April 2, 1956

To score reasonably low in the annual spring classic at the Augusta National demands a feeling for noncircuit course grass, an analytical mind and a "green thumb"

by Herbert Warren Wind

April-it was either Tennyson or P. G. Wodehouse who said it-is the golfer's month. All over the un-southern sections of America, the covers of cut oak branches which sheltered the greens during the winter have been removed. The uneven, heaving ground has started after the last thaw to settle into its familiar conformations, the grass begins to get greener, the fragrance of fertilizer gradually yields to the bright smells of sun-dried clover and crisp bark, and the voice of the caddymaster is heard again in the land.

The golfer awakes after his restless hibernation, his head bursting with new measures he has thought of or read about or practiced on the cellar mat, measures he feels confident will enable him finally to master the game of golf to the degree demanded by his own estimate of his talents. After the past seasons of disappointment, this could be the year. by late May the 88-golfer has usually been forced to acknowledge that for some diabolical reason he is not going to turn into a 78-golfer, and the 95-golfer is delighted to settle for an occasional "rotten 93." But in April everything seems possible, and this undoubtedly adds to the golfer's general euphoria as he savors again that annual enchanting re-realization that golf is a truly wonderful game. He feels golf, thinks golf and talks golf-other people's golf as well as his own-as he does at no other time of the year.

For most Americans the tournament that signals the close of winter and the coming of spring-the golfer's equinox, as it were-is the Masters, which is regularly held in Augusta, Ga. the last four days of the first full week in April, this year April 5 - 8. Occurring when the golfer's fever is highest, it is followed and discussed and speculated about as no other tournament. Each April, regardless of whatever other discussable points are created by the happenings at Augusta, at the top of the list you will invariably find those ancient enigmas: Why is it that so few of the low-scoring circuit stars ever shine at Augusta? How is it that even the veteran experts hardly if ever cut loose with those spectacular rounds in the middle 60s? Or to put it a little differently, making adequate allowance for the Augusta National's being a considerably tougher course than any the players meet on the circuit, still, why all those 74s and those faltering 77s from golfers who would seem to have the ability to master the Masters somewhat better? Additionally, why such comparatively unsparkling iron play? And why, indeed, all those three-putt greens?

To learn the answer to these questions-as they say on television-it seemed logical to get in tough with the men who should know, the touring pros. The week of our visit, the tour was in Houston for the Open of the same name. That is a $30,000 event and so there was a little more strain in the air than if the boys were playing San Antonio ($20,000) or Baton Rouge ($15,000). Furthermore, a progressive committee had roped off all the fairways and given the layout and the tournament a decided touch of class.

But by and large, though, the tour is the tour, and at Houston or wherever it happens to be playing that week, it wears the same, unvarying aspect. All around you are the familiar sights and sounds. Out on the practice green, where 20-odd pros are forever noodling away before and after their rounds, Jerry Barber taps the customary trio of practice balls, getting the feel of the Bermuda. Largely because of his fluency with his putter, a beat-up brasshead put out by Fred Matzie of Los Angeles, Jerry has been a consistent money-winner the last few seasons. A few months ago Jerry finally hit on the exactly appropriate name for his putter: The Golden Arm. . . .Practicing next to the man with the Golden Arm is Gene Littler, winner of the previous tournament. He is greeted by a colleague with that inevitable bit of badinage, "How's it going, Money Bags?" Beneath Gene's reserve lurks a pawky sense of humor. "How much do you need?" Gene asks him casually.

Out in one of the open practice areas, Dow Finsterwald's dad, a lawyer from Athens, Ohio, who is a frequent visitor to the tour, watches intently as Dow, an eminently watchable free-swinger, limbers up with a batch of balls. . . . In another part of the forest-and at Houston's Memorial Park course this is no mere figure of speech; the ordinary practice area can accommodate only a handful of all who want to practice, so there are golfers firing shots in every available open area among the pine groves-Sam Urzetta, the 1950 National Amateur champion, now a professional trying the tour for the first time, punches out a bagful of seven-iron shots. They are not going out there just the way Sam would like-there's a slight bit of tail at the end of their flight-but Sam continues to practice without being too disturbed about it. His easy calmness make you remember obliquely that Sam during his last year of college basketball at St. Bonaventure sank something like 59 out of 63 foul shots . . .

