Darwin on Hagen
extracts from THE AMERICAN INVASION
From GOLF BETWEEN TWO WARS by Bernard Darwin
Publihed by Chatto & Windus, London 1944
IN 1920 there first appeared in this country at the age of 28 IWalter Hagen, not only a very fine player but an extraordinarily picturesque figure, a godsend to those who like to write "colourful" descriptions and retail anecdotes. He was a man as to whom it was hardly possible to take a neutral view; you might like or dislike him but he compelled your attention; his character and flavour were such that they could not be neglected. The sum of his golfing achievements is so large that it is only possible to set down a few of them, and in any case the man himself was to most people more interesting than his feats; he had such a way with him that crowds were ready to watch him when he had not the remotest chance of winning. In fact apart from numberless big tournaments in his native country-and he had the happy knack of winning when there was the largest number of dollars at stake-he won two American championships and four British ones. Yet I am inclined to cite as his most remarkable feat the winning for four consecutive years of the American P.G.A. tournament. That correspond to our `News of the World' tournament and is played for by matches and, considering the strength of the opposition, to win it four years running (he won it in another year as well) was truly astonishing. It showed more than anything else that power of dominating, almost of cowing his rivals which was one of his strongest assets.
There have been, I think, more skilful and certainly more mechanical and faultless players than Hagen, but none with greater sticking power or a temperament more ideally suited to the game. He was a strange mixture of two usually contrasted elements, on the one hand the casual and the happy-go-lucky, on the other the shrewd, long-headed, observant and intensely determined. His manner while playing was a reflection of his nature, for he could "let up" between strokes and converse in a carefree manner with a spectator and then switch off this mood and switch on one of single-minded attention to the next stroke to be played. No doubt while he was talking with such apparent insouciance his mind was busy looking ahead, but he had an almost unique power of relaxing and never presented that aspect of stern and solemn pugnacity without which the less happily gifted cannot concentrate their minds. Much, too much, has been written of Hagen's gifts as a "showman" and no doubt he fully understood that his casual manner, with a touch of flamboyant swagger about it, went down well with the crowd. No doubt also he could and did turn it on as some people can turn on, sometimes too palpably, their charm. But the casualness was natural to him and not forced. It helped him to take a strenuous life easily and unexhaustingly. It likewise enabled him to run things fine in point of time and even to be late in a way which might exasperate other people but did not cause Hagen himself to turn a hair. Others might wish to lie in bed or to stay in their baths, but they could not do so because of some malignant sprite whispering in their ears that they might have to hurry to the tee or even be disqualified. Hagen stayed in his bath as long as he pleased and trusted to the chapter of accidents. Possibly he was rather a spoilt child in this matter in that promoters of tournaments knew his value and were always ready to make allowances for what was "pretty Fanny's way". There were occasions, notably in a certain match here against Abe- Mitchell, when Hagen did considerably ruffle everyone by this inconsiderate lateness. There were not wanting those who said that it was part of a deep-laid scheme to disturb his adversary, much as in older and less scrupulous days men would deliberately fret a nervous adversary by breaking away at the start of a hundred yards' race. Personally I think such accusations were utterly unfounded. I do not for a moment believe that he had any such design; this would not have accorded with his code; he was just irretrievably casual and had the bump of punctuality, if there be such a thing, very imperfectly developed.
That Hagen had an overpowering effect on some of his opponents was clear enough. His demeanour towards them, though entirely correct, had yet a certain suppressed truculence; he exhibited so supreme a confidence that they could not get it out of their minds and could not live against it.
They felt him to be a killer and could not resist being killed. He had a very shrewd eye for their weaknesses and, strictly within the limits of what was honest and permissible, he would now and then exploit them to his own advantage. I heard a story the other day of Hagen's tactics which seems to me eminently characteristic, and I believe it to be true. He was playing in one of those four consecutive finals of the American P.G.A. tournaments which he won, and with one hole to play the match was all square. Hagen having the honour sliced his drive and the ball sailed away into a wood on the right while his adversary went rigidly down the middle. Hagen carefully examined his ball and emerged from the wood for a minute to have the crowd moved back, as if he were going to make the best of a bad job and play out sideways. He went back into the wood, had another look and then, as if suddenly spying a loop-hole of escape, played a magnificent iron shot through a gap in the trees right on to the green. The flabbergasted enemy put his ball tamely into a bunker and the match was over. Now it would be a poor compliment to Hagen's intelligence to imagine that he had only just seen this loophole. He had seen it at once; he had reckoned that his second shot would be a disappointment to the enemy and that the disappointment would be heightened by the little preliminary drama. That was legitimate whether according to the law or to Hagen's code of ethics. You may approve or disapprove but you cannot but be struck by the cold, clear brain that can thus think things out at such a moment.
