“YIPPEEE! Been playing for three weeks now and I’d almost given up getting a hole in one.”

November 1960

“Nice Shot.”

November 1959

“One snicker, remember, and you’re through.”

June 1961

“I’ll bet I couldn’t do that again if I tried all day.”

June 1955

 

October 1960

“Hey, I said I’d take the dog for a walk. I didn’t say where.”

May/June 2004

“Where do I register for the father and son tournament?”

July/August 1998

Cartoons: Tee Time The Saturday Evening Post

I was never what you’d call a good friend of Drew Claringbold. We were acquaintances mostly, occasional golfing buddies. Like most members of the Duffin’s Bay Golf & Country Club, what I knew best about him was his swing. His superb swing. When I was a teenager hanging out at the club and looking for caddy jobs, I would inevitably wander over to the practice tee if Claringbold was there hitting balls. On rare occasions, I’d be the only spectator present, but most of the time there’d be at least six or seven golfers watching him hit a wonderful low draw, his magnificent high fade, punch shots, slow risers, lobs. He could work the ball just about any way he wanted. I’m sure we all thought if we observed him long and hard enough, we’d walk away with the magic formula that would make our swings as fluid as his. In my case, it never happened, and let’s leave it at that.

Drew Claringbold was simply the best golfer at the Duffin’s Bay Golf & Country Club. It may not sound like much, but consider that he was 11 times the club champion, four times runner-up, and five times its senior champion. The belief around the clubhouse was that if his game was clicking, the tournament was pretty much settled before he reached the back nine. What prevented Claringbold from winning every year was consistency. Claringbold, so blessed with a swing for the ages, was also cursed with an uncertain putting stroke. He wasn’t a bad putter, just an unpredictable one.

When he was rolling the ball smoothly, confidently, he was unbeatable, and those who were with him the day he set the course record of 60 (on a par 72), swore up and down they had never seen a player putt it better. Claringbold fired at the flag all day and only a few unlucky bounces kept him from being inside eight feet on every hole. On the rare occasions he was 20 feet or more away, he holed each putt as if it were a tap in.

“Yeah, it was a pretty good day out there,” was all Claringbold said afterward as he bought drinks for his three playing partners and a few hangers-on who had walked with him from about the 14th hole, when word reached the clubhouse that he was on a birdie tear.

But that was just one magnificent day in a long, spectacular career.

None of the Duffin’s Bay old-timers could remember a time when Claringbold didn’t have that swing. Those in the know, and with a few connections, said Claringbold’s swing rivaled Ben Hogan’s. That both had tapped into some great golfing secret that only a select few had ever done. Among the stories I heard at Duffin’s 19th hole was that Claringbold had played with the great Hogan a few times and had never lost by more than a couple of strokes. One story floating around was that he even beat the grand master one autumn day in a friendly match in Texas some 50 years ago. Claringbold never confirmed it, but a faint smile would escape his lips when anyone ever brought it up.

He was a lawyer by trade and a damn good one according to most. I saw him try a couple of cases and recall the grace with which he walked around the courtroom, his lithe figure moved first to the witness, then back to his desk, then over to the jury. He showed intense concentration as he pored over his notes or deconstructed a story that didn’t quite fit the scenario. The demands of his profession, however, never got in the way of squeezing in his four or five rounds a week. Such are the perks of the small-town lawyer.

Once, when I still had the callowness and bravery of someone shy of 20, I asked Claringbold, with deepest respect in my voice, why he hadn’t pursued a professional golfing career. He looked at me quizzically, as if no one had ever posed the question, and then stared out toward one of the fairways for what seemed like such a long time that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. But I stayed patient and imagined he was replaying some great shot in his mind before giving an answer. Finally, he looked back at me and with a shrug and said, “I guess I loved the law more.”

Then he walked away, head bent and shoulders slouched, as if he regretted his answer and his life choice.

Despite his accomplishments on the links, and the awe he inspired in all of us Duffin’s Bay golf groupies, there was one nemesis to Claringbold’s game, besides the aforementioned putting. To the astonishment of everyone, Claringbold had never been able to birdie the 10th hole. According to sources better than I, he had birdied every other hole countless times and eagled about half of them. But the 10th remained unattainable.

What made this remarkable was that the opening hole of the closing nine was far from being the club’s toughest. Running almost straight for 465 yards to a fairly generous green, the 10th was the type of hole that needed two solid, but not spectacular, shots, followed by a good putt for birdie. A few poplars, spruce, and maples hugged the right side to separate it from the par-5 first hole, and a couple of shallow bunkers protected the green on either side. But beyond a few bushes at the back, there was nothing too challenging for a good golfer, let alone a great one, to overcome.

Still, Claringbold couldn’t birdie it.

Even when he was playing his best, he could only summon par. There was no explaining it really. His woods and irons were so true that he rarely missed the green in two swings. But somehow he could never get it down from there. Twenty feet, 12 feet, eight feet, five feet. Regardless of how far his ball was from the hole, his putter would desert him. Once when I was older and playing with him, he stuck his second shot 18 inches from the flag. I didn’t dare say anything in case it jinxed him, but I could barely contain the thought that I’d be there when he finally birdied the 10th. But when he hit his putt, the stroke was just slightly fast and the ball lipped out.

“Damn this hole,” he said, in what was probably the strongest language he had ever used.

