Fred Corcoran: The Man Who Sold the World on Golf
Judy Corcoran
Copyright © 2010 by Judy Corcoran
Published by Gray Productions, New York, NY at Smashwords
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About the Author
Judy Corcoran, who is Fred Corcoran’s daughter, is a freelance writer and editor living in New York City and the Creative Director of www.MagazineMarketers.com. She is the co-author of Joint Custody with a Jerk: Raising a Child with an Uncooperative Ex (St. Martin’s 1996 and 2010) and Volleyball: Playing with Your Head at Any Height (Wish Publishing 2006), and the author of The Concise Guide to Magazine Marketing: Tips, Tools and Best Practices (Gray Productions, 2008).
Cover and book design by Judy Corcoran
Cover illustration by Frank Becerra, 1977
Dedication
To Fred, my father, who I wish I had known now rather than when I was a teenager.
And to Dennis Clawson who, with a love of history, ancestry and me, encouraged me
every step of the way.
Judy
A special thanks to Molly Kawachi, Jane Aderhold, Dave Anderson, Frank Becerra, Jr., Susan Belair, Carol Corcoran, Freddie Corcoran, Jane Costa, Lisa Cribari, Stephen Cribari, Michael Dann, Martin Davis, Jeanne Fico, John Garrity, Peter Gogolak, Liz Khan, Tom Kochan, Renée Martin, Bob Mead, Peggy Mead, Bill Morely, Bill O’Hara, Dermod Sullivan, Burch Riber, J. Richard Ryan, Rick Schwab, Nick Seitz, Tom Stanton, Peter Thall, Jean Ufer, Ken Venturi, and the other Tiger.
And a huge thank you to Greg Walker, who came along to find my missing hyphens, eject my extra commas, and help me “play the course” specific to editing golf-related copy.
Introduction
Fred Corcoran sold the world on golf. He was a man with a passion for the game, an encyclopedic mind, an ear for a punch line, an eye for a headline, and a keen sense of marketing long before the business schools named the tools. As one of golf’s first businessmen, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1975, some thirty years after he first proposed it.
Fred’s story about the business of golf and his devotion to it spans sixty years, from around 1913 when golf was in its infancy in this country until 1977, when he left it in the hands of the corporations. This book is the story of how Fred, “not single-handedly, mind you,” as he would say, put golf on the map and turned it from a minor curiosity to a major business that today delivers billions of dollars in endorsements, tournaments and associations.
I don’t know how old I was when I realized my father was famous. “He’s famous in golf and sports,” I’d tell my friends when they’d ask why there was a limousine parked in our driveway or why we were flying to Hawaii just for the weekend. I knew something was up when I was about ten and we skipped school for two weeks to go meet the King of Morocco.
As a child, I just thought everyone had a fake uncle named Sam, whose last name was Snead, and one named Ted, whose last name was Williams. But I really knew my father was important when we went to Disneyland in 1960, and we were met by a woman in a uniform who looked like a stewardess. She took us around the park and cut in the front of the lines, letting us go on the rides without a wait. It seemed General Dynamics had just put in their Nautilus submarine ride and my father knew someone at General Dynamics. Actually, he always knew somebody everywhere we went.
“Get me anyone,” Fred once said to a telephone operator. I heard him tell the story a million times, and his love affair with the telephone was real and documented.
“AT&T should erect a monument to Fred Corcoran. He’s trained more telephone operators than Ma Bell,” Bing Crosby wrote in Fred’s book Unplayable Lies. Bing, the famous “White Christmas” crooner, and Fred went back to 1937, when Bing had a little golf tournament and Fred worked for the PGA Tour.
While Fred started out as an impoverished caddie, he found many measures of success, earning an international reputation as “Mr. Golf.” By the time I was born in the early 1950s, he was at the height of his career, having made a lot of money with some high-profile clients. It was then that I think he embarked on his true calling in life. “He goes around the world and teaches other countries how to put on golf tournaments,” I would tell the kids. Fred liked to say that his claim to fame was having three-putted in forty-eight countries. But it was actually a lot more than that.
Early on, Fred befriended the press, who had enormous respect for him as an agent, publicity man, and storyteller. Unique to Fred, he was a sportswriter’s best source, always able to come up with a fresh angle, historic comparison, or hypothetical argument for deadline-driven writers. But Fred also had some heart-wrenching breaks and an Irish temper, all part of a legendary life story that generated some entertaining moments and many original ideas, while it laid the foundation for the business of golf.
In his words, Fred “committed autobiography” in 1963, some fourteen years before he passed away. He wrote Unplayable Lies with Bud Harvey, a delightful golf writer with a rich vocabulary, who also played the piano and sang in a barbershop quartet. I remember vividly the summer he spent at our house, taking notes that my mother typed as my father told his stories into a tape recorder that only I could thread properly.
Over the years, a few people suggested I re-write or re-publish Unplayable Lies, which is now out of print. After reading it again, I longed for a sense of chronology, which wasn’t how Fred wrote it. When Fred told stories, he jumped around. A story about Ted Williams would remind him of one about Walter Hagen, which would remind him of Tony Lema, and so on.
So I set out to tell Fred’s story as it happened, and through the process, I saw more clearly just how much he accomplished and what a rock star of golf he was. While working on the new book, following his career year by year, I kept thinking that once I finished one year, I’d a catch a break. But then that next year was just as full of stories, people and events as the one I had just finished writing about. He just kept going and going.
