DAILY NOTES - June 28, 2008
Back in January, when ballots for the World Golf Hall of Fame class of 2008 came out, I wrote a column regarding the future HOF chances of todays top players, and naming several stars of the past who, to borrow from the Jefferson Airplane, are “conspicuous only in their absence.” Well, it appears that the class of ’08 will now have five members, and it’s gratifying to see that two of the Hall’s previously glaring omissions have been rectified: Craig Wood and Denny Shute. As for the others, Pete Dye is the very definition of “no-brainer” as, for that matter, is the Dean of American golf writers Herbert Warren Wind. Carol Semple Thompson is a bit less so, but her accomplishments are undeniably impressive.
Anyway, to save time, I once again borrow from my Book of Golfers to profile the 2008 inductees:
PETE DYE (USA)
Born: Urbana, OH 12/29/1925
Old Tom Morris was among the first to codify it, Willie Park, Jr. and H.S. Colt advanced it greatly, C.B. Macdonald gave it Golden Age definition and Robert Trent Jones modernized it worldwide. Yet for all the impact that these men had on golf course design, a strong argument can be made that no one has influenced it more than an insurance broker from rural Urbana, OH, one Paul “Pete” Dye.
A fine amateur who competed in one British and five U.S. Amateurs, Dye (b.12/29/1925) played at Florida’s Rollins College where he met and married Alice O’Neal before returning North to sell insurance. In 1959, Dye left the business world to begin designing golf courses, initially creating a several low-budget Midwestern layouts hardly demanding of the world’s attention. But in 1963, Pete and Alice took a month-long trip to Scotland, where they discovered pot bunkers, unmanicured rough, railroad sleepers shoring up hazards and a far less power-oriented approach to game. The impact of these things upon the Dyes was immense, and once back in the States Pete blended them into a somewhat modernized hybrid that would soon become the most copied style in the business.
Crooked Stick, a local Indianapolis club completed in 1966, was the first layout to reflect this old/new look, with The Golf Club, a 1967 project in New Albany, OH, spreading the word a bit farther. But only in 1969, when Dye teamed with Jack Nicklaus to build Hilton Head Island’s Harbour Town Golf Links, was the Dye style widely introduced to the world stage. Initially measuring little more than 6,600 yards, the tight, strategic Harbor Town hosted the PGA Tour’s first Heritage Classic in 1969, yielding the highest 36-hole cut of the season with rounds in the 80s outnumbering sub-par scores roughly 2 to 1.
In 1981, Dye would again change the face of architecture with his TPC at Sawgrass, a longer, tougher track built to serve as permanent host of the PGA Tour’s Players Championship. With its much-imitated 132-yard 17th elevating the concept of the island green to an entirely new level, the TPC’s creative use of waste areas and greens contoured to repel inferior approaches once again captured the design world’s attention. Several years later, as advances in equipment began to presage changes in the game’s fundamental balance, Dye stepped things up even further, first with the Stadium course at PGA West (1986), then, in 1990, with the windswept Ocean course at Kiawah Island.
It is interesting to note that for most of his career, Pete Dye has charged considerably less for his services than many other big-name architects, and, occasionally, has worked essentially for free. Further, he has long built his courses in the oldest of fashions, seldom using maps or even sketches, always improvising and refining in the field. Misunderstood by many but widely observed by all, Pete Dye has surely been postwar golf’s most important – and copied – golf course designer.
DENNY SHUTE
Born: Cleveland, OH 10/25/1904 Died: Akron, OH 5/13/1974
An outstanding player primarily during the 1930s, Herman Densmore “Denny” Shute was a 15-time winner on the PGA Tour despite entering far fewer events than many of his brethren. His first important victory came at the 1930 Los Angeles Open when he defeated Bobby Cruickshank and Horton Smith by four. Three years later, while traveling abroad with the Ryder Cup team, Shute won his first Major at the Open Championship at St Andrews, riding four straight 73s into a playoff with countryman Craig Wood, which Shute won by two. His best finish at the Masters was a tie for fifth in 1935, while at the U.S. Open he was seven times among the top 10, finishing second in 1941 and losing in a three-way playoff to Byron Nelson and Craig Wood in 1939 in Philadelphia.