Hagen's dominating personality and his extreme astuteness have given rise to many stories, some of which at least are apocryphal, and to his being endowed by the public imagination with all manner of mysterious and almost sinister powers. This is to my mind largely nonsense. For instance, whenever the Ryder Cup Match was about to be played and Hagen was the American captain, it was said that he would out-manoeuvre our captain, whoever he might be, and twist him round his finger. That Hagen was an excellent captain no one can doubt, as good a one as a team could desire; but when all is said what can the captain of a golf side do besides putting his men in the best possible order and encouraging them in every possible way? He is not like the captain of a cricket eleven who may turn the whole fortunes of the day by understanding an enemy's weakness and making an inspired change in the bowling; he does not even know beforehand in what order the enemy will be arrayed. He can be the best possible leader but he can be no more, and to attribute to him Machiavellian designs or mesmeric powers is absurd. People like to believe these things because they enjoy having their flesh made to creep, but such stories must not be taken too seriously. Let me say something of the more technical and perhaps less interesting side of Hagen's game. He was, I should say, a strong rather than a conspicuously accurate driver with a tendency to make one or two really crooked shots in the course of a round, and a preference for a strong shot with an iron to a wooden club through the green. On the whole his wooden club play was the least impressive part of his game, though it became both sounder and more stylish on his later visits to this country. When he first appeared here there was a touch of something that the hypercritical might call "straggling" about his swing, and this disappeared. Duncan has pointed out about certain players (Ray was one of them) that they came gradually to keep their bodies throughout the swing in the same space which it occupied in addressing the ball. Perhaps, if it be not fanciful to say so, something of this change came to Hagen. He looked less forceful and more compact. His long iron play was always very fine but it was in pitching, in all sorts of bunker shots, especially the more delicate ones, and in putting that he excelled. He had a fine stance on the green, comfortable and yet rock-like, and a velvety touch. It would hardly be possible to name a better putter day in and day out,,but that which more than anything else at once fascinated the crowd and made him so formidable was his power of recovery.
If it could be said of anyone that he was not afraid of bunkers it could be said Of Walter Hagen. He wasted no time on vain regrets; he assumed that he would make a wild shot or two in a round and accepted the results not merely with philosophy but, as it almost seemed, with a lifting of the spirits. "There she lies," he was supposed to say of a ball in trouble and that was the one important fact; how it had got there was part of the irrevocable past and did not matter; the point was how to get it out again as well as possible, and no man had a greater repertory of recovering shots nor used a greater variety of clubs for them from a putter upwards. Especially was he skilled in taking the ball out cleanly from a bunker, a shot needing immense confidence, since a grain or two of sand may ruin it. I shall never forget one such shot he played at the fifteenth hole at Sandwich, I think in the second championship he won there. It was in the last round and he was apparently well set to win though he had nothing much to spare, for Sarazen was behind him with a good chance. That bunker is a fairly deep one with a fairly steep bank, and many a stout-hearted player, however good the lie, would in his situation have played an `explosion' shot and made as sure as might be of his five. Hagen took one good look at the ball, then flicked it out with exquisite precision close to the hole, and that as if it were the easiest shot in the world, played in the least important of half-crown games. The beholder of such strokes, and he played many of them, was divided between a desire to damn his eyes for his impudence and fall on his neck for his dauntless skill.
I had first seen Hagen at the Country Club at Brookline in i g 13, but he was then only beginning to come into prominence in his own country and he had not, I am afraid, made any particular impression on me. I have a much clearer recollection of Jim Barnes, then of Tacoma. Barnes, although the sturdiest of Englishmen and Cornishmen, had then an aspect which to the stranger suggested the Wild West. His mop of fair hair, his tall and lanky frame, his looseness of build everything about him brought to mind some of the San Francisco figures in The Wrecker. Both he and Hagen were well in the hunt almost to the end in that championship, for when both Vardon and Ray faltered in the last round they gave several people a good chance of catching them, though only Francis Ouimet succeeded in taking it. I was, however, so much occupied first in watching our own two champions and then in chasing Francis with a frantic crowd over his last nine holes, that Barnes and Hagen had to be left to the imagination. By a good fortune that does not always attend the reporter, both faded out a little and finished three and two strokes respectively behind the winners. It was in any case a different Hagen who came here in 1920, seven years older and with the prestige of two American championships at his back. He was obviously good and he and Barnes accomplished at least one considerable victory in a four-ball match, but I do not think we were very much afraid of him; our faith in our own men was as yet unshaken and as it turned out there was nothing to fear. Barnes finished sixth but Hagen failed rather dismally, though everyone admired the good-humoured way in which he ploughed round on the last day with never a soul to watch him. He might have said with Disraeli, "The time will come when you will hear me," but the time had not quite come yet.
