How I Played the Game Read online

  I remember the warehouse caught fire one time, and everyone came running to see it and help put out the fire. My mother saw my Daddy up on top of the warehouse, trying to get the fire under control, and she started screaming, “He’s going to be burnt up!” Fortunately, they did get the fire put out and my father was all right. But the smell from that mohair burning was awful, and it hung around for days.

  We had a wonderful team of horses and a wagon, and part of the time Daddy hauled gravel for a highway that was being built quite a ways away. It was too far for him to come home except weekends, so he found an old wooden crate someone had shipped a piano in and slept in that when he couldn’t come home. Our family knew what “poor” really meant.

  Next, we moved to Alvarado, south of Fort Worth. Our neighbors, the Majorses, who lived one-quarter of a mile away, had thirteen children living with them. Some of them were Mrs. Majors’ sister’s kids. Her sister had died some time before we moved there. I played with one of the children quite a lot.

  Our place backed up to my Grandfather Allen’s. It’s from Grandfather Allen that I inherited my woodworking ability, but fortunately I didn’t inherit his disposition. Gran didn’t like children much, though he and Gram had six of their own. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like them. Anyway, I was always such an active little child that he would offer me a nickel if I could sit still for five minutes, but I was such a wiggler, I never got that nickel. My mother used to tell him, “Gran, if Byron needs a licking, you tell me and I’ll give it to him. But I don’t want you to touch him.”

  One day we were over at their house and the grownups were all sitting inside talking and I went outside looking for something to do. I guess I was about five or six. Gran had a few turkeys he raised, and he’d just fed them, so they were out in the yard pecking at their food. I wanted to see if I could catch one, so I sneaked up behind this old turkey hen and grabbed her by the tailfeathers. She started jumping and flopping around, but I held on, and first thing you know, all her tailfeathers came out in my hands.

  I was in trouble, and I knew it. I looked around for a place to hide the evidence, and saw Gram’s washtubs sitting on a bench, turned upside down waiting for washday. I hid the feathers under them and went inside, never saying a word. Not too much later, Gran went outside and came back in with this puzzled look on his face and said, “That’s the strangest thing—I just went out and checked on the turkeys, and there’s one that doesn’t have any tailfeathers. She’s all right, not sick or anything, but there’s not one feather in her tail!” Naturally, I kept real quiet, and no one suspected anything.

  Well, it came washday, and Gram went to turn over those washtubs and found all those feathers, and told my mother. Mother came to me and said, “Byron, did you pull the feathers out of Gran’s turkey’s tail?” I knew I had to come up with something good, so I said, “No, ma’am, I didn’t. I just grabbed hold of her and she pulled them out herself!” For some reason, this got my mother to laughing, and I never did get the licking I deserved, fortunately.

  We’re so used to all our shopping centers and supermarkets now, but I can still clearly recall when we’d go to town in our horse and wagon for supplies once a week. We’d get flour, beans, shortening, and so forth. If you ran out, you did without till the next Saturday. Of course, the Majorses had so many children, they’d run out of something every once in a while, and they’d come to us for oh, some flour, maybe. Mrs. Majors had to get up awful early of a morning to start her cooking, so most of the time the kids would come over before daylight. They’d stand out in the yard and holler “Hello!” until Mother or Daddy answered, then tell us what it was their mother needed.

  But they’d always pay us for it, or bring back the amount they’d borrowed next time they went to town. People were like that back then.

  It was in Alvarado that my mother developed mastoiditis—an infection in the mastoid bone behind the ear. I was just ten, and I was out plowing the fields with our team of horses and the cultivator. My father came and told me they were going to Fort Worth to see the doctor, and I had to take care of the place while they were gone. When they came back, it turned out Mother had to go back four days later for surgery, and so I was the “man of the house” again, taking care of the house, plowing the cotton fields and all.

  A little later, we moved to Fort Worth from our place south of the city. We lived in a town called Stop Six, so-called because it was on the way to Dallas on the interurban bus line, and right near our place was the sixth stop—the interurban was sort of like a streetcar line.