Along with using Unplayable Lies, I spent many hours reading other golf books, downloading newspaper and magazine articles, looking at photos on eBay, watching videos, interviewing people who knew Fred, and sorting through my mother’s scrapbooks and Fred’s letters to her. From all this, I connected a dot or two, added some context, and wrote some dialogue, but I tried to remain true to his original story, which was interesting, impactful and important to golf—and me.
Judy Corcoran
“What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world—and three-putt the 18th green?”
Fred Corcoran
Unplayable Lies
Chapter 1
Like many who planted the seeds of modern golf in America, Fred Corcoran started as a caddie. Born to a poor Irish family near Boston, with six boys spaced two years apart, Fred got swept up in the excitement around the historic 1913 match where Francis Ouimet, a 17-year-old school boy from down the street, beat the established British golfers, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. They were the Woods and Mickelson or the Palmer and Nicklaus of their day, and much has been written about this match. In fact, Disney made a movie about it: The Greatest Game Ever Played.
As you can imagine, the match was big news that year in Belmont, Massachusetts, especially since Ouimet’s caddie was ten-year-old Eddie Lowery, one of the local kids. Fred was only eight that year, too young to caddie, but he was already waiting around the yard.
As the story goes, Ouimet’s mother gave an interview to the local press, saying that caddying had opened all the right doors for her son Francis, and that caddying was an admirable alternative to hanging around pool rooms. When Winifred, Fred’s mother, read that, she jumped on the idea.
“Look what caddying did for that Ouimet boy,” she said, as she struggled to get breakfast ready for her brood of young boys. “You could do worse than to try it yourself.”
The Corcorans had recently moved from Cambridge to Arlington, Massachusetts, and lived in a shabby house adjacent to the Belmont Country Club. Like many Irish families right after the turn of the century, they struggled to get by.
Seeing signs posted saying, “No Irish Need Apply,” Fred’s father Sam had all but given up looking for honest work, using this discrimination to his advantage. “I won’t work for anyone who won’t have me,” he added, displaying pride that was lost on all but the young boys.
Sam never let the world trap him into regular employment. There were a couple of times when he signed up for a starting time on a payroll, but never reached the first tee. He finally said to hell with it.
Sam’s real name was Michael, but it, like the few paychecks he did manage to earn, got lost somewhere on the way home. He would come home with stories, and he often arrived with excuses, and occasionally, he toted a bottle of Scotch, but bringing home the groceries was not his thing. On a good day, Fred and his brothers ate corn flakes, whether it was for breakfast or dinner. Lunch was often not in the running.
Sam was often called a “seanachie.” In Ireland, in the days of old, a seanachie was a strolling historic storyteller. The legends and lore of the Irish people were handed down from generation to generation by the seanachies who drifted around the country, paying their way with tales. They had a very special status in Ireland. There was always a bite to eat and a warm spot by the fire for them. Like Sam, Fred had a gift for telling a story. But not only could Fred deliver an entertaining tale with excitement and humor, he also had a knack for finding the angle that noted some irony or uniqueness that made the tale even more memorable.
By the spring of 1914, Fred’s mother pointed her sons in the direction of the Belmont golf course. She urged Frank, the oldest, to become a caddie, but Frank was not much of a trailblazer, so she turned to Fred. By now, he had reached the exalted age of nine, and he was eager and ready to set his feet down on the fairway. At one time, there were five Corcoran caddies in the pen at Belmont—Frank, Fred, George, Joe and John. Billy, the youngest, was still at home, studying the rules and waiting for his muscles to arrive. But on very hot days, Fred put him to work as well, selling sodas on the golf course while Fred told stories as he passed out the bottles or made change.
Fred became a regular at the course, slinging bags that were as tall as he over his shoulder, chumming up to the best players at the club, and studying the game every chance he got. Not being a shy guy, Fred quickly sought out Ouimet and introduced himself, offering his caddie and ball-shagging services. Soon, he was caddying for Ouimet, who was the first player ever to give Fred a dollar.
“I went to get him change,” Fred said, “but Ouimet smiled and said, ‘You keep it all. You’re a fine caddie.’”
Most people agree that tournament golf in America began with Francis Ouimet and that 1913 match. In a thrilling finish, Ouimet became the first American-born winner of the United States Open Championship. But Ouimet’s victory at The Country Club did more than just thrust him into the national spotlight. It brought golf out from behind the privileged walls, away from its British ancestry and Scottish dunes, and put it on American soil with a sense of ownership. Up until this time, only the very wealthy in America played golf. There were no professional golfers and most caddies were taught not to swing a club. That’s why Ouimet’s victory struck such a chord with the young boys who lived near the courses around Boston. The victory gave them a local hero. If Francis Ouimet could play golf and become a celebrity, so could any one of them.
Fred took the course like a bug in a grass rug and quickly became a first-rate caddie, able to judge distance within a few feet and to explain the finer points of the course. His first big assignment came in 1916 at the age of 11. That year, the USGA Women’s Amateur Championship was played at Belmont and he caddied for Alexa Stirling, who won it.
That was also the year that Annie Oakley, the famous buckskin gunslinger, gave an exhibition of sharpshooting at Belmont and asked Fred to help set the traps for her. After shattering a few clay plates, Fred had an idea. “How about I toss golf balls into the air and you shoot them instead of clay plates.”
“I bet I can do it,” Annie Oakley said. “Start tossing ‘em, son, as high as you can!”
With that, Fred took a golf ball in his right hand and stepped back for the wind up before letting it rip through the air. Boom! It went as it exploded with a direct hit. He threw another, which Annie Oakley hit, and another, until he thought his arm would fall off. Then she upped the ante, turning her back to Fred until he counted and called, “Now!” Then she whirled around and blasted ball after ball, sending debris in all directions.