...In the next year, 1922, came Hagen's turn. The American professionals have a habit of saying of a tournament that it was So-and-so's tournament, meaning, I take it, that So-and-so was from the start playing winning golf, that the run of the green was with him, that his victory was all the time predestined. I have always had it in my mind that this 1922 Championship was Hagen's, that he looked all the time a winner. I am still inclined to think that there was such a feeling in the air at Sandwich, but a glance at the scores show me that such an intuition came very near to being wrong and that I had forgotten a good deal. Duncan's wonderful last round spurt (there is something of tragic bitterness' still in remembering how it just failed) had wiped everything else from the mind. In fact it looked very like an American championship from the start and still more so with one round to go, but it was not at all sure that the agent of victory was to be Hagen.
What happened was very briefly this. Hagen got briskly off the mark and after the first two rounds he was at the head of the field with a 76 and a 73, with Barnes one stroke behind him. -Hutchison, defending his title, had had his bad round to begin with: his scores were 79 and 74.. Incidentally if he had the luck with him at St. Andrews he did not have it at Sandwich. A just too strong approach at the fourth hole went through the fence by a few inches while other more fortunate balls rebounded from it, and I believe he hit the rail of a bridge over the Suez Canal at the fourteenth. No doubt he ought to have taken care not to hit that rail and bad luck is a thing hard to define, but at least that other indefinable thing, the run of the green, was hardly with him. Once again the third round appeared to alter the whole complexion of affairs, and here a curious parallel may be drawn between Hutchison and Hagen. At St. Andrews Hutchison had slipped back with a 79 in the third round and now it was Hagen's turn to suffer in exactly the same degree. Hutchison bounded forward with a 73. So with one round to go it was Hutchison who led with 226 and behind him came in a triple tie, Hagen, Barnes and Charles Whitcombe, who had made a sudden and splendid thrust with a 72. It still looked like an American win for, fine player as we knew Charles Whitcombe to be, this 'was the first time he had been prominent in a championship and he was hardly to be regarded as of the same stature as those three invaders. As to Duncan he seemed to have put himself out of court with an 81 and was six shots behind the leader.
There was no fading-away by any of the leading four in the last round. Barnes 73, Whitcombe 75, Hutchison 76 all wrought manfully but Hagen played irresistibly well for his 72, and when he led by a stroke all was apparently over. He himself, and I have a clear vision of him, was smoking a cigar in evident relief ancL in complete solitude near the first teeing ground. Duncan remained far out in the distance and I resolved, rather against the grain at the end of a tiring day, to go and look for him. Partly a sense of duty urged me on and partly a wild hope. I knew that in Jack White's year both Taylor and Braid had broken 70 in heroic attempts to catch him in the last round and what had happened once might happen again. But the Sandwich of 1922 was a different course from the Sandwich of 1904. Duncan was to be sure incalculable, but the hope was a faint one.
Trudging across the course, cursing my own conscience, I picked up Duncan and his partner by the twelfth green and then I had my reward in six holes of delicious agony. He had but a handful of spectators with him and these were divided between joy and despair. They were full of joy over Duncan's astonishing play up to the flag and of despair because he could not crown these inspired approach shots by holing the putts.
As I have said elsewhere, Duncan in a 'crazy' mood does produce those feelings' *for the putts look so holeable for those who have not got to hole them. I cannot believe that he had been putting downright badly, but his approaching had given him chances of doing wholly marvellous things and he had not quite clinched them. Still he had good hope and he continued to play superbly and to get no help from Providence on the greens. One shot I seem to remember particularly, a lovely second lashed right up to the fifteenth pin, and a three at that hole would have been worth much fine gold-but the putt never looked in "off the club". Still on he went till he had a four for a 68 and a 68 would tie with Hagen. We thought he would do it; the tee shot was perfect and out came his spoon. Clearly he played to let the ball drift in a little from the left, his natural shot with the club. It started away to the left but alas! it never quite came in. In the case of a minor player I should say that here was bad luck, that he hit the ball just too well and truly. That is what most of us would say about a shot of our own, but that will not serve in the case of such a player as Duncan. There is nothing to say but that he did not quite play the shot he intended. ' His pitch or pitch-and-run was hit hurriedly and ended very short. It was all over; the man who had first set up a mark to be shot at had won again and the spurt had failed. But it remains one of the great spurts of golfing history.