80th Anniversary of ‘Shot Heard Around the World.’
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
In 1935, in just the second Masters ever, Gene Sarazen holed a 4-wood from 235 yards for an ‘albatross’ at the par-5 15th hole.
South Africans like myself, and golfers from every other continent outside the USA, refer to a score of 3-under par on a hole as an albatross. Because an eagle is a 2-under par, a ‘double eagle’ would be 4-under par, and Sarazen scored a 2 on the hole, not a hole-in-one.
For an article debunking the ‘double eagle’ term, Read this USA Today story
By whatever name, it’s one of the rarest shots in golf. There have been 3 other albatrosses at Augusta National . . . Bruce Devlin in 1967, Jeff Maggert in 1994, and Louis Oosthuizen in 2012. But Sarazen’s was the first, the most famous, and led to his winning the tournament.
The 1935 field was incredibly strong and included Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Paul Runyon, and many more legends of the game.
80th Anniversary of ‘Shot Heard Around the World.’
Sarazen put the Masters on the map!
It was called the “shot heard around the world.”
No, not the one at Concord’s Old North Bridge in 1775 that ignited the American Revolutionary War and launched a new country – this one happened in Augusta, Ga., in 1935, some 160 years later.
But to a golfer, this shot was almost as significant, as it vaulted the Masters Tournament into the big time.
This shot wasn’t taken with a musket, but by Gene Sarazen (pictured above receiving the winner’s check from the 1935 Masters) with his 4-wood – it was called a spoon then – from 235 yards on the 15th hole in the fourth round. It flew straight as any shot in Lexington and Concord and found the cup for the rarest one of all – a double eagle – a 2 on a par-5 hole!
By the time Sarazen reached the 1935 Masters, the second one played, he was already an established star.
Born Eugenio Saracini in Harrison, N.Y., in 1902, he later changed his name to Gene Sarazen because he felt it sounded like a golfer’s name, as opposed to his birth name that he thought better suited to an opera singer. Dropping out of school in the sixth grade, Sarazen caddied at the nearby Apawamis Club where he reportedly saw Harold Hilton – the winner of four British Amateurs and two British Opens – win the 1911 U.S. Amateur.
As a 20-year old he won the U.S. Open at Skokie in 1922, shooting a 68 in the final round, the first player to shoot under 70 to win.
He added the PGA Championship at Oakmont later that year. With great bravado he challenged golf’s supreme showman, Walter Hagen, to a 72-hole event for the “world championship,” and won. Repeating his victory in the PGA the next year, Sarazen won numerous tournaments in the ensuing years – his total eventually reaching 39 PGA Tour victories. In 1932, on the strength of his new-fangled invention, the sand wedge, he won the British Open at Sandwich, then the U.S. Open at Fresh Meadow, for a historic double in the world’s two major Open Championships. In 1933 he added a third PGA at Blue Mound in Wisconsin.
The 1935 Masters featured an incredibly strong field of 64. All four of the reigning U.S. national champions were entered – Olin Dutra, Open; Lawson Little, Amateur; Paul Runyon, PGA; and Charlie Yates, Intercollegiate (NCAA). There were also nine former National Open champs, including the sainted Bobby Jones, and two former British Open victors. It was quite a formidable field, fitting for what would ultimately become America’s most cherished golf tournament.
The fourth round started with Craig Wood leading at 209, on the strength of a 4-under 68 the previous day. Olin Dutra was second at 210, Henry Picard third on 211 and Gene Sarazen fourth with 212.
Dutra, with a 42 on the front, shot himself out of the tournament, despite a stellar 32 on the back, ultimately finishing third. Picard, paired with Wood, shot a 38 on the front en route to a 75 and fourth place.
Ultimately, only Sarazen stood to challenge Wood.
With a 39 on the front, Wood missed a 20-inch putt on the 10th for bogey. He then went on one of the great rallies of the tournament, making three birdies in a row – the 13th, 14th and 15th – before bogeying the 16th and, with a final flourish, birdied the 18th, to finish with a 73 and a 282 total.
