He was the most engaging person I have ever known in golf. Born Eugenio Saraceni, son of a carpenter in Harrison, New York, his formal education ended in the sixth grade, but later the world would become his
classroom. He carried his game to five continents, sometimes playing exhibitions, other times winning championships. He was the first to win what
came to be known as the professional Grand Slam: the U.S. and British
Opens, the PGA Championship, and, finally, in the most dramatic finish
known to man, the Masters, in 1935.
He struck what is still generally regarded as the greatest shot in golf, the
double eagle on the fifteenth hole at Augusta National, setting up a thirtysix-hole play-off the next day with the crestfallen Craig Wood, who had
already been celebrated as the winner in the clubhouse. Sarazen won
strolling.
He was an innovator. He created the sand wedge and became a master
at bunker escape. Other than the ability to use it, he never profited from
it. He was under contract to the Wilson Sporting Goods Company at the
time, and the Wilson people considered it just a part of the deal. So did
they when Sarazen recommended that Wilson sign an athletic young pro
out of West Virginia, Sam Snead. Everything was company property. His contract was for $8,000 a year, and at the age of ninety-two he
signed a ten-year renewal at the same price. He never got a raise, though
championships he won did gain him a bonus. At about the time of the
renewal, Wilson signed John Daly to a contract for $5 million, an item that
didn’t escape Sarazen’s attention. “The figure made me dizzy. I never really
made any money with Wilson.”
“I was looking down the list of players and the money they won on the
Tour this year,” he said at the time. The player in 169th position earned
more than I made playing tournaments in my whole lifetime.”
He played the major championships, though they hadn’t become known
as “major” at the time, but he never played the professional tour, such as it
was.
“I never played the Tour on a regular basis,” he said. “There was nothing in it. I worked for a company that manufactured jet engines in World
War II, then connected with Martin-Marietta for several years in public
relations later on.”
That was another of his gifts, his public appeal. Sarazen was good on his
feet.
Farming was yet another of his interests. Yes, farming, which is how he
came by the address of “Squire.” He held one job as a club professional, a
connection essential to other players who needed a guaranteed income to
underwrite life on the Tour.
“It was at Fresh Meadow on Long Island,” he said, “but it didn’t last
long. I’d just won the PGA Championship in 1932, and a banker friend
wanted me to switch to a new club a friend of his had built nearby named
Lakeville. So they made me a deal, and I moved.
“They had a big dinner celebrating my PGA Championship, and lots
of entertainment stars were there—Bert Lahr, Eddie Cantor, people like
that. At a closing ceremony the club president presented me a check. I
looked at it, and there was nothing on it. I looked at him, and he looked
at me and said, “I’m sorry, but the club is in bad shape and we can’t give
you anything right now.
“They never did. These actors thought the club should be honored to
have them as members, and they never paid their bills. The club went
broke, and I was never a club pro again.”
He got his first taste of golf as a caddie at the Apawamis Club, near his
home in Harrison, in the company of Ed Sullivan, who would later become
a major television figure. One day, as their numbers were called out for bag
188 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
duty, Sullivan seized the flashy bag on the rack and Sarazen picked up “one
of those little canvas Saturday bags,” whose owner turned out to be Grantland Rice, the famed sportswriter. Thus a longtime friendship was begun.
It was, coincidentally, that day that he heard Francis Ouimet, then a
mere caddie, had won the U.S. Open at Brookline, defeating England’s two
greatest golfing figures in a play-off. Moreover, upon learning that Ouimet
had used the interlocking grip, Sarazen adopted it and used it from that
day to the last swing of his life.
He later landed his first job as an apprentice professional at Brooklawn
Country Club in Fairfield, Connecticut, and it was there that Saraceni
became Sarazen.
This was his story: “I had a hole in one one day, playing in a little tournament, and my name appeared in the local paper the next day,” he said.
