Hagen - Match-Play Master
by O.B. Keeler
Some Observations on His Seventy-Two-Hole Match with Bobby Jones
From America Golfer 1926
IN THE MOST RECENT BOUT BETWEEN A GREAT match-golfer and a great medalist, the match-golfer came out convincingly on top. Walter Hagen, professional golfing champion of the United States, and rated the leading match player of the game, defeated Bobby Jones, National Amateur Champion, regarded as the leading medalist of golf, by the impressive margin of 12-and-11 in a 72-hole match played February twenty-eighth and March seventh at Sarasota and Pasadena, Florida. The result, aside from inspiring one rather impetuous section of the critics to announce that Sir Walter had thus proved himself the master golfer, has revived the old question of match golf and medal golf, and a discussion of the curious difference existing between the problems and tactics of a golfer confronting a single human opponent and a golfer competing against the grim specter of the card and pencil.
Incidentally, it is unfair to both Sir Walter and Bobby to intimate that either is lacking in proficiency at either style of golf. Walter has won the United States Open Championship twice, and the British Open Championship twice; these are medal competitions. Bobby has won the United States Amateur Championship twice in succession-a match-play tournament. Yet Hagen persistently is regarded as a match-player and Jones as a medalist; and that rating, based on the records which include them both, may be assumed as reasonable. In the last six United States Open Championships, in which both have competed, Jones has led Hagen five times at medal play, and trailed him once. In the aggregate score for twenty-four rounds, Jones leads his professional rival nineteen strokes. He has won the title once, finished in a tie for first place and lost the play-off once, and been second twice. In the last four years he has been either first or second-the top record for consistency in the Blue Ribbon event. Hagen in the last six years has been as high as second once.
The inference, then, is reasonable that Jones is the better player against the field-that is, against the card and pencil. And Hagen's impressive record of losing only four set matches in the last five years, topped by his second consecutive win of the United States Professional Golfers' Championship, at match play, and his sound drubbing of Bobby Jones in their one formal match, surely should establish him as our greatest match-play performer. '
The Florida encounter of these two champions affords a curious study in the psychological differences of match and medalplay; and as a witness of the match I saw quite too much of that odd factor to be blinded by the conclusion that any one match, even of seventy-two holes, could establish definitely a rating between any two first-rank golfers. There is much in golf besides mechanics; even besides the patient courage and the implacable morale needed to play under the shadow of the card and pencil, generally regarded as the highest type of golfing competition.
Walter Hagen unquestionably has something in his game beyond the ability to stroke a golf ball correctly. Indeed, up to the vicinity of the green, a dozen players may be adduced who are his equal or superior. But around the green, within chipping and putting range, Hagen surely is as good as the best; and many experienced observers rank him as best of all. Hagen also is celebrated for his recovery shots, which reputation collaterally implies an inclination to wildness. The implication is accurate. Walter is one of the wildest of the first rank golfers; I might even say he is the wildest of all the first-rank golfers of America; and this disposition to wallop the ball off the visible confines of the course, not to mention the fairways, has cost him more than one medal-play championship.
But where a stroke gone in medal play is a stroke irrevocably lost, in match play one hole may cost a competitor a dozen strokes and still be only one hole gone, which a pretty 3 may recover on the very next green-that is the vast difference between match and medal play.
Hagen is a hard man to beat in match competition for two principal reasons, and one, oddly enough, is the very tendency to wildness just considered. The other is his superb showmanship; his histrionic talent; his gift for "acting," and for making of some special shot a ceremony on which the gallery hangs with an hypnotic attention-and which his hapless opponent regards with a distinctly disadvantageous concern, not to say exasperation.
In addition to which, please never forget that Sir Walter can chip and putt with the very best of them.
With the Florida triumph over Bobby Jones in mind, let us examine these factors a bit. After that match Bobby said to me:
"I would far rather play a man who is straight down the fairway with his drive, on the green with his second, and down in two putts for his par. I can play a man like that at his own game, which is par golf. If one of us can get close to the pin with his approach, or hole a good putt-all right. He has earned something that I can understand. But when a man misses his drive, and then misses his second shot, and then wins the hole with a birdie -it gets my goat!"
Of course Mr. Jones is not to be understood as stating that this is Sir Walter's habitual manner of playing golf; not at all. But I knew perfectly well the hole to which Bobby referred; and in my opinion it was the turningpoint of the match, which had started off with Bobby playing raggedly and then beginning to settle down in the second round, as Sir Walter, also starting raggedly, seemed beginning to loosen up. It was the sixth hole of the afternoon round at the Whitfield course in Sarasota. Bobby had just won the fifth hole with a great iron second against a terrible miss by Walter-who had the better drive-and had cut Hagen's lead to three up. On the sixth tee Bobby had a fine drive down the alley and Walter, who had missed every drive but one in that round, shoved his tee-shot out to the edge of the rough, where a tall pine tree stood inconveniently near the line of his pitch to the welltrapped green.
