When War Played Through by John Strege

Author:John Strege
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

NELSON AND MCSPADEN BECAME entertainers too. In one year’s time, they traveled back and forth across the country four times, staging fund-raisers and performing for soldiers. When Nelson’s wife, Louise, was unable to make the trip—more often than not the case in 1943—Nelson and Jug often traveled together, crossing vast distances via train. (Commercial flying was not a viable option; when a plane was full, Nelson was required to pay for an extra ticket to account for his golf clubs.)

Nelson always kept a diary of sorts in a little black notebook he carried with him. To while away time on these monotonous, endless rail excursions, he enjoyed working with calculations. On one such trip, he began calculating how much money he would require to retire comfortably, eventually concluding that $100,000 should be enough. More than curiosity was behind his retirement ciphering; though he was only thirty-one, he had already decided he did not want to face any more important four-foot putts than were necessary to assure a reasonable standard of living for the rest of his life.

It was a pipe dream in 1943. Tournament golf was largely on hiatus, so most of the golf he was playing was on behalf of others. His efforts were tireless. He not only played with McSpaden, but with anyone else available in a particular time and place. An Associated Press story on February 28, 1943, recounted the thirty-fifth exhibition match that Nelson had played. He teamed with Bill Clark, a Texas club professional, and defeated Jimmy Demaret and another club pro, Don Murphy, 3 and 1, in a match in Texarkana, Texas, that raised $300 for the local Red Cross Canteen Fund.

The stage was small, the sum was smaller. But together they were symbolic of the sacrifice that Nelson intended to make due to his inability to don a uniform and march on Berlin. Nelson was willing to range far and wide, to big city or small, from the West Coast to the East, wherever his presence might help scrape together a few bucks on behalf of the war effort. Hundreds of dollars eventually added to thousands of dollars and eventually to tens of thousands of dollars. In the thirty-five exhibition dates he had played to that point, he had helped raise more than $60,000 for the Red Cross, Navy Relief, and the USO. And he was just getting started.

Nelson hooked up with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby for a series of exhibitions. The three of them often traveled via military plane, one of which bogeyed a landing on a rainy day in Memphis in 1943, sliding off a narrow runway and into a field of mud in which it became mired. A bulldozer was summoned to extricate the plane from the mud, at which point the three of them made a mad dash for the club, finally arriving ninety minutes late. The crowd gamely stayed put and was gleeful when they arrived.

On another occasion, Nelson and Crosby arrived via train in San Antonio.

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.