High Noon At Broadmoor

Last may at Muirfield in Scotland during the week of intensive preparation for the Walker Cup match, the American team received just the jab of jocularity that helps a side along when Mr. E. Harvie Ward (as the British refer to the Carolinian when they are not misrepresenting him as Mr. E. Harvie-Ward) released to his teammates the list of nicknames he had concocted for them. During his first warmup rounds, when he had been getting the ball out no distance at all from the tee and about as straight as a parenthesis, Harvie, while hoping for better things, had taken to calling himself "E. Mickey Mouse, the playing pro from Disneyland." Ruminating in this same vein in the leather chairs at Graywalls Inn, Harvie eventually rounded up sobriquets for his eight colleagues, similarly off-beat and on the mark. Ward Wettlaufer, the chubby young slugger, was "Baby Fat." The very blond Jack Nicklaus was "Snow White." Tommy Aaron from deep Georgia, "Cotton Mouth." Deane Beman, all focus and acuteness, "Bee Bee Eyes." As for the veterans, Bud Taylor was dubbed "Bulldog Drummond," Bill Hyndman "The Praying Mantis" and Billy Joe Patton (with his backswing in mind) "White Lightning." Charlie Coe, captain of the team, was "Wyatt Earp."

The easiest of these nicknames to arrive at, undoubtedly, was Coe's. There might be some debate in a person's mind as to which Western character the reigning Amateur champion most closely resembles, but nothing further afield than that. Tall, spare and with a deliberate gait that seems to kick up dust even when he is walking a clean sweep of Merion blue-grass, Coe, a 35-year-old oil broker from Oklahoma, has all the contingent attributes of the men who introduced law, order and the invariable Boston schoolmarm to our rough frontier a century or so ago. When Charlie speaks, which is seldom while he is golfing, his words are brief and to the point and are uttered in a voice as dry as sagebrush. In tournament play few expressions other than the steady frown of concentration crease his sun-and-wind-worn face and, hole after hole, his blue-green eyes set straight ahead and unflickering, he advances toward the green as though it were high noon. To round out the picture, it should be added that when he is not bearing down on work at hand there is in Charlie Coe humor, graciousness and a fund of warmth, but even then he remains in character. He is the adult Westerner and, not unlike Ben Hogan, he enjoys taking seriously the things that interest him. This is one of the reasons why next week at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs he is the defending champion in the National Amateur and not simply a contestant who won the Amateur back in 1949 and whose game lost its sharpness bit by bit as he grew older.

When Coe at 25 first gained the Amateur championship at Oak Hill in 1949—the year before, he had given clear indications of his ability by reaching the semifinals and ousting Julius Boros en route—he possessed a very long, detailed and rhythmic swing, the kind that usually wilts as tournament pressure accumulates unless its owner is a real player. Well, Coe was that. In the fifth round, for example, three down with five to play against Mr. E. Harvie Ward, he evened the match by the home hole and won it on the 19th. The new champion was so altogether impressive that the best observers felt he would be one of those rare players who year after year would have an excellent chance of repeating, the way a few choice amateurs had done in the 1920s when, to be sure, the field was much smaller.

During his next few seasons Coe fulfilled these expectations. He won the Western one year and went a very good distance annually in our Amateur. In 1951, in his one start in the British, he moved all the way to the final at Porthcawl before losing to an inspired finishing spurt by Dick Chapman. And then, so inconspicuously at first that you almost didn't notice it, something began to corrode the timing in Coe's long swing and he became increasingly erratic and beatable. In the 1953 Walker Cup, for instance, he lost both his matches. He was put out in the first round of the Amateur in 1954 and again in 1955. The last straw, as far as his patience went, was a round in the 1957 Masters in which he needed 88 strokes. When he returned home to Oklahoma City, he impassively tore down his old swing and started the very risky job of building a new one. It wasn't half so pretty, the swing he gradually arrived at after months of study and practice. The arc was considerably shorter, the hitting action more brusquely efficient, but Charlie had much better control of it and really knew where the ball was going for a change. This has never been known to hurt a golfer.