Hagen had to play the odd and he hit as wretched a shot as can be imagined-he topped the ball so that it fairly rolled along the turf, straight to a wide sand trap guarding the front of the green. See now how the complexion of a hole and a match can change and change again in a few seconds. As Hagen missed that shot any sane spectator would have concluded that Jones had won a hole, and that he was only two down, and staging a rally. But the topped ball ran on through the trap and wriggled up on the green and stopped a dozen feet from the cup. Jones' perfect drive and good pitch left him a couple of feet farther away, and his putt rimmed the cup and stayed out, right on the edge and an almost complete stymie for Hagen. Now it appeared that Walter had a lucky half-instead of which, putting with incredible daring and accuracy, he trickled the ball delicately past Bobby's up to the left-hand edge of the cup, where it hung an instant and then toppled in for a birdie 3. And Bobby was four down instead of two down.
A great putt-certainly. But Walter had made one good shot and two very bad ones, and Bobby had played the hole in par.
That was the turning point of the match, I shall always believe. And on the hole just preceding, when Bobby had played his iron second beautifully to ten feet from the pin, and Hagen, with a shorter and easier shot, had messed it up almost past belief and was far over the green and to the left, as Bobby told me afterward, he stood there and looked at Sir Walter in a sort of bewilderment.
"I watched that shot," said Bobby, "and I said to myself, 'I'm four down to a man who can miss one like that!"' You see how deadly it is to take such an attitude with Sir Walter, and to permit yourself to consider his shots instead of sticking tight to the card and to Old Man Par, who never makes a birdie and never commits a buzzard. One never can count Sir Walter out, even with trees in the way. At the thirty-sixth hole at Whitfield, and at the fourteenth at Pasadena, Sir Walter hit a tree with his drive, the ball bounded out into the fairway, and each time he won the hole with a birdie against a perfectly played par. These shocking upsets do not affect the card and the pencil, in a medal competition; but they do work havoc with the equilibrium of a single human opponent-which is one of the reasons Sir Walter is accounted so formidable at match play. Willie Park said a long generation ago that the man who can putt is a match for anyone, and Hagen can putt. In his match with Jones, he used twenty-seven putts in the first round and twenty-six in the second. Bobby, a fine putter himself, and in this match behaving like a human being about the greens, took thirty-one putts in the first round and thirty in the second. He used eight putts more than Walter, and he was eight holes down at the thirtysixth. Bobby needed eleven putts more than Walter in the match, and was beaten by a margin of twelve holes, though it should be explained that Walter also was playing his irons better than Jones; and in justice to them both it should be stated that in Bobby's last rally, at Pasadena, he shot the concluding twenty-five holes of the match in par and went four down to Walter's amazing golf. So Walter can play golf, undoubtedly. Now for that other factor-showmanship. Years ago, Patterson McNutt, a great admirer of Bobby Jones and himself an actor and a playwright, told me that what Bobby lacked in golf was nothing but the histrionic instinct.
"If he loved to 'show off,"' said Pat, "if he liked to act-to strut his stuff-they'd never beat him. But he's just a bashful kid and a great golfer. He's no showman."
The gallery has no effect whatever on Bobby Jones so long as it keeps out of his way. It doesn't bother him, and it doesn't inspire him. He doesn't care if its component members hang with bated breath on his next shot, or if they read a newspaper, so long as they don't walk about or talk out loud when he is making a shot. Not so Sir Walter. If Hagen were not a great golfer, I fancy he would be a great actor. He loves to do his stuff, for the gallery-and for an opponent, when it is match play.
I remember once when Sir Walter was playing a quiet practice round before a certain tournament, and on the last hole his second shot went into a shallow, simple sand trap by the green. Without an instant's consideration he picked a mashie-niblick from his bag, went down into the trap, chipped the ball from a clean lie to a couple of feet from the pin, and holed the putt for a par 4. The next day he was in the tournament. He had a big gallery with him. At the home green, his second shot behaved precisely as it did the day before, in the practice round-it hopped into the shallow trap, to a clean lie on the sand, about the same place as before. But this time there was a gallery.
And Sir Walter did his stuff.
Walking slowly into the trap, Hagen studied the position of the ball carefully, and considered its relation to the position of the pin on the green. Then he chose a mashie-niblick and returned to the ball, which he inspected again with the utmost care. Then he went back to the bank of the trap and exchanged the mashie-niblick for a niblick, returned to the ball and resumed his study. The gallery by this time was on the verge of hysterics and on the outskirts frantic units were semaphoring distant friends to hurry thither and see the sights. After another painstaking examination, Sir Walter regretfully shook his polished head and went back to his caddie for the third time, changing the niblick for the mashie-niblick he had picked out at first. Armed with this implement he returned again to the ball, once more studied the situation, took his stance, addressed the ball-and played exactly the same shot that he had executed in three seconds in practice the day before; a neat chip, two feet from the cup, for his par 4. And the gallery, convinced that it had witnessed a golfing miracle, split the welkin up the back like a patriarchal locust.
