The Professional Golfers Association of America turns 100 this year, its first tournament held October 10−14, 1916, at Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville, New York. Winner Jim Barnes received $500 and a gold medal — a long way from the $1.8 million prize at this year’s PGA Championship but enough for Barnes to get a new spoon (3-wood) or mashie niblick (7-iron) and pursue his dubious craft.
Until the 1920s professional golfers were so déclassé that they were forced to enter most country clubs through the back door and barred from the members’ locker room. Walter Hagen, one of the first pro athletes to make a million dollars, helped to change this, in brash Yankee style. At one snobby 1920 British tournament he used his chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow, parked in the country club driveway, as his locker room and social headquarters; at another, he declined his first-place money because it was to be handed over inside the clubhouse that had banned him.
Described by many historians as “the father of modern professional golf,” Hagen is often linked to Arnold Palmer, the two credited with having popularized an elitist sport. The two golfers became close over Hagen’s last years, and when he died in 1969 Palmer was a pallbearer. In A Golfer’s Life, Palmer describes his summers at the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, nine-hole course where his father was club pro and head groundskeeper. Instructed by Dad to “Hit it hard, boy,” Palmer practiced doing so with an old Walter Hagen driver. And as Hagen became “The Haig,” so Palmer became “The King” — though as explained in his just-released A Life Well Played, Palmer did not care for his moniker:
I know it was meant to be flattering, but there is no king of golf. There never has been, and there never will be . . . what I really am, inescapably — and how I prefer to be thought of in terms of my legacy — is a caretaker of the game, just the way my father was before me. Someone who tried to preserve it, nurture it and improve it if he could, and who tried, also, to be a caretaker of the dignity of the game.
Palmer piloted his own plane to Hagen’s funeral, but his early years on the golf tour were spent behind the wheel, hauling a trailer from tournament to tournament, his wife, Winnie, at his side. In Michael Bamberger’s Men in Green, Palmer tells a “back in the day” road story that involves fellow golfer Al Besselink:
“I’ll never forget this,” Arnold said. “Winnie and I are driving from Baton Rouge to Pensacola. We’re watching the car in front of us. All of a sudden sparks are coming out of the back of that car. I’m watching. And I thought, I’m seeing something that I don’t understand.
“I pulled up closer to them and there’s Besselink hanging out of the back door of the car, grinding a wedge on the highway. That’s what the sparks were.”
You could see it like it was in a movie.
“It really happened,” Arnold said.
“Al Besselink’s a crazy man . . . ”
“Oh, shit,” Arnold said in casual agreement.
Men in Green is itself a road trip, Bamberger in pursuit of some of the game’s most legendary and colorful players, and of an answer to one of the game’s most venerated beliefs: “One of my goals here is to see for myself whether Arnold and Jack [Nicklaus] and the rest really put the game ahead of themselves, or if that was a myth handed down to me by sportswriters happy to god-up the ballplayers.”
Should anyone like to document some of the game’s most colorful fans, they could excerpt heavily from The Tao of Bill Murray, in which Gavin Edwards demonstrates that Murray, a mainstay at the PGA’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, is both crazy and a corrective for a sport that seems out-of-control commercialized. In the 2011 tournament, Murray played a round behind John Daly, whose golf bag featured a video screen that rotated commercials for a car dealership and Daly’s own line of golf gloves. “It would be nice to play some black-and-white movies, maybe some Kurosawa films, get some culture out here,” said Murray. Then, in his giant red Elmer Fudd hat, he played Robin Hood with a spectator’s beer cooler, tossing drinks to the gallery — and played well enough to win the event with pro D. A. Points.
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Sig Nordal 