The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Read online

  When it comes to golf, Texans probably have a right to feel that way. Texas golf can legitimately claim to be bigger and better than most anywhere else. Ever the golf history buff, Cheatwood explained to me that Texas had produced legendary players like Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Jimmy Demaret, Jackie Burke, Lee Trevino, and Dave Marr, to name but a few, as well as grand old courses like River Oaks in Houston, Preston Trail in Dallas, and Colonial in Fort Worth. As my buddy put it, “Texas can play with anyone.”

  Even though Texas summers are brutally hot during the time of year when the major championships are being played, the golf establishment has never hesitated to bring its majors to the Lone Star State. Thus, I was surprised to learn, Cedar Crest in Dallas hosted the PGA Championship way back in 1927, when Walter Hagen won the last of his five PGA titles. Dallas Athletic Club was the next Texas host of the PGA in 1963 (where the trophy became so hot sitting out in the sun that winner Jack Nicklaus had to hold it with a towel), followed by Pecan Valley in San Antonio in 1968. Colonial brought the U.S. Open to Fort Worth in 1941, Northwood in Dallas followed in 1952, and Champions Golf Club in Houston hosted the national championship in 1969. Champions has also hosted the Ryder Cup, the U.S. Amateur, the season-ending Tour Championship for the top 30 money winners of the PGA Tour, as well as countless other championships. As recently as 1991, Colonial hosted the U.S. Women’s Open. Houston Country Club was the site of a classic match between Sam Snead and Ben Hogan on Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf. The PGA Tour still makes annual visits to Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio for regular Tour events.

  Texas remains well-represented on the current pro tour, with several Texans being recent winners of major championships. Ben Crenshaw, who has won The Masters twice, hails from Austin. So does Tom Kite, who won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in 1992. In addition, former PGA champion Mark Brooks and recent British Open champion Justin Leonard both call Dallas home.

  I had known some of this already, but Ken Cheatwood filled me in on the rest. He was now checking on me a couple of times a day for updates on my investigation.

  Ken and I had become fast friends. In less than a month, he had turned me into an avid student of golf tradition. Cheatwood really knew his stuff; he was the kind of guy who might eventually become a member of the USGA Executive Committee or at Augusta National. He truly loved all things golf, and his enthusiasm for the game and everything about it was infectious.

  One afternoon I showed him the articles about Stedman winning the Mississippi and Louisiana tournaments. As he looked at the scores, he whistled.

  “This guy was on a mission,” he said. “He was really out to prove something.”

  He looked up. “You know, for some of these guys, winning golf tournaments was the only way they could have a better life. Look at Byron Nelson. He wanted a ranch. Every tournament he won brought him that much closer to it. He had that incredible run in 1945, winning—what was it?—11 tournaments in a row. Jones must have loved this; of all things, it was an amateur who finally beat him in Memphis. Guy from New Orleans by the name of Freddie Haas. Nelson won 18 tournaments that year. By the end of the year, he had nearly enough money to buy his ranch and the cattle to go with it. Two years later, he was done. Quit at the age of 35. Never really played seriously after that. Can you believe it?”

  He was watching me to make certain I understood the importance of what he was saying. “Hell, Ben Hogan didn’t win most of his majors until after he turned 40. Imagine what Nelson might have done if he had stayed motivated.”

  I looked at Cheatwood. “You mean Nelson quit because he got his ranch?”

  “That’s right,” Cheatwood nodded. “Said he had accomplished what he set out to do. His dream put the fire in his belly. Once it became reality, the fire went out.”

  He tapped on the paper in front of him. “There was a fire burning in Stedman. He had dreams of winning championships, and this was the only way he could do it, by going to smaller tournaments. Why else would he risk getting sent back to South Carolina to get fried for something he didn’t do?”

  I handed another sheet of paper to Cheatwood. “Then you’d better take a look at this.”