“When I saw my name in print, I thought it looked like a violin player. I
wanted something that sounded more like a golfer, so I became Gene
Sarazen. My father didn’t approve of it, but I told him I was still proud of
my Italian heritage, and I still am.”
When he passed away in 1999, buried by the side of his beloved wife,
Mary, Sarazen had reached the age of ninety-seven. We reach a point here
in trying to determine how one compresses the ninety-seven exciting years
of Gene Sarazen into these few pages.
There was never a day I spent with him, and I spent many, that some
new chapter in his life wasn’t revealed. Such as the day he was haying in
the field at his farm near Germantown, New York, and he saw a car coming down the road in a cloud of dust.
“It was Mary. She said some fellow named Herbert Warren Wind was
calling from New York. He said the Shell Oil Company was interested in
doing this golf show with me,” he said.
“I drove into the city the next day”—Germantown is north of New
York, near Poughkeepsie—“and we made a deal, $50,000 and expenses. I
thought it was going to be for one year. It lasted for nine and led to a lot
of other good connections. What a treat it was, working with Jimmy
Demaret.”
It became the most rewarding affiliation of his career. He made more
money and was seen by more people—well, let him tell you: “It was the
greatest thing that ever happened to me in golf. It made me known all over
the world. More people saw me on one Shell show than saw me play golf
in fifty years.”
The Squire of Harrison • Gene Sarazen 189
Reruns of the series are still on some sports channels, and testifying to
its international appeal, “Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf” has been
resumed with fresh matches filmed of present-day players.
As a competitive player Sarazen exploded on the scene in 1922, a fresh
kid just twenty years old. Grantland Rice described him as “a cocky twentyyear-old” when he won the U.S. Open at Skokie in 1922. Then, a month
later, he won the PGA Championship at Oakmont, four and three winner
over Emmett French in the final, and “the cocky kid” was on his way.
Down through the years Sarazen spoke of only one fellow professional
for whom he had a deep-seated dislike, and it began that year of 1922. He
had been paired with Long Jim Barnes, an Englishman from Cornwall who
had migrated to America, at the Southern Open in New Orleans.
Sarazen went out in 32, Barnes in 38 and having a rough time of it. At
the turn Sarazen made a gesture in an attempt to be friendly, but it didn’t
come off that way. “You’ll do better coming in, Mr. Barnes,” Gene said.
“You’ll probably get the 32 on this side.” Barnes’s cold response was, “Listen, kid, you just play your own game. I’ll take care of mine.”
The rift carried over to the week of the Open at Skokie, when Sarazen
showed up looking to play a practice round one day. Seeing Francis
Ouimet, Chick Evans, and Barnes lined up to go out as a threesome, he
asked if he might join in. Ouimet and Evans welcomed him, but when
they told Barnes they had a fourth, he said, “I wouldn’t like that. I’d rather
play a threesome.”
It cut Sarazen deeply, and he never forgot it. Years later, though, when
he and I were working on some elaborate tee markers on a new course at
Marco Island, each named for a great player of his era, he did include
Barnes in the group, and he is thus enshrined by Gene Sarazen himself.
The young Sarazen was a dapper fellow who dressed stylishly and oozed
personality. He became united with plus-fours, known to most as “knickers,” and was still identified with them until the last days of his life. He
also had an eye for stylish women and once spoke of a lovely young lady
he often saw waiting to catch the train into New York. He learned she was
a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, but all attempts he made to get to know
her were to no avail.
Many years later on the West Coast, a lovely woman of dowager age
approached him and said, “Do you remember that girl you tried to pick
up on the train into New York several years ago?”
190 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
When he said, he did, she said, “I’m that woman. I’m Dolores Hope, Bob
Hope’s wife.” Gene Sarazen was not shy about telling the story on himself.
The love of his life, though, developed out of an approach that worked,
during the winter of 1923 in Miami Beach. Sarazen noticed a pretty blond
across the dining room one evening and asked the hostess if she might
arrange an introduction.
