Hagen The Artist
by ROBERT E. HARLOW
Intimate Observations by His Manager
From America Golfer 1929
IF THERE IS ONE EXPRESSION WHICH WALTER Hagen has heard his manager use more than any other over a period of seven years of association on the road in America, Canada and Europe, it is this: "Come on, Haig; hurry up." Hagen is the slowest-moving individual I have ever encountered. He can linger longer over playing a card at the bridge table than anyone of my acquaintance. If there is ten minutes to reach the theatre at something like the opening hour, Hagen can meet a friend, or stranger for that matter, in the lobby of his hotel and talk about nothing for thirty minutes.
Once Hagen gave me a good answer. He was due to start in some minor open tournament and, as usual, was taking his time about getting dressed. He does the most exasperating things. When you at last think he is all ready to leave for the course, he will take a look at the hose he has selected for the day and decide that the stockings do not look as well as he had anticipated. This means another fifteen minutes while he makes a change.
On the particular occasion in question Walter was shaving and time was flying. I realized that, at the best, he would be ten minutes late at the tee. So I was being even more persistent than usual, giving him what must have been the one-hundredth lecture on not keeping his audience waiting. Of course, it did no good. This time Walter stopped, and with razor poised said, "How do you expect me to have a smooth stroke on the green today if I start by hurrying my stroke with this razor? I can't rush around now and change my pace when I start playing golf. I want to be relaxed on the course, so I must be relaxed now."
Of course, one might explain that he could have gotten up an hour earlier and thus had ample time to conduct his dressing and shaving according to the most suitable tempo for the day, but Hagen always has an answer and he would have said that getting out of bed the hour earlier would have been hurrying because he was not ready. Hagen has the reputation of being late and he has earned it. His tardiness can be attributed to a number of causes. He is by nature very deliberate. He is likewise a leader and hews to his own path pretty much no matter what the consequences may be.
Then, Hagen is a showman, and another contributing cause and a factor of no small importance is that the public-tournament officials and others-have stood for his being late for these many years. He has never been disqualified. Thus, over a period of years, Hagen has developed to a high degree the habit, a natural one with him, of being deliberate in all his actions. I know that no matter what the circumstances Hagen will take his time and not act until he is ready. Nothing can change his tempo, his unflinching ability to make his muscles follow his mind and at the pace that suits him best.
We have been together in a great many duck-hunting blinds in all parts of the North American continent. Hagen is usually the first man to see a flight in the distant sky and say, "Mark!" And usually the last to shoot. Nothing gives him a bigger laugh than to wait until the man in his blind fires, and, if his companion misses, for him then to drop the duck just as the bird is getting out of range. Hagen is as deliberate in a duck blind as he is on the green.
Our last shoot was near Tulie Lake in Oregon last fall. Just before dusk Hagen said "Mark!" and pointed out six large mallards coming towards our blind. Without the least show of excitement Hagen waited as they circled three or four times while the leader was making up his mind whether to decoy. These birds were very shy and seemed disinclined to come down. Finally, they got into a position which suited Hagen. He stood up and raised his automatic. There was no hurried movement. I watched as he covered the leader of the six mallards. To me it seemed a long time before he finally pulled, but he knocked the leader three feet in the air and the duck dropped, a thoroughly dead bird.
Hagen had six shells and he dropped all six ducks and there was never a hurried movement in the entire performance. It was an artistic job from start to finish. He never pulled once until he was satisfied he had the duck lined up, and then with his unfaltering eye and finished touch he fired and the unhappy bird fell from the sky. Surely there is a close relationship to Hagen in a duck blind and Hagen on the putting greens. There is no doubt that Hagen is the greatest artist that golf has produced. I never take part in arguments that this or that golfer is better than Hagen. I never offer a protest when some of the Southern sports writers everlastingly start their copy with this line: "Bobby Jones, the world's greatest golfer," and I never complain when the journalists of London tell me that for many years Harry Vardon was never off the fairway. I give these gentlemen all the credit in the world. From a mechanical view Vardon in his day and Jones in this day both may have found a better groove in which to swing their clubs and both may have been able to everlastingly keep their clubheads in that groove.
But let a discussion commence of who is the greatest artist golf has produced and I am ready for debate. Who of the links but Hagen creates the same atmosphere one feels when Raquel Meller stands in the center of the stage in Paris and sings her songs of romance to an enraptured audience? When Raquel goes off the stage she takes something with her that leaves the efforts of the other performers almost vain. Impossible to obtain anything but standing room in the Royal Theatre in Leeds, England, on a Saturday night when she broke the house attendance record, I stood and watched Gracie Fields hold that great audience for song after song, without as much as a whisper from any part of the house. This is the greatest tribute any artist can receive, because it means complete attention. Only the real artists get that sort of recognition from their audiences, and I noted in the crowds that followed Hagen at Muirfield, and that listened to Gracie Fields in England and Raquel Meller in Paris, the same sort of enthusiasm.