  He read a few minutes and then burst out laughing. “Ernest Hemingway? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  I couldn’t resist a chuckle myself. “According to some of the other letters, he heard the name somewhere and liked the way it sounded. He didn’t know it belonged to a famous author.”

  Cheatwood shook his head. “So he tried to use it as an alias to play in the Texas State Amateur?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He registered for the tournament using that name. When he got to the Texarkana Country Club, officials with the Texas State Golf Association were waiting for him. They must have thought he was a pro trying to sneak into the tournament. Anyway, they pulled him into a back room in the pro shop and started asking questions. Poor bastard must’ve been scared to death.”

  I held up another file. “According to this, he took off in his car and was in such a hurry that he was stopped by a deputy sheriff a few miles outside of town for speeding. When he couldn’t produce a driver’s license for his bail, they hauled him off to jail.”

  My buddy rolled his eyes in disbelief as I explained, “I don’t know how he talked them into it, but somehow he got the jailer to let him make a phone call to Mr. Jones. Jones then wired the money to pay Stedman’s fine, and he was sprung.”

  Cheatwood chuckled. “I bet he was glad to be out of there.”

  My friend sat there stroking his chin and thinking about what it must have been like. Shifting in his chair, he said, “Stedman was damned lucky. Texas was always light years ahead of most places when it came to golf. They were used to all kinds of hustlers and sandbaggers. Golf was a big money game in Texas back then. The people running their state tournaments were gonna pay a lot more attention to who entered than those folks in Mississippi and Louisiana.”

  He looked up. “Did he play in any more tournaments after that?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I would be surprised if he did. From what I can see in his letters to Mr. Jones, he must have been frightened out of his wits by the experience.”

  Cheatwood looked at his watch and jumped up. “Man, it’s later than I thought. I’ve got to have a memo on fraudulent joinder on Mr. Benefield’s desk in the morning.” As he reached the door, he turned back and said cheerfully, “While I’m back to the grind, you keep reading, and let me know what you find.”

  After my fellow clerk left, I reentered the time warp in Jones’s old files. I did not find any further attempts by Stedman to play in amateur tournaments. As I soon learned, he had turned his attention to much bigger game.

  10

  IT WAS WELL KNOWN that Bob Jones was unshakably loyal to his friends. When he placed New York financier Cliff Roberts in charge of Augusta National, the autocratic Roberts made numerous enemies with his brusque and unpredictable ways. For instance, a member once complained about a bunker. Roberts had it rebuilt and sent him the bill. That was Roberts’s way of discouraging what he considered to be meddling in his domain. He was also known to warn members who complained about the way the club was run that it jeopardized their status with the club.

  Roberts was judge, jury, and executioner when it came to club matters, and he punished those who violated its rules almost according to his whim. What made things worse was that many of the rules that Roberts enforced in such an intemperate style appeared to exist only in his head and could change on a day-to-day basis without notice. Through repeated controversies, however, Jones never wavered in his support of his friend.

  For whatever reason, Jones had also developed the same kind of loyalty to Beau Stedman. Just as he forgave Roberts his sins, he also absolved Stedman of his. I imagined that both Roberts and Stedman must have taxed Jones’s patience on occasion. Like Roberts, Stedman had a growing list of transgressions, to which the fiasco in Texas was the latest addition.
But as I read the increasingly frequent correspondence between Jones and Stedman, it was clear that the bond between the two remained strong.

  For one thing, Jones had to admire Stedman’s perseverance. Despite great adversity, Stedman continued to support himself with hard work. Most of it was quite physical in nature, ranging from carpentry to heavy construction. Two things that Jones admired were hard work and great golf. Stedman had a talent for both.

  It was also clear after the close call at Texarkana that Stedman couldn’t compete on the regular amateur circuit any longer. Word about the incident no doubt spread quickly throughout the leading amateur golf associations around the country. Stedman would be a marked man from then on.

