THE AGE OF VARDON
For some years now it has been customary, and logical, to speak of Harry Vardon, Bob Jones and Ben Hogan as the three greatest golfers of all time. Everyone knows who Hogan and Jones are—Ben has accomplished his wonders within the past decade, and Bob's are still remembered vividly. But who was Harry Vardon? There he is, grouped along with Hogan and Jones as automatically as Nod is with Wynken and Blynken, Chance with Tinker and Evers, Marx with Hart and Schaffner, but, aside from the facts that he was an early English golfer who used the overlapping grip and was defeated by Francis Ouimet in the playoff for the 1913 Open title, Vardon is one vast vagueness for most present-day enthusiasts. Of course he shouldn't be. He is not placed alongside Hogan and Jones as a gesture of courtesy to our sensitive forefathers. Vardon belongs there.
The reason for this sudden awareness of Harry Vardon—beginning this month his name will be popping up with regularity all summer long—is that next week the 1957 National Open will be played at the Inverness Club in Toledo, where Vardon lost a memorable Open by a stroke in 1920, and, furthermore, that in September the National Amateur will be held on another course that always brings Vardon to mind, The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., where the astonishing young Ouimet outplayed Vardon and Ted Ray in that historic playoff for the 1913 Open championship. Harry, it must be said, was a few shades past his peak on both these occasions. He was 43 at The Country Club, and he had turned 50 at Inverness. In this last instance, his age alone, you could say in truth, prevented him from winning. With nine holes to go, 2 over par for the tournament up to that point, he stood well in front of the field. Even a 41 on the in-nine would give him a total of 295, a stroke better than the lowest score on the board (turned in, incidentally, by Jack Burke Sr., the father of the present PGA champion). As Harry stood on the tee of the long 12th, or 66th, a terrific storm suddenly swept in off the lake. It was just too much for the old boy. In very much the same way that Ken Venturi lost stroke after stroke down the stretch in the 1956 Masters, Vardon didn't play any really bad shots, but he needed quite a lot of time to reach the greens and then he couldn't get down the short putts he needed to rescue his pars. He staggered in at length in 42, quite exhausted. His old compatriot, Ted Ray, eventually won the tournament, and Vardon tied for second with Burke, Diegel and Hutchison, a shot behind. Had Vardon managed to win at Inverness, it would have been an absolutely marvelous achievement, for he had carried off his first major championship, the British Open, a full quarter of a century earlier, back in 1896! Talk about holding your form over a period of years!
During the era in which Vardon flourished, our National Open was only beginning to gain its present luster and importance. The big one then was the British Open. Vardon won it in 1896, 1898, 1899, 1903, 1911 and for the sixth and last time in 1914. (J. H. Taylor and James Braid, Vardon's two illustrious contemporaries who, along with Harry, composed what was known as The Triumvirate, each won the British Open five times.) You will note that there is a gap of eight years, from 1903 to 1911, between Vardon's fourth and fifth victories. The explanation is unusually dramatic, and a lot more than that. In 1903, when he was the reigning champion, Vardon suddenly was stricken with tuberculosis. He entered a sanatorium in Mundesley-on-Sea in Norfolk, where the doctors immediately took his pipe and his clubs away from him and prescribed a fairly sedentary existence for many months. He was well enough to play in the 1904 British Open, though he was certainly not his old self. Despite several later recurrences of his illness he managed to play in each ensuing British Open and generally to maintain an active position at the forefront of his profession. Then, in 1911, at the advanced age of 41, regarded as almost a has-been, the old master effected that stirring comeback that saw him win two more British Opens (1911, 1914), barely fail to take two others (1912, 1913) and undertake on top of this an extensive American tour in which he was apparently hardy enough to play almost a match a day, digest American railroad food as he traveled continuously between matches and to all but carry off our Open in 1913. This was Harry's second visit to our country. He had made his first American tour in 1900, and that year he did win our Open.
