitation. They usually didn’t learn until later that a charge had been added to their bill for what was described as a “playing lesson.” Frequently that lesson consisted of nothing more than Snead advising the guest to use a stronger grip.

  Snead also made a lot of money playing exhibitions. Again, he was savvy enough to insist on being paid in cash—and would not tee off until he had the money in hand. Not only was this method of payment less likely to gain the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, but, as Snead often pointed out, cash didn’t bounce.