  For this reason, the two comrades-in-arms had apparently been discussing an alternative plan to keep Stedman in competition. One of Jones’s letters (he was still keeping copies in his files) explained the plan:

  My dear Beau,

  I agree that it would be imprudent for you to enter any more tournaments. The ones that are prominent enough to offer you good competition will also present the highest risk of discovery. The others aren’t worth entering for a player of your abilities.

  I also understand your intense need to compete. You have been blessed with remarkable talent, and it should be tested.

  There is another way to go. Matches can be arranged between talented players outside of formal competition. In fact, with the right backing, you can play the world’s finest players. I am fortunate enough to know virtually all of them, as well as people of means who would just as soon bet on a golf match as on a horse race. The idea of backing a player with great hidden talent like you against a well-known player will appeal to many of them.

  Allow me time to make some arrangements. In the meantime, keep your game sharp.

  As ever, Bob

  Since I had embarked on this project, I had found many surprises along the way. However, nothing surprised me more than discovering Jones acting as a broker to arrange matches between Stedman and the greats of golf. This was a private side of Jones that had never been revealed to the public. Under the circumstances, though, it made perfect sense.

  Most successful tournament players thrive on competition. According to Ken Cheatwood, the competition is a kind of addiction. Few of them care much for casual golf. If they’re not competing in a tournament, then they’re playing for high stakes in some betting game. As Cheatwood explained it to me, it has always been a common practice on the pro tour to engage in heavy betting during practice rounds. Many pros believe that it keeps them from developing careless habits that might carry over into formal competition.

  Jones and the players of his day were no exception. For many of them, a three-foot putt wasn’t worth laboring over unless something was riding on it.

  For this reason, it didn’t surprise me to find a letter from Jones to friends at the Boca Raton Club in Florida confirming arrangements for Stedman (under an assumed name) to play Tommy Armour in March of 1932. Although Armour was one of the best players in the world, he still needed the additional income of a winter job, and the Boca Raton Club was one of the finest resorts in the world. Just as Sam Snead did at Greenbriar, Armour supplemented his income nicely by giving “playing lessons,” which meant that he charged the resort’s well-heeled guests for the privilege of playing a few holes with him.

  If Stedman was going to step up in class, it was going to be a big step. Tommy Armour was at the top of his game. Originally from Scotland, Armour lost an eye while fighting in World War I, yet went on to win the 1927 U.S. Open at Oakmont (beating Harry Cooper in a playoff), the 1930 PGA (defeating Gene Sarazen in the finals), and the 1931 British Open at Carnoustie. He nearly won the PGA again in 1935, losing to Johnny Revolta in the finals.

  After facing death in the trenches in Europe, there was little about golf that could make Armour nervous. If Stedman was looking for another way to test his game, he could not possibly have found stiffer competition than the man whose nickname, the Silver Scot, was inspired by the color of his hair.

  Each side agreed to put up $500, winner take all. The match would consist of 18 holes at stroke play, and whoever had the lower total after 18 holes would be declared the winner.

  Stedman’s backers were to pay his expenses and give him $100 if he won. It seemed to me that, after paying Stedman, they didn’t stand to gain all that much from winning their bet, but these sports no doubt loved the idea of backing some unknown who might knock off the Silver Scot in his adopted backyard. Besides, they had to figure that any player recommended by Bob Jones was worth watching.

  I can imagine their reaction, though, upon seeing Stedman for the first time, with his wild, woolly hair and all. The fact that he was all of 20 years old had to worry them, too. But they must have gotten over the shock eventually, because the match came off.

  There couldn’t have been a greater contrast between the contestants. Compared to the rough-around-the-edges Stedman, Armour was second only to Walter Hagen in deportment. He was a keen observer of the wealthy clientele at the resort, and, when he wasn’t playing, he could be seen giving lessons on the practice tee while sitting in a chair drinking gin and tonic. Armour definitely had style.

