The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Read online

  To a Scotsman, the ideal round consisted of getting around the course in “level fours.” This produced a total of 72 strokes for 18 holes. Holes playing into the wind often required five strokes, while holes playing downwind might require only three. Thus, while the Scots designated “par for the course” (hence the term), they did not believe that par could be determined for a particular hole without proper regard for the conditions of the day.

  It occurred to me that Stedman’s match with Sarazen might have been around the time that Sarazen was preparing for the PGA Championship. If so, the match play format made perfect sense.

  The match was to be played at the Yale University Golf Club. Stedman would be in for a treat, I thought. One of the books I had been reading was a history of golf course architecture. It described the great courses around the world, and the Yale course was listed.

  The Yale course was originally designed by Charles Blair Macdonald, perhaps this country’s first great golf architect. Macdonald was the son of a Scottish father and a Canadian mother who was born in Ontario and raised in Chicago. According to what I read, Macdonald first learned to play golf while attending the University of St. Andrews in his father’s native Scotland and was able to watch matches involving Old and Young Tom Morris, David Strath, and other great players of the era. After returning to Chicago, he set about promoting the game in this country.

  Macdonald’s first venture into golf course design was the Chicago Golf Club, which was the first 18-hole course in the United States. In 1895, the Chicago Golf Club became one of five clubs that chartered the United States Golf Association. That same year, Macdonald won the inaugural United States Amateur Championship that was conducted by the USGA. He then moved to New York in 1900 and became a stockbroker while continuing to design golf courses (usually in partnership with Seth Raynor and others) around the country, including such notable venues as St. Louis Country Club, National Golf Links, Sleepy Hollow Golf Club, Greenbrier Golf Club, and the Mid-Ocean Club in Bermuda. Macdonald also wrote a splendid memoir entitled Scotland’s Gift—Golf and published numerous articles on golf architecture that earned him the unofficial title of “Father of American Golf Course Architecture.”

  The file I was reading didn’t contain much in the way of details about Stedman’s match with Sarazen. I was disappointed. Sarazen outlived virtually all of his contemporaries and therefore was the one player from the 1920s with whom I was most familiar. Too, he was universally admired until the day he died, and his record established beyond question that he was an extraordinarily talented player.

  Stedman competed in this match as Tom Crandall. If he was intimidated by Sarazen or Yale, it didn’t affect his play. He beat Sarazen 2 and 1.

  I wanted to know more than the result. My book on golf architecture described the Yale course as having large greens with “deep creases” and “steep banks.” I wondered how Sarazen and Crandall nee Stedman negotiated these topographical challenges. Was the match close? Did Sarazen ever lead? How was it decided? Did Sarazen play poorly to lose the match or did Stedman play well to win it? There didn’t seem to be anything more in the meager file contents I had before me to sate my curiosity, and I came away from this part of Beau Stedman’s story feeling very unsatisfied.

  14

  AT TIMES IT WAS difficult to believe what I was reading. All of this yellowed paper in various forms of newsprint, stationery, legal pad, notepaper, and scraps of envelope backs was yielding a remarkable tale of athletic achievement. According to what I had found, Beauregard Stedman was as good or better than any player who ever lived. Yet the story of his exploits had remained locked away in these scattered file materials for god-knows-how-many years until I found them.

  Maybe this didn’t rank with discovering King Tut’s tomb, but you wouldn’t know it from Ken Cheatwood’s reaction.

  “He hasn’t lost yet? Man, what a waste. I hate to think of what-all he might have won. When you can dust off Sarazen on a classic course like Yale, you can start lining ’em up. Take on all comers.”

  “If anyone was beating him,” I said, “I haven’t seen it yet.” I pointed to a golf encyclopedia that I had borrowed. “Every guy he beat was a big-time player. And he usually played them on their turf.”

  Cheatwood looked at me. “Do you have any idea how many more matches like this he played?”

  I shook my head. “No. It was a year between his matches with Ouimet and Sarazen. Can’t play too many at that rate. I wonder why he didn’t play more often?”

