Walter Hagen
The Maestro of Match Play. Part I
In this, the first of three articles we look at Hagen's formative years for clues as to why he became such a great match player)
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The Accenture Match Play Tournament has just been completed (Feb. 24 2007), and the cup has been won by Swede Henrik Stenson. It is fittingly called the Walter Hagen Cup after the greatest match player of all time!
Ask who was the best golfer in the world during the '20,s and '30,s, and most people would answer Bobby Jones, although not a few would give Walter Hagen the nod; ask who was the best match player of the era and almost no one would reply other than Walter Hagen. Walter won the PGA Championship an incredible five times including, between 1924 and 1927, an astonishing four times in a row! Walter had an awesome record in challenge matches - prior to 1925 he had only lost three. It was also common for the winners of majors to challenge each other over 72 holes for the 'Unofficial Championship of the World' Walter won this an amazing 4 times between 1924 and 1928 with defeats of Cyril Walker (1924 - 17 & 16), Bobby Jones (1926 - 12 & 11), Gene Sarazen (1927 - 9 & 8) and Johnny Farrell (1928 - 3 out of 5 matches). Remember that in all cases he was playing against who was then considered the best player in the world! His PGA record is particularly astounding. He beat every top professional of his era, sometimes at a romp, sometimes in a close match, and some times from coming from behind. Poor Leo Diegel was caught twice in this manner, once after being dormie 2! Understandably he said "I never want to play that !!%^$#$... again!", although it was in fact he who put an end to Sir Walters reign in the PGA in 1928!
The question that must be asked - and has been asked and answered several times - is why was the Haig so good! This series will review and rehash some of the theories, although so much has been said on the subject it is doubtful that it will come up with anything new, but perhaps a new light will be shone on some of the old.
First of all it must be remembered that Walter was a really good golfer and was certainly no slouch at medal play. After all he won 2 US Opens and 4 British Opens as well as numerous other stroke championships, including 4 Western Open Championships, then considered a 'Major'; second he was a phenomenal athlete and excelled in every sport to which he turned his hand; third he was a master of psychology; and fourth he was a great showman who thrived on the drama and give and take of match play. Not to be overlooked was his ability to stay calm in seemingly impossible situations, and something that is also often forgotten is that he practiced more than most of his contemporaries and he was match hardened. No professional has probably played more golf than the Haig. He would play up to 200 exhibition matches a year - and he would always insist on having something on the line! To see why he was such a great match player we will start by looking at his formative golf years.
Athlete and Golfer - Beginnings
Golf was not Walter's first love, his first love was baseball, and he was a very good baseball player, good enough to be invited to spring training with Philadelphia Nationals. In fact golf was a secondary sport for him until his US Open win. He had started at age eight as a caddie at the Country Club of Rochester, helping to put bread on the family table, and apart from golf he tried his hand at the numerous other sports played at the club - tennis, polo skating, hunting and fishing, and he excelled at all of them. As he himself put it:
"I had a sort of tireless energy, a compulsion to be doing something, to be on the move. not a nervous energy, but an inspired physical reaction which gave me so much confidence in my own ability that I was always thoroughly relaxed in any game ... I played to win ... I liked the feel of a golf club in my hand and I was forever swing a club".
He had no formal golf lessons, but he had - like all great actors and showmen - a wonderful power of mimicry. He could mimic the duffers as well as the better players. He figured out what it was about the duffers swing that made them duffers, and then set out to avoid it.
In the famous 1913 US open - an Open he might have won had he been more suitably shod - this mimicry served him well. He was dressed to the nines - more of this later when we discuss his showmanship, and a part of his attire was a pair of red-rubber soled shoes. Very flashy but they gave him little traction. By the final round after days of rain, the fairways were slippery, and Hagen had difficulty keeping his balance. As he himself described it, his swing "started with a sway and ended with a lunge", not the ideal swing for one shod in rubber soles on slippery turf! His shoes probably cost him the seven that kept him out of the famous playoff. However during the final round he realized that his swing was also not suited for the conditions - he started 5 over par on the first three holes, so he decided to mimic that most graceful and balanced of all swings, that of Harry Vardon, and remember, he had seen Vardon swing for the first time just two days previously. The swing change did the trick, his game settled down and he got the second best score in this his first US Open.