By that summer, Fred was totally immersed in the game of golf. When Mike Brady, the Oakley Country Club professional, made the news by scoring two holes-in-one on the same round, Fred felt the importance of this feat and used the back-to-back aces as an excuse to visit the Brady home to congratulate him in person. But when Fred offered his best, Brady just shook his head sadly.
“I should have had three,” he mourned. He held up his thumb and forefinger, showing a gap of about two inches and said, “I missed the third one by that much.”
“That’s golf for you. It’s an ‘umblin’ game,” Fred often said, mimicking the way the Scots talked about golf. From a young age, Fred understood the game of golf completely. He saw how it frustrated, how it thrilled, and how it compelled people to play against the course and against themselves, never seeing their accomplishments and focusing on the shots they missed. He saw golf clearly, for its pain and its pleasure, and he loved every minute of it.
“I’ve listened to the wailing and lamentations of more golfers than any man living,” Fred would later say. “I have a shoulder that is perpetually damp and aches in bad weather from amateurs and professionals, men and women, who have cried on it while they described how that second putt hung trembling on the lip of the cup. I have what has been described as the worst case of three-putt ear ever seen at the Mayo Clinic.
“And I have yet to meet anyone who came to me and said, ‘I putted like a champion out there today.’ Champions who, after setting records for eighteen holes, still mourn, ‘Yeah, but I missed two putts I should have holed.’ And I have yet to hear of a perfect round of golf. By the way, the only medal I ever won in my life was for being runner-up in the New England Indoor Putting Championship, and if I hadn’t three-putted that last hole from twelve feet…but where was I?”
The Corcoran boys lost their mother in the flu epidemic of 1918, after she had nursed three of them through it. But by that summer, while the older boys were marching off to army training camps, Fred was on the job where he was promoted to caddie master, becoming the youngest caddie master in America at the age of 12. With the pay small and the hours long, Fred used to check in at Belmont at five o’clock in the morning, and many a day, he didn’t carry a bag until five in the afternoon. There was no salary, but the job functioned as a virtual franchise or concession. He got five cents a round from the boys who carried the bags.
One evening, Fred came upon a curious incident. As he was taking his time closing up, he noticed Harry Hall, one of the members, searching along the stone wall that bordered the third hole. For the next three days, Fred watched him tramping back and forth through the rough. Finally, Fred asked what he was doing.
“I’m looking for my golf ball,” Hall said, “and I’ll give five dollars to the boy who recovers the ball I’ve lost.”
This struck Fred as rather strange, but sensing an opportunity, he called all the boys together and told them there was money in it if they found a ball that was lost along the wall. He didn’t tell them how much was in it. He knew to leave some things to the imagination.
The caddies combed the ground and ended up with a basket load of lost balls—and a few they had brought along. When Mr. Hall came in, he burrowed into the basket like a gopher and came up with a badly battered old ball.
“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Here it is.” He handed Fred the five dollars and, after taking a cut for himself, Fred spread the wealth among the other boys. But the episode stuck in his mind for a long time, until two years later, when he spotted Harry Hall on the course and tracked him down. Hall recognized Fred immediately.
“You know,” Fred said, “something has been bothering me all this time, Mr. Hall.”
“What’s that, Fred?” he asked.
“Remember that golf ball you lost along the stone wall? I’ve often wondered why it was worth five dollars to you.”
Hall chuckled. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’m in the paint business, and everyone was looking for a golf ball paint that wouldn’t chip in play or soak off in water. I had played 226 holes with that ball when I lost it and the paint hadn’t faded or peeled. With that ball as evidence, I was able to land a tremendous contract for golf ball paint. Finding it was worth a lot of money to me.”
Fred learned an important lesson that day: For many things, there is no fixed value. An object or a service is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay. All you have to do is find the right person, the one who wants it. After that, everything is subject to negotiation. And Fred also learned that people love golf balls, especially championship balls—those responsible for a hole-in-one or those that sunk after a long putt on the 18th green to win a tournament. People will pick a golf ball as a souvenir over a baseball or football because it fits so nicely in your pocket or sits so majestically on your desk.
But not all of Fred’s lessons were that easy to learn. While he scuffled with the other boys on a pretty regular basis, he occasionally stood up before the adults. One was Bert Nicholls, the professional at Belmont. Nicholls would never permit a caddie on the golf course with a club in his hand, reminding the caddies of the societal difference between them and members.
Well, one day Fred was idly swinging a driver in the caddie yard, the way kids will, and Bert shot out of the shop as if he were fired from a cannon. “Put that down,” he shouted, “and don’t let me ever see you with a club in your hand again.”
“I was only swinging it,” Fred protested. “Don’t get your feathers all ruffled.”
With a quick shot across the face, Nicholls snapped. “I don’t even want to see you pick up a club except to hand it to a member,” warned Nicholls in his Scottish brogue. “The next thing you know, you’ll be teaching the members and then looking for my job. Remember one thing…you’re here to serve the members, and not to play golf.”
It was a rough lesson, but Bert did Fred a great service. He was the pro who taught Fred not to play golf and to seek his success on the golf course as a non-player.
About this time Fred learned another valuable lesson: The man you meet on the golf course or in the stadium often bears only a physical resemblance to the same name you meet in a business office. This fact was driven home by a wealthy automobile agent, one of the club members, who promised Fred that all he had to do was report to his office and pick up his passport to the world of golden opportunity. But when Fred showed up at his office one morning, the man turned out to be just a voice growling behind a paneled wall. A secretary crisply dispatched Fred to an automobile parts stockroom far across the city where he put in ten hours a day, six days a week, for seven dollars a week until a state inspector fined the man as a violator of the child-labor laws.
