The Man from Titusville
by Bernard Darwin (1932)
From Wikipedia:
Gene Sarazen (born Eugenio Saraceni) (February 27, 1902 – May 13, 1999) is one of only five golfers (along with Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, and Tiger Woods) to win all the major championships in his career, the Career Grand Slam: U.S. Open in 1922, 1932, PGA Championship in 1922, 1923, 1933, British Open in 1932, and The Masters in 1935.
He was born in Harrison, New York and died on Marco Island, Florida.
The winner of 39 PGA Tournaments, Gene Sarazen was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1974. He was the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year in 1932, a charter member of the World Golf Hall of Fame (1974), and won the PGA Tour's first Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.
He played on six U.S. Ryder Cup teams: 1927, 1929, 1931, 1933, 1935, and 1937.
Sarazen invented the modern sand wedge and debuted the club at the British Open at Prince's Golf Club in 1932 (which he won). He called it the sand iron and his original club is still on display at Prince's.
Sarazen hit "The shot heard 'round the world" in the 1935 Masters. It was a final round 235-yard 4-wood on the par-5 15th hole that went in, giving him a very rare double eagle 2 on the hole. It led to his later winning the tournament in a playoff over Craig Wood. At the time of his second shot a check for $1500, the winning prize, had already been written to Craig Wood.
For many years after his retirement, Sarazen was a familiar figure as an honorary starter at the Masters. From 1981-1999, he joined Byron Nelson and Sam Snead in hitting a ceremonial tee shot before each Masters tournament. He also popularized the sport with his role as a commentator on the Wonderful World of Golf television show.
At the age of 71, Sarazan made a hole-in-one at the 1973 Open Championship.
In 1992, he was voted the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship in golf.
Asked how to say his name, he told the Literary Digest "Veteran Gene Sarazen/ Aims to play par again":
"All right", said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.' When I read my Alice in Wonderland and come to that sentence about the Cheshire Cat, I think of Gene Sarazen. His grin is so very much an integral part of him, and even when he has dashed away after winning our Championship to win that of his own country, he leaves an agreeable appearance in the air, resembling a grin, to remind us of him. It is by no means an unchanging grin, as was that of the Cat. It grows perceptibly broader as he holes a long putt at a crucial moment, seeming then to spread entirely across his pleasant olive face. It contracts into something of a wry smile when the putts just decline to drop and he has perhaps hard work to keep smiling at all. It is, however, impossible to think of him without it, because it is the outward and visible sign of the very charming and at the same time very strong and resolute personality that is Sarazen.
I first met that grin in a hotel in New York in the autumn of 1922. Its owner had leaped into sudden fame earlier in the year by winning the Open championship at Skokie, a Chicago course. He then came from a course called Titusville. Nobody here had ever heard either of it or of him and even in his own country I do not think his fame was as yet very great. He soon proceeded to show that his win was no fluke, for he won the Professional championship of his country and beat Hagen in a set match over 72 holes, a thing that at that time no other golfer in the world was likely to do.
It was with the glory of his championship still upon him that he first came over here, in 1923, to play for our Open championship at Troon. His golf at once made a great impression on all who saw him. Arnaud Massy is capable of enthusiatic outbursts of hero-worship, and I remember his declaring that the championship was over before it had begun, since nothing could prevent Sarazen from winning by strokes and strokes. And then, by some astonishing accident, he failed to qualify. He had a bad first round, but played up gallantly in the second and was believed to have saved his bacon. I remember it well because after dispatching my telegram saying that he had qualified, I had departed far from Troon. Next morning I was horror-stricken to hear that someone had come in at the last moment and ousted him. Fortunately, there was a trusty person in London who had altered my message or furious editors would have had my head on a charger.
When we saw him after an interval of nine years at Prince's playing the sort of golf that seemed incapable of going wrong, it was almost impossible to believe in that earlier failure; but in the first place he was then nine years younger, and decidedly more 'temperamental', and in the second, allowance must always be made for the strangeness of a strange land. When Bobby Jones first played in our championship he tore up his card and drove his ball out to sea; when Hagen first played he finished in something like the fiftyeth place. It is hard work to play a game in the other fellow's country, and it seems that a probationary visit is needed before even the greatest can give of their best. However it happened, Sarazen accepted his downfall very well and declared that he would come again if he had to swim across. He had to come again several times, but the long lane had a glorious turning at last.