Whatever working confidence Coe needed in order to trust implicitly in his new game he received in the 1958 Masters, in which he played four very solid rounds. He then went off on a genuinely brilliant sequence of achievements over the following 12 months: In June in the National Open at Southern Hills in Tulsa he was low amateur (75-71-75-74—295). In September he took the National Amateur at Olympic, in serious trouble only once during the arduous week, faltering in the morning round in the 36-hole final, calmly working out at lunch that he was mis-keying his swing by setting his hands too low at address, then coming back in the afternoon to play golf that was practically errorless. In October, in the heavy, biting winds at St. Andrews in the Eisenhower Cup, won by Australia after a playoff with the United States, he brought in the lowest five-round total for the American team. The following January, partnered in the Crosby, or the National Pro-Amateur Invitational tournament, with Art Wall (then on the eve of his fabulous depredation of the winter circuit prize money), Charlie helped the combine something like 27 shots as they blew the tournament wide open. In April, back for the 1959 Masters, he finished sixth with a great 288 total, nosing out Billy Joe Patton for the low amateur medal when, for the second day in a row, he picked up four birdies on the last six holes, a feat that went all but unnoticed because of Wall's even more electrifying finish (five birdies on the last six holes) which won him that thrilling championship.

In more recent months Charlie has not played quite this well. The responsibility of captaining the Walker Cup team this past May seemed to cut into his concentration in his singles match with Joe Carr. Then, after all that strainful golf and thinking about golf, he appeared tired and a little off his best form in both the British Amateur and our Open. However, with two full months of comparative rest behind him and the tonic pickup of a little dove hunting in the familiar fields around Ardmore, it would not be at all surprising if next week the old marshal of the badlands put up an unusually stubborn defense of his title. In addition to a really sound method and a reliable temperament, Charlie will have one other thing going for him at Colorado Springs: he knows the altitudinous Broadmoor course well—which should help him considerably in selecting the right clubs in the thin mountain air and handling the puzzling greens which break every which way and need lots of learning before you know which side is the right side of the cup to be on. Besides being a scenic delight, the remodeled Broadmoor is a suitably testing course. The nine new holes which Robert Trent Jones constructed a few years back are by general agreement among that architect's most imaginative work.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

Of all of Charlie Coe's fine performances during his renascence period, there is little question that his repeat victory in the Amateur last summer was the most notable. It was the hardest. Composed of eight rounds of match play, the first six over 18 holes, the semifinals and the final over 36, the Amateur now stands as our lone surviving major match-play event and as the most grueling tournament on our national golf calendar. Besides requiring vast reserves of physical and nervous stamina, a certain amount of luck is needed to play your way out of the pack in the Amateur. In an 18-hole match anything can happen. Have the misfortune to run up against an opponent whose putter is working like a magic wand or who falls into one of those trances where he can do no wrong for four or five holes and, before you know it, before you have a chance to stabilize the situation, the holes have run out and you are on your way home, wondering what happened, since you didn't play badly at all. The foreknowledge of how hard it is to stay alive in the Amateur impels old hands who are as keen as ever to ponder new and more arduous means of preparing for it. Last year Patton spent some time every day in the weeks preceding the tournament keying himself to start every round with a rush, and Bill Campbell topped off his daily training with a few miles of roadwork. Neither, it turned out, proved to be the right ticket.

There once was a time when a fellow could count on a breather round in the Amateur now and then. He could look up at the pairings board and see that his next opponent was someone beautifully unknown—say, Elmo Gresham from Ketchikan, Alaska—and deduce quite accurately that old Elmo probably wouldn't be too tough. Today just about everyone who gets to the Amateur is pretty darn tough or else he wouldn't be there. The other evening, for example, I was leafing through the record book of the postwar championships, noting the number of times players whom no one had ever heard of outside their section had cut quite a swath. In 1947, for instance, that fine established player, Charley Kocsis, was put out by some unknown by the name of Robert Rosburg, who went all the way to the semifinals. Three years later a slim, sandy-haired kid who looked like a player's son somehow went all the way to the quarter-finals. This unknown was Frank Holscher. It's quite excusable if you can't remember the names of all the young unfamiliar faces. How many, really, are going to amount to anything? In that same Amateur a kid from Ohio named Dow Finsterwald got knocked off in the third round. Why bother to try and get a difficult name like that straight when the chances are you'll never hear of him again, not with so many other really impressive young players showing up year after year?

For these reasons, the Amateur these days is a formidable Chinese puzzle, and only when the winner has solved it-does it become clear what the solution was. In Charlie Coe's case, his method was simple. Over the course of eight matches in six days at Olympic he hit only a handful of bad shots. Only a few of the rest were sensational. They were merely very, very good golf shots.