The Best Golf Writer You’ve (Probably) Never Read

The first time I laid eyes on Charley Price, he was sitting at a Royal typewriter in the Quonset hut that served in those days as the media center for the Masters. The room was filled with long, rickety hunter-green tables that appeared cobbled together in an eighth-grade shop class. He was wearing a seersucker jacket, and near the typewriter was a black plastic ashtray, the kind you’d find in every dive on Washington Road, with a lit cigarette pinched down into one of the notches on the rim. It seemed like every time he hit the period key, he returned to the cigarette, the way a bird pecks at a pile of sunflower seeds. I was there to take his picture for Golf World magazine, the publication where he had his golf-writing roots, and where I had recently been hired. And if he’d known how little I knew about pretty much anything, but especially golf, he wouldn’t have let me push the button.

Though Charley was in the generation of golf writers before mine, I was fortunate to get to know him, at least a little. In the hindsight of my life, I now regard something he told me—at the time, in raspy exasperation—as an act of immense kindness. The two of us were holding up the same bar at a major championship—a U.S. Open or a PGA, my only recollection confined to the fact that it was in a part of America that wasn’t Augusta, Georgia. Charley knew as well as anyone that paying the bills as a freelancer, which I had become, could be daunting, and that photography was keeping the lights on in my house. Somewhere along the line, he looked at me impatiently and said, “You know you’re a writer, don’t you?” Epithets may have been involved. Later, when I sobered up, it occurred to me he had read something I’d written and hadn’t felt the need to throw the magazine across the room.

Charley passed away in 1994, but if you read him today—which too few people interested in golf do—his words remain as fresh as if he’d typed them this morning. In the first lines of a piece written in 1991, this is how he described Bobby Jones as the great man neared the end of his life:

“By 1968 Bobby Jones’ health had slipped from the terrible to the abysmal. His eyes were bloodshot from the spinal disease he had endured for 20 years, his arms atrophied to the size of a schoolgirl’s, his ankles so swollen by body fluids they spilled over the edges of his shoes. This was a man who could once effortlessly drive a golf ball a sixth of a mile.”

In an era of golf-writing icons—Herbert Warren Wind and Dan Jenkins, to name two of Price’s contemporaries, are deserving members of the World Golf Hall of Fame—Charley was the writer’s writer. Roughly a year before his death, prompted by a request from Golf Digest’s editor, Jerry Tarde, Charley sent a fax to the magazine’s Connecticut offices with a few of his thoughts about the craft. Here are three:

• Write as though your reader is an ignorant genius. He doesn’t know anything, but he’s capable of understanding everything.
• Write everything as though it will make sense 50 years from now. In 1956 the most popular lyric in America was “Some enchanted evening.” Six months later it was “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.”
• Read what you ought to read, not just what you want to.

In a career that began, more or less, the day he graduated from College of the Holy Cross in 1947, Charley would become Golf World’s first “staff” writer, Golf magazine’s founding editor, Walter Hagen’s chauffeur for a summer, Ben Hogan’s ghostwriter, and Bob Jones’ legs when the man who won golf’s Grand Slam was no longer physically capable of leaving his apartment at Augusta National during the Masters. Charley wrote history because he lived it.

He was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Washington, D.C., where the family lived on 16th Street Northwest until they moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, to be closer to his father’s work. He was the second of four boys born to Helen, a registered nurse, and Charles—for whom Charley was named—a professional gambler who wasn’t registered with anyone.

Charley’s father ran a gambling club in Prince George’s County called the Maryland Athletic Club, but everyone called it Jimmy’s Place, after its owner, James A. LaFontaine. In the days before casinos became as common as toadstools, Price described his father’s, and its 7-acre parking lot, as the finest gambling emporium “between Saratoga and Havana.” In a story Charley wrote for Sports Illustrated in 1976, he recalls the time during the Great Depression that Mr. Jim, as the owner was called, was kidnapped and held for $40,000 ransom.

Three men spirited him, blindfolded, to a backwoods cottage in Virginia. There they waited for three days, but nobody offered to pay Mr. Jim’s ransom. That bothered Mr. Jim not at all. He whiled away the time napping, telling stories and puffing on his Havanas. To kill time, he suggested that they play some Hearts. Mr. Jim beat them out of several thousand dollars for which he took a marker.

On the fifth day the kidnappers began getting nervous. Mr. Jim, on the other hand, was enjoying himself immensely. He was playing cards against three of the biggest patsies he had ever seen. Finally, one of the men blew his stack. “Why doesn’t somebody pay your ransom?” he demanded. “That’s easy,” said Mr. Jim. “I’m the only guy I know who’s got $40,000, and nobody knows where I keep my money. But I’ll tell you what. You take me home, and I’ll get your money for you.”

For Mr. Jim, as Price told it, a deal was a deal. He walked into his unpretentious home, kissed his wife on the cheek as if he’d been away on a particularly tedious business trip and counted out $40,000 in $1,000 bills from a safe no bigger than a breadbox. He gave the kidnappers 36 of the bills and told them he was keeping four for himself to cover their losses at cards.

Charley rarely mentioned his father in his columns, and the only time he focused on the man in full was a decade after he passed away, in a piece he wrote for Coronet magazine in 1959 titled “The Death of a Gambler.” What he composed about his father could, and certainly should, be taught in writing classes:

He was also acquainted with every notorious hood, cheat and racketeer on the East Coast, and he was afraid of none of them. He was accustomed to being entrusted with large amounts of other people’s money. He always kept his mouth shut about other people’s affairs. And he was scrupulously honest.