  My father got a job as a truck driver and a deliverer for White Swan Foods. I was surprised he even got the job, because he’d had no experience like that. Pretty soon the economy caught up with us and he was laid off. Then he went to work delivering feed for Dyer’s Feed Store on 15th Street in Fort Worth. Mr. Dyer was a good boss, but he drank and used bad language, and my father didn’t do either one. My father never said a word to Mr. Dyer about it, but pretty soon, Mr. Dyer stopped drinking, and then he stopped swearing, too. Mr. Dyer liked my daddy a lot, just like everyone else who knew him.

  That fall, I started school, and pretty soon, I noticed quite a few of my friends would have an extra nickel or dime or quarter to spend. Doesn’t seem like much now, I know, but back then, it was very unusual for a child to have any spending money. So I asked them where they got it, and they said, “Caddying at Glen Garden Country Club.” I had no idea what caddying was, so I asked more questions, and when they started explaining about golf and what they did to earn that extra money, I decided I’d like to learn more about it. But before I could learn much, I had to learn about something else—rabies.

  I have to back up a bit to tell this story. When we had lived at Stop Six, right across the street from us was a family named Wells, with six children. We’d occasionally go back to visit them and I’d play with the Wells children, and one time, they’d just gotten a puppy, so we’d all play with that puppy. The puppy was sniffing us and nipping at us a bit, just playing, and pretty soon we all had a scratch or bite here or there. Well, in a few days, the puppy got sick and started foaming at the mouth. Back then, rabies was rampant because there wasn’t any vaccination done like there is now.

  When they had the dog examined, he did have rabies, which meant all of us children had to get rabies shots. You don’t see much about it now, but back then it meant you had to take one shot a day, in your abdomen, for twenty-one straight days. But if the place you were bitten was above your shoulders, you’d have to have two shots a day.

  Mr. and Mrs. Wells decided it was too expensive to get the shots done in Fort Worth, so they took their children and me to Austin, where the state would do the inoculations free. They had gotten permission from my mother and father, naturally, and it was very nice of them to include me.

  They rented a house with quite a few bedrooms, which they were lucky to find, because times were really tough then in 1922. Then, every day, we’d all go to get our shots at the insane asylum. You weren’t in there with the residents, but that was where we had to go to get the shots. They used quite a large needle, and after a few days, you didn’t feel very good, but you had to keep taking the shots so you wouldn’t get rabies.

  Along about the fifteenth day, I began to feel really bad, and was getting a lot of headaches, which I was not accustomed to. Mrs. Wells gave me some aspirin to keep my head from hurting so much, but she wasn’t as alert to signs of sickness as my mother was. She didn’t think there was anything else wrong except my reaction to the shots.

  When the twenty-one days were up, we headed back to Fort Worth. We got back late in the afternoon, and both my parents were there to greet us. But when my mother put her arms around me—I’ll never forget it—she right away held me back from her with her hands on my shoulders, and said to my father, “This child’s got typhoid fever.”

  Of course, in that day and time, typhoid was very prevalent, too, because they didn’t have plumbing and water sy
stems like they do now, and I guess down in Austin they just got the water right out of the river. The reason my mother recognized mine was that my father had gotten typhoid right after they were married, and she recognized the odor from when he’d had it. Typhoid basically is an intestinal disease, and creates its own peculiar smell.

  So they put me to bed right away and called the doctor, and he agreed with mother’s diagnosis: typhoid fever. I weighed 124 pounds when I got it, and over the next few weeks I dropped to 65. They even wrapped me in a sheet one time and weighed me on a cotton scale, and it was true—I’d lost half my weight. I was about eleven at the time, and about 5′8″ or so, so you know I was awful thin. I can remember lying in bed and seeing my hipbones sticking straight up so plain.

  I also remember that I gave myself a relapse. You weren’t allowed to eat anything, just take the small amounts of liquids and things that the doctor authorized, and I didn’t realize how serious it was. But there was a bottle of Horlick’s malted milk tablets on the windowsill near my bed, and I’d get so hungry, I just kept eating those, and no one ever saw me, so they didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t very much, but it was enough to make me even sicker. My temperature soared to 104, 105, even over 106. They were packing me in ice, and said I’d never live.