Sarazen, paired with his pal and rival Walter Hagen, was playing an hour behind Wood. Even par on the ninth tee before making a bad bogey-5 for a 1-over-par 37 on the front, Sarazen was only one behind Wood at that point. On the 14th tee, Sarazen, two behind Wood now, hooked his drive into the rough leaving some 200 yards to the mounded, undulating uphill green. Hearing a distant roar from the area of the 18th green, word quickly reached the duo that Wood had birdied the final hole to extend his lead to three. Now Sarazen needed three birdies over the last five holes to simply tie Wood. Tough? Yes. Doable? Maybe.
O.B. Keeler, reporting in The American Golfer, related the needling byplay between the two friends:
Hagen: “Well Gene, that looks like it’s all over.”
Sarazen: “Oh, I don’t know. They might go in from anywhere.”
It is almost a cliché to say truer words may never have been spoken.
Sarazen proceeded to hit his first great 4-wood of the day as he ripped the ball out of the left rough, reaching the green, but ultimately leaving a putt of some 100 feet. Two putting for a par – the second one of some 6 feet – he came to the fateful 15th hole and his date with golf immortality.
Hitting a fine drive of some 265 yards to the right side of the 15th fairway, Sarazen had a full 4-wood of some 230 yards off a close, wet lie in cold, heavy air to a green fronted by water.
Jones, perhaps realizing the moment, decided to come down from the clubhouse to see if Sarazen could catch Wood, thinking he needed three birdies coming in to force a playoff. He reached Sarazen and Hagen just as a young Byron Nelson, playing the adjacent 17th hole, pushed his drive near where Sarazen’s ball had come to rest.
So, all four of those ultimately on golf’s Mount Olympus – the hallowed Jones, the flamboyant Hagen and the soon-to-be great Nelson, watched as Sarazen’s arrow-like 4-wood hit a foot before the green, “…bounded once – twice – and settled to a smooth roll, while the ripple of sound from the big gallery went sweeping into a crescendo – and then the tornado broke,” according to Keeler.
80th Anniversary of ‘Shot Heard Around the World.’
Eugenio Saracini, now the golfer Gene Sarazen, had made all three birdies with one swing of his now magical 4-wood.
In an almost anti-climatic 36-hole playoff the next day, Sarazen defeated Wood by five strokes, 144 to 149.
No less an authority than Grantland Rice, America’s first great sports writer and a founding member of Augusta National, called it “ … the most thrilling single golf shot ever played.”
Even now, with the passage of 75 Masters Tournaments, one can clearly say without equivocation or hyperbole that Rice’s simple assessment of Sarazen’s shot is as appropriate today as it was in 1935.
It may have been Jones’ reputation for sterling play and sportsmanship that leant credibility and panache to this new tournament, but it was Sarazen who indelibly put the Masters on the map for all time with his “shot heard ‘round the world.”
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
Of course, you all know about the legendary baseball career of Babe Ruth. But how much do you know of his golfing life?
Ruth was 20 when he began to golf in 1915, during his rookie year with the Boston Red Sox. By the 1930s, Ruth played and practiced as often as he could and became a single-digit handicapper. After his last full season in baseball in 1934, the Babe spent most of his golfing in New Jersey or in Florida. He told a New York reporter in the late 1930s, “I played 365 rounds last year. Thank God for whoever invented golf.”
In 1941, Ruth staged his first headline-grabbing charity event with another baseball legend, Ty Cobb. He also created another charity match with himself and Masters champion Jimmy Demaret against Gene Sarazen and former heavyweight champ Gene Tunney. This event drew a boisterous crowd that loved the banter between Ruth and Sarazen, and it even included a live swing band that blasted tunes as the golfers swung.