In the match with Jones, on the way to the ninth green at Whitfield, Hagen's ball after the drive was in the short rough of a sort of valley below the green, resting against a twig the size of a pencil. From where I stood I could see that the twig could not be moved without moving the ball and incurring a penalty. But Walter, with the gallery close about him, and Bobby standing none too well at ease after an indifferent second shot, consumed all of a minute that seemed an hour, studying that twig. At last he got up from his knees and played the shot, and a very good shot it was, and won the hole. And it may or may not have been a coincidence that Bobby Jones slipped over par on the tenth, and again on the eleventh, and got only a half on each with Walter, who also was stuttering at that juncture.
A great golfer-a great match golfer-and a great showman, is Walter Hagen. His cold, confident, deliberate personality impinges on a single human opponent with such effect that we have so good and game a player as Leo Diegel, last year in the P. G. A. championship, when Hagen picked up a deficit of five holes and won on the fortieth green-we have Leo Diegel saying to Bill Mehlhorn along toward the finish:
"Bill, I never want to play him again; he's killing me!"
Possibly you never considered the possibilities of psychological browbeating in golf; or perhaps in your sphere it is known simply as the gentle art of goat-getting.
One golfer at least has been able to resist the Hagen psychology successfully in match golf-Gene Sarazen, who has defeated Walter in two out of three formal matches, one of them for the P. G. A. championship of 1922 at Pelham. It was in the final round, and Hagen tried all his golf, and all his showmanship, and all his psychology, on Gene. Gene was playing as good golf as Hagen, and he didn't bother about the showmanship, being something of a showman himself. And as for the psychology, it went right over Gene's unimaginative little black bean. So along about the sixth hole of the morning round Hagen tried something else. I was standing by the green and heard all of it, and so far as I know it never has been in print before.
The second shot for the sixth hole at Pelham is a pitch over a sort of precipitous mountain. Hagen's ball reached the green, short of the hole and to the right, about a dozen yards from the pin. Sarazen's ball was on a narrow strip of turf at the left edge of the green, where a sort of walk-way had been left between two pot-bunkers, across which golfers traveled from the green toward the next tee. The grass had thus been somewhat worn away. A leaf lay over Sarazen's ball. He asked the referee if he might move it.
"Certainly," said the referee.
Gene carefully removed the leaf. Then the official suddenly spoke up.
"That ball's in a path," said he, "and a path is a hazard."
Gene looked at him rather helplessly. Hagen began walking over toward the colloquy.
"But I picked up a leaf," said Sarazen. "What shall I do about it?"
The referee plainly was puzzled, having told Gene he could move the leaf. Hagen spoke up, loud enough for the adjacent gallery to hear. "You ought to know the rules, Gene," he said.
Sarazen again looked helplessly at the referee.
"Well, what about it?" he inquired. Hagen spoke again, with elaborate condescension.
"Oh, go ahead and play it," he said wearily, and walked back to his own ball.
Sarazen chipped-and his chip was three yards from the cup. Hagen won the hole, and Sarazen failed to hit the fairway with his next three drives.
There is a good deal more in match golf than ever gets into the public prints. In this particular instance, however, there was a flareback. Sarazen was playing well enough to hold his own up to the intermission, and at lunch time-I recall it well-he said to me:
"Walter had no business to show me up in front of the gallery. I'll give him a licking for that"
And that is what he did, though Sir Walter, game to the core, picked up a three-hole deficit in the last nine with a tremendous rally, squared the match, halved the first extra hole with a birdie 4 after the most powerful iron shot I ever saw, and then lost at the thirty-eighth green to Sarazen's miraculous recovery from the rough for a birdie 3.
But except for little Gene Sarazen, Sir Walter's golf, plus showmanship, plus psychology, has pretty well flattened out the opposition these last five years, so far as match golf is concerned. Bobby Jones' own pet system went to smash against the Hagen psychology in Florida. After Max Marston beat him at Flossmoor, in the National Amateur, Bobby discovered that by playing the card in match competition as well as in medal, he could win matchesand he won nine of them in succession, and two consecutive Amateur Championships. But in Florida Bobby made the vital mistake of going back to his original plan and playing Walter Hagen instead of playing the card, and Walter is a calamitous opponent, when you try to match shots with him. He makes such odd shots from the tee-and he takes so few shots about the green! He can be so shockingly wild and so distressingly precise, all playing the same hole! He's the great match golfer, is Sir Walter!