The Longest Shot: Jack Fleck, Ben Hogan, and Pro Golf's Greatest Upset at the 1955 U.S. Open - Hardcover

Sagebiel, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312661843 ISBN 13: 9780312661847

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012

Synopsis

The inspirational story of the unknown golfer from Iowa who beat his idol in the 1955 U.S. Open

With the overlooked Jack Fleck still playing the course, NBC-TV proclaimed that the legendary Ben Hogan had won his record fifth U.S. Open and signed off from San Francisco. Undaunted, the forgotten Iowan rallied to overcome a nine-shot deficit over the last three rounds―still a U.S. Open record―and made a pressure-packed putt to tie Hogan on the final hole of regulation play. The two men then squared off in a tense, 18-hole playoff from which Fleck emerged victorious in one of the most startling upsets in sports history.

On par with the classic golf narratives of Mark Frost and John Feinstein, The Longest Shot will surprise and delight fans as they trace the improbable journey of an unheralded former caddie who played his way into the record books by out-dueling the sport's greatest champion of his time.

About this title

About the Author

NEIL SAGEBIEL is the founder and editor of Armchair Golf Blog, one of the top golf blogs on the Internet. A former copywriter for a Seattle advertising agency and major newspaper, he is a freelance writer in Floyd, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
MUNI PRO
 
