Four Books About the Game of Golf
By Colman McCarthy
Much of the sports world, or at least the couth part of it, turns this week to the U.S. Open golf championship. The scene is the par 70 west course at Winged Foot Golf Club, a short go north of New York City. It is also the acreage where Claude Harmon served as the head professional for more than 30 years, beginning in the mid-1940s. A rarity, he was a teaching pro who could play and a playing pro who cold teach. In 1948, Harmon won the Masters at Augusta National by five shots. At Winged Foot, he gave thousands of lessons. Among his students were his four sons. All went into golf themselves.
The most hailed would be Claude “Butch” Harmon, Jr. Written with Steve Eubanks, “The Pro: Lessons About Golf and Life From My Father, Claude Harmoln, Sr.,” is a reverential memoir of an athlete who put his family first by declining the life of a nomadic touring pro in which spouses and children have little place. Butch Harmon offers enough stories to keep the 19th hole tap room going halfway to midnight. Golf tales are here aplenty: Claude Harmon and Bobby Jones, Harmon and Ben Hogan, Harmon the teacher of kings, presidents and those P. G. Wodehouse called “top-notchers” and “foozlers.”
Butch Harmon, now in his early 60s and who played the PGA tour as a struggler for three years, has had star students of his own: Tiger Woods, Greg Norman and Davis Love III, among others. Teaching pros are now called swing coaches. Butch Harmon’s accounts of helping Tiger and other guns hit it far and straight are ably told but are sideshows to his memories of his father’s personal warmth and grace. I had a glimpse of those qualities in 1959 when I played an exhibition match with Claude Harmon at Sands Point Golf Club on Long Island. Every summer he and another pro—usually Shelley Mayfield--came to Sands Point to play its pro and club champion, which that year, thanks to a lucky bounce or two, was me. I was only college boy far down in the amateur ranks, but for Claude Harmon for those 18 holes I was a fellow golfer. “Whether you had everything or nothing,” the son writes, “whether you had come from privilege and fallen into poverty or come from nothing and risen into greatness, the game treated you the same, and so did my father.” (p. 27)
Among those who did rise from nothing to greatness through golf, few bucked greater odds than Johnny Goodman. The son of Lithuanian Catholic immigrants who settled near the hog pens and slaughterhouses of Omaha, Nebraska, Goodman was orphaned at 14. His mother died after delivering her 13th child. Soon, his father, a lush and a lout, fled. On his own, Goodman found work by caddying at the Omaha Field Club. Of the stuffy members at the swankiest playground in town, how many would have guessed that a reserved impoverished kid in their own caddy yard would win the U.S. Open only 10 years later?
In “The King of Swings: Johnny Goodman, the Last Amateur to Beat the Pros at Their Own Game,” Michael Blaine offers not only a well-crafted biography of a resilient athlete but a honed sociological portrait of Midwestern life in the 1920s and ‘30s. “The Omaha Field Club,” Blaine writes, “must have seemed like a glorious oasis to Johnny Goodman. The city’s most distinguished and affluent citizens drifted in and out of the lavish clubhouse. Johnny also caught glimpses of holiday activities, charity affairs, and tea parties for women who flounced around in the latest fashions. Among themselves, the caddies gossiped about the faster, younger women who sneaked a smoke or had a taste for strong spirits or didn’t mind flashing an ankle.” (p. 15)
Blaine dug into varied archives to capture the flavor of the 1920s when hickory shafts, plus fours and hardpan fairways were the rule. He traces Goodman’s first hint of greatness to his victory in the Omaha caddy championship. The same year, and playing with castoff clubs, he won the city title. Four years later, and scores of full days of hauling rich people’s golf clubs and practicing on caddy’s day, he rode a grubby mail train to the1929 U.S. amateur at Pebble Beach. In the first round, the 19-year-old Goodman from the servant class bested Bobby Jones, a country club boy and darling of the upper class. Four years later, Goodman won the U.S. Open against a field that included Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Tommy Armour. In 1937, Goodman won the U.S. amateur. No one since has won both tournaments, and no amateur has won the U.S. Open.