Then, instead of expressing concern for young Fred, his benefactor not only fired him, but accused him of lying about his age. Actually, the question of age never had come up. But Fred remembered walking off down Boylston Street, puzzling over the inconsistency of a man who offered two different profiles to the world. He was glad to return to golf.
After his mother’s death, the burden of holding the family together fell heavily on Sam and the older boys. There was little time for school or anything else not directly related to the pressing problem of economic survival. Looking to make money wherever they could, the Corcoran boys would hike to Fenway Park on days when the Red Sox played and sell peanuts in the stands.
It was at one of these games that Fred first saw one of his heroes and future good friend, Ty Cobb. Despite his reputation for being ornery and mean, Fred thought Cobb was the greatest baseball player who ever pulled on a pair of spikes, and when he first saw him play at Fenway Park in 1919, he was ecstatic. But the Tigers lost the ball game to Boston on a controversial decision that made Cobb boiling mad and sent him storming off the field into the Detroit dressing room.
Fred and some of the kids followed him and climbed on to a water pipe, where they could peek through the steamy window into the Tigers’ dressing room. They watched as Cobb stomped angrily through the door, and when he looked up and spotted the kids, he reached around and picked up a bar of soap and hurled it, as if he was throwing it from left field to home plate. It shattered the window pane and narrowly missed Fred’s head. “I scrambled quickly to recover the prize and carried it home as a souvenir,” Fred said. “It was a bar of Lifebuoy.”
In addition to selling peanuts, Fred worked at a variety of slavish jobs by day and hustled Postal Telegraph wires by night. He carried his share of telegrams from the War Department that year. Many of these deliveries required a streetcar ride and Fred was supposed to obtain this ten-cent round-trip fare from the recipient of the wire. But when one of those telegrams began, “The War Department regrets…,” he didn’t have the heart to ask for trolley money. He just quietly disappeared.
On one of these trips, he met a beautiful young Irish girl. She lived in the neighborhood where many of these families lived so he was in and out quite often. He finally got up the nerve to ask her to go out with him one evening and much to his surprise she agreed. On the day of their date, however, she sent her sister to find him and tell him that she was too sick to go out that evening.
Late that afternoon, Fred passed a field filled with some yellow flowers growing wildly about. Since he now had nothing to do that night, he picked a few and made his way up to the young lady’s house, thinking he’d present them to her in person and wish her a speedy recovery. But as he approached her house, he noticed all sorts of activity. Through the glare of the lights in the living room, Fred could see people laughing and dancing. As he got closer he could hear music playing and people having a good time. Then he saw his girl, looking very healthy and sitting on some guy’s lap!
Fred threw down the flowers in disgust and swore off women forever. He concluded that women were dishonest and not to be trusted. Without their mother, none of the Corcoran boys had much use for women. The tender, loving care that women provided was gone from their home and their lives.
These times were difficult for Fred and his brothers. Sam was often down at the local pub, acting like one of the boys. Maybe that’s why Fred was always grateful for the fatherly advice he received from James A. Stillman, the New York financier and donor of Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary. As the guest of a member, Mr. Stillman was practicing his putting on the new 13th green in violation of a strict club rule. Not wanting to anger the member’s guest himself, the club manager instructed Fred to put a halt to it.
Fred walked slowly to the edge of the green and stood silently while Mr. Stillman putted a dozen balls. He then stepped up to him and addressed him.
“Excuse me, sir, but I need to point out that practice is not permitted on a playing green,” he said, using an official tone.
Stillman must have been impressed by the fact that Fred courteously refrained from interrupting him in the middle of his stroke because he came over and patted Fred on the head and said, “Young man, if you show this much tact as you go through life, you’ll be a great success.”
Chapter 2
The United States Golf Association was officially formed in 1894 to become American golf’s governing body and to administer the national amateur championship along with the rules of golf. The Professional Golfers’ Association came on to the scene in 1916 but stumbled at the gate due to World War I. But by 1919 it was up and running, and while the USGA dealt mainly with the amateurs and the golf clubs in America, the PGA looked after the interests of the rising number of professional golfers. Both organizations worked together to bring the players and the United States Open Championship to Brae Burn Country Club, near Boston, in 1919.
Fred had applied as a caddie for the tournament, but with a reputation already preceding him, he was picked for the better job as a runner to shuttle scorecards to the press room. But as soon as he arrived, he was promoted to his first important assignment in golf. He had been picked for the plum job of handling the scorekeeping duties for the USGA’s U.S. Open Championship. He would be paid five dollars for his work, and he knew that if he did a good job, they might want him for other tournaments. And, he had an idea.
In those years there was really no such thing as a tournament scoreboard, as we know it today. At best there was only a score sheet, usually one of those advertising gimmicks distributed by the equipment manufacturers, which was tacked to the wall of the pro shop or caddie shack. It offered its information grudgingly as it existed mainly as a privy document, intended only for the information of the players and the tournament officials. The cold numbers told something of the progress of the match or tournament, but the sheet offered no clue to the drama unfolding on the course.
On the first morning of the tournament, Fred stopped at the corner store on the way to the course where he picked up some crayons and then went to the butcher’s for a roll of paper. Once at the course, he set up shop against the south wall of the clubhouse. Carefully unrolling his butcher paper, he tacked it up to the wall. Then with a black crayon, he wrote the names of the players in big letters, so everyone could see them.