DEMARET AND COMPANY
In the next opening among the pines, Duke Hancock, one of the last of the old brigade of professional caddies, stands with his arms folded, looking very well these days and British enough to pose for a sherry ad as he watches Jimmy Demaret warm up. The patriarch of the touring pros, Jimmy has been enjoying an extremely successful season after many had consider him definitely over the hill. His comeback has not only warmed the hearts of all golfers but started up afresh the old controversy as to Jimmy's correct age. Official records would seem to suggest that he will never see 45 again, but Demaret, the Jack Benny of golf, sticks unflinchingly to 43, a figure he has favored for many seasons. . . .down the first fairway, following the threesome Cary is playing in, goes Edie Middlecoff, who walks more holes than any other golf wife. . . . On the steps of the clubhouse Clark Wilcox, the ubiquitous golf-shoe entrepreneur, is overtaken by an earnest young pro who wants to order two new pairs: one with a maroon suede saddle, the other straight brown calfskin but with one of those fancy double-back tongues. . . . Commuting endlessly between the first tee and his headquarters tent, Ray O'Brien, the portly PGA tour director, stops to explain to another young player that tomorrow's pairings and starting times will be posted just as soon as they are completed. . . . And so on and so on, ad infinitum. Whatever it may not have, the tour certainly possesses activity, and when you have been away from it a while, it is always strangely reassuring to return to it-in much the same way that it is to come back to your place of business after an absence-and to find that the old machinery is still whirling around.

When you discuss with the touring pros what they think are the reasons for the remarkable disparity between scores on circuit courses and at the August National (and, for that matter, on other championship-caliber courses such as those the Open is played on), you find that it is a subject to which they have addressed their minds on many occasions. One player may tip the emphasis a little differently from another, but there is general agreement as to the contributing factors.

As is well known to all golf fans, the Augusta National (about 6,950 yards, maximum) is longer than most circuit layouts. Yard for yard Augusta also plays much longer, for its lush, watered fairways are appreciably softer and slower than the hard-baked, thin-grassed circuit courses where a tee shot keeps bob, bob, bobbing along. Furthermore, since the typical circuit course is wide open and the unrough roughs are seldom discomfiting unless a player is stymied by that occasional tree, a player can let out on his drive with a sanguine sense of impunity. While the Augusta National cannot be characterized as a tight tee-shot course, placement of the drive is primary on many of the holes, distance subsidiary.

One result is that at Augusta a golfer is usually faced with playing longer irons on his approaches than he does on the circuit, and its stands to reason that he will be less accurate with a five than with a seven, particularly if, like most touring golfers, he gets to play so few middle and low irons that he becomes relatively less proficient with them than with the shorter ones.

Just how long the Augusta National plays depends, to be sure, on the conditions prevailing the week of the Master. In 1953, for example, when Ben Hogan cut five strokes off the previous tournament mark with his torrid rounds of 70-69-66-69 for a total of 274, conditions were ideal for low scoring. The fairways were reasonably fast, the air windless, the greens only moderately fast. The situation was not unlike what it was at St. Andrews in 1927 when Bob Jones shot his record 285 in the British Open; a severe drought had parched the links and hardly a puff of wind came off the bay during the three days of the championship. Admire as they did the quality of Bob's golf, veteran St. Andresans felt that he could never have made such figures had he not caught the course at a time when the old girl was hardly herself at all.