In later years, when he had retired from law, Claringbold would spend almost all his days at Duffin’s Bay. On some evenings just before the sun would set, he’d head for the 10th hole just to play it and nothing else. Sometimes he’d hit a couple of balls to increase the odds. Drew knew that a birdie under such circumstances wouldn’t count, but he had to prove to himself it could be done. Even with the rules of golf loosened, he couldn’t notch the elusive bird.

It was strange and unexplainable. Here was a guy who routinely birdied, and a few times eagled, the par-4 seventh, easily the toughest hole on the course—a landing area that was maybe 25 yards wide and 250 yards uphill from the small tee. Hit it too far left or right and you were in the woods. Hit it short of the landing area, as most of us did, and you were fighting a blind, uphill second shot at best, or else enduring the slow agony of watching your ball roll downhill to a flat spot that was maybe 100 yards from the tee.

We all cursed the seventh.

Once, when I was caddying for Claringbold, he smacked a lovely drive on the seventh. It pierced the slight wind and landed at what looked to be 275 yards dead center. When we got there no ball was seen. I walked around in circles for several minutes and finally noticed a 7-iron someone must have forgotten lying on the fairway at about the 270-yard mark. Acting on a hunch, I headed into the woods on the right, and there was his ball, dead behind a couple of birch trees in thick grass. No shot.

Incredibly bad luck. Claringbold grunted disapproval, but otherwise seemed unfazed. He looked at his shot, saw that he couldn’t go straight for the green, and asked me to walk across to the left woods to “keep an eye on this one.” I’m sure what happened next was planned. He took a 4-wood from his bag; made a short, punchy swing; and popped the ball almost straight left, watched it carom a tree near where I was standing, and saw it bounce on the green. One putt, 18 feet, for his third stroke.

He didn’t say anything until the eighth tee where he pulled out his card and pencil (he didn’t like caddies keeping his score) and muttered “routine birdie.” We all cracked up. He then took out the 7-iron we’d found on the seventh, teed his ball about 180 yards from the par-3 flag, and swung. Knocked it in for an ace before he tossed the club in the garbage can.

Geez, the guy was amazing. Except at the 10th.

When he was in his late 70s, Claringbold was in a minor car accident, which reduced some of his mobility. He still had the swing, but age and injury had reduced its power. He played occasionally for a year or two after, but he was eventually relegated to sitting in the clubhouse to watch others play the game he loved and excelled at. Ironically–he’d say unfortunately–the main clubhouse window overlooked the 10th tee.

Every so often I’d see him staring out that window and shaking his head. “I could birdie that hole,” I heard him once mutter. “I could.”

One evening in late summer, I walked off the ninth into the clubhouse and saw him finishing up his dinner. He looked up and smiled.

“How’s the score today?” he asked.

“Not bad today, Drew. I’m five over.”

“Pretty good… for you.” And he chuckled. “You going to fit in the back nine?”

“Naahhh, not enough time.”

He stood up, slowly. “Come on, a group just went off. You could do it.”

He stared at me, not saying anything, but something made me say what I hadn’t even considered for the past couple of years. “Tell you what. I’ll play the 10th and come back on the 18th if you come with me.”

“Sure,” he said, without hesitation.

“And play, too.”

That stopped him momentarily. He looked first at me, then the 10th hole, then back at me. There was just a hint of a smile. “Of course, my clubs aren’t here. They’re in the trunk of my car.” Who knows why he kept them there, long after his playing days were over.

“Really? Well, give me the keys and I’ll get them for you.”

Claringbold seemed to be doing everything in slow motion, even talking. “All right,” he said quietly. “Yeah, let’s do it. I’ll meet you on the tee.”

He moved sluggishly in an awkward shuffle, but didn’t change his mind. I went to get his clubs and took my time, knowing it would take him awhile to reach the 10th. When I got there, he was sitting on a bench, pale and weak looking.

“You sure you’re up for this, Drew?”

He coughed violently for a moment, and then stood up. “Yes, yes, I’m all right. Damn congestion, that’s all. Hand me the driver, please.”

Something about golf invigorates a person. Perhaps it’s the notion of being outside with nature, breathing the air, the quiet hum of a summer evening. But as he took his club, he appeared to shake off 20 years of age, standing tall once again and looking as if he had never left the game. Watching him take his backswing was like seeing him again through 18-year-old eyes. For a man in his condition, he simply smoked it. It landed about 220 yards out and rolled another 25 dead center.

“Not bad for an old geezer,” he said.

For one of the few times in my life, I outdrove him, but at that point I didn’t care. I was getting one more chance to play with Drew Claringbold, and he was still showing me a thing or two. He had his clubs on a pull cart, but was breathing hard when we reached his ball. He waved off any suggestion that we stop and rest. “I’m feeling OK,” he said, but the words came out languidly between breaths. He was sitting about 220 yards from the flag, and I suspect that the drive took so much out of him that there was no chance he could go for the green. Claringbold thought otherwise. “Hand me the driver again, please. I think I’ve got a pretty good lie.”

There are those that’ll tell you they were there the day Drew Claringbold hit his second shot with a driver on the 10th. They’ll rhyme off details about the wind conditions, the lie, the grace of his swing—even what he was wearing that evening. But I know it was just the two of us out there in the middle of the fairway, the sun low on the horizon. When the club connected with the ball, I followed its flight, knowing he’d hit a good one. It just sailed, and for a moment, I had the feeling it might never come down. But a sound nearby interrupted, and I looked back to where he had been standing.