“What are you doing there, Fred,” one of the members asked.
“I’m going to post the scores as they happen so everyone here will know who’s winning each hole.”
“But how will you know what’s happening out on the course?” the gentleman asked.
“My brothers are going to run back and forth and tell me the score and I’ll write it here for everyone to see.” Fred pulled another paper from his back pocket and showed it to the man. “See, I’m going to put the pars in blue and the birdies in red and the bogies green so you can see how the match is going, hole by hole.”
By then, a crowd had gathered and the men asked Fred all sorts of questions. “Is this the first time this has been done?” one man asked. “I’m a reporter for the Boston paper and I don’t think this has ever been done before,” another answered.
Fred saw his brothers, John and George, walking toward him and he waved to them to hurry up. “Now look it,” he said in what sounded like a command for their utmost attention. “Here’s what you need to do.”
He sent them out to the course with his instructions to watch the play and run back with the score. On his scoreboard, Fred began adding footnotes, reporting the dramatic highlights, and as a result, raised the neglected art of scorekeeping to a new level and produced the world’s first leaderboard. But he also noted something more significant. The sportswriters stayed by his side, and whenever John or George reported back, Fred would describe what had just transpired and tell the writers stories about the players, about the course, about the game.
Old Sam, by the way, also had a knack for knowing what was necessary and valued, which he obviously passed down to Fred. Sam probably printed the first football scorecard or program in America. This was back around 1908, before the players wore identifying numerals on their jerseys. Sam had the printer line up the names of the players in their corresponding positions and sold these scorecards at Harvard Stadium the day Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indians played the Crimson.
Apples don’t fall far from trees, and while Sam may have been a seanachie, Fred was a master storyteller. He could remember a golf match, hole by hole, and then entertain an audience for hours. Fred may have written his way into major league golf with colored crayons and a fresh philosophy of the scoreboard in his head, but it was his nose for news and publicity that set him apart. He soon befriended the sportswriters, who hungered for stories and often feasted on Fred’s ability to turn the ordinary into the noteworthy.
It rained all week at the tournament, but even so, the 1919 U.S. Open was a magical event. It was the first time Fred saw Walter Hagen play. Hagen, who had won the U.S. Open five years before, was 27 years old and already a sports-page celebrity. In fact, he was well on his way to becoming a legend and the first professional in any sport to earn a million dollars.
Hagen entered golf at a time when the amateurs were held in higher esteem than the professionals, who were often treated as “hired help” and asked to enter the clubhouse through the service doors. On one occasion, Hagen refused to claim his trophy because he hadn’t been allowed inside the clubhouse before the tournament.
“Walter Hagen was unquestionably the most colorful person I ever met in golf,” Fred would later say. “And I use that term ‘color’ in an indefinable way. What is this mysterious and magic quality that brings spectators swarming to the ticket window? What is it that makes someone stand out in a crowd? Why, give me one golfer with color and 144 others, and you’ll find him surrounded by fans lining every fairway and green, while the rest play to an empty lot. Not all winners have color but your true champions do.
“True champions are magnificently considerate of people, and this is where you separate the champions from the mob,” Fred added. “The champions don’t have to step on your corn to prove they exist. Thoughtfulness and consideration is as much a part of their natural makeup as the lightning reflexes and air-conditioned nervous systems that make them champions.
“Hagen never, to my knowledge or in my presence, lost his temper or his urbane graciousness. He had that magic about him. It was there in the way he lit a cigarette, the way he walked and talked, the way he dressed. As they say in the theater, Hagen was always ‘on stage,’ yet there was nothing stagey about him. What he did, he did as naturally and as easily as he breathed. He was debonair and exciting, and he had a way about him. Hagen always walked with his head in the air as if he was, subconsciously, looking over the heads of ordinary mortals,” Fred said frequently about his friend.
There is no doubt that Hagen helped raise the image of the golf professional, even though he had a bit of a prankster in him. Hagen liked to mess with the minds of his opponents. He was known to take a perfectly pressed tuxedo and throw it against the wall a few times and splash whiskey and perfume on it, and then arrive at a match, looking like he had stayed out all night.
During this particular U.S. Open match, Hagen came up to the last hole of regulation play needing a pretty good putt to tie Mike Brady, who was already in the clubhouse, crying over the putts he had missed. Impeccable as always in his traditional white silk shirt and silk tie, Hagen lazily drew his putter and surveyed the putt. Then he looked up with a smile and called, “Where’s Mike?”
“Brady had finished two holes before and had gone into the men’s locker room,” Fred told a group of reporters that night. “And all of a sudden, Hagen’s calling out, ‘Where’s Mike? Where’s Mike?’ and he’s looking around, putting his hand above his eyes, as if to improve his vision. And then he says, ‘Tell Mike to get out here. I want to give him something to think about for the next twenty-four hours.’ And then he stroked home the tying putt. It was unbelievable!” Fred exclaimed.
The play-off round actually wasn’t much of a golfing exhibition. Neither Hagen nor Brady played well. But the turning point came at the 17th hole where Hagen took command with a typical Hagen combination of brains and skill. He put his tee shot into a peat pocket where it lay virtually buried. Then, as now, there was a penalty for playing the wrong ball, so equity permitted the lifting and cleaning of the ball for purpose of identification. Hagen asked the officials to dig out his buried ball in order to identify it. Naturally, when it was dropped again, the lie was improved considerably. Hagen then put his next shot on the green, holed out in four, and went on to win—a patented Hagen finish.