“Be sure to tell her that I just won the U.S. Open Championship,” he
told her.
“You might add that I would be happy to autograph a golf ball for her.”
Her name was Mary Henry, then attending the Miss Harris School for
Young Ladies. She came to watch him play an exhibition at Miami Country Club, and they began a regular correspondence. After winning the PGA
Championship, he proposed and they were married at Briarcliff Manor in
June 1924. There were no children by the marriage but two by adoption,
a boy and a girl, named Gene Jr. and Mary Anne.
Mary Sarazen began to take an interest in golf with serious intent, leading to another story the amused Sarazen likes to tell on himself. In 1934,
as Mary’s intensity for the game increased, Gene lost the Open to Olin
Dutra at Merion Cricket Club. As she met him at the train in Pennsylvania Station, the depressed Sarazen was greeted by an exhilarated Mary.
“Gene, Gene,” she cried as they met, “guess what I did yesterday? I shot
an 84!”
A downcast Sarazen looked at Mary and said, “Do you know what I did
yesterday? I lost the U.S. Open by a stroke, and it’s more important to you
that you shot an 84?”
One special ingredient came with the marriage. Gene had always felt a
degree of insecurity in nongolfing company, and Mary was able to help fill
the void in his educational life. She was quite intelligent and moved with
ease in any class or function and soon added polish to Gene’s conversational skills. Another of her special touches was learning to speak Italian
and learning to cook Gene’s favorites Italian dishes, which endeared her to
Sarazen’s parents.
“I married a walking encyclopedia and gradually completed an education that had stopped at the sixth grade,” he said in his book Thirty Years
of Championship Golf, co-authored with Herbert Warren Wind.
On the other hand, Sarazen educated himself in the field of agriculture.
What he had taken up as an avocation became a serious matter of business.
The Squire of Harrison • Gene Sarazen 191
Sarazen the golfer became Sarazen the farmer between playing appearances,
hence the popular name “Squire.”
They first held acreage in Connecticut, a dairy farm near Brookfield. It
was later sold to Gabriel Heatter, the World War II newscaster. They bought
another near Darien, later sold it, and went in search of another.
“I’ll never forget driving up the road to that farm near Germantown,”
he said. “It was just what we wanted, and we bought it from the man on
the spot. I think he manufactured neckties or something like that.”
They lived there for twenty-three years, and to illustrate how serious a
farmer he was, annually Gene and his hands produced twelve to fifteen
thousand bushels of apples and fifteen tons of grapes and maintained a herd
of beef cattle.
“I used to drive the tractor, but I wasn’t much for manual labor,” he said.
“I had a fine farm manger, Al Marchisio, who looked after the place when
I was off on my golf travels.”
Occasional trips to the islands off the southwest coast of Florida led to
the Sarazens’ final location on Marco Island. Earlier in life, Sarazen had
landed in Florida not as a celebrity, but as a worker in a brickyard at
Sebring, earning $3 a day. That was to tide him over until the tournament
season began, far back in 1919. After marriage to Mary, her interest in
seashell collecting led them to Marco Island, and they bought a condominium there, migrating between a home they owned in New London,
New Hampshire, with the change of seasons. They eventually settled permanently on Marco Island, and there Gene became a fixture. He still played
an occasional round into the nineties and shot his age with regularity.
It was a casual meeting with another man of Italian extraction that led
to a connection that capped off his career. Dr. Don Panoz, a capitalist of
many ventures, had made his fortune in the pharmaceutical business. Panoz
is a native of West Virginia who transferred his interests to Ireland, where
he established the Elan Corporation, then later returned to the United
States and created the wondrous resort facility, Chateau Elan, north of
Atlanta. In the process he decided to construct a golf course called the Legends, honoring three of the game’s great players, Gene Sarazen, Kathryn
Whitworth, and Sam Snead.