At Leeds, Gracie took call after call and finally had to tell her audience she could sing no more that night. That was the sort of enthusiasm that Hagen got from his audience at Muirfield in the British Open this year, not alone because he was winning but because of the artistic rather than the mechanical method in which he was doing the trick. I heard one man say, "I prefer seeing this man do a 90 than any other golfer a 70."
Why did Hagen win at Muirfield? Not being at all times a mechanically perfect hitter of a golf ball Hagen needs, then, an inspiration to make him do his stuff and nowhere does he have a greater inspiration than when he stands on the sand dunes of the old country for a try at the British Open, especially when the championship comes directly following a Hagen defeat. Defeat, which he takes as graciously as any sportsman living, at the same time hurts and rouses a hidden fire within him.
Hagen went to Muirfield having been badly beaten in his singles match in the Ryder Cup at Leeds by George Duncan, an inspirational golfer who has allowed the mechanics of the game to befuddle and confound him so that half the time he is the artist that is in him, and the rest of the time he is striving to make a robot of his arms, legs, hips, wrists, ankles, knees, neck, and whatever other portions of the anatomy enter into the manufacture of the perfect swing.
Sometimes he lapses into the pure artist when everything is easy and simple and he operates not on theories but on inspiration, and then he moves majestically on in perfect figures. The only British Open Duncan ever won, at Deal the year Hagen started his career in British golf, he won in the last two rounds under the magic spell of an inspiration. On that day Duncan had no idea where his right knee was in any given position. I presume that he beat Hagen both in the Ryder Cup matches at Leeds and in the Yorkshire Evening News tournament at Leeds because again he was playing upon inspiration and not theory. He had a burning desire to conquer the most talked-of man in the game, and a golfer whom he believes in his heart to be inferior to himself as a striker of the ball.
Duncan is not as fortunate as Hagen at selecting the right time for the inspiration to come upon him. Hagen in his deliberate way waits patiently his hour. In the duck blind he is first to see tiny black spots against the horizon and he knows that the big flight is on, and in his deliberate, painstaking way he makes ready for the kill.
So on the links. For the past twelve months Hagen had played at golf, doing nothing serious. For the first time in five years he lost his title as American professional champion. At Chicago he made quite a bold bid for the American Open and failed, and for the rest of the summer, fall, winter and spring, life had been just a picnic for Hagen, marked by an occasional burst of speed, but with nothing to rouse him to a major effort. Tournaments for money prizes do not inspire Hagen, no matter how great the purse. If he looks at the crowd at exhibitions it is not to count them, but with the same regard as some artists in the theatre look up at the balcony to throw kisses. I have known Hagen to stay at a party until five in the morning when at nine o'clock he was due at the first tee to play the final thirty-six holes in a tournament, the winning of which would have meant ten thousand dollars to him. He was having too good a time to leave.
But the British Open, the American Open and the American Professional Championship during the years he was establishing his record run of wins in the events-then Hagen rose to the occasion and became at times in these events the most accurate striker of a golf ball in the world and by far the greatest artist of the game. That is why in his last six starts in the British Open he has had four firsts, a second and tied for third once, when if he had not attempted to hole a mashie niblick shot, he might very well have been second. That is why for four years he won the American Professional Championship, and while he has only won the American Open twice, and not for a number of years, he has often been a factor right up to the last hole. Hagen is a most observing person. In eight years of travel with him I have been astonished by the manner in which he will take in details. He is especially interested in mechanical equipment of all sorts, and farming, and in travelling in Europe will very often point out a piece of farming machinery, and although he has never seen anything like it, he very quickly comprehends just what it is for and how it is operated. Coming from Berlin to London he quickly observed how much further crops were advanced in Germany and in The Netherlands than in England. In flying from Berlin to Vienna he pointed out that the farming communities in Germany were organized in quite a different way from those in the United States, and while flying at several hundred feet over the countryside, pointed out and described the difference.
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Upon returning from the Berlin Golf Club, where he was engaged in the German Open Championship, he described to a number of people in the minutest detail, some of the ensembles worn by the women and some of the coats, shoes and other wearing apparel of the gentlemen in the gallery. On the last day of the German Championship, while he was making these observations, he scored 71-72.
And so in golf. When it is all very obvious, Hagen has no great advantage over the rest of the field, because there is no great difference in the physical gesture of striking the ball. There are many others who can perform this feat about as well as Hagen, but when it comes to ground condition and elements, there are many problems to be solved; when each stroke needs considerable thinking out, when the hole has to be visualized and analyzed, and when Hagen has a sufficient inspiration for really concentrating on the job, then Hagen becomes the greatest artist of the game.