American Triumvirate by James Dodson

Author:James Dodson [Dodson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95739-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

For Sam and Ben, redemption of a kind came within weeks.

A week before the start of the PGA Championship at the Seaview Country Club outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, Sam drove to Norfolk to enlist in the navy. “My thinking there was that they might station me right there, close to home, where I knew a good number of folks and some of the better golf courses,” he laughingly explained years later. “But I guess that was pretty naive thinking.”

At the time, he told several recruiting officers, including, he claimed, an admiral who turned up to have their photos made with him, “The PGA Championship is next week up in New Jersey. They’re planning to cancel play until this thing is over and I’d like one more shot at a title. Will that be a problem?”

“Oh, we’ll give you a pass for that, don’t you worry,” one of them assured him. “You just go ahead and sign.”

Something, however, told Sam to wait. “I thought about my wife, Audrey, and about the three thousand dollar purse and the two thousand dollar bonus from Wilson [if he won], and I decided the rest of the boys could handle Tojo all right for just one more week.” He asked if his induction could be delayed a week, and the brass reluctantly agreed. It turned out to be perhaps the wisest—and most challenging—decision of his playing career.

Though other top stars were signing up to serve as well, the most competitive field of the year began grueling match play in the final week of May on the relatively short but demandingly tight composite course that drew from Seaview’s Bay and Pines eighteens, layouts to which Donald Ross, Howard Toomey, and William Flynn had all contributed design work.

En route to the thirty-six finale, Sam beat Vic Ghezzi, red-hot Sam Byrd, an aging Willie Goggin, PGA president Ed Dudley, and ever-dangerous Jimmy Demaret, who playfully advised Sam not to wear his sailor’s cap in his match against Corporal Jim Turnesa, who was on leave from the army’s nearby Fort Dix and had brought along a throng of seven thousand GIs to cheer him along. “This crowd isn’t exactly pulling for you,” Dudley had remarked to Sam earlier in the tournament. The hostility, Sam later learned, stemmed from a rumor circulating that he’d attempted to dodge his enlistment—and that it was the navy only doubled the offense, hence Demaret’s joke.

Turnesa is quite a story himself, one of the seven sons born to Vitale and Anna Turnesa, who’d immigrated from Naples, Italy, to Elmford, New York, in 1904. All the boys became prolific golfers, creating perhaps the game’s most storied family dynasty. Phil, Frank, and Doug became outstanding teaching professionals. Joe, Mike, and Jim migrated from the amateur ranks to the tour in the 1940s and early ’50s, between them winning dozens of events, reaching the final of every major championship, having played on both the Walker Cup and Ryder Cup teams. With help from his older brothers, the

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