It’s been awhile that I have so relished a biography of an athlete, not including David Mariness’s wondrous work on Roberto Clemente. Always refusing to compete for prize money, Goodman chose not to cash in on his fame. Blaine explains it well: “Johnny Goodman’s values became a relic of a lost time. In our money-driven moment of American history, the idea that amateur athletes have an innate purity that is lacking in professionals sounds so quaint as to be incomprehensible. Today, scouts crawl all over talented junior high school basketball players, and we think nothing of it.” (p. 310)
Goodman died in 1970, at 60. I was told recently by a friend who had a job a summer or two ago serving drinks at the Omaha Field Club that a favorite spot for current members is the Johnny Goodman Room.
Amateur—from the Latin amator, lover—is at the core of George Peper’s “Two Years in St.Andrews: At Home on the 18th Hole.” Sagging shelves of sports books hold the story of the Scottish links that nearly everyone ranks as golf’s most sacred shrine. Beg pardon, but I’m not among the worshippers. Take away the six centuries of encrusted lore and subtract the profundities forever being spouting by canny St. Andrews caddies, and the course is not much more than a few hundred acres of tricked-up fairways, overly large greens, and treeless terrain marked by bedeviling humps and hillocks.
George Peper disagrees. Fair enough. His enamoredness of the Old Course at St. Andrews was of such strength that it pushed him far beyond being another distant admirer. In July 1983, he paid an overpriced $65,000 for a townhouse bordering the 18th hole. It would be many years of fixing up the place and renting it out to students before Peper and his wife moved from their New York suburb to settle in.
As a seasoned golf writer—more than a dozen books on the game, plus 25 years as the editor of Golf Magazine—Peper had no trouble finding material for 42 chapters of fast-paced prose. The stories range from his becoming a dues-paying member of St. Andrews—you don’t join, you’re elected—to figuring out how to fit in with the town’s codgers ever wary of outsiders, especially burly Americans. Although it would help to be mildly rabid about golf to totally savor all that’s here, Peper offers enough cultural and social commentary to draw in everyone else. First off, I’d recommend real estate speculators take a look.
If nothing else, “Dream Golf: the Making of Bandon Dunes” takes us into the mind of golf lover who had the millions to really speculate. Stephen Goodwin, a former director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts, combines reportage and commentary in describing Mike Keiser’s successful drive to build a world-class golf course on Oregon’s Pacific coast.
A 1967 English major Amherst College graduate who made the golf team, Keiser went into the greeting card business and specialized in 100 percent recycled cards. Environmentalism came along and by the mid-1980s sales at Keiser’s company—Recycled Paper Greetings--were nearing $100 million. “I’d made enough money to do what I wanted,” Keiser reports, “and I wanted to build a golf course….[one] that people would be playing five hundred years from now.” (p 22)
If globally warmed rising oceans don’t submerge Oregon’s shoreline, that may happen. To his credit, Keiser built a course open to the public. He kept the greens fees low, separating him from egomaniacs like Donald Trump who ransack the land for private clubs for the wealthy few. Further credit is due Keiser. His Bandon Dunes course, which opened in May 1999 and has been hailed by golf writers as rivaling the natural beauty of Pebble Beach, Cypress Point and Shinnecock Hills, has no cart paths and no golf carts desecrating the landscape. With the help of caddies—as endangered a species as the grey wolf--golf at Bandon Dunes has a quiet purity. Goodwin writes: It’s “just men and women walking side-by-side, playing an ancient game by the sea, making a little journey together.”
The technology of hopped-up golf balls whacked by oversized clubheads is cutting off golf from its past. But not so fast, at least not as long as writers like these four keep coming forward with worthy exultations of what the game was and the finest who played it.
Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace, is the author of “The Pleasures of the Game.” In college, he played in several PGA tournaments.