I like to think that before he crumpled in a heap some 245 yards out on the 10th fairway, Drew Claringbold, before he drew in his last breath, had also watched that sweet second shot of his. I like to think he looked intently as it hit the front of the green, took a couple of bounces, and started rolling. And I also like to think that the expression on his face, as he lay there on the ground, was one of pleasure rather than some final grimace of pain more likely to accompany a sudden heart attack. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that throughout his long, marvelous golfing life, Drew Claringbold, the finest man I ever had the chance to play the game with, never birdied the 10th hole at the Duffin’s Bay Golf and Country Club. But I’ll never forget the last shot he hit and how it rolled smoothly toward the hole, before dropping into the cup.

For an eagle.

The Last Sweet Shot of Drew Claringbold The Saturday Evening Post

The Swimmer

Diana Nyad was 28 years old in 1978 the first time she tried to swim from Cuba to Florida. She went 42 hours before conditions forced her to quit. The following year Nyad swam 102 miles from Bimini, The Bahamas, to Jupiter, Florida. She got out, toweled off, and determined never to get in the water again.

More than three decades later her record still stands. It’s the longest uninterrupted open-water swim without a shark cage—marathon swimming’s equivalent to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak—and Nyad did it without the benefit of GPS and other technology that’s now allowing swimmers to push way past the limits of earlier generations.

But as 2010 neared, Nyad, approaching 60, yearned again to do something extreme, something beyond her previous accomplishments. Against all odds she decided to complete that Cuba-to-Florida swim. “I wanted to be filled with a feeling of commitment to something,” she says. “It’s not the swimming, per se, it was the high of being immersed in something that extreme.”

She put herself through an arduous training regimen for two years and, in August of last year, she got back in the water.

By the rules of the swim she could not touch the boat or be touched by anyone on it. That meant not just swimming the 103-mile stretch of the Florida Straits but staying awake and pushing on for at least 60 hours through hard currents in shark-infested waters. With a support team alongside her, Nyad lasted 56 miles and almost 30 hours before an injury to her shoulder and an 11-hour asthma attack that wouldn’t abate finally defeated her.

That she’d try again seemed unlikely. Gathering a good team is expensive and logistically complicated, requiring money, boats, supplies, visas, and travel arrangements. Moreover, trying again would mean maintaining her fitness and positive mental outlook for another year—unless she tried again right away.

And that’s what Nyad did.

In September, barely six weeks after the earlier attempt, Nyad returned with her team to Havana’s Hemingway Marina and leaped back in. She began swimming, between 50 and 54 strokes per minute, propelling herself through water at about the pace of a good walker, hour by hour, as the sun fell into the Caribbean. Her shoulder was fine, and there was no asthma. She swam through the night, the darkness of the sky and the deep sea blending together. She swam all the next day and into the second night. The water was much calmer. For a while it seemed as if she would achieve her dream.

What she didn’t count on were the box jellyfish—umbrella-shaped organisms that give vicious and potentially lethal stings. Nyad suffered an attack only two hours offshore and a second sting at around hour 26. The pain was exquisite. Her face swelled. The doctor who dived in to help free her from the creature had to be injected with two shots of epinephrine.

And still Nyad went on—until doctors warned that a third attack would be likely to kill her. When she stopped she’d gone 42 hours and an estimated 43-69 nautical miles.

Nyad has said she will try again this summer. But whether anyone can do the swim given all the obstacles is a question. Possible or not, Nyad does not believe her age is a factor. “All athletes wish they had the head they have now then,” she says. “Physically I’m stronger now. I used to swim in anger, now I’m happy. I have a whole new attitude about my life and life in general. Sixty is the middle of middle age. I’m just getting started.”

[Follow Nyad's journey on Twitter at @diananyad.]

The Trekker

Todd Carmichael

Todd Carmichael placed one foot methodically in front of the other, his shoulders in a harness that pulled a red wagon loaded with 50-gallon jerrycans of water.

It was September of 2010, and Carmichael was attempting to become the first person to walk alone across Death Valley. But he had barely started when he came to an impasse—a 45-plus-degree downhill slope. His only option was to off-load the wagon’s 450 pounds of supplies and carry each drum and then the wagon itself, one piece at a time. After 12 hours, he’d covered a mere 300 yards—of a 160-mile journey.

Ninety miles and ten days later, walking all night and sleeping by day to escape the 118-degree heat (in the shade), Carmichael had lacerations on his legs and puncture wounds on his feet where hard needles had speared his boots. Then, at 3:30 in the morning, Carmichael made a wrong turn and strayed miles off course. In the darkness there was no point of reference, no connection to the rest of the world. It was just him, the moon and Venus, and coyotes trailing behind. He looked up at the sky, drew a breath, and knew at that moment that he had to be the happiest man on earth. A short while later he would regain his position and continue onward one step at a time.

In his ordinary life in Philadelphia Carmichael is the T-shirt-and-dungarees CEO of La Colombe Torrefaction, a coffee supplier to high-end restaurants that exceeds $20 million a year in sales. In 2008 he and his wife, singer-songwriter Lauren Hart, adopted three girls from Ethiopia, one of several African countries where he sources beans and funds projects to improve access to clean water. Trekking, though, is how he responds to that call of the wild and steps off the grid.