  “That’s a good question,” my friend replied. “Maybe it wasn’t so easy to arrange these things as you think. Maybe Jones was having more trouble than he expected finding ‘investors’ to back Stedman. You know, they had to be careful about this. There was a price on Stedman’s head; he couldn’t just come out of the closet whenever he wanted.” He paused. “Not to mention the fact that Jones was getting Augusta National off the ground around this time.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Although Cheatwood didn’t mention it, Jones also had his law practice to attend to and his instructional movies as well. There was a lot to this that my ragged assortment of paper wasn’t telling.

  I just looked at Cheatwood and shrugged. “Only one thing to do. Just keep reading.”

  My friend put his hand on one of the boxes. “I really wonder what happened to this guy,” he said after a while. “People always talk about the ‘good old days,’ but it wasn’t that long ago that life was a lot tougher than it is now. People got lynched for being the wrong color. They got tried and executed because they were the wrong religion or too liberal for the times. Or they got worked to death in sweatshops up north.”

  Cheatwood’s voice had become surprisingly cynical. I couldn’t help but notice that there was a passion to it that he usually reserved for our discussions about golf or Greg Maddux. I knew better than to interrupt him, as I expected him to continue.

  And he did, asking me, “Have you ever seen old pictures of people in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl? Or in the Appalachians? They look like they’re holding on for dear life and don’t even know why. Some ‘good ole days.’”

  Ken’s remarks made me realize that the gross injustice of what had happened to Stedman was much more common in those times than I was perhaps willing to admit. Was it any worse because he happened to be a great golfer? What was the real injustice—that Beau Stedman never won a U.S. Open or that he was spending his life in hiding because of a trumped-up murder charge?

  I had to wonder whether I was responding more to discovering a great sports story or a terrible injustice. Being a law student, I hoped it was the latter. But, I admitted to myself, I really wasn’t as sure as I wanted to be.

  Reading on, I found that Stedman’s next big match came in the winter of 1934. And it gave him a chance for revenge against the man who had beaten him nearly five years earlier in the Metropolitan Open.

  Stedman was going to play The Haig. Walter Hagen. Five-time PGA champion. Four-time British Open champion. U.S. Open champion in 1914 and 1919. Five-time winner of the Western Open, which was then ranked by many as one of golf’s major championships. He won the 1931 Canadian Open, too. You couldn’t read a golf encyclopedia or record book that didn’t have his name splashed all over it.

  Walter Hagen’s playing record, as impressive as it was, told only part of the story about his place in golf history. By all accounts, he was a master thespian given to grand dramatic gestures and gamesmanship.

  There are those who consider Muhammad Ali to be the greatest showman-athlete of the 20th century. But according to golf historians, he had nothing on Walter Hagen, and he did nothing that Walter Hagen hadn’t already done. While Ali may have perfected the athlete as showman, Hagen is widely credited with inventing the role.

  In Hagen’s day, there was no strict rule about starting play on time. As a result, it seems he thought nothing of arriving at the first tee forty-five minutes late. By this time, his opponent was usually fit to be tied, and any s
ense of purpose to his round or other semblance of calm was gone. Advantage Hagen.

  Hagen would usually compound the felony by pretending not to know—or to care—that he was late. Because he had managed to convince tournament promoters that they needed him more than he needed them, he was usually allowed to play without penalty while his unfortunate playing companion was too distracted to play any kind of decent golf. The tactic worked like a charm—just as Hagen no doubt intended.

  Hagen was well off compared to his fellow pro golfers, but that wasn’t saying much. He could not have been considered a man of means, but he somehow managed to affect a lavish lifestyle. Another one of his favorite ploys was to arrive at a tournament in a chauffeured limousine, stepping out in a disheveled tuxedo as if he had been out all night. He would then ask his disconcerted opponent—who had been waiting perhaps a half hour for Hagen to arrive—to allow him a few minutes more to change into his golf clothes before they teed off. Of course, Hagen had been to bed early the night before and had spent well over an hour warming up at a nearby golf course, but his opponent didn’t know that.