Vardon's standing as one of golf's three greatest players rests partially on his splendid record on two continents, but only partially. It was how he played golf that gave the name Harry Vardon its especial ring and sent it sounding down the decades. To begin with, despite the fact that the implements he played with were primitive by modern standards, he was the straightest player who ever lived, no question about it. In one stretch, for example, he is reported to have played seven consecutive tournament rounds without once hitting the ball off the fairway. When he first visited our country at the turn of the century, his accuracy was so confounding that it nurtured the famous mythological story that Harry never liked to play the same course twice the same day: on his afternoon round he had to play out of the divot marks he had made that morning his first time around.
Vardon's own countrymen, though more advanced in golf at that time than we, were no less impressed by his singular ability to hit one shot after another right down the middle. The better to study how he did it, some pioneers of technique arranged to have him stand on a grid of white lines chalked on the tee of a hole which had been carefully selected for the experiment: a large, spreading tree stood menacingly on each side of the entrance to a very narrow fairway. At the tee Harry asked the scholars if they were ready. They were. He teed up a ball and sent it winging slap down the middle, bisecting the opening between the trees. He moved to one side and the scholars charted the position of his feet in reference to the point where he had teed the ball. Would he hit another now, they asked. Gladly. He stepped up and slapped another drive dead-straight down the slender fairway. And that is the way it continued without variation—Vardon casually splitting the trees and the fairway on drive after drive and pausing long enough between strokes to let the posse of scholars graph his footprints. Their investigation, interestingly enough, disclosed that Vardon's stance in relation to the ball varied a wee bit from shot to shot, and from this they made the very sensible deduction that golf was not an out-and-out cold science but, rather, something of an art.
Henry cotton, that latter-day British champion and insatiable student of golf, was, to be sure, too young to have assisted at this experiment or to have watched Vardon during his peak or near-peak years, but he did have several opportunities to observe Vardon when the old champion was well into his 50s. "One afternoon when my wife was taking a lesson from Harry," Cotton was saying recently, "I asked him if I could stay around and watch. He agreed on the grounds that I would not interrupt, which I didn't, of course. When the lesson was over, I asked him if he would hit a few shots for us. He took a very old niblick that had an absolutely smooth face, not a marking on it, and proceeded to hit a batch of balls to a green about 125 yards away. He hit the balls so squarely that the face of his club was almost solid white when he finished, just as if someone had daubed a paintbrush across it. All of the balls finished within two or three yards of the flag. When I congratulated Harry on his wonderful demonstration, he shrugged it off by saying, 'Oh, I remember when I could back myself to hit every one within a few feet of the pin.' "
Indeed, during his best years Vardon was as accurate with his brassie as most tournament players are with their short irons. He consistently hit full brassie shots within 15 feet of the pin or closer. This is no old golfer's tale: no one before or since has been in his class when it came to hitting a long wood to a green. There was a great deal of power in Vardon's swing—he was long as well as accurate—but this power was concealed by a seemingly effortless style, and all that a spectator was aware of was the way the ball soared toward the green in a high parabola and floated down so easily that it practically had no roll on it at all. Vardon contacted the ball, on all standard strokes, at the beginning of the upswing. He had molded his swing during the era when the golf ball was a solid glob of gutta-percha, and the "gutty" had to be hit for carry, to be swept away. He won his first championships playing the gutty, his last with the "modern" ball, where elastic stripping is wound tightly around a small rubber core and encased in a thin cover of gutta-percha. Men who watched Vardon play with both balls rarely hesitate when asked with which one he achieved the higher degree of skill. The gutty.
A man of medium size and moderate physique, Vardon had an enormous pair of hands. He was the first great gripper, although he was not, as he is frequently credited with being, the originator of the overlapping grip, the one we still adhere to today with only mild modifications. The true inventor of the overlapping grip—it supplanted the "palm grip" in which the two hands were separated about the way they are when you grab a baseball bat—appears to have been one Mr. J. E. Laidlay, a crack amateur who took that British championship in 1889 and 1891. This grip was gradually adopted by the up-and-coming professionals in the '90s. Taylor and Braid used it as well as Vardon. How it came to be referred to as the Vardon grip is one of those things that one can only guess at. Perhaps it was simply because Harry was using that grip when he won three championships in four years and completely captured the imagination of his contemporaries. Vardon himself never claimed to have originated it.
