How I Played the Game Read online

  How I Played the Game

  ALSO BY BYRON NELSON

  Byron Nelson’s Winning Golf

  (available from Taylor Publishing)

  Shape Your Swing the Modern Way

  How I Played

  the Game

  BYRON NELSON

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  FOREWORD BY ARNOLD PALMER

  Copyright © 1993 by Byron Nelson and Peggy Nelson

  First paperback edition 2006

  All photos are from the author’s collection.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200

  Lanham, Maryland 20706

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Nelson, Byron, 1912–

  How I played the game / by Byron Nelson ; foreword by Arnold Palmer.

  p. cm.

  1. Nelson, Byron, 1912– 2. Golf—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  GV964.N45A3 1993

  796.352'092—dc20

  [B]

  92-37339

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-87833-819-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58979-322-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-87833-819-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-58979-322-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  To Peggy,

  the joy of my life

  since November 15, 1986

  and my favorite golfing partner

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Always, ever since I’ve been in golf, I’ve been helped by many wonderful people. I believe you’ll find I’ve thanked each of them in turn in this book, but as for the actual writing of it, I first must thank all those friends who insisted that I do it. Without their urging, I never would have thought of it myself. Even with their encouragement, though, I couldn’t have begun without all the records, statistics, and so forth supplied over the years by my wonderful friend Bill Inglish of Oklahoma City. Bill knows more about my career than I do, I think. Pat Seelig, an excellent golf writer I’ve worked with numerous times, read the manuscript at various stages and offered many helpful suggestions. Yet, with all the help of Bill, Pat, and my many other friends, this book still wouldn’t have been written without the help of my wife, Peggy. Peggy is a freelance writer who volunteered to be both interviewer and typist for my recollections, and who also spent hours researching old scrapbooks and other records of my career in golf. Finally, to my editor, Jim Donovan, I owe a debt of thanks for his assistance in putting the chapters in the best sequence, checking on the accuracy of my stories, and generally making the book readable. I’m happy so many people expressed an interest in my doing this book—and I’m even happier now that it’s done.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 The Road to Glen Garden

  2 From Caddie to Pro

  3 Texarkana and a Girl Named Louise

  4 Ridgewood and a New Driver

  5 Reading and Some Major Wins

  6 Inverness and the War Years

  7 1945 and the Streak

  8 Golf for the Fun of It

  9 Television and My Own Tournament

  10 Golfers I’ve Known Over the Years

  11 Today

  Appendix: The Records of Byron Nelson

  Twenty-four pages of photographs follow page 120

  FOREWORD

  Back in the late 1970s, when Cliff Roberts was in the process of handing over the chairmanship of Augusta National Golf Club to Bill Lane, they decided to create a private room for those of us who had won the Masters Tournament, a sanctuary where we could relax and have a bite to eat at our leisure during that always-exciting week in April. Appropriate wooden lockers were installed along one short wall of the room. By then, there were some twenty-four living Masters Champions and many more to come, so doubling up of active and inactive players was deemed proper. I have no way of knowing who decided who would share a locker with whom—very likely it was Cliff Roberts, who died before the project was completed—but nothing has ever pleased me more than when I walked into that new Champions Room upstairs in the main clubhouse and saw two plates on one of the lockers, one bearing my name and the other that of Byron Nelson.

  It would certainly have been my choice if I had been asked, because Byron Nelson was an idol of mine long before I met that wonderful gentleman and magnificent player. I was in my impressionable teens and wrapped up in golf when Byron was accomplishing things on the pro tour that never have been and never will be even approached.

  How many times have people in golf wondered out loud what Byron Nelson might have put into the record books if he hadn’t retired from serious competition at such a relatively young age? As a player myself, I absolutely marvel at two of his greatest accomplishments on tour—the eleven consecutive victories he posted from March to August in 1945 and the eighteen tournaments he won that year. I have never won more than three in a row and was quite proud when I won eight times on the Tour in 1960. I can’t think of any records that are farther beyond anybody’s reach than those two.

  I read Byron’s first book back in the 1940s and used a lot of his instruction as a blueprint in the development of my own game. Later on, when I was on the Tour and got to know Byron pretty well, I always enjoyed it when we got together and talked about golf. I remember times when he was working as a television commentator that he would come out on the course and walk and talk with me while I was playing practice rounds at the major championships.

  We never played together, of course, when Byron was competing on a full-time basis, just once or twice at the Masters, but I well remember the enjoyable day we had when Jack Nicklaus and I joined with Byron and Jug McSpaden—remember those years when the press revelled in calling them the “Gold Dust Twins”?—in an exhibition at Jug’s Dub’s Dread course in Kansas.