A full life, he says, requires risk. “What happens if you fail? How do you mitigate the risk? I look around and see people who live in the safest places in the world, and they are preoccupied with anxieties and fears because they don’t know what risk is anymore.”

Carmichael, a former Washington State track champion, is part of a small, informal fraternity of elite trekkers who eschew such conquests as climbing Mt. Everest as “too Disney World.” He has hiked across portions of the Sahara, Namib, and Arabian deserts. In 2008 he became just the third person—and the first American—to solo to the South Pole, walking almost the whole way because his skis broke, and still doing it faster than those who had finished before him on skis.

At 49 Carmichael is practically geriatric for this community, but even the youngest, hardest-core members regard Death Valley as unconquerable. Because the mountains enclose the main riverbed, the dry air is trapped like in an oven. The valley itself is ripped apart by thousands of intimidating pans and washes—dry river beds—many of them 25 feet deep. The margin for error is extremely slim: Carmichael’s first attempt had failed because his wagon couldn’t stand up to the punishment. This time, he’d redesigned it, creating a gyrating, flexible axle that would turn and bend over the punishing terrain.Still, he hadn’t counted on the tires bursting every 20 minutes from the heat. All the pumping to refill them had left him with raw ulcers on his hands.

For 10 days Carmichael experienced oscillating joys and ordeals, cosmic harmony and physical pain. “People think it’s impossible,” he said before he’d departed. “That intrigues me. With enough focus, drive, and attention, it is possible. It’s just not easy.”

Indeed. By the 11th day, the constant pumping of his tires had finally become too taxing, and it had taken away precious hours that he could have spent resting. After pulling the wagon through seas of roasted sand, hour after hour, day after day, forward progress became impossible. The tires began to burst beyond repair. He had traveled about 90 of the 160 miles. He called his project manager, Patrick Libois. “That’s it,” he said. “It’s over, dude.”

He made his way to the Furnace Creek Ranch, a golf resort whose busloads of day-tripping German tourists could not have been farther removed from his own desert experience.
He’d come all this way, again, another year gone when he didn’t know how many he had left to do this. The hair on his normally shaved dome and face had grown in all white, and when he looked in the mirror he saw his grandfather.

But a few hours and a shave and a shower later, he was already gathering himself for another attempt.

“When you have to fold the tent, it’s not a fun experience,” he would say later. “The word that goes through your mind is ‘fail, fail, fail.’ But once you get some perspective you realize that you learned something important. In the end, it’s not about how many tries you needed to get something done. It’s about not quitting and keeping at it until you achieve the goal. So, no, I didn’t fail. Failure is if it broke me, if I said, ‘I’m done, I’m not going back.’” He paused. “I just didn’t make it—this time.”

“So you’re going back?” a reporter asked.

“Next year, baby! The third time will be a charm.”

Carmichael has plans to make another attempt on Death Valley this September.

The Golf ZenMaster

Ben Witter

Ben Witter does implausible things with golf balls. Amazing things. He strikes them far or makes them twist or bend. Sometimes it’s as if a ball he hits is a yo-yo attached on a very, very long string connected to his club. If you blink you miss it. Still, your impulse is to blink to be sure your eyes haven’t deceived you.

‘“A trick shot is only a trick shot if you call it in advance,” he says, and then explains the shot he intends to make to a gathering of about 150 people who have come to see him near his home in central Pennsylvania. He will hit it off a 3-foot-high tee under an arched footbridge, skim it off the face of some water in a lake beyond, and make it land about 250 yards away by an inflated yellow exercise ball in the middle of the fairway. And then, as promised, he hits precisely that shot.

Witter is a former world long-drive champion—he once hit a ball 409 yards, almost all of it carry—and can still mash it jaw-dropping distances. At 6’2” and 215 pounds he has
a physique that most men half his age would envy. For 20 years tour pros such as former LPGA star Jan Stephenson and fellow long-drive champ Carl Wolter have traveled long distances to learn at the knee of this golf Zen master.

If he has lost anything along the way, it’s not because he’s 47. It’s that every time he seems poised to move on, the cancer that he has fought through since he was 22 keeps reappearing. So the amazing things you see—Ben hitting balls while standing on exercise balls, bending the flight of shots, making golf balls fly like F-14s or turn like boomerangs, all while explaining the physics of ball flight and “swing planes” to slack-jawed audiences—is all the more staggering for what you can’t see—that he has one lung and a layer of thick scar tissue around his ribs that constricts his lateral movement or that he has no central vision in his right eye, depriving him of depth perception. Or that the day before, he was getting experimental radiation treatment.

Or that Ben’s lovely teenage daughter, Gabbie, has had to overcome a rare form of cancer. (For more about the Witter family’s struggle, go to takeaswing4benandgabbie.com.)

The thing is to keep going on: “If cancer has taught me one thing,” says Ben who after recent treatment is doing well, “it’s that everyone has a date of expiry, and no one knows what it is. Some of us know it’ll be sooner, but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to live every day.”

The way he has stood up to adversity and never given up may be Witter’s most admirable trick of all.