But the wildest tournament Ruth hosted consisted of a hustler and trick-shot artist Laverne Moore, playing with top amateur Sylvia Annenberg, and legendary golfer Babe Didrikson partnering with Babe Ruth. Promoters hoped to sell 6,000 tickets. . . . 12,000 people showed up.
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
Trick-shot artist Laverne Moore, playing with top amateur Sylvia Annenberg, and legendary golfer Babe Didrikson partnering with Babe Ruth.
Ruth ignited the crowd by arriving in his Stutz Bearcat car with the carcasses of his recent Canadian hunting trip strapped to his fenders and also slumped in the passenger seat. (a 250lb. Bear in that seat!)
Spectators danced on the greens, they pocketed approach shots, they knocked Ruth off his feet, and they stole the tartan right off of a kilt-wearing referee.
At the height of the madness, Babe Didrikson lofted a fairway wood over the 6′ deep crowd encircling the 9th green, and the ball stopped one inch from the cup. Fearing a melee, the promoters declared the match over after 9 holes, with the Babes being the winners.
In this time period, Bobby Jones was the BEST golfer in America, but golf was a minor sport, and the galleries were small. Babe changed that when he became the most famous golfer and made it look fun for the average person with his hijinks.
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
by Kevin Cook
Posted: Mon Mar. 16, 2015
The Sultan of Swat, they called him. The Big Bam, the Jovial Giant, the Colossus of Clout, the Behemoth of Bust, the Wizard of Whack. During the Roaring Twenties, when he restored America’s faith in baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Babe Ruth reached a level of fame that redefined fame. He slugged more home runs than most teams hit. He hobnobbed with war heroes and movie stars who were dazzled to meet him. Crowds thronged railroad crossings just to watch his train go by. In 1923, when the New York Yankees spent a shocking $2.4 million on a new stadium, sportswriters dubbed it “the House that Ruth Built.” In 1930, a reporter asked how a ballplayer could get paid more than the president of the United States. Ruth said, “I had a better year.” The Babe also played some golf.
In fact, Ruth was once the most famous golfer in America.
Bobby Jones was the best golfer in Ruth’s day — the game’s superstar — but it was a minor sport then, far behind baseball, boxing, horse racing and college football in popularity. It’s true that Jones drew crowds of thousands while chasing his 1930 Grand Slam, but far more often he played for galleries that would disappoint Briny Baird.
“Jones was a celebrity to golf fans, but there weren’t that many of them,” says Doug Vogel, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research who has spent nearly ten years researching a book about Ruth’s golf game. “In contrast, Babe Ruth was the most famous athlete in the world. He played a big role in making golf a spectator sport in America — arguably, bigger than Jones.”
We’ve grown accustomed to the sight of robust galleries at PGA Tour events. It’s estimated that 50,000 spectators per day attended the men’s 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. A few months earlier, a record 563,008 fans turned the Phoenix Open into golf’s biggest party. In the 1930s, it was Ruth who made the game look like fun, and whose passion for golf not only generated large crowds but motivated millions of average Americans who had never pictured themselves playing the rich man’s sport.
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
Ruth was 20 when he took up the game in 1915, during his rookie year with the Boston Red Sox.
The Sox trained in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a gambling-and-golf mecca where baseball players rubbed shoulders with crime lords like Al Capone and hustlers like Titanic Thompson. The six-foot-two jock whaled at the ball, sometimes snapping the shaft of his driver. He launched 300-yard drives (using wound-rubber Haskell balls, no less) as well as hooks and slices that were still rising as they sailed out of bounds. “With broken clubs and lost balls taken into account, golf is a pretty expensive pastime for Babe Ruth,” quipped one news account. To his credit, he always took his penalty strokes and putted out. No gimmes for the Babe. And he improved in a hurry. Despite his image as a roly-poly powerhouse, he was a terrific athlete and light on his feet.
On January 5, 1920, Ruth was in Los Angeles, playing a round at Griffith Park, when news arrived that after five years with the Red Sox, the team had sold him to the Yankees for $100,000.