In any event, Harry, like few men, realized the full significance of the role a good, correct grip plays in the execution of the golf swing. (Only one other fundamental was ever faintly comparable in importance, he believed: keeping the head steady.) He arrived at his version of the overlapping grip after a year of constant experimentation. "I tried every conceivable means of holding the club," he related in one of his instruction books, "and the one I have described proved to be indisputably the best. It did not come naturally to me but it was well worth the trouble of acquiring. It seems to create just the right fusion between the hands and voluntarily induces each to do its proper work." There was no "master hand," as Vardon saw it. Each contributed equally.
Vardon's great grip was the heart of one of the truly great styles of all times—perhaps the most attractive swing between the coming of golf and the coming of Jones. Until the coming of Vardon, the old St. Andrews-type swing, flat, exaggeratedly wide and lengthy, consciously muscular, served with few exceptions as the basic model for young men who were out to govern the gutty. Vardon introduced a revolutionary style: the upright swing. He stood with his feet generously separated, the right foot toed out a bit, the left foot toed out markedly so that there would be nothing to impede the club head in coming through fast. His left arm bent at the elbow, he started the club back on a normally lateral course but, when his hands were hip-high, he would wheel his shoulders and his upper trunk into a brisk, full turn that gave his swing a pronounced and, for that day, unorthodox verticality. "To come down," Henry Cotton was explaining not long ago, "Harry simply straightened his left arm. With that one movement he was just where he wanted to be: in the perfect position to hit from the inside out." On his irons, Vardon took no turf, just brushing the grass with his club head as he swung through to a high finish. He was a master of the controlled left-to-right fade, which he played with more natural ease than the hundreds of aspiring golfers who sought to imitate him.
When Vardon first flashed on the horizon in 1893 as a contender in the big events, those who watched him, Bernard Darwin among them, thought his style ungainly. The feature that bothered them the most was the abrupt way the club was lifted up on the back-swing. When, as Bernard has recounted, he and his fellow golf enthusiasts found themselves absolutely smitten with Vardon's style some four or five years later, it was somewhat disturbing to them: they didn't know for sure whether Harry had always been as pretty as a picture and they themselves too blinded by convention to recognize it or whether Harry had really improved and refined his style and gained that compactness, that flow, and above all, that unimpeachable rhythm. Whatever was actually the case, professional and popular understanding of the correct method to hit a golf ball was entirely different after Harry Vardon made his way to the top. Around the turn of the century, his influence on other golfers was as prodigious as Jones's was in the '20s and Hogan's is today, and it continued to be for decades. As late as 1916, John Duncan Dunn, a noteworthy instructor, stated that he could sum up in one sentence the message he would choose to impart to each aspiring pupil: "Whatever is Natural and Harry Vardon."
Harry never lost his swing. In his middle and late 50s, he was as unerring as ever from tee to green (if a little shorter), but on the greens he was the victim of a strange nervous affliction in the right elbow (and wrist) that has plagued more than one aging golfer. "You never knew when it would happen, and Vardon didn't know when either," Archie Compston, the old lion of Bermuda, has said, "but that nerve near his elbow would sometimes jump—you could see it jump—just as Vardon was about to strike the ball on his short putts. When it did, he would hit a three-foot putt a foot or more off line, to the right of the cup. I played with him once when he completely missed the ball when he was trying to hole a two-foot putt." Gene Sarazen, similarly, remembers playing a round with Vardon in which Harry, faced with a four-footer, took a divot in the green three inches behind the ball. There was nothing Vardon could do about this affliction, and it was doubly pathetic since the rest of his game remained as smooth as silk. (Now and then you will hear that, even in his romaine days, Harry was an uncommonly bad putter. That isn't quite so. He was never an uncommonly gifted putter, but he was a good putter.)