Chapter 3
Quickly ensconced in a world of golf and golfers, Fred met many who became friends and a few who would become life-long friends. In 1922, Fred introduced himself to a young golfer who would become one of his best friends and favorite people in the world—Gene Sarazen. Like Fred, Gene arose out of the caddie pens in Rye, New York, and at 20 years old, was just starting out on a Hall of Fame career filled with major wins, course records, and major accomplishments, including the invention of the sand wedge.
Sarazen had just won the U.S. Open Championship and was scheduled to team with Francis Ouimet against Walter Hagen and Joe Kirkwood, the Australian pro, in a match that would dedicate the new Charles River Country Club. Tickets were issued by invitation only, and Fred was determined to be there. He went to the downtown office of Barton K. Stephenson, the president of the new club, to ask if he might purchase an admission ticket.
Stephenson gave Fred a pretty thorough grilling, demanding to know who he was, where he came from, and why it was so important that he attend this exclusive and private match. Fred quickly spun a tale of Ouimet and Hagen, adding that he had only heard of Gene Sarazen and badly wanted to see him play. Finally and grudgingly, Stephenson conceded to sell Fred a ticket. He drew one out of a desk drawer. “That’ll be two dollars, young man,” he said.
Fred paid his two dollars—which was all he had—and then hiked from the Boston financial district all the way out to the Charles River Country Club, a two-hour marathon. He arrived late, but Sarazen was considerably later, reaching the club a full hour behind schedule. Kirkwood, who staged a trick-shot demonstration to keep the gallery from becoming restless, wasn’t amused, especially when a cheer announced Sarazen’s arrival.
Sarazen, a jaunty figure, stepped from his car with bold, flashing eyes and a general to-hell-with-you look for all the proper Bostonians he had kept waiting. He swept into the locker room and emerged a short while later, a young dandy clothed in white shirt, bow tie, and white plus-fours, black hose and black and white shoes. To top it off, he had a cigar cocked in his mouth at a rakish angle. There was something about him that day that endeared him to Fred. He told himself: Here’s a guy who’s going places. And he did. He went right out and set a course record that stood for years.
A year later, Sarazen and Hagen played an epic match in the 1923 PGA Championship at the Pelham Country Club, and it was considered for years as the “match of the century.” Hagen had won the championship in 1921 and Sarazen had won it in 1922, so this, in Fred’s mind, was a huge deal. Fred felt the attraction of a head-to-head battle of champions, and even though the course was some four hours away by car, Fred hitched his way there, just to witness this final round.
“The match, which rolled along through 37 well-played holes, reached its dramatic peak on the 38th hole, when Sarazen pulled his tee shot and it appeared to go out of bounds,” Fred recalled.
“All Hagen had to do was play his ball safely to the green and hole out. But then, Sarazen’s ball was found lying in the tall grass, well within the boundary stakes.
“Seeing the ball up close, Walter got really steamed, and I had never seen him like this, pacing back and forth, swearing under his breath. He was usually calm and happy. Well, Walter insisted that Gene’s ball had gone out of bounds and suspected that it was tossed back in play by an outside agency, which could have been one of many things,” Fred explained. “Maybe one of Gene’s fans who lined the course kicked the ball back in bounds. It was, after all, his home turf at a club near Portchester, where he had been raised. He probably had a lot of well-meaning friends in the gallery.”
“Sarazen, unfazed by Hagen’s outrage, hit a magnificent gambling second shot that carried across a dangerous elbow to the green, within a foot or two of the hole. Hagen stared at Sarazen in dismay and shook his head in disbelief. Then, obviously shaken, he proceeded to put his second shot in a trap, short of the green, and that was the match.”
Fred also met Bobby Jones around this time. Jones, who was the same age as Sarazen, was attending Harvard graduate school and the team practiced at Belmont. Fred, who was by then the Massachusetts Golf Association’s golf secretary, quickly introduced himself.
“Jones would arrive in the afternoons, carrying a crimson stocking that bulged with practice balls. Then he’d go to the farthest end of the 13th hole and start hitting spoon shots to the green. I was always mesmerized by his accuracy,” Fred said. Jones would go on to win the U.S. Open that year.
As the summer stretched into the fall, Fred was drawn away from golf one day in late September when an emergency long-distance call came in for Bill Shriner, the shoe manufacturer. He tracked down Shriner far out on the course and returned with him to the clubhouse, where Shriner called his Chicago office and engaged in a long, muffled conversation.
Fred passed Shriner in the locker room just as he hung up. With a disappointed look on his face, Shriner turned to Fred and said, “I don’t know why people can’t be honest. Here I have a man working for me in Chicago who I thought I could trust, but they took stock this morning and found his books short. And he’s carrying a lot of empty shoe boxes on the shelves that should have shoes in them.”
Fred shrugged with an I-know-what-you-mean look. “Can I get you anything? Some water or some whiskey?” he offered.
Shriner turned and looked at Fred. “How would you like to go to work for me?” he asked.
Needing more money than golf during the coming winter in New England could provide, Fred considered his offer, even though the only security he’d ever known had come from the feel of turf under his feet. But two weeks later, Fred stepped off a train at Grand Central Station in New York on his way to work in Shriner’s store. A cab took him for a delightful spin through Central Park before depositing him on the sidewalk in front of 350 Madison Avenue. After paying the driver, he looked up and found himself gazing at Grand Central, a block away. Fred never again trusted a New York cab driver.
