The Story Of American Golf: Its Champions And Its Championships – Herbert Warren Wind, 1956 ★★★★

Before Arnie Came

Golf’s elitist tag is long out of date; it was back in 1980 when Caddyshack came out but lingers still. Yes, the sport can be expensive and there are clubs for rich golfers only, but so what? They have clubs like that for other sports like tennis and swimming; no one considers those pastimes “exclusive.”

Another ugly word may have more merit in its application: Stodgy. People associate golf with tradition, with a sense of personal honor bordering on rectitude, and with boring stories told by a crusty old-timer who rounds his vowels like John Houseman. If you were to imagine a book written by such a fellow, it might well resemble something like what’s before us today.

Herbert Warren Wind loved anecdotes of mashies and brassies and niblicks. He has his idols, men of sterling character and zero color like Bobby Jones and Ben Hogan who dominate the history of American golf both by their presence and their absence. At times, his narrative devolves into a dry recitation of trophies won and low scores.

Still, Wind could write. Reading The Story Of American Golf, his sprawling overview of the sport as played in the United States, reminds you why he was one of the great prose stylists of his time, in or out of sports journalism.

Consider this account of Ben Hogan’s triumphant return from life-threatening injury at the 1950 U. S. Open at Merion Golf Club:

There was a lot of gauze in the air in Merion at that moment, the soft mood of twilight in so tranquil a setting accounting for some of the unreality and, in another and entirely different way, the inward recognition by each spectator that he was witnessing a truly dramatic moment without knowing quite what to make of it.

Or this description of the technique of an earlier U. S. Open champion, Gene Sarazen:

There was a conscious casualness to the swing he settled for. Gene held his hands in close to his body, brought the club back a little flatter than taller men with a longer hitting arc, threw his right side furiously into the shot, and let himself take a step forward or a step to the side if he felt like it at the finish. The informality of this finish, plus the calculated abandon with which Gene stepped up to his shot once he had made up his mind how he was going to play it, was a striking contrast to the super-deliberate, super-refined methods most of the pros were striving to master. Gene’s wasn’t the better style. But it was better for him.

There are several editions of The Story Of American Golf; this is the first revised edition, which includes an added chapter on Ben Hogan’s dominance of the early 1950s. A later edition, published in 1975, presumably covered the rise of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

Since Palmer and Nicklaus remain such central figures in golf, I enjoyed this as a break from all that. It’s a fascinating volume as much for how it represents the curious culture of the game in its formation as for the stories it tells.

Still widely regarded as golf's greatest writer, Herbert Warren Wind was a rare bird: An elite craftsman whose prose was both accessible and high-toned. Image from https://valuablebook.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/golf-books-by-herbert-warren-wind/

According to Wind, it all began on a New York City cow pasture transformed in 1888 into a three-hole course where John Reid, “the father of American golf,” gathered some friends to try out this game he had brought back with him from a trip to his native Scotland. Soon, they formed their own golf club, named “St. Andrews” in recognition of Scotland’s most famous golfing locale.

Other golfing clubs existed before St. Andrews, Wind writes, but “St. Andrews was different. The club endured.”

My own takeaway was that St. Andrews in New York was important not because it was an origin point but because Wind was friendly with some of its members. Wind skims past some important facts, like that golf actually has been played for centuries in the Carolinas, or that while St. Andrews in New York moved around, struggling to stay afloat, golf clubs in other parts of the country sprang up with full 18-hole courses.

But as a competitive sport with professional tournaments, golf’s story in America does begin at the end of the 19^th century:

Considering that it has been a part of the American scene for less than seventy years, the game’s expansion has been incredible. In 1888 there were less than a dozen golfers in the United States. In 1956 there were approximately five million, the largest number of active practitioners any outdoor game has attracted since the beginning of history.

The early years were populated by rich eccentrics who used golf as an excuse for odd fashion choices and experimentation. One Richard Peters carried a pool cue, Wind writes, “not because he wanted to clown around but because he was convinced he could putt better that way.”