Three months later he reported to the Yankees’ training camp in Florida but skipped his first practice to play 18. He was falling under the game’s spell, improving from a scattershot hundred-shooter to someone who could occasionally break 80, and discovering that this country-club diversion suited his appetites and talents. A golfer could drain a flask of whisky while playing and eat a hot dog or three between holes — what a game!
In his first year with the Yankees, the 25-year-old Ruth (who pitched for the Sox but was moved to the outfield by the Bombers) batted .376 with 54 home runs. His feats on the links were somewhat less Ruthian. “Everyone saw him as this big, jolly character, but he cared about the game, and it frustrated him,” Vogel says. Once, during a radio interview, the Bambino was talking about his passion for golf.
His wife, Claire, chimed in: “And I’ve often heard you come off the golf course saying, ‘Baseball really is a great game!'”
Ruth took lessons from Alex Morrison, a golf guru to the stars who pioneered swing-sequence photos by hanging a lantern from a club swung in a dark-room. “He got better,” says Vogel, “and he could play under pressure. Whenever the Babe teed it up, the papers covered it. He became a single-digit handicapper, but his putting held him back. I discovered one scorecard with a 69 — I think it’s the only time he broke 70.”
By the 1930s, the late years of his baseball career, he played almost daily with Sammy Byrd, a substitute outfielder known as “Babe Ruth’s legs.” Ruth was heavy and gouty by then; Byrd would pinch-run for him. More important to the Babe, Byrd was probably the best golfer ever to play major league baseball. After eight years with the Yankees and Reds, Byrd joined the PGA Tour and won six times.
He finished third in the 1941 Masters, fourth in the 1942 Masters, and lost the 1945 PGA Championship in a match-play final against Byron Nelson. During his baseball days he tutored Ruth on the golf course, but it was the Babe who gave Byrd a practice tip golfers still use. During batting practice one day, Ruth tucked a hand towel in his armpit to keep his front elbow close to his chest. Byrd tried the trick, passed it on, and golfers have tucked towels on the driving range ever since.
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
In 1934, the year of his last full season as a ballplayer, Ruth announced his desire to manage the Yankees.
Owner Jacob Ruppert promised the aging icon the job but was just stringing him along, hoping to keep the greatest Yankee loyal to the franchise. In private, Ruppert asked cronies, “How could Ruth manage a team when he can’t manage himself?” The Babe’s reputation as baseball’s Falstaff stuck, despite the fact that he was now a family man, happily ensconced in an Upper West Side apartment with Claire and their two daughters. “I don’t think Mr. Ruppert realizes I have matured,” he fumed to reporters. “I’m a grown man, not the playboy I was in 1919.” Still, he was snubbed again and again. After his retirement in 1935, he’d play 36 holes in New Jersey, then hurry home and ask, “Did the phone ring?” His wife knew what he meant: Did anyone call about a baseball job? She hated telling him no.
“It’s hell to get older,” the Babe said.
Seventy-nine years later, in 2014, I found Julia Ruth Stevens sitting in a quiet, comfortable house in Henderson, Nevada. “Daddy was dying to manage a ball team,” she said. Now 98 and legally blind, Ruth’s surviving daughter can still see “how his face fell when Mother gave him bad news. He was so hurt not to be managing. But he still had his golf. When it got too cold to play in New York and New Jersey, we’d pick up and go to Florida.”
As Ruth told a New York reporter in the late 1930s, “I played 365 rounds last year. Thank God for whoever invented golf.”
In 1939, the 44-year-old Ruth represented Long Island against teams from New Jersey and Westchester County in the annual Stoddard Cup. “This was serious golf,” Vogel says. “The club champions on his side usually carried him because they were good sticks and he was, well, Babe Ruth.” With nine holes to play, Ruth’s squad looked beaten. “Then he reeled off the best nine holes of his life,” Vogel says. “At his best, if his putter was working, he was a scratch player. That day, when it counted, he was better.” The next morning’s New York Times carried a six-column headline: Babe Ruth’s Double Victory Helps Long Island Capture Golf Trophy.