Take It To The Limit The Saturday Evening Post

"Well, that cuts it to 423."
from July 28, 1956

"YIPPEE! Been playing for three weeks now and
I'd almost given up getting a hole in one."
from November 12, 1960

"I hope you don't think for one minute
that I enjoy these business trips!"
from May/June 2012

"I'll bet I couldn't do that again if I tried all day."
from June 11, 1955

"Guess again."
from April 1, 1961

from October 22, 1960

"Hey, I said I'd take the dog for a walk.
I didn't say where."
from May/June 2004

Cartoons: Golf—A Good Walk Spoiled The Saturday Evening Post

I looked at his hair. It was thick. It had a tendency to curl. It was exactly the right length — not too long, not too short. It wasn’t a butch through which his scalp showed pinkly. I envied him his hair and his even tan, every inch of which was exactly the same degree of darkness. There were no freckles, no peeling spots, I thought, figures that his hair should look right. He should know about such things. After all, fit’s the most famous barber since Delilah, although he abandoned his tonsorial trade about twenty-five years ago to sing for his living.

“I understand you’re a big man in the icechomping field,” I said to Perry Como. “I’m an ice eater myself, and it drives my wife to distraction. She says she can hear the echo of my molars all over the house. Does your dentist tell you it’s bad for your teeth when you crack a whole cube with one bite?”

Como looked cautiously around his office as if he were afraid it was bugged. “I’ve never told him,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“You mean he can’t tell by just looking into your mouth?” I asked.

“He’s preoccupied with some other dental problems of mine,” Como explained. “For eighteen years I’ve had a small space between my two front teeth. That was my Number One problem. It was a minor one. I acquired a major one many years ago when they drilled why you should know this, but once your teeth are ground and capped, they’re tender afterward. If you get a little cavity or decay on the uncapped part of the tooth, the dentist has to take the cap off, drill a little higher and put on another cap. Dentically speaking, I’ve been going through hell for eighteen years. In all honesty, I guess if I had laid off my ice-breaker bit, my teeth would be in pretty good shape.”

I said, “I’m curious about how you go about crunching ice with caps on.”

“Obviously my caps are made of concrete,” Como said, “I can polish off a whole bowl of ice in no time at all.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I’ll tell you why I think I’m an ice craver. When I play a lot of golf, as I frequently do, and it’s very hot, I perspire bucketfuls. I get dehydrated and I have to push that lost water back into my body, I’m not very big, but in one round of golf I can ooze between five and seven pounds.”

“On just an ordinary, peaceful, quiet day of golf?” I asked.

“It’s actually water. It’s bloat that vanishes.”

I said, “I understand that you play a very leisurely game of golf, a lazy game. So why all the perspiration?”

He smiled, confessing, “I can sweat like a herd of wild animals. My pores are wide open and ready to go any time. I’ll tell you a secret,” he went on, “I know your spies have told you that my rounds of golf aren’t strenuous, that I keep my eyes and ears open to the crunch of grass underfoot and the sound of birdsong as I journey around eighteen holes. They doubtless tell you also that I seem to relish these things so greatly that I play very slowly. Well, to use a sweet word instead of a crude one, that’s a lot of hooey. I may appear to loiter, but honestly I’m just as fast as anybody else on a golf course.” He thought of something and added, “With the exception of England. I really had a problem there. For some reason, British players hit the ball and run. Their wives may find them something less than volcanic at home, but put them down on a golf course, and it’s Balaklava and The Charge of the Light Brigade all over again. They charge at you like wild boars — polite wild boars, mind you, but if they want to play through you, if you’re smart, you let them play.”

I said, “The only English golf match I’ve ever seen was one played between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for the Playing Fields of England Fund, They had to call it off on the fourth hole because they were driving their balls right down the spectators’ throats. Twelve or fifteen thousand people crowded onto the fairways until there weren’t any fairways; there were just masses of people.”

“I played in a few of those things myself,” Como said. “They’re fun until they start leaving you no room to play in. After that they’re murder.”

I said, “I helped Bob Hope write his story for The Saturday Evening Post. There are those who say he’s no good without his writers around him, but I can testify that there were many times when he said sidesplitting things to me on his own, without his writers thinking them up for him.”

“He’s a swifty with an ad lib,” Como agreed. “Hope’s played a lot of golf exhibitions for charity, and I’ve played with him on some of them. You gather together three or four characters like Hope, and ten or twenty thousand people are apt to turn out. When the galleries start lining up on the fairways until they leave only a long, narrow slit for you to drive through, it scares the hell out of you. You could kill a spectator if you hit him in the wrong spot.

“Most of the benefits I’ve played,” he went on, “have been for boys’ clubs or for such things as cerebral-palsy funds. I remember one day in Washington, D.C, when there were five of us—Hope and I, Ben Hogan, Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Demaret. Most of the people who’d come out to see us play weren’t golfers and knew no golf etiquette. They didn’t even have enough gumption to know they were in danger and get out of the way when Hope and Sullivan and I were shooting. Hogan and Demaret knew where their shots were going, but you can’t stand in front of Hope or me when we’re shooting without running a good chance of having a slice or a hook slam into you.