But the fact that players must use "more club" on their approaches is only a small part of the story of why iron-play at Augusta is so much more difficult. The heavier texture of the taller fairway grass influences the shot-making in various and subtle ways. To begin with, simply striking the ball cleanly and crisply is a good deal more exacting than on the sere circuit fairways. There, "most of the ball" sits atop a light beard of grass, and the ball can be contacted decisively and propelled on that kind of flight which produces a sharp backspin when it hits the green. A golfer gets many perfect "hairbrush lies" on the Augusta National's superb fairways but his ball sometimes finishes, as in the nature of things it must occasionally on a meadowland type of course, lying fairly deep down among the blades of grass. Then the golfer must be skilled enough to alter his stroke to fit the lie.

SOFTLY DOES IT
Among other things, he must allow for the probability that the engrassed ball will take off, as it were, from the face of the club, fly somewhat more erratically and a few yards farther, and carry less true backspin. Knowing these things, the shrewd golfer will take one club less for the shot than he ordinarily would from that distance. In this general connection, I am in mind of an interesting comment by Walker Inman, the young professional who is a native Augustan and will be playing his first Masters this year. "Most spectators don't realize that you need an awfully good lie to play the wedge," Walker was saying. "They take up their position behind a certain green, like the third, and let's say eight or nine golfers in a row fail to stop their pitch shot from rolling well beyond the pin. The tenth golfer puts his stiff. Many golf fans think this proves that he's that much better than the other golfers. It doesn't necessarily follow. That 10th golfer may have been the only one who had a lie that permitted him to play a wedge and contact the ball so that he could get real good backspin."

In brief, then, where a pro can more or less repeat one type of striking action on he circuit fairways, on a meadowland course he must have the capacity to play a greater variety of shots. Golf is essentially a hand-action game-the swing is the means by which a golfer gets his hands (in affiliation with his body) into a position to hit the ball right. As Jimmy Demaret, a three-time winner of the Masters, point out, "The great golfers are and always have been those players who consciously or instinctively make slight adjustments in their technique to suit individual shot problems and who also make slight adjustments in their overall technique to suit the special requirements of the course they're playing. Ben does. Bryon does. Now at Augusta, you don't want to rifle the ball to the pin, as a general rule. You want to drop the ball on the green as soft as you can manage. With this in mind, at Augusta Byron might turn a bit more than he ordinarily would or introduce some other tiny change that would facilitate his getting the soft kind of flight he wants."

And why is it so preferable to drop the ball as softly as possible on the greens at the Augusta National? To begin with, the greens are of exceedingly fine grass which is mowed close, and the resultant surface is decidedly faster and slicker than that of the average circuit green. The ball turns over easily, it gathers speed very easily, so be as gentle as you can, feather that ball up there. But this is only half of the challenge. On the January-March trail, it is the rare green which confronts the golfer with much more than a slight roll or break to take into account. The majority of the greens are almost as flat as a pancake. Forgetting for the moment how this simplifies putting, consider how it reduces the problem of the approach shot. You can bang right for that flag. If you "fly" the ball 15 feet past the pin or 15 feet to the left, there's no sharp undulation to worry about that might send the ball kicking many feet farther away from the target. All sides of the pin are for you. This breeds confidence and boldness.

How different at the Augusta National where one of the distinguishing features is the severe contours of the greens (especially the greens on those holes where there are no water hazards). These greens are modeled to provide three or four distinct pin-positions-relatively flat areas of the green separated from the other pin-positions by folds and ridges and slopes. Accordingly, the big thing at Augusta is not simply to hit the green. If your ball ends up, say, on the left portion of the green and a sizable ridge must be traversed to reach the cup situated that day in the right-center of the green, to get down without taking three putts is often a first-class feat. The big thing for the golfer is to place his approach shot (on a par 4, let's say) in the spot that enables him to get down in two. Frequently he is better able to do this via a chip or an approach putt or from 40 feet away from the "right" edge or apron than he is by putting from 20 feet away from the "wrong" side-that is, in reference to where the pin is positioned that day. To play the smart short takes headwork and finesse. To play the aggressive shot when you should, with only a quarter or a third of the green to shoot for, takes courage and finesse.

