Augusta National is front and center this week, but a book about another iconic club also is receiving attention.
Jeff Silverman won the Herbert Warren Wind Award from the United States Golf Association for the best golf book, Merion: The Championship Story.
Silverman chronicles the vast history of the Philadelphia club that has been a vital part of American golf. This is the place where Bob Jones completed his grand slam in 1930 and Ben Hogan won his famous U.S. Open in 1950. Last year, Justin Rose won the Open at Merion, as the USGA went back to the course after a long layoff.
There’s much more in Silverman’s coffee-table style book that is 500 pages and weighs six pounds. Here is my Q/A:
Six pounds? Did you have any discussions about charging by the pound, not the page?
Boy, in hindsight I wish I had. I could have retired to a comfortable life of writing and golf.
How did this book come about?
Not long after the announcement of the Open coming to Merion, Philadelphia magazine asked me to write a piece about the marvelous improbability of harmonic convergences that led to golf’s circus coming to town again. One thing led to the next, and six pounds later…
For those who don’t know, why is Merion so important in golf history?
The simple answer is that no club’s hosted more national championships, and so much of what happened in them was swept up by a certain magic and wedged into golfing lore. Merion is where Bobby Jones made his national debut – at the 1916 Amateur. It was where he won the first of his five U.S. Amateurs – in 1924. Merion is where he closed out The Grand Slam in 1930. Twenty years later, Merion is where Ben Hogan came back from the dead to win the U.S. Open in what remains for me the greatest golf story of them all. And, 21 years after that, you’ve got Trevino and Nicklaus going head to head in a tale so built on sub-text that it would stand apart even if Trevino hadn’t brought a snake to the proceedings.
The Hogan picture might be the most famous in golf history. Why was it so captivating and what really happened on that hole?
Two separate strands come together to make the photograph so arresting. The first is the sheer beauty of the composition: the lone warrior beneath the white cap in perfect balance on fragile legs with his destination framed and receding in the background. The second is the import of the moment that photographer Hy Peskin froze: the Open was on the line and every heart was beating for Hogan. Hogan had already squandered his lead – on those legs, playing 36 holes in one day less than a year and a half after his crash, nothing was a gimme, even for him — and he had to fight for a par on a very difficult hole for a piece of the playoff Together, those strands unite in an image that embodies grace under pressure.
Had Mickelson planned and played his 72nd hole as intelligently as Hogan did his, Phil might have forced a playoff, too. Hogan admittedly dialed back his drive because finding the fairway was paramount. What had never been known before my research led me to it was that Hogan had practiced two distinctly different shots just for this moment depending on whether he was in contention and whether he needed a par or a birdie. So, when he pulled his 1-iron, he was as mentally prepared as he could be. His approach left him some 40 feet from the flagstick. He managed to get down in a nail-biting two.
For me, one of the most fun stories in the book brings this shot into a different focus: I found and interviewed the kid – he’s now in his late ‘70s – whose shoulder served as Peskin’s tripod for the shot. The kid turned into a top amateur golfer and could recall the moment with the same kind of crisp detail as photo itself.
In doing two years of research, what was the biggest surprise and/or your favorite discovery?
The biggest surprise was seeing that as far back as 1934, the pros were predicting a walk in the park over the East Course. But Merion’s length turned out to be every bit as deceiving as its greens – and clearly always has been; Olin Dutra’s winning score that year was 13 over par and only one card was returned under par over the course of the championship.
As for discoveries, there were two. The first was coming upon the long-lost story of Bobby Jones in the immediate aftermath of his victory in 1930 to complete the slam. The pressures on him had been so great that had he been less of a gentleman, they’d still be cleaning up the carnage in Merion’s upstairs locker room.
The other was attaching the correct ID to Hogan’s caddie in 1950 – and then being able to link him back to the all-important pairing of Dutra and Lawson Little in 1934. A local family presented itself to Merion a few years before the 2013 Open with the contention that their father caddied for Hogan, but their proof was at best circumstantial and I wasn’t convinced; a search of old photos and newspaper clips solved the mystery.
If you had to rank, what is the most important tournament ever played at Merion?
The 1930 U.S. Amateur. The idea of the Grand Slam was so audacious; at the time, only a handful knew that this was something Jones had consciously set his mind to. The sheer impracticality of it captured the imaginations of golfers and non-golfers alike on both sides of the Pond and created a frenzy that far transcended the game.
Will there be another U.S. Open at Merion?
If I were a betting man, I’d book it. Do you have Ladbroke’s private line?
How does it feel to win an award named after Herbert Warren Wind?
I was stunned. The award is such a singular honor, even more so because of the giant of our craft that it’s named after. Honestly, the only thing I’ve ever had in common with Herb Wind was that he shouldered sheepskins from Yale and Cambridge and I dropped out of graduate programs at both.