“That was the maddest day I can remember. Bob was flying in from somewhere with Jim Demaret. They were supposed to be there at one o’clock, but when they didn’t show up, Hogan gave the crowd a golf clinic.
He showed them how to hit some balls, then he explained his shots over a microphone to kill time. People were milling and trampling around out of hand, and I was hiding in the locker room. I wasn’t about to go out there and get flattened. Finally there was the sound of police-motorcycle sirens, and in came Hope.

“From the moment we teed off on the first hole, trying to play golf was ridiculous. By the time we got to where a ball had landed, it was gone, and we never saw it again. I didn’t see the same ball twice all day. There were supposed to be marshals to protect us — they were really to protect the crowd —but they didn’t. So the people gathered in the middle of the fairways and grabbed the balls as fast as we hit them. We kept trying anyhow and finally got to the fifth hole, which was a well-trapped par three. I’ll never forget what Bob did then. It showed a softer and kinder side of this man who seems so cocky on the outside. He told the rest of us, ‘I’m going to hit it in the trap,’ and sure enough, that’s where he hit it.

“I wish I had a movie of the action for the next fifteen minutes. Bob deliberately hit that ball from one trap to another, dealing out stale jokes for the crowd every second of the time. He was giving the crowd a show for their money, and it was hilariously funny. He’d hit under the ball so it would go straight up in the air, or he’d top it and bury it in the sand. You know, people consistently underestimate Bob. He’s much more than just a funny man; he’s a very kind man too.

“We played four more holes because we thought we ought to play at least nine, after which we dropped everything and ran for the clubhouse like rabbits. I simply couldn’t have stood another nine holes. We’d be there yet. It had taken us four and a half hours to play the holes we did play. When we saw a ball, we hit it. The rest of the time we were signing autographs and walking. A couple of times I even walked in the wrong direction because I couldn’t see the fairway.”

From Our Archives: I Call On Perry Como The Saturday Evening Post

© SEPS

A Look at the Post’s Occasional Lapses in Judgment

“I’ve found that golf is the best mild exercise for a woman. You won’t develop big muscles, and you can wear becoming clothes.”
—Post article in the May 1973 issue

We’re sure this comment was well intended at the time—and one has to give allowances for the fact that the writer was a top-ranked woman pro golfer herself. Women were a rarity on the links in 1973, but today 25 percent of U.S. golfers are women.

We’d be hard-pressed to describe the benefits of golfing in terms of attire and small muscles, however.

Did We Say That? The Saturday Evening Post

Miserable Golfer by Lawrence Toney

Miserable Golfer
Lawrence Toney
August 8, 1925

The look on this poor guy’s face says it all. If it didn’t, the busted golf club would be clue number two. Artist Lawrence Toney’s 1925 cover shows us all that a bad day golfing may not “be better than a good day at work”. The same artist shows us a golfer having a better day in the next cover.

Hole in One by Lawrence Toney

Hole in One
Lawrence Toney
September 11, 1926

Is that a…it can’t be…it is! A hole in one! This 1926 golfer has a witness to the feat and the caddy is just as astonished as the player. Great facial expressions and body language – note the boy’s clenched fist. Artist Toney did a dozen Post covers.

Stinky Putt by J.C. Leyendecker

Stinky Putt
J.C. Leyendecker
March 13, 1920

J.C. Leyendecker, the artist who painted more Saturday Evening Post covers than any other (322!) shows us a caddy with a different opinion. We take it the shot stinks. One of my favorite golf covers was done by Leyendecker’s protégé, what’s-his-name (below).

Important Business by Norman Rockwell

Important Business
Norman Rockwell
September 20, 1919

“Gone on Important Business”, says the note on the door. The inspirational saying above the desk proclaims “Do It Now”, so the gentleman is doing just that. Out of deference to Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell painted one less Post cover.

Eighteenth Hole by John Falter

Eighteenth Hole
John Falter
August 6, 1955

We’re not sure if the man in the yellow sweater is studying the green or smelling it, but apparently the putt was thaaaat close. We are sure this is from 1955 by terrific Post cover artist John Falter.

Woman in Sandtrap by Penrhyn Stanlaws

Woman in Sandtrap
Penrhyn Stanlaws
June 6, 1928

She may be in the dreaded sandtrap, but this is one stylish lady. If you love covers of pretty, fashionable ladies, the artist named Penrhyn Stanlaws did thirty-seven of them between 1913 and 1934. Although this looks like a blazer I might have worn in 1969 or 1970, this lovely cover is from 1928.

Love golf covers? We have dozens! Or if there’s another theme or activity you’d like to see on old Saturday Evening Post covers, let us know!

Classic Covers: The Art of Golfing The Saturday Evening Post

Stacey Webster

Providence, Rhode Island

Score Card The Saturday Evening Post

A large part of his success came from his willingness to reinvent his game and himself. For instance, he overcame country-club prejudice against immigrants by redesigning his name, changing it to the less-Italian-sounding Gene Sarazen. (For a while, he even tried passing himself off as a Scottish MacSarazen.)

Another innovation came in the late ’20s, with his invention of the sand wedge—a club found in any respectable golf bag today.

For years I had been afflicted with that dread malady of the links which, for lack of a better term, I call “trap phobia.” It’s a virulent plague that strikes at the hearts of men and turns them to stone… Nearly every championship is decided in and out of traps, with the result that you either master your niblick before a title event or you might as well start back home and save the caddie fees.