For two years Fred shuttled around the college campuses as a “shoe dog” for Shriner, returning between semesters to the Manhattan store where he met some interesting people, including Jack Dempsey (size 10-C), Clark Gable (six pairs of patent-leather pumps at a time), and Robert Moses (a tender corn on his right little toe). Fred quickly learned never to sell a man a pair of shoes that were too tight, because he would have to take them back—which meant Fred, not Bill Shriner, had to take them back. And after wearing returned shoes that pinched, pricked and rubbed, Fred honed his sales skills knowing that telling the truth and getting his facts straight was paramount. He also learned how to close a deal and keep the customers coming back for more.
Fred returned to Boston in 1926 to open a Shriner store on Washington Street and that completed the circle for him as a shoe hound. But a few months later at the age of 20, Fred was asked to succeed the ill and retiring Dan Horan as the Massachusetts State Golf Handicapper. He hung up his shoehorn permanently and walked away from the world of profit-and-loss statements (wearing Shriner shoes, of course) and back to the wonderful world of golf. He never looked back over his shoulder.
CHAPTER 4
Except for this brief detour through the shoe business, Fred devoted his life to golf. From 1923 to 1925, he served the Belmont Country Club as golf secretary and now, in 1927, he stepped into a position as both golf secretary and golf handicapper at the Massachusetts Golf Association (MGA) where he would spend the next ten years. In the winters, Fred escaped to Pinehurst, North Carolina, as an Assistant Golf Secretary in the office of Donald Ross, that grand old Scot and shrewd architect of some of the world’s best golf courses.
In the ten years that Fred served as MGA secretary, he was fortunate enough to handle the scoreboard duties for every USGA championship, some thirty-five of them. Just to be part of the pageantry of golf meant the world to him, but more importantly, it was in these years that he began filling his mental file with pictures of people and places that would become his business inventory, so to speak. He fell in step with the gang from the sports department early in the game and won his varsity letter as a legman for the golf writers. They learned to rely on him. Part of his success later in life was that he could remember the details and was quick to point out a story or inaccuracy. “If Corcoran says so,” ended many an argument for decades to come.
In 1931, Arthur Sampson, a distinguished high school and college football coach, turned his hand to sportswriting and was sent to cover the 1931 USGA Amateur Championship at the Beverly Country Club in Chicago. It was an important sports story because Francis Ouimet was playing and trying to make a comeback. Samson was told, “Stick to Corcoran like plaster. Don’t let him out of your sight and you won’t get scooped, because he’ll be where the news is.” Sampson took the advice literally. He became Fred’s roommate and, as luck would have it, he hit the jackpot. Ouimet came back after seventeen years to win his second amateur championship and Fred had the inside scoop.
With Fred on their team, sportswriters put golf on the front page. Whether it was a quote about the rivalry between Hagen and Sarazen, or Hagen’s thoughts on practicing, Fred had a story for their next edition, even in the off-season, with no golf tournament within 500 miles. Fred’s desire for an audience and the press’ need for a lead led to a respectful relationship and a heck of a good time. They began to seek each other out.
He told reporters that Walter Hagen never showed any great enthusiasm for the marathon practice sessions that would become part of the working day for the modern tournament pros. Fred commented, “I remember standing with him at the Colonial Club in Fort Worth, watching the players hammering away on the range. We watched the pros for several minutes while they hit a steady barrage of flawless iron shots. Then Hagen let out a loud sigh.”
“What a shame to waste those great shots on the practice tee,” Hagen said to Fred. “What are they doing out there anyway? Those guys already know how to hit a golf ball. They don’t have to practice that. I’d be afraid to stand out there and work at my game like that. I’d be afraid of finding out what I was doing wrong.”
They turned back to the club and Hagen talked on. “You know, I used to go out to the practice tee and hit four or five balls—just to relax and get the feel of it. I always planned to make any adjustments on the course. I always figured to make a couple of mistakes on the first few holes. But mistakes don’t hurt you at this stage. It’s those mistakes you make on the last few holes that kill you. I always plan to have my game under control by then. That,” he said, jerking his head back toward the firing line, “is nothing but corporal punishment.”
While Fred was still with the MGA and on scoreboard duty at the USGA, he was also busy promoting the game he loved in any way that landed golf on the pages of the newspapers and introduced it to new audiences. Because golf was still a gentleman’s game and golfers dressed like gentlemen, Fred decided to play up this angle at the 1929 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, by holding a Best-Dressed Golfer Contest with a formal judging panel and all.
“But to tell the truth, the winner was picked in advance,” Fred said. “It was to be Johnny Farrell, the defending champion, who was living that week in an apartment across the street from the 15th hole. Well, back and forth he ran that day. Between the club and his apartment, he changed his clothes six times. He won the Haberdashery Handicap, but scored an 86 and failed to qualify, which was more tragic than humorous. The previous year he had beaten Bobby Jones, no less, in a play-off for the title.”
Fred learned at that point not to mix his promotions of the game with a serious tournament. Championship golf was sacred and even though the prize money was not a lot, the title of “Champion” was what mattered. And Fred knew how to spot a champion.
“There’s a thoughtfulness and consideration which seems to be the mark of the real champion,” Fred said. “You usually can recognize the bush leaguers in life because they’re always pushing, pushing, pushing for every advantage. On the other hand, the real champion with the natural instinct for decency comes equipped with a wonderful humility. The major leaguer, whether it’s in sports or in our workaday world, has a way of saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ He has the good sense to recognize thoughtfulness in others, and the good taste to respond to it.”
In 1929, Fred and his colored crayons arrived in Pebble Beach for the 1929 U.S. Amateur. With Bobby Jones as defending champion, it was a big tournament, and Fred was in the USGA room making up the scoreboard when the USGA committee called Johnny Dawson and Johnny Goodman to appear before them. Dawson was regarded by many as second only to Jones in American amateur golf. But he was employed as a traveling representative by the A.G. Spalding Company, and the USGA committee had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t truly an amateur. They told him he couldn’t compete in the Amateur Championship.
