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Arnold, Jack, Greg Norman, Billy Casper. Ben Crenshaw with his turf grasses. Golfers first, they've become businessmen, successfully reinventing and marketing themselves beyond the scorecard.
There seems no end to the possibilities: equipment companies, instruction schools, books, videos, CD Roms, course design and management firms, tie-ins with resorts, clothing, office products, furniture, hearing aids, vineyards, cable TV networks, Web sites, even jelly beans and hot sauce, for goodness sake.
The pickings may be exponentially richer today but the concept is hardly new. Willie Park Jr. was able to parlay his renown into course design as golf took early root in North America. Harry Vardon, too, set a promotional precedent way ahead of his time. His department store exhibitions, merely hitting balls into a net, drew enthusiastic crowds - and sales for
his line of signature clubs to newly-impressed Yanks.
Decades later Bobby Jones, the great amateur, found commercial expression as did Walter Hagen. Each spread the game's appeal and the prospects for making a living in golf. Certainly many more prospective golfers saw Jones perform in darkened theaters than ever saw him play.
Tiger Woods then, assumes his place.
A beneficiary of his phenomenal talent obviously, he strides along a firmly established, accepted, and ever more lucrative, path.
It wasn't always that way. At the other end of the modern time-line rests another wizard at match play, Walter J. Travis, a thoroughly modern twentieth century golfer, known affectionately as The Old Man.
Travis's accomplishments in golf were extraordinary. He took up the game at an age, the author rightly notes, "when some national champions retire," that is, well past 30. With few resources to turn to, as a father and an accomplished businessman, he willed himself to a remarkable level of achievement and dominance. If you practice putting with balls in ever widening circles around the hole, you might tip your cigar towards the O.M., by all accounts, a demon putter.
His landmark British Amateur win in 1904 was a monumental upset and a crack in the door of what would one day befall the British hegemony of top level golf.
He once shot a 62 in competition. These things just didn't happen back then.
Grantland Rice believed him the greatest putter "in my book," ahead of Jones and Hagen. In a memorable exchange, he also leant a helping hand. A tweak of the stance and grip turned the young Jones's putting around. It was a bequest that set the stage for the young but struggling prodigy's legendary run.
A wonderful course architect, Travis edited and founded The American Golfer magazine.
He showed tremendous foresight for the game's potential. He knew golfers had an insatiable appetite for instruction; they still do, and he capitalized on it. He saw through the stymie's foolishness, campaigning for its removal. His eye for course routing was nothing short of exceptional and his courses remain imaginative and delightful tests.
Travis was also a pioneer in the study and development of sound course construction and maintenance, prodding the USGA to establish a national clearinghouse, which it eventually did, the Green Section. His precepts for good greens, we learn, would produce excellent results 80 years into the future.
Basically, Walter J. was a dynamo in the best progressive American tradition.
"We keep at it," he wrote once in contrasting the styles of golfer, British vs. American, "…until we think we have found the source of the trouble."
Walter J. always kept at it.
Seventeen straight championships, three wins, medalist six times, he "retired" at
52 to concentrate on his emerging design work.
Helped by a score of personal correspondence, we're treated to a lively walk through the Old Man's "wondrous career."
Decidedly old school, Travis was a precursor to the American golf renaissance that he helped, literally and figuratively, lay the groundwork for. When he passed on, Chick Evans wrote: "No man in his time exercised a more potent influence on the game, or stood higher as a player. To the youngsters of that period he was a figure to worship."
Walter J. also liked his whiskey and cigars.
In a famous rendering, concentration positively oozes from a cloud of smoke circling around his head as he puffs mightily and prepares to convert another three-footer. What a guy! The Old Man was an early American patron saint for the true spirit of the game, and for future generations of Americans who share his burning competitive fire.
Rating: Cat-Stroker * * *
Duly Noted - Edition I - Shouting at Amen Corner
Duly Noted - Edition II - Precision Putting
Duly Noted - Edition III - In the Women's Clubhouse
Duly Noted - Edition IV - Royal and Ancient
Duly Noted - Edition V - Into the Bear Pit
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