A “niblick,” for the great majority of us who don’t know, was a club with a slightly angled face resembling a modern nine iron.

Personally, I wasn’t able to save anything—neither fees nor strokes nor reputation. I lived through some pretty desperate years that way, and then, suddenly, the answer came at a time and place when I wasn’t thinking about golf at all.

The scene is Roosevelt Field, Long Island, the year 1928; I was idly watching the planes land and take off, without the faintest thought of golf… I had noticed that as the pilot started to take off he lowered the rudder to get the plane in flying position. And within a few moments I was murmuring absently to myself: “How about a rudder on the back of my niblick?”

The result was a special niblick with the rear edge one-quarter of an inch lower than the front edge of the blade… it is designed with a rudder like an airplane, and its effect was amazing. I don’t fear the traps now.

Sarazen also designed a four wood that enabled him to make one of the most famous shots in golf history. It was during the 1935 Masters tournament, and he was approaching the fifteenth hole three strokes behind the leader, Craig Wood, who had completed play. Sarazen still thought he had a chance to catch up over the next three holes. In fact, he completely passed Wood with his next shot.

I found myself with a downhill lie, one of the toughest of fairway shots, but I still had a hunch up my sleeve or, rather, in the bag, to cover the situation. That was my club especially designed to offset the effects of this awkward shot. Selecting this club, I stood slightly ahead of the ball and toed the club head in at address. Then, as I came down into the shot, I drew the face of the club slightly across the ball in order to get it high enough to carry the water.

The ball sailed over 230 yards, clearing the water hazard, onto the green, and into the cup.

It was called the greatest shot ever made in a pinch; also some other things not quite so complimentary, there doubtless being an element of luck in holing a 230-yard shot from the fairway… What was I thinking of? Somebody asked me that after the round, and the answer was simple enough. “I was thinking of getting 230 yards,” said I grimly. “And I got it exactly to the last inch. Lucky? Oh, yes; quite lucky. But it was a good shot, hit exactly the way I wanted to hit it.”

More impressive than his mastering of the game, though, was Sarazen’s mastering of himself.

Straight as an arrow. Watching the ball fly down the fairway for a birdie.

At that time my temper was inflammable and quite beyond control. A bad shot was something to drive me into a tantrum, with the result that my reputation for club-throwing somewhat exceeded my prestige as a golfer. I recall, for instance, that I used a member’s putter during one round of the course in which I missed all putts from three to thirty feet.

The first thing I did was to head for the pro’s shop. The next was to put the putter in a vise and saw it into sections. This sounds crazy as I tell it now, but it actually happened. The third thing was to leave the sawed-off sections in the member’s locker. I later paid him for the club, but I hardly think he appreciated the spirit of the thing. It didn’t seem to occur to me at the time that he might have cherished the club.

Anyhow, I was so boisterous around a golf course that everybody got a laugh when I was paired with Bobby Jones for the first two rounds of the national open championship at the Columbia Country Club, Washington, D. C., in 1921. They thought we would wind up in each other’s beards, Bobby being quite a man for temperamental outbursts in those days. The result was that we made a private bet, whereby each was to forfeit five dollars to the other every time he threw a club, and the funny thing was that not a dollar changed hands for the two days. I don’t know what this did for Jones, but it convinced me of one thing: If it was going to cost me money, I wasn’t the man to lose my temper.

That was the beginning. The finish of Sarazen-the-fanatic came through my wife, Mary, and Walter Hagen, an arch-opponent. My wife shamed me into a degree of decent behavior on a golf course by telling me how the gallery murmured inaudibly and then walked away in tacit disapproval after one of my periodic outbursts. “Every time you get riled and show it,” she said quietly, “you lose some friends. I know you’re only mad at yourself. They don’t. They think you’re a bad sport.”

I’m not insensible to the importance of the men and women who pay for the show and thus make my living possible. It occurred to me, in fact, that I had as much privilege to step out of my part and rant at destiny as would an actor onstage in suddenly abandoning his character and haranguing the audience.

Hagen did the rest—by precept. I have played many a round with him and don’t mind conceding several points, including the fact that there is no great devotion between us. But in one respect I have to move well back and let him stand alone. As a golfer who can take the good with the bad, he’s a positive standout. I’ve seen him get the worst breaks a man ever had and never for a moment betray the fact that he had noticed anything out of the ordinary. To one of Hagen’s sublime self-faith, the alibi is simply not to be thought of.

This may be regarded as a surprising tribute, coming as it does from a man who openly stated before the 1933 championship at Chicago that Hagen belonged in an armchair and who, in turn, had to accept the ignominy of a rather grim jest by Hagen before the end of the tournament.

He waited, in fact, for the final round and the certainty that I was to get nowhere on those abominations known as the creeping-bent greens. Then he called a clubhouse attendant, gave him five dollars and an armchair and told him to take the latter out to me on the fifteenth tee.

Read “I Play Hunches,” by Gene Sarazen, August 31, 1935 [PDF].

The Old Masters: Gene Sarazen Reinvents His Clubs and Self The Saturday Evening Post

Concentration and Discipline

“These [golfers] who play the circuit now,” he said, “they all have to take a week or two off every now and then. They all get jaded with it, as you do with anything. That’s really the reason I quit playing in competition. I’d made up my mind even before I got around to 1930 that if I ever found a convenient stopping place, I was going to do it.

