Hagen the Competitor
THE MAN who makes up his mind to do something and then goes after it with every ounce of power, blasting every barrier with an indomitable will to win, fighting where fighting is necessary, relaxing a bit where he can, gambling like a gasconade where gambling means victory, clamping the pressure on early and bearing down to the positive end-he is the fellow who picks up and goes places.
Such a fellow is Walter the Haig.
He averages over $100,000 a year in prize money, $45,000 a year from his exhibition matches, and his annual salary as the golf expert of the Pasadena Golf and Country Club is just $30,000 a year more.
Babe Ruth, the king pin of baseball, draws $70,000 a year for six days of hard work a week. Hagen gets $90,000 a year for playing golf an average of three times a week and practically all his expenses, tobacco, wearing apparel, golf supplies, automobiles and what not besides.
Golf with him, of course, is a matter of intense business. That's one of the interesting things about him. Here is a pro in the heart of a game that is essentially amateur and of all the professional athletes of all the sporting world, Hagen is the most professional of all.
Hagen has never consciously shot a stroke of golf for nothing, and he probably never will. Other golfers, even other professional golfers, mix considerable chit-chat and persiflage in their play.
Hagen doesn't.
He's as full of foolishness as the next fellow, after a match or even before one, but once he tees off, it's cold-blooded commerce. Watching the grim and almost belligerent manner in which he goes to work on a game, one who has beheld the killer instinct operating in the prize ring can almost imagine a stubble of cocoa-buttered, blue-black whiskers on his jaws and a pair of wine-colored mitts on his hands.
Just as Dempsey used to hurl himself into his fights to punch until something dropped, Hagen strides into his game so savagely that you find yourself wishing to heaven that he'd at least pucker his face with a little window-dressing of joviality, if only to make it seem just the least bit sporting.
That's the way Hagen makes his $90,000 a year. In return he has refashioned himself into a colorful personage, like a grand opera tenor, or a movie top-liner. He seldom moves without at least three trunks of clothes. His valet is in constant attendance. He drives only the fastest and flashiest cars. He wears lemon yellow gloves and spats upon occasion.
In England a golf pro has no social standing. He ranks as a sort of boss servant. Hagen has elevated a lowly profession to the heights of a lucrative and decorative art. He has crowned it with dignity, and enriched it with elegance. And for all the scenery he is perhaps the world's foremost competitor. He hasn't subsidized cold skill to anything.
Further power to his slashing blades. May he stick around for many a year.
-BILL CUNNINGHAM, Detroit News [ 1927 ]