Babe’s golf exploits sometimes drew more attention than he wanted.
A year after his Stoddard Cup heroics, Ruth played New Jersey’s Pine Valley for the first time. New York newsmen flocked to the course, and Ruth bet them five dollars apiece that he’d break 90. He shot 85. That evening, celebrating his victory, he called Pine Valley “a pushover” and offered the writers double or nothing. “I’ll break 85 tomorrow,” he said. “Who wants some of that?”
Eleven writers anted up, along with a pair of Pine Valley waiters. The next day Ruth was whistling while he swung, looking like a million bucks, when he hooked a shot into the trees on the long, uphill 15th. Several swats sent his ball in several directions. When a playing partner asked if he needed a line to the green, he said, “Hell, I don’t need to know where the green is. Where’s the golf course?” Ten minutes later, putting out for a 12, he had no chance to break 90. He paid off his bets and bought drinks for the house.
Babe Ruth – And the Sultan of Swings Golfing Life!
“Daddy thought it was funny — the way one bad hole ruined his day,” his daughter Julia recalls.
“In baseball, he could strike out and still win the game his next time up.” Ruth liked to say that the main thing in golf was to hit the ball to center field.
In 1941 Ruth staged a headline-grabbing charity event with fellow baseball legend Ty Cobb. Rather than flip a tee for first-tee honors, the old rivals grabbed a driver and played hand-over-hand like sandlot players. Ruth gave the fiery-eyed Cobb a pat on his bald head and got a slightly bemused look for it. Cobb, a fierce competitor and a better putter than the Babe, won two rounds out of three in what he called “the Ruth Cup,” and the victory meant so much to him that he put the trophy over his fireplace.
In 1941, Ruth staged a golf exhibition with fellow baseball legend Ty Cobb. The Babe drew a bemused look for this pat on Cobb’s head.
Another charity match from around that time pitted Ruth and Masters champion Jimmy Demaret against Gene Sarazen and former heavyweight champ Gene Tunney. Sarazen, who mocked the decorous hush that hung over the game, had a kindred spirit in the boisterous Babe. That day, with a festive gallery shouting huzzahs at Connecticut’s Shorehaven Golf Club, Fred Waring and his band blasted swing tunes while the golfers swung. At one point Ruth backed off a putt. He turned to the crowd, cupped his hand around his ear and said, “C’mon, let’s hear it!”
Ruth razzes Demaret at a 1940 charity match as Tunney, Sarazen and Fred Waring’s swing band look on.
Golf Chats is a website to encourage discussions on various subjects relating to the game of golf. I am Mel Sole, Director of Instruction of the Mel Sole Golf School and SAPGA Master Professional. I invite you to enter into a discussion on this or any article on the golfchats.com website. The input is for the entire subscriber base to learn something new each time! Please post your comments below. Keep it clean and tasteful. We are here to learn from one another!
The Master’s tournament is the only major which gives golf’s top player the chance to close out a career Grand Slam.
Only 5 players in history have won all four majors. They are Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Gene Sarazen, and Tiger Woods.
Jack Nicklaus has won 18 Majors and 3 Career Grand Slams.
This year Rory McIlroy will attempt to join that prestigious list. The atmosphere will crackle with more excitement than usual when Rory arrives on the scene. This could be his third consecutive major championship since winning the British Open and the PGA Championship in 2014.
Rory McIlroy comes into the 2015 Masters one win shy of his career Grand Slam.
And, with multiple winners of past Masters like Tiger, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson contending again, the hype of this most popular of the 4 majors will be off the charts.
Tiger & Phil continue their pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’ record!
Do you hope Rory wins? If not, whose name would you like to see on the 2015 Masters trophy? Post your comments below.