Shute’s luck ran a bit better in the PGA Championship, however, an event he would win in 1936 and ’37 and remain the last man to claim back-to-back until Tiger Woods in 1999 and 2000. In 1936 at Pinehurst, Shute bounced Bill Mehlhorn in the semis before closing out long-hitting Jimmy Thomson on the 34th hole of the final with an eagle. In ’37, he caught a break when Jug McSpaden missed a four-footer at the 36th to win, opening the door for Shute to triumph with a par at the 37th.
A quiet, focused and well-liked man, Shute gained a bit of unwanted notoriety in 1939 when his entry into the PGA was refused because his entry fee arrived a day late. A threatened boycott by other stars got Shute into the field, of course, but the story is highly illustrative for those who might assume the PGA of America’s preoccupation with money to be strictly a modern thing.
CAROL SEMPLE THOMPSON
Born: Sewickley, PA 10/27/1948
The rare golfer whose game truly has improved with age, Pennsylvanian Carole Semple Thompson (b.Sewickley 10/27/1948) is the all-time champion of Curtis Cup participation, playing in a remarkable 12 matches between 1974-2002 and amassing a record total of 18 victories, including the 2002 clincher at Pittsburgh’s Fox Chapel GC. The low amateur in four U.S. Women’s Opens, Thompson won the 1973 U.S. Amateur (1 up over Anne Quast Sander at Montclair, NJ), then lost her title defense in the 1974 final to Cynthia Hill. Her summer wasn’t a total loss, however, for after traveling across to Porthcawl, Thompson defeated Angela Bonallack in the British Ladies final to become only the ninth player to claim both national amateur titles. Also the winner of the 1976 and ’87 North & South Amateurs, the 1986 Trans-Mississippi and the USGA’s contemporary Mid-Amateur title in 1990 and ’97, Thompson further solidified her dominance by winning four consecutive U.S. Senior Women’s Amateurs from 1999-2002.
HERBERT WARREN WIND
Born: Brockton, MA 8/11/1916 Died: Bedford, MA 5/30/2005
The Dean of American golf writers, Herbert Warren Wind graduated Yale University in 1937, then journeyed to England to earn a Masters degree at Cambridge in 1939. Fascinated by golf after seeing such stars as Francis Ouimet, Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen play during his youth, Wind became fully addicted to the game while in Britain, attending the 1938 Walker Cup matches at St Andrews and meeting the great Bernard Darwin.
Wartime saw Wind stationed in both China and, during the occupation, Tokyo. Upon returning Stateside, he landed a job writing profiles for the New Yorker while also researching and writing his first book, the epic Story of American Golf (Farrar, Strauss, 1948). An enduring classic which has been reprinted as recently as 2000, this masterpiece opened numerous literary doors, paving the way for famous biographical collaborations with Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus, as well as with Ben Hogan for the instructional epic The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (A.S. Barnes, 1957). Another period work, The Complete Golfer (Simon & Schuster, 1954) showed Wind as a most astute editor, for a half-century later, this remains among the very best anthologies of golf material ever assembled.
Blessed with a pleasant, informative style that is at once extremely learned yet relaxed and highly accessible, Wind gained great fame as a writer and editor in the early years of Sports Illustrated, then for his expansive essays on all aspects of golf upon returning to the New Yorker in 1962. Two anthologies of Wind’s magazine work can be deemed essential, Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book (Simon & Schuster, 1971) and Following Through (Ticknor & Fields, 1985) as they represent, quite simply, the best that American golf writing has ever had to offer.
CRAIG WOOD
Born: Lake Placid, NY 11/18/1901 Died: Palm Beach, FL 5/7/1968
Perhaps as popular a player among his peers as has ever teed it up, Craig Ralph Wood came out of Lake Placid, NY to make a major splash in golf during the game’s prewar Golden Age. The son of a timber company foreman, Wood was big, blond and exceptionally powerful, yet he also possessed the sort of refined skills that led to 21 victories on the PGA Tour between 1928-44. As a glamour figure golf has seen few grander, for Wood married a beautiful New York heiress and lived the jet set life when jet-setters traveled by Packard. Yet he was universally hailed as the ultimate non-celebrity, a down-to-earth man who routinely helped younger players and remained modest to the core. Indeed Sam Snead once called him “the nicest guy I think I’ve ever seen.”