  Despite appearances, Armour took his teaching seriously. He was recognized by most of his contemporaries as a keen student of the game. In fact, he eventually wrote one of the best instructional books on golf ever published, How To Play Your Best Golf All the Time. (Naturally, my buddy Cheatwood had a copy.)

  Although he was every bit as much a hustler as the other pros of his day, the dapper Scotsman probably didn’t welcome this particular wager. It is no fun being challenged on your home turf, where there is always a potential for embarrassment, particularly when your opponent is a relative unknown. However, it would have been considered bad form to turn down the challenge.

  Jones’s file had copious notes and a letter from one of his friends in Boca Raton. Together, they provided a running commentary of sorts about the progress of the match. Someone had given Jones a remarkably detailed account of what transpired.

  I thought it was unusual and said so to Cheatwood. He reminded me that golfers were notorious for recounting even the most ordinary round stroke by stroke. In fact, he told me that one of the oldest pro shop tricks in the book to cut short a member’s boring replay of an entire round was to ask what club the narrator hit for his approach at the seventeenth hole. He said it was guaranteed to mercifully shorten the account by sixteen holes almost every time.

  This was different, of course. This was no Thursday afternoon dogfight. Stedman was playing Tommy Armour. On an occasion of this significance, the detail both enriched and authenticated the narrative.

  From what I gathered, the match was played on a Monday morning when the course was all but deserted. One of Armour’s assistants served as his caddy, and one of Stedman’s backers, a real estate developer named Frank McCalla, carried his bag.

  Stedman must have been nervous at the start, because he bogeyed the first two holes. I could only imagine how his supporters, who knew him as Eddie Brennan, must have felt as Armour parred the first two holes and took an early two-stroke lead. By the turn, however, Stedman had recovered by making three birdies to Armour’s one, and the match was tied after nine holes.

  Stedman really hit his stride on the more difficult back side, making three more birdies without a bogey to shoot 68 and beat Armour by two strokes. He had defeated the winner of three major championships and had netted $100 over expenses for his efforts.

  11

  IT WAS DIFFICULT for me to imagine how Stedman must have felt after his match with Tommy Armour. Beating a player of that caliber—on his home course no less—was a powerful confirmation of his extraordinary talents.

  Jones’s notes and the letter from one of the backers describe a golfer with world class abilities. There was no apparent weakness in Stedman’s game. He hit full shots long and straight, and he putted well. It was difficult t
o tell whether he possessed a short game to match his other clubs; he missed so few greens that he rarely was forced to pitch or chip the ball. It seemed to me that Jones was perhaps keeping these notes and other records about Stedman’s play so that at least some evidence would exist of this great player.

  As things stood now, Stedman had already claimed victories over Jones, Von Elm, and Armour before his twenty-first birthday. No stronger threesome could be found.

  But Stedman clearly wanted more. In a letter to Jones, he wrote:

  Dear Bob,

  I did it! I beat Mr. Amour. He was very nice. Those fellos you sent me to were sur hapy.

  This is what makes life worth livin.

  Who is nex?

  Your friend, Beau

  Now that his own competitive days were over, Jones was in a way competing vicariously through Stedman by arranging matches for his powerful protégé that only someone of his stature and influence could. In that respect, it seemed odd that Jones had not personally attended Stedman’s match with Armour, but I realized that he probably feared the attention his appearance might draw.

  Certainly, the last thing Beau Stedman needed at that time was to draw a crowd. Still, Jones had to be a most interested onlooker, and I wondered if he would eventually succumb to curiosity and find some way to join the gallery at one of Stedman’s challenge matches.

  Then I remembered what Jones’s personal historian, O.B. Keeler, had written about Jones’s reasons for retiring. Apparently, competitive golf was a mixed blessing for Jones. Despite his enormous success, which earned him two ticker tape parades down Broadway, Jones found the pressure of competition to be excruciatingly painful. He would often lose as much as ten pounds during the course of a tournament because he was unable to eat.