Sarazen was the main contributor to the design of the course, then later,
when Dr. Panoz went a step further, Sarazen became the central figure of
a world-class tournament played there. It was called the Sarazen World
192 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
Open, inviting national Open champions from around the world. It was
an attractive new tournament concept, with every open champion invited,
from the British and the American to those from the tiniest nations on the
globe. It raised golf to a new standard in many an area where it had been
in a retarded state. Open champions came from such distant points as New
Guinea, Slovenia, Vanuatu, Pakistan, and even the Russians initiated a
national championship.
The Sarazen World Open was first played in 1994, won by Ernie Els of
South Africa, a champion who gave the event definition. Such international
champions as Frank Nobilo of New Zealand, who won it twice, and Mark
Calcavecchia, onetime British Open winner; and Sarazen always there to
present the trophy, his once robust frame diminished by age, but not his
personality. When the World Tour brashly moved in, it ran roughshod over
the Sarazen event, and though the European Tour picked it up for a year
on a minor basis, it expired. There is no doubt that the Sarazen World
Open added years to Gene’s life, but once it was gone, soon was he. He
passed away in May 2000, and he and Mary lie side by side in a cemetery
on Marco Island.
While a cherished highlight of his life—he even once suggested a marker
for the spot from which he struck the four-wood—-the historic double
eagle at Augusta National sometimes became rankling. On an exhibition
tour in the Orient, he was often referred to as “Mr. Double Eagle.”
“You’d think that’s all I’d ever done in golf,” he said.
His harvest of major championships began in 1922, at barely twenty
years of age. He won both the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship that
year. He was the repeat PGA Championship winner the next year. He came
close several times in the U.S. Open and PGA, and in 1928 lost the British
Open to his friend and rival Walter Hagen, by two strokes. A long dry spell
came after his early splurge of championships—oh, he won the Western
Open (then a major) the Metropolitan Open, the Southern Open, Miami
Four-Ball with Johnny Farrell, but the nowadays-majors eluded him until
the breakthrough year of 1932. He finally won the British Open at Prince’s
in southern England, with the caddie Hagen had lent him, Skip Daniels,
now sixty-five years old, on the bag. He had won the U.S. Open at Fresh
Meadow earlier, and 1932 is remembered as a kind of resurrection year. He
would win his third PGA Championship in 1933, and by this time Sarazen
had become the dominating American professional, a status reaffirmed
The Squire of Harrison • Gene Sarazen 193
when he struck the shot that led to winning the Masters, completing the
“major foursome” in 1936.
His most resounding shot in British Open championship play would
not come until he reached the age of seventy. The year was 1973. He had
been invited to Royal Troon on the fiftieth anniversary of his first Open
there, not a pleasant memory.
Though he was the reigning U.S. Open and PGA Champion in 1923,
he was still required to qualify. He was sent out early the first day, late the
second day, and caught foul weather both times. To his death he felt that
he had been the victim of jaundiced scheduling.
Some measure of revenge came with his return in ’73, when he aced the
renowned “Postage Stamp” hole the first round, then birdied it out of the
bunker the second day, playing in the same pairing as Arnold Palmer. The
King bogeyed and parred the hole those two days—a Sarazen three against
a Palmer seven.
Knickers were as much a part of his personality as his swing, and
throughout most of his life he kept and displayed a complete wardrobe of
knickers supplied by a personal tailor on Fifth Avenue. His cheerful smile
and engaging manner opened many doors, and he associated with royalty,
nations’ presidents, movie stars, corporate executives, songwriters, politicians, war heroes, and of course, the athletic greats of his day. But of all the
people of his acquaintance, he would say later in life, the “finest man” he
ever knew was Archie Wheeler, an elder member at the Brooklawn Club,
who had shown confidence in and gave responsibility to Sarazen as a
teenaged apprentice.
Mr. Gene lived the good life, he gave as well as he received, witnessed
by a scholarship he established at Siena College in Loudon, New York, and
the various charity events he involved himself in around Marco Island. No
professional athlete ever commanded more respect