On the links, Wood was a long and superbly straight driver of the ball, an earlier version of Greg Norman. And beyond the driving, blond hair and gregarious lifestyles, the Wood-Norman similarities hold one more unfortunate component, for Craig Wood was among the unluckiest golfers of all time. Like Norman, Wood lost all four Major championships in playoffs. At the Masters, he was the victim of Gene Sarazen’s miraculous double eagle, his seemingly insurmountable three-shot lead vanishing in a heartbeat before Sarazen beat him over 36 holes the next day. At the U.S. Open it was Byron Nelson beating him in an classic 36-hole playoff which saw both men shoot exceptional 68s over the first 18. In Britain Wood had largely himself to blame, driving into the Swilcan Burn to commence a 1933 Open Championship playoff at St Andrews, ultimately losing to Denny Shute by five strokes. And then, inevitably, there was the 1934 PGA Championship. Facing his own former assistant Paul Runyan in the final, Wood hit his second shot on the first playoff hole, a par 5, to just nine feet while Runyan needed a deflection off of a car tire just to lie 60 yards short in the fairway. Runyan wedged to a foot, Wood missed and Runyan closed him out on the 38th.
As his 21 titles testify, however, Wood also knew how to win and in 1941, at age 39, he finally broke through to become the first man ever to capture the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same season, the former by three over Byron Nelson, the latter by the same margin over Denny Shute. By this time, however, any Grand Slam aspirations had died amidst the wartime cancellation of the Open Championship, with the conflict soon removing most big-event play from what little remained of Wood’s prime.
After serving as the golf professional at Winged Foot during the war years, Wood would ultimately retire to the Bahamas and Florida, outliving his wife and dying childless in 1968.
Anyway, to save time, I once again borrow from my Book of Golfers to profile the 2008 inductees:
PETE DYE (USA)
Born: Urbana, OH 12/29/1925
Old Tom Morris was among the first to codify it, Willie Park, Jr. and H.S. Colt advanced it greatly, C.B. Macdonald gave it Golden Age definition and Robert Trent Jones modernized it worldwide. Yet for all the impact that these men had on golf course design, a strong argument can be made that no one has influenced it more than an insurance broker from rural Urbana, OH, one Paul “Pete” Dye.
A fine amateur who competed in one British and five U.S. Amateurs, Dye (b.12/29/1925) played at Florida’s Rollins College where he met and married Alice O’Neal before returning North to sell insurance. In 1959, Dye left the business world to begin designing golf courses, initially creating a several low-budget Midwestern layouts hardly demanding of the world’s attention. But in 1963, Pete and Alice took a month-long trip to Scotland, where they discovered pot bunkers, unmanicured rough, railroad sleepers shoring up hazards and a far less power-oriented approach to game. The impact of these things upon the Dyes was immense, and once back in the States Pete blended them into a somewhat modernized hybrid that would soon become the most copied style in the business.
Crooked Stick, a local Indianapolis club completed in 1966, was the first layout to reflect this old/new look, with The Golf Club, a 1967 project in New Albany, OH, spreading the word a bit farther. But only in 1969, when Dye teamed with Jack Nicklaus to build Hilton Head Island’s Harbour Town Golf Links, was the Dye style widely introduced to the world stage. Initially measuring little more than 6,600 yards, the tight, strategic Harbor Town hosted the PGA Tour’s first Heritage Classic in 1969, yielding the highest 36-hole cut of the season with rounds in the 80s outnumbering sub-par scores roughly 2 to 1.