  By now, the doctors had pretty well given up on me, and it was a Mrs. Keeter, a chiropractor and a member of the Church of Christ we attended, who saved my life. This may sound strange, but she was an expert on giving enemas—I guess they’d call it colon-cleansing now. She told my mother, “I can help that child. It will take quite a while, but I can cure him.” So she treated me once or twice a day, very gently and carefully, and after about ten days, I began to improve. It took me quite a while to regain my strength and get back to my normal weight, but I did. The high fever I ran, however, apparently caused some memory loss, because I have very little recollection of my childhood, other than what my family and friends have told me.

  So by the time I got well, I was just barely twelve years old, and had twice been given up on by the doctors—once when I was born, and again when I had typhoid. The fact that I survived both experiences is one of the reasons why I feel I’ve always been a blessed man.

  TWO

  From Caddie

  to Pro

  THOUGH I WAS SO SICK WITH THAT TYPHOID, I WAS MORE concerned about something else. My parents were both members of the Church of Christ, and by this time I had been well-taught by them about the Bible and God’s laws. My mother, in fact, was a wonderful Bible scholar who worked not only with me but with many other people in her lifetime, teaching God’s plan of salvation and all the Bible prophecies and such. I knew I needed to be baptized, and I was worried that I wouldn’t have the chance. So as soon as I was recovered enough to go to church, it so happened that we were having a gospel meeting, preached by a man named Brother Hubbard. At that time, people didn’t have enough money to pay for a full-time preacher, and Brother Hubbard had a regular job as a railway mail clerk who sorted mail on the train as it went from town to town. He had to develop a peculiar way of walking to balance himself as he did this, and when he preached, he did the same thing. He’d kind of rock back and forth, back and forth as he talked.

  During that meeting, I took my opportunity to obey the gospel and was baptized. It made me very happy to know my past sins had been forgiven, and because of my early upbringing and teaching from my parents, I have continued as a member of the Church of Christ and realize more and more that the Bible truly is the inspired word of God. My faith has been a great blessing to me all my life. In fact, I really feel the reputation I’ve enjoyed all my life, especially after becoming a champion golfer, came very much from that upbringing and my continued faithfulness to the Bible and the church. Even the fact that I never smoked or drank or used bad language, and have tried to treat others as I’d like them to treat me, comes from that.

  It took quite a while for me to really recover from the typhoid, but pretty soon I began to think again about my friends at school and the extra money they’d gotten by caddying. I had pretty well determined that I wanted to find out more about being a caddie, because I already knew as much as I ever wanted to know about rabies and typhoid both. When I was well enough, and my parents said it was okay for me to walk over to Glen Garden one day, I started off. Of course, I knew nothing about golf whatsoever. But I’d talked to my mother and father about it, and they said it would be all right for me to do it. As it turned out, it was a pretty important step for me, even though at the time all I was concerned about was that extra change in my pocket.

  It may not sound like much, a boy having a nickel or dime spending money, but in the mid-twenties, it was a lot more than most of us had. Families weren’t destitute and they had plenty to eat and to wear, but they didn’t have extra money to spare.

  So when my friends said they caddied at Glen Garden Country Club, well, that gave me an idea that I wanted to caddie also. Of course, I knew nothing about golf whatsoever. But I walked over to the club, which is on the southeast side of Fort Worth, about a mile away from where we lived on Timberline, and I went to the caddiemaster and told him I’d like to become a caddie.

  His name was Harold Akey, and he told me, “Well, we have more caddies now than we have players, but if you want to come over on the weekends or on holidays, why, that’s fine, ’cause that’s when most of the play is.” I thanked him and went home, and that weekend, I went over there. It took about six times before I ever got to caddie for anyone, but in the meantime, the ones who weren’t getting to caddie were getting caddying lessons from Mr. Akey. We were taught how to look out for the clubs’ owner, how to carry the clubs over our shoulders, how to hunt golf balls and keep our eye on the ball, how to stay out of the way, and the other rules that caddies have to abide by.