  On one occasion, Hagen came to the final hole of a tournament two shots out of the lead. After his drive, he was 150 yards from the green for his second shot on the par-four hole. In order to tie the tournament leader, he needed to hole the shot for an eagle. While an expectant gallery watched, Hagen had his caddy walk to the green and remove the flagstick while he calmly waited in the fairway. Of course, his shot didn’t go in, but the headline the next day was about Hagen instead of the poor fellow who won the tournament.

  Like Ali, Hagen understood that sports was entertainment. More than any other player of his time, he put on a good show for the fans. It helped, of course, that he truly was a world-class player. For a time, he literally owned the PGA Championship, winning four consecutive times and five titles in seven years.

  Although Hagen cultivated his image as a devil-may-care player, the truth was that he was an avid student of the game and very keenly aware of how to get the most out of his own skills. For instance, he recognized very early in his career that he played much better when he was truly relaxed. To induce the desired state of repose, Hagen developed a pregame routine that he followed religiously. It included a leisurely hour-long hot bath. Thereafter, he forced himself to dress slowly and to do everything at half-speed until he began play.

  All of this revealed Hagen to be a far more calculating and thoughtful player than many gave him credit to be. It also meant that this would be a different kind of test for Beau Stedman. Unless he was used to someone coughing in his backswing, jingling change in his pocket as he putted, and inserting a playful needle here and there during the round, he was not going to enjoy competing against Walter Hagen as much as he did his other opponents.

  Jones apparently found Hagen hanging out in Florida for the winter. His connections with the Seminole Golf Club at North Palm Beach made it possible for Stedman to take on The Haig at the site of his Southern Amateur win over Jones. At least this time Stedman’s opponent would have less of a home court advantage. Some of the club’s members, undoubtedly friends and admirers of Jones, became Stedman’s backers for this one. Hagen leveraged his bet by acquiring his own sponsors as well.

  Seminole was as well-regarded then as it is now. According to my growing library of golf literature (I was becoming as big a collector as Cheatwood), the course had been designed by Donald Ross in 1929. Ross, of course, was the most prolific golf architect ever, having been credited with the design of hundreds of golf courses in virtually every state in the union. According to published reports, more than 3,000 men were employed annually during the mid-1920s in the construction of Ross-designed golf courses.

  From early on, Seminole has enjoyed a national membership that generally has had two things in common: wealth and a low handicap. The course is hard by the Atlantic Ocean, and play has always been heavily influenced by the wind. Seminole is a demanding course with tight fairways and small greens that are heavily bunkered. The length of its holes varies quite a bit, which requires the player to use every club in his bag. As an indication, the length of Seminole’s par-threes ranges from 170 yards to 235 yards.

  For these reasons, Ben Hogan liked to prepare for The Masters at Seminole. He claimed that playing the course called for great precision in his shotmaking and that, in the course of a round, he was virtually certain to hit every club at least once.

  Seminole is also reputed to have the best locker room in the world. However, it is difficult to single out any one thing that makes it so. Photographs of the room do not reveal anything particularly unique about it except perhaps for its size (it is quite large). It is rectangular in shape with lockers against three of the four walls and a bar and shoe shine stand at one end. The ceiling is very tall, perhaps 20 feet high or so, and the middle of the room is occupied by various chairs, tables, and sofas in different seating arrangements. It is, more than anything else, a room exquisitely dedicated to the company of men.

  Jones’s file contained reports from two of his friends at Seminole about the match. One apologized for failing to ensure that the match attracted no attention, as Jones had apparently requested. Hagen, it seems, did nothing in private. He didn’t seem to care who this unknown challenger was and certainly did not fear losing to him. If Hagen was going to play golf, he required an audience.

  In the five years since Stedman had competed in the Metropolitan Open, Hagen had competed in 30 to 40 tournaments annually around the world. It seemed unlikely that he would remember Stedman’s face, much less his name. After all, he had only seen Stedman that one time.