In 1981, Dye would again change the face of architecture with his TPC at Sawgrass, a longer, tougher track built to serve as permanent host of the PGA Tour’s Players Championship. With its much-imitated 132-yard 17th elevating the concept of the island green to an entirely new level, the TPC’s creative use of waste areas and greens contoured to repel inferior approaches once again captured the design world’s attention. Several years later, as advances in equipment began to presage changes in the game’s fundamental balance, Dye stepped things up even further, first with the Stadium course at PGA West (1986), then, in 1990, with the windswept Ocean course at Kiawah Island.
It is interesting to note that for most of his career, Pete Dye has charged considerably less for his services than many other big-name architects, and, occasionally, has worked essentially for free. Further, he has long built his courses in the oldest of fashions, seldom using maps or even sketches, always improvising and refining in the field. Misunderstood by many but widely observed by all, Pete Dye has surely been postwar golf’s most important – and copied – golf course designer.
DENNY SHUTE
Born: Cleveland, OH 10/25/1904 Died: Akron, OH 5/13/1974
An outstanding player primarily during the 1930s, Herman Densmore “Denny” Shute was a 15-time winner on the PGA Tour despite entering far fewer events than many of his brethren. His first important victory came at the 1930 Los Angeles Open when he defeated Bobby Cruickshank and Horton Smith by four. Three years later, while traveling abroad with the Ryder Cup team, Shute won his first Major at the Open Championship at St Andrews, riding four straight 73s into a playoff with countryman Craig Wood, which Shute won by two. His best finish at the Masters was a tie for fifth in 1935, while at the U.S. Open he was seven times among the top 10, finishing second in 1941 and losing in a three-way playoff to Byron Nelson and Craig Wood in 1939 in Philadelphia.
Shute’s luck ran a bit better in the PGA Championship, however, an event he would win in 1936 and ’37 and remain the last man to claim back-to-back until Tiger Woods in 1999 and 2000. In 1936 at Pinehurst, Shute bounced Bill Mehlhorn in the semis before closing out long-hitting Jimmy Thomson on the 34th hole of the final with an eagle. In ’37, he caught a break when Jug McSpaden missed a four-footer at the 36th to win, opening the door for Shute to triumph with a par at the 37th.
A quiet, focused and well-liked man, Shute gained a bit of unwanted notoriety in 1939 when his entry into the PGA was refused because his entry fee arrived a day late. A threatened boycott by other stars got Shute into the field, of course, but the story is highly illustrative for those who might assume the PGA of America’s preoccupation with money to be strictly a modern thing.
CAROL SEMPLE THOMPSON
Born: Sewickley, PA 10/27/1948
The rare golfer whose game truly has improved with age, Pennsylvanian Carole Semple Thompson (b.Sewickley 10/27/1948) is the all-time champion of Curtis Cup participation, playing in a remarkable 12 matches between 1974-2002 and amassing a record total of 18 victories, including the 2002 clincher at Pittsburgh’s Fox Chapel GC. The low amateur in four U.S. Women’s Opens, Thompson won the 1973 U.S. Amateur (1 up over Anne Quast Sander at Montclair, NJ), then lost her title defense in the 1974 final to Cynthia Hill. Her summer wasn’t a total loss, however, for after traveling across to Porthcawl, Thompson defeated Angela Bonallack in the British Ladies final to become only the ninth player to claim both national amateur titles. Also the winner of the 1976 and ’87 North & South Amateurs, the 1986 Trans-Mississippi and the USGA’s contemporary Mid-Amateur title in 1990 and ’97, Thompson further solidified her dominance by winning four consecutive U.S. Senior Women’s Amateurs from 1999-2002.
HERBERT WARREN WIND
Born: Brockton, MA 8/11/1916 Died: Bedford, MA 5/30/2005
The Dean of American golf writers, Herbert Warren Wind graduated Yale University in 1937, then journeyed to England to earn a Masters degree at Cambridge in 1939. Fascinated by golf after seeing such stars as Francis Ouimet, Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen play during his youth, Wind became fully addicted to the game while in Britain, attending the 1938 Walker Cup matches at St Andrews and meeting the great Bernard Darwin.