 
In March 1955, after a week at home in Iowa to ready his two Davenport municipal courses for the upcoming golf season, Jack Fleck drove 1,300 miles southeast to rejoin the PGA Tour at the $12,500 St. Petersburg Open, the first event of the annual Florida swing.
For Fleck, sunny St. Petersburg wouldn’t be just another routine stop on the tournament calendar. It would be a turning point, an unexpected detour in the career of a wannabe tour golf professional who was determined to lift his game as high as his hopes. A long cardboard box bound for Fort Worth, Texas, awaited him in Skip Alexander’s pro shop at the Lakewood Country Club. The contents of that box would put his season and golf career on a surprising new path.
Fleck, now thirty-three with a wife and four-year-old son, needed any break he could get to achieve his dream of playing the PGA Tour full-time. Money was scarcer than birdies on the tournament trail, and he had family responsibilities. The pro golf tour was a young man’s game—preferably those with a healthy bankroll. Fleck’s youth was fading, and his twentieth-place finishes didn’t earn him enough money or recognition to escape obscurity.
Fleck arrived on the palm tree–lined streets of St. Petersburg with his tour career riding on every drive, approach, chip, and putt. He needed to become a successful PGA Tour player, someone who could make an adequate living and support his family while playing the full circuit. The unfulfilling alternative was clear: He would return to Iowa for good and settle for the humble life of a hometown pro. The 1950s PGA Tour was unlike today’s giant money grab; there was no financial security for marginal or middle-of-the-pack players, especially family men like Fleck.
Jack and Lynn Fleck had made their decision about his golf future before the 1955 season teed off in Los Angeles in January. Fleck would play full-time on the PGA Tour for two seasons while Lynn and Jack’s assistant pro ran Davenport’s two public golf courses. Not exactly a pact, the arrangement was one of those understandings between husbands and wives. This was Fleck’s shot. With his two-year trial period, he would either make it on the tour, or, as Lynn said, “you will get it out of your system.”
Maybe so—but it was hard to imagine that Fleck, a golf professional since the age of seventeen, would ever be cured of tournament golf.
*   *   *
A native Iowan, Jack Fleck was the head club professional of Davenport’s Duck Creek Golf Course and Credit Island Golf Course, a post he had held since 1947. Iowa’s third-largest city, Davenport was located 175 miles due west of Chicago on the Mississippi River, which formed the state’s eastern border. Overseen by the Davenport Parks and Recreation Department, Duck Creek and Credit Island were Davenport’s home of public golf. The greens fee for 18 holes was seventy-five cents, an affordable alternative to the private Davenport Country Club, the golfing playground of the privileged set.
Duck Creek opened in 1927 and was located in a residential neighborhood on Davenport’s northeast side, not far from Jack and Lynn Fleck’s home on East Street. It was a rolling, tree-lined layout of modest difficulty, playing under 6,000 yards and to a par of 70. There was no driving range. When Fleck gave lessons, he and his pupil would go to a nearby section of the city park. A caddie would tag along to shag the practice golf balls.
Several miles away, Credit Island was a small island in the Mississippi connected to the Iowa shoreline by a paved causeway. Also an 18-hole course, Credit Island featured a large clubhouse and practice field. The course had been invaded by the rising currents of the colossal river many times in its thirty-year history. In the spring of 1951, four years into Fleck’s tenure, the course became submerged beneath fifteen feet of water. Credit Island was to flooding what California was to earthquakes.
Like many club pros of his day, Fleck earned his modest income from merchandise sales, golf lessons, and club repairs. The city of Davenport leased the two pro shops to Fleck for a dollar a year but paid him no salary. Similar to Iowa farmers, he lived off the land—his two golf courses. The length of his days at Duck Creek and Credit Island matched those of men toiling in nearby fields, lasting from first light to sundown.
The Davenport muni pro looked nothing like an Iowa farmer, though. While overalls and dungarees were the uniform of the farmer, creased trousers, cotton sweaters, polo shirts, and flat caps were the apparel of the postwar golf professional. One who set an immaculate standard for golf attire was Ben Hogan, the era’s greatest golfer and Fleck’s secret idol. Hogan looked the part of a golf god.
“The first thing that struck me about Hogan when I saw him the first time in person was his perfect clothes,” Tom Weiskopf, a later-generation tour pro, told Hogan biographer James Dodson. “I’d never seen shirts that fit so beautifully on a human being before.”
Hogan’s “perfect clothes” came in conservative blues and grays. His apparel featured trousers with razor-sharp creases, cardigan sweaters, tailored shirts, and polished leather golf shoes, each shoe with an extra spike for better stability. Hogan’s clothing was custom-made. He routinely removed labels, he said, to avoid offending anyone.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Nobody ever looked the way Hogan did,” Weiskopf said.
Still, there were imitators. Hogan protégé Gardner Dickinson emulated the golf legend in almost every conceivable way, from clothing to golf swing to mannerisms, even puffing away on cigarettes. Hogan smoked Chesterfields, and no one would be a bit surprised if Dickinson did, too.
Fleck didn’t smoke. He never had, despite two older brothers who smoked, and despite serving in the U.S. Navy, where cigarettes were as commonplace as salutes. Fleck epitomized wholesomeness. He shunned tobacco, alcohol, and vices in all forms. His mother once told him he would be just like his brothers, smoking and such—a form of reverse psychology, he surmised. Whatever his mother’s motivation might have been, he turned out squeaky clean, a straight arrow who had no interest in straying from his heartland values.
Nor did Fleck have Hogan’s perfect clothes, but he was blessed with good looks and a slender frame that helped off-the-rack golf shirts and pleated trousers look sharp on him. He stood 6'1½" tall and weighed 164 pounds, a weight he would maintain within a pound or two for the next half century. He favored his father, Louis Fleck, but had the gentle eyes of his mother, Elsie. His eyes were green. His thick brown hair was neatly parted, and his face featured dark, bushy eyebrows, a long nose, dimples, and a strong chin. It was a friendly, handsome face that, in photographs, sometimes had an aw-shucks grin and at other times a broad, gleaming smile. Lynn once gushed that her husband looked like matinee idol Tyrone Power, Hollywood’s romantic lead in movies such as The Mark of Zorro and The Black Swan.
Fleck’s movements matched his lanky frame. There was nothing abrupt or jerky about how he carried himself or approached golf. He had the easy, casual way of a man on an afternoon stroll. One golf writer wrote that Fleck “had a loose-jointed walk, his arms and legs flapping about as if with no plan.” The Iowa pro remembered being called “slew foot” because his right foot turned out when he walked, the result of a broken leg at age seven when he and his older brothers were horsing around in an empty public swimming pool. Others described him as angular, straight, and Lincolnesque. Fleck possessed a long, fluid golf swing that wrapped around his lean body like a loose belt. He moved with unassuming ease.
Exhibiting social grace, on the other hand, was among Fleck’s most enduring life challenges. He had been painfully shy since his schooldays. He would always choose to make a special project with his dependable hands rather than face the terror of an oral presentation to his classmates. “I would build guillotines or whatever illustrated the stories we were studying so I could get credit and not have to get up in front of people,” he said.
In his early days as an assistant pro at the Des Moines Golf and Country Club, he preferred the solitude of the club room. He dreaded the encounters with customers in the pro shop. “At first, I was so bashful ... that I had to talk myself into going into the front golf shop to wait on the members that wanted service.”
His strongly held values, combined with his social unease, sometimes worked against him. Fleck was modest, serious, and, at times, stubborn. He was plainspoken and unflinchingly honest, which sometimes rankled others. Sugarcoating was not his style. He did not believe in undertaking special efforts to be popular or endear himself to others. He eschewed the art of politics that was so enmeshed in society.
Instead, Fleck sided with the unvarnished truth as he saw it, even if it occasionally hurt. Because there were few gray areas in his world, he tended to let fewer people in. In many ways, this made the solitary rhythms of life as a golf pro a perfect fit for Fleck, who was, at heart, a loner. He was adept with his hands, wielding a club, swinging it, and sending a golf ball toward a distant target. As in his days as a Davenport schoolboy, he would rather show you what he could do than talk about it.
*   *   *
Jack met Lynn when she walked into his pro shop in the summer of 1949. She wanted the pro to repair a golf club. The pro wanted a date. “I talked her into having dinner,” he said. “We had many dates that summer and fall.” The broken c...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0312661843
• ISBN 13: 9780312661847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336