Harry Vardon was not one of golf's precocious geniuses. It took him a while to get there. He was born in 1870 in the village of Grouville on the island of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands that lie between England and France. One of the nine children of a gardener, he attended the local school where the schoolmaster was a young man named Boomer, whose two sons, Aubrey and Percy, were also destined to become prominent figures in golf. (At the age of 60, Boomer Sr. retired from teaching. He became a golf professional, assisting his son Percy at the St. Cloud Golf Club.) The fateful circumstance which oriented Harry Vardon, his brother Tom and the Boomers toward golf and which accounted for the incredible sprouting of a whole band of fine golfers on that out-of-the-way little island—Ted Ray was also a Jerseyman, as were the Renoufs, the Becks, and the Gaudin boys—was created in 1877. That summer a group of English "strangers" obtained permission from the constable of the parish to lay out a golf course on a section of the common land. The terrain and grass were both so splendidly suited to golf that all that was necessary to do to devise a course was to cut the fairways with a mower and then roll the greens. In this speedy, economic fashion the Royal Jersey Golf Club was born, and it was there that the local boys caddied and played.
The Vardon who looked like the golfer in the family was Tom, a boy a few years younger than Harry. Harry was a pretty fair golfer—the boys played a lot by moonlight, incidentally—but he was at least as good, if not better, at soccer, the 150-yard dash and cricket. His boyhood ambition was "to excel at cricket." When Harry was in his teens, he was apprenticed to a gardener and, while he was learning that profession, he joined the local workingmen's golf club. He was about an 8-handicap player at this time and might have gone on to be remembered locally as one of the best amateurs in the whole Channel Islands if his brother Tom had not had the gumption to go to England, land a job as a pro, write home about the good money a young man could make in professional competitions, encourage Harry to join him and finally locate a pro job for his older brother when Harry did come over. Harry's achievements, of course, quickly came to eclipse Tom's but Tom was a very accomplished golfer in his own right, a successful tournament player and a very successful instructor in both Britain and America. Even after Harry was the toast of every man on the face of the earth who could tell a cleek from a midiron, his father, who certainly is entitled to a spot near the top in any listing of Famous Difficult Parents of History, continued to think of him as a gardener gone astray. Hard on the heels of Harry's third victory in the British Open, Vardon Sr. made the following pronouncement: "Although Harry may win the trophies, it is Tom who plays the golf." Well, as they say in the Azores, every man to his own bed of nasturtiums!
Harry had played in three British Opens and fared well in two of them when he made his breakthrough in 1896, at Muirfield. At that time the 18th hole at Muirfield was a difficult, dangerous par 4; it took two woods to get home, and you really had to hit two big ones, for a deep bunker, running almost the full width of the fairway, protected the green. Harry came to the 72nd needing a par 4 to beat J. H. Taylor. He hit a fine drive and then he couldn't make up his mind what to do, whether to gamble for his 4 by going for the green (and risk a possible 6 if his second buried itself in the face of the bunker) or whether to play short of the hazard with his second, settle for a safe 5 and take his chances of beating the redoubtable Taylor in a playoff. Vardon was an unusually candid man and, as he tells the story, he was standing by his ball, still wracked with indecision, when far down the fairway he spotted a trusted old friend who was gesticulating emphatically toward the ground short of the bunker. That was good enough for Harry. He played short and got his tying five, and then went out and beat Taylor in the playoff. By the time they came to the 36th hole, Vardon had the match pretty well wrapped up, and it was all over when Taylor, who had to try to reach in two, caught the far wall of that bunker.