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| The well dressed golfer in 1913. The white silk shirt; the bow tie; the flannel pants with the cuffs turned up once - twice would have made him a rube; and the red rubber soled shoes! |
Hagen has the reputation of being a playboy, and he certainly loved his parties, although this was often part and parcel of his great showmanship, but when it came to practice he was the very opposite of a dilettante. As he points out, by the age of 15 he had "played more golf and practiced more shots than most golfers of 21 today" (written in 1956), and at the age of 14 he was taken on as assistant pro by Andrew Christie. When not in the pro shop he was playing semi-professional baseball as a starting pitcher with the Rochester Ramblers, clearly a star player. Incredibly he was not only a switch hitter, he was a switch pitcher, and could pitch with either hand! In 1912, the US Open was being held in Buffalo, and Hagen went up with his pro for some practice rounds. Hagen shot a 73 in his practice round, a great score - but he was sent back home for the tournament proper to mind the shop, while Andrew Christie stayed on to play. Probably the pro did not want to be one-upped by his assistant. But as a consolation Hagen was promised time off to play in the Canadian Championship. As he put it though, he did not come away from Buffalo empty handed. Hagen was always a snappy dresser and his dress usually contrasted with the shabby dress and dull shades of the majority of the players. While in Buffalo he saw Tom Anderson Jr., the brother of the late, great Willie Anderson, winner of 4 US Opens, and Anderson was a sharp dresser! As Walter put it:
"Tom had class! His outfit just about knocked your eyes out. His shirt was pure white silk with bright red, blue, yellow and black stripes. His immaculate white flannel pants had the cuffs turned up just once. if he'd rolled 'em twice he would have been a hick. He wore a red bandana knotted casually round his neck and a loud plaid cap on his head. In my small-town life he was the most tremendous personality I'd ever seen! His white buckskin shoes had thick red rubber soles and sported the widest white laces any two shoes could carry. I decided right then to copy that out fit from white buckskins to bandana."
Those shoes were to be the Haig's downfall in the 1913 US Open!
Walter did not do well in the Canadian Open - or so he thought. Even in his first tournament he had acquired the habit of thinking he should win. George Sargent won with Jim Barnes as runner up, but 11th place, just out of the money was in fact a great finish for a 19 year old in his first tournament, and he did finish ahead of the great Aleck Smith, two times winner of the US Open. On returning, he was greeted with the news that Andrew Christie was leaving for another job, and Walter Hagen was offered, and accepted the position of head pro. So here he was, age nineteen and head pro at a prestigious Rochester Country Club!
In the winter after the 1913 US Open Hagen headed for Florida. While there he played with the Phillies at their training camp, which resulted in the invitation to their camp the following winter. Hagen was sure that he was on his way to becoming a baseball star! That summer as the US Open came round, Hagen decided not to enter. He was somewhat discouraged with golf, after all the best he had managed was an eleventh place finish in the Canadian Open and a runner-up up spot in the National Championship! One of Rochester's members, Ernest Willard, editor of the Rochester "Democrat and Chronicle" was astounded. To encourage him to go he offered to pay Walters expenses, and also, luckily as it turned out, the expenses of his assistant Dutch Leonard. Hagen got out his fancy outfit again, but not the Red Rubber soled shoes! They went to the memory chest and were replaced by a pair of hobnailed shoes - buckskin of course! Also he exhibited another trait that made him the greatest player of his era, but for which he is little known to day - he practiced, practiced and practiced!
The story of the 1914 US Open at the Midlothian Country Club in Chicago is well known, but bears repeating. Hagen suffered severe food poisoning after eating lobster (any one who eats lobster in Chicago probably deserves food poisoning!) and almost scratched on the first day. However his assistant insisted that as they were on Willard's nickel he should at least attempt to play. He played the first round in a daze, barely able to swing his club. He was in the rough all day, but his short game shone and he rarely took more than one putt, establishing a pattern that would often be repeated in coming years. He finished with a 68, a new course record. Still ill, but now at least semi-conscious he continued to play well and at the end of four rounds Hagen posted a 290, equaling the US Open record. This was good enough to give him a one-stroke victory over Chick Evans. How the victory changed Hagen's out look! Here are his own words:
"Here I was twenty-one years old and the Open champion of the United States. I notified Pat Moran of the Phillies that I would not be in Florida for a tryout with the team. After all, I'd hit the big time in golf, so why bother with baseball?"
The win also open Walter's eyes to the financial opportunities of golf:
"Almost immediately the winning of the open began to widen the horizons for me. I was invited to give exhibitions and to play in tournaments arranged by various clubs. I even endorsed a few products, and this more than anything else made me realize the importance and potentials of the title."
He also realized the limitations of his game, he began to study form - swing mechanics we would call it today - he learnt the rules backwards and forwards, and he practiced, practiced and then put in more practice. Hagen was known for his luck in later years, but perhaps his luck was due to, as Ben Hogan was to later put it, "the more I practice, the luckier I get".
This look at Hagen's early years illustrates the emergence of the traits that made him such a superb match player, and some of the traits for which he was not so well know historically. His outstanding athleticism; his overwhelming self-confidence; his showmanship; his ability to arise above adversity; an ability to keep things going when everything seems to be falling apart; his willingness to learn, and above all, somewhat surprisingly to those of us reared on the 'Hagen - Playboy - Party Animal' outlook, his incredible work ethic.
Hagen birdies the 72nd Hole at Midlothian in 1914.
A drive, a pitch -from the rough, naturally - and a putt.
In Part II & III we will look at how these traits played out and how they made him the match player par-excellence.
F.B.