All this requires time to learn and an honestly sound game, and to some extent it accounts for the regularity with which the old horses roar to the front at Augusta. Nelson has finished in the top ten 14 times, Hogan 13 times, Snead and Mangrum 11 times. Demaret, Middlecoff and Boros have also piled up consistently good records. The edge which some of the younger players have as birdie-putt holers over such celebrated non-holers as Nelson, Snead and Boros doesn't count for too much in the Masters, where consistent work on the greens based on heady approach putting is the ticket (as it is at St. Andrews, the patron saint of all contoured green courses). Even when a player's approach shot finishes nicely in the birdie area and he has a relatively straight putt left, he cannot charge the hole because of the fast surface. The one coming back is always too long.

This is just a once-over-lightly and there are, for certain, a number of other reasons why scores at Augusta are seldom very low-the pressure which a major event inevitably creates, the havoc which all those water holes on the second nine can wreak, the strategic challenge of the course in general-to name just the three which leap first to mind. The Masters, in short, is a sturdy test of a golfer's ability to control the ball. This does not mean that to win on the circuit does not demand enormous skill. It sure does. But it calls for a different type of skill. There is little question that scores would be lower at Augusta if the transition from the circuit to the Masters were not so abrupt and the players had more time to adapt themselves to what amounts to a whole new set of conditions.

DEMARET ON THE TOUR
While we're at it, we might as well tackle another one of those related priority questions: Is it harder to be a consistent winner on the circuit today than it used to be? According to Jimmy Demaret, who has been traveling the route for nigh on to 21 years, the answer would go like this: For the player who is merely a very fine golfer, it is harder to win big money on the tour these days-the number of very fine golfers has increased and is forever increasing. However, a truly great golfer would find the circuit competition perhaps easier than it was right after the war because there are only a couple of great golfers following the sun today, not six or seven.

For Demaret, the circuit has gone through three distinct eras: the period roughly from the middle '30s up to the war, when Demaret was just a young pup on his way up; the period just after the war, when Hogan, Nelson, Locke, Snead and Demaret were setting the pace and when Demaret, incidentally, was acting as a paternal guide to dozens of hopeful young golfers, showing them how to dress, talk and generally how to handle themselves; and the period embracing the last half-dozen years or so, when Demaret has been the acknowledged elder statesman. "Today the tour's not as much fun as it used to be," Jimmy was musing after one of his rounds at Houston. "The boys are making too much of a business of it. At the time I first joined the tour, when the era of Hagen and Sarazen and that crowd was just coming to a close, it was sort of a post-graduate course for golfers who wanted to gain more knowledge of their profession. Ninety-nine percent of the players had club jobs. With free time during the winter months, they convened for the pleasure of competition and to talk over sales methods and teaching methods. The atmosphere changed when the players began working at the tour. I suppose the first ones who did were Hogan and Nelson. They brought in a new idea: practice and prepare for each event. Sarazen and Hagen and their contemporaries used to warm up for a round by hitting a few balls, maybe six or seven down a nearby fairway. Now you come to a course and it looks like a flock of locusts have moved in on the practice tee.

"There used to be a great deal of informal comradeship in the evenings, but now you rarely see anyone after dark. They boys are up in their rooms practicing their putting.

"It's understandable, too. They're under a terrific strain now to win money, because for too many it is their only means of support. Prize money keeps going up, to be sure, but there's nowhere near enough for more than a relatively small percentage of the boys to make a living from tournament golf. Few of them will willingly face up to that hard fact. And we're coming dangerously near that point when we're getting a breed you might term a "golf bum'-a player who borrows money from a backer so that he can play the tour, exhausts the money, finds another backer the next year, exhausts that and keeps repeating the process, sometimes with no genuine intention of paying the money back. Every young golfer is entitled to a chance to see if he can make the grade on the tour, but simple arithmetic makes it impossible for much more than a dozen to live on their tour winnings. The boys would be a great deal better off if they buckled down to jobs as home pros and played the tour as an adjunct of that basic job."

Well, those are a few chunks for golfers to chew on until the time comes when we can all turn in our No. 7 snow shovels and return to till the good earth.