CT Golf News

By Jack Burrill

Tommy Armour, Billy Burke, John Golden, Gene Sarazen, Harry Cooper, Dick Chapman, Julius Boros, Doug Ford, Bob Kay, Jim Grant, Dick Mayer, Dick Siderowf, Ken Green, Jerry Courville Jr., The Travelers.

With reasonable regularity, players with legitimate Connecticut connections have been participants in the Masters since the event's inception in 1934 when it was known as the First Annual Invitation Tournament. Jerry Courville Jr., who earned his invitation to this year's Masters by winning the 1995 U.S. Mid- Amateur, maintains that impressive continuity and has given the Connecticut golf community something personal to root for once more.

In the 1934 Masters field were several Connecticut-connected professionals. Tommy Armour, whose relationship to this state wouldn't come until he became resident head professional at Rockledge Country Club in 1944, played in this tournament several times in the '30s and was invited back on the strength of his victories in the U.S. and British opens, and the National PGA until the invitation qualifications were necessarily made more selective as the Masters grew in stature. Somewhat past his competitive prime by 1934, Armour never seriously contended for the only one of modern golf's four major championships to elude him, and a tie for 8th at 293 in 1937, 10- strokes behind winner Byron Nelson, was his best effort.

In that inaugural event, however, Connecticut did have a true contender in Billy Burke, Naugatuck native, who had won the U.S. Open in 1931 when he defeated amateur George Von Elm in a record 72-hole playoff at Inverness. Burke, brother of Connecticut professionals Eddie and Pete, was playing from the Round Hill Club in Greenwich at that time. In the initial 1934 Masters, he had teamed with another Connecticut-based invitee, Wee Burn professional John Golden, to win the pre-tournament foursomes (alternate shot) competition, forerunner of today's par-3 affair, with a remarkable 32-35-67; then proceeded to make 72-71-70-73- 286 in the tournament proper to finish tied for third, two behind winner Horton Smith. He finished in a tie for third again in 1939 at 282. Golden, who won four consecutive Connecticut Opens 1931-34, and who was a winning Ryder Cup player in 1927 and 1929 as Walter Hagen's foursomes partner, was not a low finisher in that first Masters, and his untimely death a few years later deprived Connecticut of a national class playing professional.

Gene Sarazen, to whom Connecticut makes a rightful claim by way of his having had his first professional job in golf at the Brooklawn Country Club in 1918 as assistant to George Sparling, won the 1935 Masters in a 36-hole play- off with Craig Wood, who would become head professional at Winged Foot in 1939. Largely because of his sensational 4-wood second for double eagle at Augusta National's 15th, Sarazen's Masters win is one of the most celebrated in all golf competitive history. It is interesting to speculate whether this historic stroke, rivaled only, perhaps, by Ben Hogan's famed 1-iron on the 72nd hole in the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion as the best-known single shot in golf, would have shaped the outcome of that second Masters so much if the course's nines hadn't been reversed after 1934. Without the change, Sarazen's two would have been made on the 6th, very early in that final round, and could have inspired a score that would have won the tournament at regulation. Or? But the Squire won it in high drama, and though he defended commendably in 1936, finishing alone in third at 287, and in third again in 1937, four behind winner Ralph Guldahl's then-record 279, he never again came close to winning at Augusta. But he is, of course, properly recognized as the first of but four men to win each of golf's quartet of major championships. And, thankfully, at 94, he will strike the first tee shot Thursday at Augusta, thus, with Doug Ford and Courville Junior in the starting field, giving this state three worthy representatives at the 1996 Masters.

Here is a compendium of other prominent Connecticut- connected Masters participants through the years:

• Harry Cooper, 90 years and alive and well and still teaching in Westchester, was throughout his competitive career the best player never to have won a major championship, a judgment based primarily on his runner-up roles in two U.S. Opens and two Masters. He played in the first two Masters without finishing among the leaders; but in the 1936 event he was second alone, a stroke back when Horton Smith won his second; fourth alone in 1937 when Byron Nelson won his first; and runner-up with Ralph Guldahl in 1938, at two more than Henry Picard's 285. In 1939, when head professional at Connecticut's Wee Burn Country Club, Cooper won this state's Open championship by five at New Haven. Then, in 1940, he made a solid 69 in his opening round in the Masters, but was five back of Lloyd Mangrum's record 64; he finished at 287, tied with Augusta National's head professional Ed Dudley, and seven more than the 280 of winner Jimmy Demaret, who would win the 1941 Connecticut Open while an assistant at Wee Burn.
  
  
• Greenwich-born Dick Chapman, the first of now four prominent Connecticut amateurs to participate in the Masters, was invited in different years as U.S. Amateur champion (1940), as runner-up in the British Amateur (to Willie Turnesa in 1947), as British Amateur champion (1951), and as a Walker Cup team member. He died in 1978.
  