  Still, the other letter to Jones gave evidence of another close call.

  Dear Bob,

  Your friend Homer Dampf turned out to be every bit the player you represented him to be. He certainly gave Walter all he could handle.

  They proved to be quite the opposites in temperament. As you can imagine, Hagen put on quite a show for us and never stopped talking the entire time. Dampf, on the other hand, had virtually nothing to say.

  At first, Walter seemed convinced that he had met Dampf before. When they were introduced, he looked hard at Dampf and asked him, “Where do I know you from?” Dampf just looked away, like he was embarrassed. At the time, we thought Hagen had intimidated the poor fellow. If he did, though, it didn’t show in the way he played.

  Walter started strong and birdied two of the first four holes. Your man came back with two of his own, but Hagen birdied the ninth hole to lead by one at the turn.

  Walter stayed hot, making birdies at the tenth and eleventh holes, giving him three in a row, and it seemed that young Homer was done for. However, he matched Hagen’s birdie at number twelve to stay only two down and then made birdies himself at fourteen and fifteen to pull even.

  His youth showed at sixteen, however, when he tried to cut off too much of the dogleg, found the bunker, and made bogey. Hagen returned the favor at the seventeenth hole when he went for a sucker pin, I suppose trying to make birdie and end the match right there, and dumped it in the bunker. The ball buried, and Walter couldn’t get down in two.

  They went to the eighteenth all square. As you know, our final hole is a long par four and plays to an elevated green. The pin was front left and much too close to the bunker on that side.

  Your man drove first. He hit a prodigious tee shot, but it hooked a bit and ended in the left rough. Walter played it smart and kept his drive on the right side, giving him a far better approach to the flag.

  Being away, Hagen hit first. From a clean lie, he hit a magnificent mashie-niblick that dropped next to the pin, bounced twice, and spun back. When it came to rest, he was no more than seven feet away. It was vintage Hagen.

  Although Dampf was closer, he had a flyer lie, and it would be difficult to spin the ball. Still, he gave it a mighty effort. The ball flew straight for the flagstick, but flew past about fifteen feet and continued to roll until it reached the very back of th
e green.

  His putt must have been at least forty feet. I thought Walter was going to swallow his cigar when it went in. For the first time all day, his smile seemed a little thin as he faced a do-or-die putt to avoid losing the match.

  That was when the showman kicked in. He circled the putt twice. Then he instructed his caddy to do the same. Then they talked with one another. Then he explained to us that the putt looked to break to the left but that he expected the grain to move it to the right.

  At one point I looked over at young Mr. Dampf. He had not moved and seemed to be taking it all in with only casual interest. He’s a cool customer, that one.

  Hagen apparently sensed our growing impatience. Having milked the moment for all he could, he then leaned over the putt and calmly knocked it in without a second glance at the hole.

  After eighteen holes, the match was all square.

  It was agreed to begin a hole-by-hole playoff on the tenth hole. The first player to win a hole would win the match.

  Throughout all this, Homer remained aloof, and we were hesitant to approach him, even to offer encouragement, for fear we would break his concentration. We did, of course, applaud every one of his shots enthusiastically. He occasionally smiled in response, but I am not certain that he ever really heard us.

  It ended on the thirteenth hole. As you recall that is one of our best holes, a challenging par three played directly toward the ocean. Your man had the honor and hit a wondrous shot that bounced right by the hole—we thought for a moment it had gone in—and stopped barely eight feet past. Hagen rose to the challenge and hit one every bit as good, finishing ten feet or so to the left of the flag. His putt slid by just on the right. Homer’s putt crept slowly to the hole (much too slowly for us) and appeared almost to stop at the edge before dropping in.

  It had taken twenty-two holes, but we had won our bet. I must say that Hagen was, as always, ever so gracious. Dampf for some reason seemed more anxious to separate himself from the crowd and make a quick departure than to enjoy his triumph.