  My father was a great influence on me in many ways, not the least of which was my behavior and treatment of others. That all sank in quite well, but I must say that observing and getting to know Byron Nelson reinforced every bit of that. Here has always been a man of the highest personal standards, a man we in golf can hold up as the epitome of a true golf champion.

  —ARNOLD PALMER

  INTRODUCTION

  There has been quite a lot written about me, and I’ve been fortunate that most of it has been accurate. But there have been a few times when what was written wasn’t quite factual enough to suit me, such as the amount of my winnings in 1945, my so-called “nervous stomach,” why I left the tour, and a few other things. This is the best opportunity I’ll ever have to put my two cents’ worth in about how I lived, how I played the game of golf, and to set the record straight for anyone who wants to know.

  I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.

  —BYRON NELSON

  Roanoke, Texas

  1992

  ONE

  The Road to

  Glen Garden

  I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A BLESSED MAN, AND THE FIRST WAY I was blessed on this earth was by having
wonderful parents. My father was John Byron Nelson. His family was from Virginia originally, but he was born in Texas in 1889. He was a quiet, gentle man, shorter than me, but his hands were even larger than mine. He was a hard worker, but not particularly ambitious, and my mother always felt he was too kindhearted to be a good businessman.

  My mother, Madge Allen Nelson, was born in 1893. Her family came to Texas from Tennessee when she was a small child. She loved Texas, and lived here all her life till her death in 1992 at the age of ninety-eight. She was smart, spirited, ambitious, and full of energy. She taught school some before she married my father, who was five years older than she was. They were married on February 8, 1911, and I was born four days shy of a year later, on February 4, 1912.

  I was born at home, out in the country, on our 160-acre cotton farm in Long Branch, in Ellis County outside of Waxahachie, Texas. I was named John Byron Nelson Jr. after my father. My father had inherited the farm when he was just six years old after his father died of tuberculosis. His mother had died of consumption—what we now call TB—when he was just six months old. My father had it too, before he got married, and it ruined one lung, but fortunately it never spread to the other one. My father was raised by two maiden aunts, and he was a fine, hardworking man, so I guess those two aunts did a pretty good job.

  Back then, you know, no one ever went to the hospital to have a baby—mostly only if they were about to die. So there was nothing unusual about my being born at home, except for my size.

  I’m told I weighed twelve pounds, eight ounces at birth. My mother had just turned eighteen two months before, and she was in labor such a long time that the doctor figured I couldn’t have survived it. In fact, he had given up on me and was just trying to save my mother’s life at that point. He finally had to use forceps to deliver me, and broke my nose doing so. I still have a few dents in my skull from it. After I was delivered, he just placed me on a table near the bed, thinking I was dead.

  After a few minutes, though, my Grandmother Allen, my mother’s mother, shouted, “Doctor, this child is alive!” Then my grandmother started working with me, and the doctor did too, and to everyone’s surprise I did make it, thanks to an abundance of my mother’s milk. It was such an ordeal for my mother, though, it took her quite a long time to recover; in that day and time, there was no medication. I don’t know whether my size and the difficult labor had anything to do with it, but she had only two more children, at seven-year intervals. Both my sister Ellen and my brother Charles, though, were of normal size, fortunately.

  Our house was very close to the dirt road we lived on, and we stayed there till I was five. The soil in that area was heavy black clay, and having a cotton farm always meant a lot of hard work. I can still remember seeing folks in their horse and buggy going down that road in wet weather, when it would be all the horse could do to pull the load, the road was that slow and sticky.

  I guess from the time I could walk, I woke up when my parents did, and my mother had to make breakfast holding me on her hip. I walked when I was about ten months old, which is early, but then, I was about half grown when I was born.

  I was always an outdoor child. I hated being in the house, and I never really played much—I “worked.” I had a little old wagon, and I’d take it out and fill it with rocks or dirt and haul it someplace and empty it, then go back for more. That was my idea of play.

  Not only did I not like to be inside, but I hated shoes, and went barefoot all the time. I remember when I was about five my mother bought me one pair, for wearing on Sunday. When we came home after church the first time I wore them, though, I took them off as soon as I got in the house. My mother had gone to the kitchen to cook dinner, and there was a fireplace in our living room, and I took those shoes and threw them on the fire.

  After a little bit, my mother smelled that leather burning, and came in to see what I’d done. She scolded me and said, “All right, if you don’t want to wear shoes, I just won’t buy you any more. You can just go barefoot everywhere, winter and summer alike.” And that was just fine with me.

  I was fair-skinned with blond hair, and because I spent so much time outdoors, I sunburned easily. One time when I’d gotten burned, my mother put a sunbonnet on me, and tied it so I couldn’t get it undone. I went out to play in the front yard of our house, which was very close to the road, even though we were out in the country. I tried every which way to get that bonnet off, but I couldn’t, and I was getting pretty hot out under that Texas sun. So first I took off my shirt, then I took off my pants, and pretty soon I had everything off but that bonnet.