  
• Dick Siderowf, born and reared in New Britain and for years now of Westport, has played in eight Masters, variously as reigning British Amateur champion (1973, 1976), and as a playing member of the U.S. Walker Cup team (1969, 1973, 1975, 1977); he was non-playing captain in 1979. His most cherished recollections are of the year he shot 69 to make the cut, and the year that he was paired with Arnold Palmer and "the whole world was following us."
  
  
• Jim Grant, second son of Connecticut golf institution Robert M. Grant, was low amateur in the 1966 Masters, making 299, 11 behind Nicklaus, Gay Brewer and Tommy Jacobs, and was invited back in 1967 because of that and because he finished in the low 24. Jim turned professional later in 1967.
  
  
• Bridgeport-born Julius Boros, winner of the U.S. Open in 1952 and 1963, and the National PGA in 1968, played in the Masters 24 consecutive years, 1950-74, competing all of those years as a professional, although his first two invitations, for 1949 and 1950, were based on his play as an amateur, which, in light of his comparatively weak amateur record, may surprise some people. Julius had been invited to the 1950 Masters because of having reached the fifth round of the 1949 U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill. But well before Masters time 1950, he had turned professional, yet was still allowed to play because the rule that prohibited such participation by an amateur- turned-professional was not yet in force. Among his more memorable Masters are 1952, when he tied for fifth at 293 with Hogan and two others; 1963, when he finished tied for third with Snead, two strokes back of the 286 Nicklaus made to win his first Masters; 1967, when he was leading with eight holes to play and had a "horrendous" (his word) back nine as Gay Brewer won. As late as 1970, at age 50, he finished in a tie for 23rd, winning some $2,000 and a pair of silver goblets for an eagle at the par-5 13th.
  
  
• Doug Ford had been long gone from his West Haven, birthplace by 1957, the year of his stunning Masters victory, as he closed with what was then a record final round 66, which itself was concluded with a sand shot holed from a half-buried lie in a steep-lipped greenside bunker. The fast-playing Ford, who called the nearby Elmsford-Mount Kisco, N.Y., area home long enough to develop a New York accent that still lingers, defended staunchly but still one behind Arnold Palmer, who won the first of his four Masters in 1958.
  
  
• Bob Kay, head professional at West Hartford's Wampanoag Country Club for 40 years, made his lone Masters' appearance in 1957 as a result of having finished in the top twenty-four in the 1956 U.S. Open at Oak Hill. As fine a ball-striker as there has been in Connecticut competitive golf history, as his six Connecticut PGA championships, 1964 Connecticut Open win, and 11 National PGA appearances indicate, Bob unfortunately found the greens at Augusta National as difficult as he had been told they would be, and his sufficiently sound tee-to-green game was more than cancelled by some disastrous putting.
  
  
• 1957 U.S. Open winner Dick Mayer was born in Greenwich but played most of his formative golf as a member of Winged Foot, where he came under the superior tutelage of Claude Harmon, 1948 Masters champion. Mayer turned professional in 1949 and had two high finishes in the Masters, an eighth-place tie with Byron Nelson and Arnold Palmer in 1955 at 293, and a fourth place tie with Canadian professional Stan Leonard in 1959 at 287.
  
  
• Danbury native Ken Green, 1988 Canadian Open champion, winner of four other PGA Tour events, 1989 Ryder Cup team member, and twice Connecticut Open champion, has played in the Masters several times. Probably the most memorable of these was in 1989, when, at 1-under through seven holes of the final round, he was among the first five. He finished at 1-over for the tournament, which comfortably qualified him for a return appearance in 1990.

If Connecticut has been rich in competitive representation at the Masters, so it also has been in commercial representation. The Travelers Insurance Companies has sponsored this golf major on CBS television since 1958, two years after CBS first televised it.

By dictionary definition, tradition is something that customarily comes about only over a long period of correct repetition and formal respect. Yet, The Masters, the golf major championship that is almost as much ritualistic pageant as it is dazzling and often quite dramatic competitive golf, arrived at tradition status by way of public demand and media recognition in a relatively short period, really in little more than two decades. Now just over 60 years old, and much younger than venerable, time- honored sporting events such as Wimbledon and the Kentucky Derby, The Masters as true tradition had a considerable boost in that exalted direction from network television coverage over CBS, who, for now 40 years of often difficult and always demanding response to the Masters committee's mostly rigid and uncompromising requirements, has consistently done at least a creditable job of presenting the play and the aesthetics in effective integration.

Appropriately, for most of those 40 years, a major international corporation, a true American institution and tradition in its own right and in its own highly competitive field, has been an integral, moving, yet always subtle and low-key force in the distinguished dynamics of this singular sports spectacle. And as it tastefully proclaims publicly in the advertising that merchandises its commercial involvement with the Masters -- and as it readily affirms privately -- The Travelers of Hartford and the world, is especially proud of its near four-decade association with this glittering premier golf event: In the language of its advertising messages, as well as that in the boardrooms and grillrooms, there is the explicit implication that in the world of business, Travelers always aims for the same lofty standards of expertise that The Masters sets in the world of top- level tournament golf.

Jack Burrill is a regular contributor to CTGolfer Online.