“In tournament golf, and particularly in an Open championship, you take an awful lot of mental punishment. Golf is played at such a slow pace that you don’t have an opportunity to work off steam in physical activity. Playing around that golf course in four hours, you get so weighted down by the strain and the responsibility and the difficulty of concentrating that you just wish to goodness you could hit a careless shot—just hit the ball without thinking. And if you ever yield to that temptation you’ll always pay for it.

Mental Preparation

“I think that a lot of our younger pros and amateurs are over-impressed with amount of time and study they have to give to the making of a golf shot. They look to me like they try to take into consideration more damn things than they have to. I think they’re setting a very bad example for youngsters.

“I used to walk around a little bit on the green after I got the ball on there, but all I was trying to do was to tranquilize my breathing. Walking a good distance up to the green and making your way through a crowd of people requires a little exertion, and so I’d stall around a little bit just to get my breathing tranquilized, and get my mind back on the shot. But no more than that. Like old Alex Smith used to say, ‘Miss ‘em quick.’ If I ever took a second waggle, I might as well put the club back in the bag. I just couldn’t hit the ball.”

Focusing on the Job at Hand

“Fundamentally, there’s just one order of movement that is the most efficient method of hitting a golf ball. You hear an awful lot of talk about the modem swing differing from the swing of twenty years ago. It doesn’t at all, except in the minutest sort of detail.

“There’s just one basic way a man can hit a golf ball with full power and full efficiency, and it never will be any different as long as he’s just got two arms and two legs. You’ve got to wind up the trunk and lift the arms and cock the wrists. Then you’ve got to use those sources of power in a certain order—unwinding the hips, leading, unwinding the trunk, leading the downswing, pulling with the arms. The final uncocking of the wrists is the culmination of the blow. But you can’t be thinking about all those things and about where you want the ball to go. And where you want it to go is the most important.”

Sportsmanship

“One of the first questions everybody asks us in connection with our trip to see Bob Jones is, ‘How is his health?’ [No one who knows him ever calls him Bobby.]

“The answer is, ‘About the same.’ His trouble was caused by an injured vertebra at the top of the spine, the effect of which was a deterioration of nerve supply to his limbs. This resulted in an increasing atrophy, and pain in his arms and legs. Two operations some years back failed to correct the trouble.”

In time, this condition led to his paralysis and, eventually, his death. Shortly before his death, someone asked him about the state of his health. Jones’ response is one of those rare expressions of true courage, and is worth remembering in the dark moments we will all face.

“I will tell you privately it’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse all the time, but don’t fret. Remember, we ‘play the ball where it lies,’ and now let’s not talk about this, ever again.”

Read “A Visit with Bobby Jones,” April 5, 1958 [PDF].

The Old Masters: Thoughts on Golf and Life from Bobby Jones The Saturday Evening Post

For the nearly 50,000 Americans seeking relief each 
year for debilitating bone-on-bone ankle pain and disability, there’s good news. Recent advances in arguably the 
most intriguing area of orthopedic surgery—total ankle replacement—are making strides in restoring mobility and quality of life to patients.

Today, four total ankle replacements are used in the U.S.: the Agility, the Inbone, the Salto Talaris Anatomic Ankle, and the Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement (STAR).

“The technology is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago,” says Dr. Robert Anderson, an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, who performed more than 40 Inbone procedures in the past two years and is part of a design team working on a second-generation device.

Hi-tech artificial ankles provide a new alternative to surgery, which permanently fuses worn-out joints. That procedure reduces ankle pain but often limits mobility, causes a limp, and can lead to arthritis in nearby foot joints. An estimated 25,000 Americans underwent ankle fusions in 2009; others considered even more drastic measures.

Reasons for needing an ankle replacement include wear-and-tear over time, accidents, sports injuries, and bone diseases that lead to severe and life-limiting arthritis.

Four years ago, Jeanne St. John’s ankle problems led her to the brink of a difficult decision.

“I was born with deformed ankles and, eventually, was 
so immobilized by arthritis that I considered a double amputation,” recalls St. John, who lives in Oregon. “Then a friend heard about the Inbone. It’s been life-changing for me.”

As with hip and knee replacements, the history of total ankles dates back to the 1970s. Healthy ankles can withstand 1.5 times one’s body weight while walking, but early devices didn’t hold up. Then, Dr. Mark Reiley—who performed St. John’s surgeries in the San Francisco Bay Area—devised a new way to replace the complex joint.

“Dr. Reiley took the proven technology of knee replacements and basically flipped it upside down to be used in the ankle,” Dr. Anderson describes. “The device, now called the Inbone, has very good mechanical advantages and can be used for primary replacements, as well as revisions of failed or previously placed devices. We believe it will be successful 
for a long time.”

Orthopedic surgeons select the specific ankle replacements depending on patient age, anatomy, bone quality, and goals. Long-term success rates on Inbone are not yet available; European data show that 85 percent of modified Salto and STAR devices are functioning well after 10 years.

But Jeanne St. John, now age 67, prefers to focus on how far her new ankles take her.

“I think in terms of steps rather than years,” she says. “I save my steps for selected activities and for travel. Some of my friends are slowing down, but I have this ‘reverse aging’ thing going on, and I’m so thankful.”

Good News for Bad Ankles The Saturday Evening Post