Even in his own country Sarazen's golf suffered for a while a period of partial eclipse. I fancy that having at first played the game almost entirely by the light of nature he took to thinking about it. That is a thing that has almost got to happen to any good young golfer at some time and occasionally the young golfer is never so good again afterwards; the 'first fine careless rapture' of hitting, the splendid confidence are never satisfactorily replaced. If on the other hand he gets safely through this inevitable distemper he is a better golfer than ever he was, for he has knowledge to fall back on in evil days. Sarazen, I believe, tried experiments. He tried for instance the fashionable overlapping grip instead of the interlocking one that had come to him almost instinctively in his caddie days. I think in the end he did make some slight change for I remember his asking me when we met again if I saw anything different; I had to confess that I did not and asked humbly to be told. At any rate the period of thoughtful sickness was safely passed and there emerged a Sarazen who, though he did not win another Open championship till this year, was yet a better golfer than before. He was always there or thereabouts, and I imagine that during the last few years no professional has equalled his record of earnings in the big tournaments for big prize money.
To-day he is obviously a thoughtful person with plenty of decided and rather original notions as to the playing of the game. I remember for example his telling me that when he taught Mrs. Sarazen to play golf he insisted on her learning with heavy clubs. I am afraid to say how heavy they were; they sounded to me almost cruelly so, but they had the right effect in making the pupil swing the club and let it do the work. It is probably on this principle that he himself is apt to practise swinging not with one club but with two or even three (it is a baseball player's trick) so that he looks like a lictor with a whole bundle of rods; but then he is as strong as a little bull and could doubtless swing a bundle of battle axes.
Not only has he thought much about method but he is using his head all the time and plays the game strategically. At Prince's he several times took a spoon off the tee, so that he could reach the best place from which to play the second shot, without any fear of going just too far. It was particularly noticeable how he always took this spoon for his tee shot to the 15th. There was here no danger of the rough in going too far, but the pitch to that small plateau, cocked up amid all manner of perils, is perceptibly easier if it is not too short and so the ball can be hit the harder. How wise in him it was too to take his iron for the second at the 17th in the last round, when he was growing rather shaky and knew it. In the other rounds he had been hitting the most glorious seconds right home with wood, but this time his ball lay a little more to the right, the danger of the bunker was a little greater and his confidence was a little on the wane; so he took his iron and played safely for a five. It is not everyone who would have had so much self-control at that moment, for the strokes had been slipping away, he knew all about Havers's 68 and, in short, things were not too comfortable.
That grin of his is the mark of a sunny and delightful nature, but not of an altogether placid one. He has had, unless I am much mistaken, to overcome something in his Latin blood that used to surge up untimely. Like Bobby Jones, he can boil inside and sometimes on rare occasions he used to boil over. When he was second to Hagen in the Open championship at Sandwich in 1928 he might have won or at least have tied but for one little ebullition. It was at the Suez Canal hole; his ball lay in the rough off the tee and his admirable caddie wanted him, I feel pretty sure, to take an iron. He took wood, missed the shot badly and then advanced on the ball again with the same club without giving himself time to think. Just for that moment he lost himself and that disastrous hole may well have lost him the championship. He would not have done that at Carnoustie last year when he fought on with a fine stoicism in the face of adverse fate. Twice in the course of the three days the wind changed between morning and afternoon, and each time it changed in favour of Armour and against Sarazen. That, to be sure, is one of those things that are 'all about the game' but it made a great difference. Sarazen's only comment was that in order to win 'you must have the breaks' - an undeniable truth but one hard to enunciate calmly in times of disappointment. At Prince's he had no 'breaks' as far as the play or the weather were concerned. Indeed, in one respect he seemed rather unlucky, for he constantly hit the hole with his putts and the ball did not drop; but this misfortune is perhaps inherent in his method; he goes boldly for the back of the tin and will have no truck with timorous trickling in at the side door. One bit of luck he did have in that he was drawn to start early on the last day, and so he could, just as in his original triumph at Skokie, set up a mark for his wretched pursuers to shoot at. He left Havers with a 68 to tie, and that was a task that seemed hopeless. I should have written 'was' instead of 'seemed' had it not been for Sarazen's own achievement in the American championship a fortnight later. Then he was left with a 69 to tie. He did a 66 and won by three strokes. If anybody likes to say that this was, in the circumstances, the greatest round of golf ever played, I do not see how anybody else can quarrel with him.
Finally in our Open champion we salute not merely one of the finest hitters of a golf ball that ever lived but also one worthy of the name of a good golfer, than which no man can look forward to a better epitaph. We may apply to him Hazlitt's famous words about Cavanagh the fives player, and I shall write them down yet again just for the pleasure of doing so. 'He had no affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the game to show off an attitude, or try an experiment. He was a fine, sensible, manly player, who did what he could'. Of that last round at Fresh Meadow at any rate we may add Hazlitt's final sentence -'but that was more than anyone else could even affect to do'.