  I knew nothing about caddying at first, but it wasn’t difficult to learn. The other caddies, though, didn’t like to see any new ones, because that might mean they wouldn’t get a job sometimes. So they had what they called a “kangaroo court.” It was like a fraternity initiation. They’d form two lines, and we’d have to run between them while each one of them gave us a good hard lick with their belts as we ran by. Sometimes they’d get a barrel and put a new kid in it and roll it down this big hill the clubhouse sat atop of. That was even worse than running the gauntlet, but for some reason, they never did that to me. I don’t know why. They did try to run the new boys off, but I didn’t run off very well. After I became a regular caddie, I never did pick on the younger boys, because I hadn’t liked it when they did it to me and didn’t think it was right.

  Finally I got a job one Saturday caddying for the Rotarians of Dallas, who had come over to play the Rotarians of Fort Worth. That long ago, there was just one club in each city. The caddie fee was fifty cents, and my golfer was a man named Mr. Shute. Mr. Akey told Mr. Shute that I was a new caddie but that he thought I’d do all right for him.

  So we got on the first tee and Mr. Shute said, “You’re a new caddie, the caddiemaster told me.” I said, “Yes sir, I am. I’ll try to do my best.” He said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. If you don’t lose a ball for me, why, I’ll give you an extra quarter.” Well, he sliced the first ball off the first tee way into the right rough, and I lost sight of it and never did find it. So there went my quarter. But I didn’t lose any more and I caddied all right, so he said I was okay, and I got my first fifty cents.

  It was late fall when I started caddying, and the club let the caddies play at Christmas time, when they had a party for us. That was the first time I ever played. I borrowed a set of clubs that year, and I shot 118—but that didn’t count the times I whiffed the ball completely.

  I liked golf right away. I liked any sport where you could swing something like a baseball bat or a stick or anything. And soon I was beginning to practice a little bit. I didn’t have any clubs at first, but I remember the first one I bought was an old Standard, a hickory-shafted mashie—what�
�s now a 5-iron. Whenever I could find an old ball, I’d beat it around with that old mashie. Pretty soon I bought a few more clubs with my caddie money, and my game progressed quickly. I learned to play by trial and error, but as I caddied I also watched the people I caddied for and gradually acquired a general idea of how you should develop a swing. I also had one golf book, the great Harry Vardon’s, that I studied until I felt confident enough to do a few things on my own.

  The next spring, I took up caddying again. A lot of times, I would go to the club just to see if I could get a job. One Saturday, I met a man named Judge J. B. Wade and caddied for him. He knew my parents, and he liked me, so I got to caddie for him every Saturday. He had a regular foursome and one of the fellows that played in it was Mr. Cecil Nottingham, who worked as assistant auditor for the Fort Worth-Denver City Railroad. He helped me get a job with the railroad when I quit school—but more on that later.

  One time when I was caddying for Judge Wade, I got myself in trouble. You see, we caddies weren’t ever allowed to hit balls while we were working or use the member’s clubs without their permission. This one day, though, I’d given Judge Wade his driver, then walked down the side of the fairway. While I was waiting, I just got an impulse and dropped a ball I had in my pocket on the ground, took out one of Judge Wade’s clubs, and hit toward where their drives would land.

  Don’t you know, that clubhead came right off the shaft. There wasn’t anything for it but to tell the judge, so I did, and he just said, “We’ll have to tell the caddiemaster.” I wasn’t any too eager to see the end of that round, but I made sure I told the caddiemaster what I’d done before the judge got there. Doing something like this generally meant getting expelled from the caddie yard for a time, but fortunately, Mr. Akey liked me, and just said, “We’ll put in a new shaft, and you’ll have to pay for it.” The new shaft cost $2, which meant three rounds of golf I’d have to caddie to pay for it. But I felt very lucky it wasn’t any worse, and I never did that again. However, as I caddied more and more for the judge, he’d every so often have me hit a ball with one of his clubs—usually an iron, and that encouraged me that maybe I had a little talent for the game.