Goodman’s case was a little different. He was a young fellow who worked for a sporting goods firm in Omaha, earning about $25 a week. He had paid his own way to the championship, and after pondering his circumstances, the amateur status committee decided to let him play.
That morning, Goodman and Jones were drawn to meet in the opening round of match play. The Nebraskan, who actually had ridden freights to California for the tournament, knocked out Jones on the last hole, providing golf’s greatest upset to date and robbing the tournament of its star at the start of the week. By noon the next day, most of the gallery had checked out of the Lodge and the rest of the championship was played before a handful of local Peninsula residents. That’s why the PGA finally changed its own championship from match play to medal. Too often the headliners were beaten in the early rounds by some unknown and the rest would cry from loneliness.
Goodman was eliminated in the afternoon round by Lawson Little, who was then a 17-year-old schoolboy, who lost the next day to Francis Ouimet. Little went on to win two British Amateur Championships, the U.S. Open and two U.S. Amateur titles, and wound up in golf’s Hall of Fame. Goodman? He was the last amateur to win the Open championship, which he did in 1933. Then he became a public-links professional in San Francisco and disappeared from the picture. “It was too bad, too; he had toppled the king,” Fred said.
“There’s a footnote to the Pebble Beach yarn,” Fred continued. “A year later, in 1930 at Merion, I sat in on the draw and I remember Goodman was a seeded player. One of the committeemen proposed to set it up so Jones and Goodman would meet in a 36-hole match, but it didn’t jell. Goodman dropped out in one of the early 18-hole rounds. Jones, of course, went on to win it as part of his Grand Slam, winning the United States and British Open championships and the U.S. and British Amateur championships—all four in one year.”
“I recall it most vividly, not because of any spectacular display of golf by Jones, but because of my own embarrassment,” Fred said. “It was blistering hot—110 degrees—and my fancy red and blue scoreboard crayons just melted in my hands.”
The episode at Pebble Beach turned a spotlight on another issue: the elimination of headliners through match play. Fred realized the importance of a gallery to a golf match, so he later proposed and eventually helped persuade the PGA to change the format of its own championship from match to medal play. Too often, the headliners were beaten in the early rounds by what the well-known pros called “some diddy-bump,” leaving the marshals with no crowd to manage.
“I always regretted, however, the passing of the PGA match-play championship,” Fred went on record saying. “Match play has a special dramatic quality that you don’t find in a medal-play tournament. The spectacle of a man-to-man duel has more emotional impact than an impersonal contest between a current champion and a norm called par. There are very few match-play tournaments left, apart from the Walker and Ryder Cup matches. We could use a few more.”
Chapter 5
Based in Boston, Fred conducted his business on the golf course, in the locker room, and at whatever bar or men’s club was popular at the time. He developed a sense for being where the action was, and in those days, the action was at the bar. Fred was a man’s man, who loved all sports and those around it.
In the early 1930s, there was not yet a PGA tour, and most of the money in golf came from playing exhibitions sponsored by the equipment manufacturers. Fred set up many of these exhibitions while expanding his network of friends and friendly press.
How Fred met Jack Sharkey, the professional boxer, is uncertain, but an educated guess puts them both in a saloon in Boston around 1932. Sharkey had defeated Max Schmeling in early 1932, at Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City, New York, in their rematch to win the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in a very controversial split decision.
A week later, Fred was with Gene Sarazen who had come to Boston to play an exhibition match with Francis Ouimet and he called Jack Sharkey. “I’ve got Gene Sarazen with me. You know he holds two titles right now,” he baited Sharkey. “He holds both the U.S. and British Open championships titles, and I thought it might make a good publicity picture to bring you two together. Can we stop by?”
Gene had an endorsement tie-in with the Packard Motor Car Company, and they had given him a brand new Packard to drive during his time in Boston. So the two of them climbed in the car and drove out to Chestnut Hill to visit Sharkey, who as the new heavyweight champion, had just built a $160,000 mansion behind a wall overlooking the Boston College campus. Sharkey greeted them warmly and took them inside the house before showing them around the property.
“Here,” Fred said to Jack, pulling a couple of tickets to the golf match out of his pocket. “Why don’t you come and watch the match?” Sharkey examined the tickets and mumbled something about his schedule but carefully tucked the tickets into his jacket pocket. Then Fred said, “Jack, would you like to see Gene’s new white Packard?”
Jack stared coolly at Fred, and then turned and looked at Gene before returning his gaze to Fred and answered, “No, but how would you like to see my two new Cadillacs?” Sharkey won the match, two Cadillacs to one Packard.
Gene was thoughtful as they drove away. Then it came out. “Listen,” Gene said, “what’s the idea of giving that guy Sharkey two tickets? I didn’t see him passing out any free tickets for the Schmeling fight last week. I had to buy mine.” They both had a good laugh as they drove back to Boston.
Sarazen went on to win the 1933 PGA that next year, adding yet another title to his list. And in 1934, he called Fred, rather excited. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. “It’s a gal from Texas.”
Fred cut him off. “I’ve got too many women chasing me right now, Gene, but thanks anyway.”
“No, I don’t mean like that, Fred. It’s ‘the Babe’ I want you to meet, not ‘a babe.’ It’s Babe Didrikson, the star of the 1932 Olympic Games in track and Field. She’s playing golf now and wants to play some matches with me.”
“Can she beat you?”