The Kingdom of Golf in America by Richard J. Moss

Author:Richard J. Moss [Moss, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1105-7
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The early touring pros, however, knew exactly what they were doing. Chandler Harper, who borrowed three thousand dollars at 8 percent to hit the professional golf tour, put it bluntly. He said, “What you did was gamble. In those early days on the tour I guess we all gambled.” What we have seen in this chapter about Hogan, Snead, and Nelson suggests that they would agree with Harper. However, it’s my guess that by the mid-1950s few players would have portrayed their work as gambling.

How did this transformation take place? Like all cultural shifts the causes are subtle and produce change slowly. Between 1935 and 1955 playing the tour for money went from wagering to legitimate work. There were some significant signposts along the way. It is fascinating to note that Hogan, Nelson, and Snead all began their careers playing in shirts and ties. They ended their careers playing in what we now think of as normal golf dress. They played in shirts and ties to signal their escape from manual labor and as a way to suggest their respectability. This habit died out quickly after the war. All three of our heroes loved expensive clothes. Nelson had sixty-dollar pants; Hogan had his custom-made English shoes and Allen Solly Egyptian cotton shirts from England, and Snead was also a dandy, who took to wearing a trademark straw hat to hide his baldness. Both Snead and Hogan became associated with a certain kind of hat. Hogan wore a white cap that became his trademark. No manual worker would ever wear such a snowy white hat. Snead was just as tightly linked to his straw hat with a colorful band, and to a lesser extent Nelson was associated with a golf visor. In the end they adopted the habits of their early role models — the members of the private clubs at which they had worked and, in Snead’s case, the guests at Hot Springs. Golf is the only major sport that does not have a prescribed uniform. It was Nelson, Hogan, and Snead who created the unofficial image of what a golfer should look like, and they did not look like gamblers and they did not look like manual laborers.

They abandoned the shirt-and-tie look of Walter Hagan, who frankly looked like a gambler, for the quiet elegance of country club chic. Of course, there was a minority movement. Jimmy Demaret was famous in the same years (1935–55) for his flamboyant and colorful clothes. However it was the expensive elegance of Hogan, Nelson, and Snead that won the day. It is truly remarkable how much the touring professionals of today look like Hogan of 1953.

The professional golf tour evolved between 1935 and 1955 into something new. Hogan, Nelson, and Snead were the public face of that evolution. Unlike the stars in other sports, PGA touring pros were not under contract to a team, did not receive a set yearly salary, were not representative of a city or a region (like team-based athletes),

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.