...Twenty-four years later, at Inverness, in our 1920 Open, against the strongest field that had ever assembled for that event, Harry Vardon was still the finest golfer on the premises. There he was, with only seven more holes of the 72 to go, comfortably ahead of the field when that lashing storm came up as he started to play the long 12th. Struggling into the teeth of the wind, Vardon needed four full woods to reach the green on that 522-yard hole. He held firm on the 13th until he missed the two-footer he needed for his par. The effort was becoming—had become, in fact—too much for the old campaigner. He was still hitting the ball straight and with his native precision, but he could never quite collect himself on the greens. He three-putted the 14th. He three-putted the 15th. He three-putted the 16th. On the 17th—he could afford to drop no more strokes no w—he was plain unlucky. He hit a fine second that missed clearing the ditch before the green by inches. That did it. Harry limped home in 42 strokes: 296, a stroke too many. It is really no tragedy when a man who has won six British Opens and one United States Open and everything else under the sun is denied one further victory, and yet, for all that, it is impossible to think about how close Vardon came to scoring a final fantastic triumph without being a little saddened that the old boy couldn't quite pull it off.
By nature Harry Vardon was an un-flamboyant and somewhat reserved man. Before a match, he would have two glasses of Bass' Ale with his lunch and then go out and quietly get down to work. He wasn't dour on the golf course, but he tended strictly to business and avoided all small talk. His color consisted of his consummate skill and the grace of his style. Off the course as well, he made no histrionic production of his enthusiasms, but they were there if you looked for them. For example, in 1896 when he became the pro at Ganton, his enduring fondness for soccer led him to organize a town team on which he played center forward. Five years later, when he returned from his first triumphant American tour, he rejoined the team, serving as goal tender now that his speed of foot had left him. He thought his colleagues in golf were exceptionally fine men, and believed that it was the steady contact with the game that accounted for their generousness of spirit. When he died in 1937 and was buried in the Totteridge Parish Churchyard, they were all on hand.
In the light of the kind of man Harry Vardon was, it is interesting that the two choice Vardon anecdotes that have come down through the years would, taken by themselves, create the impression that he was the gruffest of characters. They are very diverting stories. The first took place on his first American tour when, during his exhibition in Chicago, a local left-handed star managed to insinuate himself into the exhibition foursome. The left-hander played way over his head. He could do nothing wrong that day and finished with a very low score. In the clubhouse after the match, earnestly fishing for a compliment, he said to Vardon, "Sir, I know you've played with thousands of golfers. I imagine you've played with quite a few lefthanders. Tell me, who is the best left-handed golfer you ever saw?" Vardon paused very briefly. "Never saw one who was worth a damn," he grunted.
In the qualifying rounds for the 1920 Open, Vardon was paired with Bobby Jones, then a kid of 18 very much aware of the privilege that was his in playing with the venerable champion. On the 7th, they both cut the dogleg with their drives and had only little pitches left. Playing first, Vardon poked a tidy run-up close to the pin. Bobby elected to flip his ball up with a niblick. He looked up badly on the shot and skulled the ball over the green—fortunately there was a trap there to hold it up: Jones got down in three for his 5. He was still embarrassed by his performance and, as they walked off the green, thought he might say something to break the awkwardness in the air.
"Mr. Vardon," Bob said, "did you ever see a worse shot than that?"
Vardon said, "No." That exhausted the subject.
PHOTO
THE GREAT HARRY VARDON (1870-1937)
MAP
RAY'S WAY: The heavy line denotes the route Ted Ray took to convert the 7th, a short par 4, into the hole that won the 1920 Open for him. Ted picked up four birdies here, cutting the corner boldly each time.
PHOTO
PIPE IN MOUTH, TED RAY CLOUTS A LONG ONE. VARDON WATCHES
PHOTO
A MUCH SOUGHT-AFTER TEACHER in his later years, Vardon here patiently checks grip of lissome pupil at his indoor school.
THE HOLE THAT WON FOR RAY
Vardon's touring partner in 1913 and 1920 was Ted Ray, a large-boned Jerseyman who was one of the longest hitters of that era. British Open champion in 1912, Ray had his erratic days but, when his powerful swing was in the groove, he could take any course apart in a spectacular manner. Ray owed his victory in the 1920 Open to his mastery of the 7th hole, a short, sharp dogleg par 4, where he picked up his birdie 3 on each of his four rounds by audaciously going straight for the green, whacking four titanic drives that carried 275 yards in the air, well over the trees in the angle of the dogleg. Ray twice drove just short of the green. The other two times he actually drove the green.