Wartime saw Wind stationed in both China and, during the occupation, Tokyo. Upon returning Stateside, he landed a job writing profiles for the New Yorker while also researching and writing his first book, the epic Story of American Golf (Farrar, Strauss, 1948). An enduring classic which has been reprinted as recently as 2000, this masterpiece opened numerous literary doors, paving the way for famous biographical collaborations with Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus, as well as with Ben Hogan for the instructional epic The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (A.S. Barnes, 1957). Another period work, The Complete Golfer (Simon & Schuster, 1954) showed Wind as a most astute editor, for a half-century later, this remains among the very best anthologies of golf material ever assembled.
Blessed with a pleasant, informative style that is at once extremely learned yet relaxed and highly accessible, Wind gained great fame as a writer and editor in the early years of Sports Illustrated, then for his expansive essays on all aspects of golf upon returning to the New Yorker in 1962. Two anthologies of Wind’s magazine work can be deemed essential, Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book (Simon & Schuster, 1971) and Following Through (Ticknor & Fields, 1985) as they represent, quite simply, the best that American golf writing has ever had to offer.
CRAIG WOOD
Born: Lake Placid, NY 11/18/1901 Died: Palm Beach, FL 5/7/1968
Perhaps as popular a player among his peers as has ever teed it up, Craig Ralph Wood came out of Lake Placid, NY to make a major splash in golf during the game’s prewar Golden Age. The son of a timber company foreman, Wood was big, blond and exceptionally powerful, yet he also possessed the sort of refined skills that led to 21 victories on the PGA Tour between 1928-44. As a glamour figure golf has seen few grander, for Wood married a beautiful New York heiress and lived the jet set life when jet-setters traveled by Packard. Yet he was universally hailed as the ultimate non-celebrity, a down-to-earth man who routinely helped younger players and remained modest to the core. Indeed Sam Snead once called him “the nicest guy I think I’ve ever seen.”
On the links, Wood was a long and superbly straight driver of the ball, an earlier version of Greg Norman. And beyond the driving, blond hair and gregarious lifestyles, the Wood-Norman similarities hold one more unfortunate component, for Craig Wood was among the unluckiest golfers of all time. Like Norman, Wood lost all four Major championships in playoffs. At the Masters, he was the victim of Gene Sarazen’s miraculous double eagle, his seemingly insurmountable three-shot lead vanishing in a heartbeat before Sarazen beat him over 36 holes the next day. At the U.S. Open it was Byron Nelson beating him in an classic 36-hole playoff which saw both men shoot exceptional 68s over the first 18. In Britain Wood had largely himself to blame, driving into the Swilcan Burn to commence a 1933 Open Championship playoff at St Andrews, ultimately losing to Denny Shute by five strokes. And then, inevitably, there was the 1934 PGA Championship. Facing his own former assistant Paul Runyan in the final, Wood hit his second shot on the first playoff hole, a par 5, to just nine feet while Runyan needed a deflection off of a car tire just to lie 60 yards short in the fairway. Runyan wedged to a foot, Wood missed and Runyan closed him out on the 38th.
As his 21 titles testify, however, Wood also knew how to win and in 1941, at age 39, he finally broke through to become the first man ever to capture the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same season, the former by three over Byron Nelson, the latter by the same margin over Denny Shute. By this time, however, any Grand Slam aspirations had died amidst the wartime cancellation of the Open Championship, with the conflict soon removing most big-event play from what little remained of Wood’s prime.
After serving as the golf professional at Winged Foot during the war years, Wood would ultimately retire to the Bahamas and Florida, outliving his wife and dying childless in 1968.
Daniel
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Reader Comments (2)
Back in January, when ballots for the World Golf Hall of Fame class of 2008 came out, I wrote a column regarding the future HOF chances of todays top players, and naming several stars of the past who, to borrow from the Jefferson Airplane, are “conspicuous only in their absence.” Well, it appears that the class of ’08 will now have five members, and it’s gratifying to see that two of the Hall’s previously glaring omissions have been rectified: Craig Wood and Denny Shute. As for the others, Pete Dye is the very definition of “no-brainer” as, for that matter, is the Dean of American golf writers Herbert Warren Wind. Carol Semple Thompson is a bit less so, but her accomplishments are undeniably impressive.
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