Golf as a real sport was a largely British affair, recognized as such even in the States. Wind describes a long parade of English and Scottish champions who came to the United States to give the former colonies lessons in humility.

This would not last long, though, Wind notes. When the balance shifted, it did so rather suddenly:

Golf did not graduate into a truly popular sport in America until the Open Championship of 1913 when Francis Ouimet, an unknown ex-caddy, stunned the nation into acceptance by defeating the celebrated British professionals, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray.

Wind’s account of the 1913 U. S. Open, held confusingly enough at a country club near Boston known simply as “The Country Club,” is the highlight of the entire book. It’s a riveting, moment-by-moment account that feels fully alive more than a century later. Amateur American Ouimet is Wind’s kind of hero, self-effacing and doughty in the face of challenge. After botching a key shot, Ouimet calmly takes a penalty stroke and continues on with minimum fuss. Against Vardon and Ray, one would expect him to get unglued, but instead he remains resolute, lets his opponents make bigger mistakes, and winds up the victor.

Ouimet wasn’t the first American to defeat class British opponents, but his victory proved a bellwether. After World War I, the flower of British youth depleted, the United States found itself the apogee of professional golf. It also had golf’s greatest amateur of the 1920s, Bobby Jones.

Bobby Jones' imprint on golf extended beyond his unrivaled play as an amateur. Wind notes his work co-designing one of the sport's most celebrated venues, Augusta National Golf Club in his native Georgia. Image from http://www.golf.com/photos/11-things-you-didnt-know-about-bobby-jones#2

A downside of Wind’s book is his overreliance on Jones as central figure. As great a golfer as he was, and he remains to this day the only man to ever win golf’s four top tournaments in a single year, Jones makes for thin copy. Other than picking up his ball in disgust over poor play at the 1921 British Open, Jones offers few sparks. Wind describes him as “the magnificent standard of deportment” in the game, winning both the British Open and Amateurs title in 1930, to go with the U. S. Open and U. S. Amateur the same year:

In their minds the Scots had conjured up the faultless golfer, in about the same way a man has his ideal woman, and when Jones came along they knew right off the reel that here was their dream-golfer.

When moving on to other golfers’ stories, Wind’s narrative picks up considerably. One of the joys of this book is the way he lights upon various figures, relating their varied glories in capsule form.

Walter Hagen was a cocky clotheshorse who would show up at tournaments asking: “Well, who’s going to be second?” Jess Sweetser would hum songs and mutter to himself between shots as a way of relaxing his mind, winning the galleries’ admiration if not love:

Lawson Little was a bull-necked slugger from Stanford University who had looked like a golfer of promise when he was eighteen and, in the minds of not a few authorities, would probably continue to look like a golfer of promise until he was eighty.

Yet, as Wind goes on to note, Little did go on to win the 1934 and 1935 British and American Amateur Championships, requiring no less than 31 consecutive match-play victories. Many of those matches extended into overtime.

Wind spends considerably less time with American women, though they do get a couple of chapters. The one on Mildred Didrikson, better known after her marriage as Babe Zaharias, is an enjoyably zesty profile of one of American golf’s most colorful figures, someone who hit her drives farther than almost any man and when asked about her length, cheerfully replied: “Man, I just can’t help it.”

It’s quite possible Wind failed to get close to any of the post-Jones golfers because of some personal qualms over their often-mercenary characters. Unlike Jones, the amateur who aspired to an ideal of pure sportsmanship, these were mostly professionals. Wind complains at length of their “venality” and describes how one of the more gregarious champions, Bobby Locke, refused to answer questions about his game unless he got paid for it.

By the time Wind gets to the end of this book, we are in the company of the “wee ice mon” himself, Hogan, a driven fighter who let few into his world. After losing the 1952 U. S. Open in the final round, he responded to a well-wisher’s burst of enthusiasm in a way that was almost gracious, at least for him: “Thank you. You’re easily pleased.”

However cold these guys were, Wind makes it easy to root for them.