  My mother was back of the house, and every once in a while she’d notice folks driving by and laughing their heads off, so she got curious and came around to see what was going on. There I stood, naked as the day I was born, with that bonnet still on my head. I can’t remember whether I got a licking for that, but I probably should have.

  It was along about this time that I had the first serious injury of my life. My father had bought a fine team of horses, and while he was busy doing something else, I was feeding an ear of corn to one of the horses. Well, I let my fingers get too close to the horse’s mouth, and it bit the tip of my forefinger on my left hand. My father and mother used kerosene, or coal oil, to keep it protected and it healed up pretty soon, but that finger is still shorter than the one on my right hand. And I’ve always been mighty careful of how I feed horses since then.

  When I was six, we moved to San Saba County in southwest Texas, to a 240-acre cotton farm on the San Saba River. The cotton grew well there, and you could see the fields from our house above the river. Only problem was, there were an awful lot of rattlesnakes in that country. One summer, we killed sixty-five of them, just around our house. By this time I’d gotten used to wearing shoes, fortunately.

  By the time I was eight, I’d become a pretty good field worker. I’d weed the cotton in the summer, and pick it in the fall. I’d pick it and put it in a canvas sack, and I was so little then that the sack would just drag in the dirt behind me. I can’t say I ever liked picking cotton much, because it made your hands bleed and it was powerful hot, hard work. But my parents encouraged me to work hard, because they knew that our field hands would work harder when they saw a child my size working like I did. And their strategy worked.

  My father was drafted for World War I, but because he had one punctured eardrum and one collapsed lung from having had TB as a youngster, he was turned down. Then in 1919 my sister, Margaret Ellen, was born. I asked my mother, “Are you going to love her more than you love me?” I guess I kind of liked being the only child.

  Because we lived way out in the country, there was never any kind of school within reach till I was eight. In San Saba, the nearest school was fourteen miles away. My mother had been a schoolteacher before she married my father, so she taught me all the basics at home.

  But finally they built a schoolhouse three miles away, and I rode a coal-black horse we had across the fields bareback to school. My grandmother used to tell my mother, “You’re going to get that child killed.” But my mother would tell her, “You couldn’t pull Byron off that horse!”

  I hated school about as much as wearing shoes. I guess it was because I was used to getting all the attention from my mother at home; at least, that’s what my brother Charles told me later. But another thing was, the schoolhouse was too warm to suit me. I was always opening the windows and getting in trouble for it. But because I’d get too hot, then go outside in the cold air, I got a lot of bad colds.

  They started me off in the first grade, of course. But since I already knew how to read and write, and knew my geography and history, plus my multiplication tables up to 12, I was quickly promoted to the third grade. I still didn’t like it, though.

  I was always brought up to be honest, and of course everyone back then had to be mighty careful with the material things they did have. I remember one time I was playing over at the house of my friend, J. T. Whitt, and I brought home a
nearly empty spool of thread to play with. It was only the spool I wanted, and it just had about eighteen rounds of white thread left on it. But when my mother saw it, she asked if Mrs. Whitt had given it to me. When I said no, she told me I had to take it back, right then. Now, my friend’s house was a mile away, and it was already getting on toward dark. I guess I was about five years old at the time, so I was afraid of having to walk all that way and come home in the dark. But my mother wouldn’t hear of waiting till the next morning, so off I went. I got there and back as fast as my legs would carry me. And it taught me never to take anything that didn’t really belong to me.

  The house we lived in when I was very young, like a lot of the houses of country folk back then, was just one-walled. There wasn’t any insulation or wallpaper—they were really more like cabins, in a way. And even though it was down in south Texas, it could get pretty cold of a winter. I remember one time it got so cold that when we came in the kitchen one morning, the fire had gone out, and a one-gallon milk can we had sitting in the kitchen had frozen solid during the night.

  When I was nine, we moved to San Angelo. Ellen—that’s what we called Margaret Ellen—was about two. Our grandfather and grandmother Allen lived there, because their son, our Uncle Benton, had TB, and was staying in the sanitorium. Uncle Benton died, and it turned out later that my sister had a light case of TB herself, probably due to exposure to Uncle Benton, who’d always pick her up and kiss her. Of course, that was before he knew he was sick, and besides, back then people didn’t realize how contagious the disease was.

  In San Angelo, my father worked for a mohair warehouse that was the largest in the country, and it was right on the Santa Fe railroad line. Santa Fe was one of the largest producers of mohair wool. He loaded and unloaded the wool, but could only work part-time, because jobs were so hard to find then.