These were the qualities that set him apart from ordinary gamblers, and that enabled him to walk the underworld, if need be, with no more armor than his pinstriped suit and the incongruously flamboyant neckties he always wore.

But he was also his father. And Charley was there at the end.

All that night, I held my father’s hand. 

A croupier from my father’s casino gave him his medicine and wiped his brow. Near dawn, I climbed to my father’s attic and threw myself exhausted on his bed.   While lying there, I knew for the first time just why I loved this man to whom even the ordinary signs of love had always been embarrassing. I understood then how unselfish he had been in never trying to mold me in his own image, unlike so many fathers who act the paternal role to its fullest.

I saw, too, that despite the fact his life had been carried on outside the pale of ordinary society, he had always conducted himself with personal dignity. I decided that when I awoke I would somehow force myself to tell my father how much I loved him. Our lives together had been largely spent trying to divine each other’s feelings, and I had grown weary of the game.

I had been asleep about two hours when the croupier aroused me. “Wake up!” he said, shaking me. I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes.

“You’d better come downstairs,” he said quietly. “Your father’s dead.”

Throughout his life, Charley had an adversarial relationship with alcohol. He could go years without having a sip of whiskey, but when he fell, he fell hard. Toward the latter years of his life, there were two such occasions. The first was on a trip to St. Andrews for the Open Championship won by Nick Faldo in 1990. Charley had lived in St. Andrews for a few dark months one winter and was driven back to America mostly by his inability to make anything electronic function properly. What put him over the edge, however, was his deep reverence for Jones and Jones’ equally deep reverence for St. Andrews. He fell off the wagon on the airplane going back home. The other time, which nearly broke up his second marriage, to a woman decades younger than he was, came when he lost his father’s tigereye ring. It was as if he’d died all over again.

Charley began college as a pre-med major but wound up a willing prisoner of the English language. His favorite writer was John O’Hara, one of America’s underappreciated authors of the 20th century, and his senior thesis was on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Charley was also a heck of a player. He was the captain of the golf team, and his yearbook, in its pithy, bullet-point style, said that “in between nine holes [he] cultivated a taste for fried chicken, Prokofiev and Beethoven.”

Classical music was nearly as important to him as golf, and he was equally literate about it, though to the best of my knowledge he couldn’t even play the spoons. Once, when Charley was living on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, I visited his apartment with Dick Taylor, the editor of Golf World. There was nothing grand about the place, little more than a second-story walk-up with a view of a few live oaks and a bit of Spanish moss. Inside, however, was something approximating $140,000 worth of stereo equipment. Like many writers, when Charley was at work, his space was a chaotic maelstrom of papers and books, cascading like Victoria Falls from his prized Dunbar rolltop desk, a collector’s piece designed by a guy who’d studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. If he was deeply into his work, he might not even get out of his pajamas. To take a break, Charley would putt across the carpet and listen to Beethoven, and he didn’t care to be interrupted at either. “If you’ve got something better to say than Beethoven, I’ll turn him off and listen to you,” he would say, which was about as polite a way of saying “Shut the hell up—I’m thinking” as he knew.

Right out of college, Charley got a job selling Hudson automobiles—jobs were scarce with all the World War II veterans returning home from saving civilization—and he wasn’t any damn good at it. When he got wind of Bob Harlow’s new publication, Golf World, he talked his way into a job earning $15 a week and put the Hudsons in his rearview mirror. It was then, at the suggestion of reigning U.S. Open champion Lew Worsham, that Charley played on what would soon become the PGA Tour. In those days, all you had to do was sign a piece of paper that said you wouldn’t accept any prize money for six months, and you were welcome to give it a go. With backing from his father at $100 a month to cover expenses, Charley jumped into Worsham’s new Cadillac and headed west. To Charley, it was a fact-finding mission, a chance to find out what was what, and he was grateful to Worsham for the rest of his life for convincing him to do it.

By the time they reached El Paso, Texas, Charley was stricken with appendicitis, and he never made it to any of the West Coast tournaments. He did, however, eventually rejoin the Tour, and he had the stories to prove it. One in particular that he liked to tell on himself was about the conversation he’d had with Clayton Heafner one day on a practice putting green. Heafner was as big and thick as a carnival strongman, while Charley was about the size of your average lawn jockey. (Charley and Ben Hogan were so close in size, they could have worn each other’s clothes if Price could put on a pound or two.) One afternoon, in his lilting North Carolina accent, Heafner said, “Charley, have you noticed anything about the boys out here? Most of them are built like truck drivers with the touch of a hairdresser. You, on the other hand, are built like a hairdresser with the touch of a truck driver.” I suspect Charley enjoyed the story not so much because it was about him, but because he admired the way Heafner put it together.

Charley could define choking in two paragraphs because he’d done it himself. “As a 22-year-old amateur I played in the old North and South Open in Pinehurst, N.C. In the first round I birdied five of the first six holes,” he wrote in Golf Digest. “On the seventh tee someone volunteered the information that Sam Snead was two under, three strokes behind me. I promptly proceeded to take a quintuple bogey.

“I don’t know to this day whether I was afraid I couldn’t beat Snead or that I might. But I do know that after that nightmare 9 on my card I had no trouble making my sixth birdie on the eighth hole, now that I was behind Snead, where I belonged, and no longer in front of him, where I didn’t.”

After he got his postgrad degree in Tour golf, Charley took a job at the Washington Star for $75 a week, working the city beat. When he sold a story to The Saturday Evening Post and learned they were going to pay him $1,000 (roughly $13,000 today) for it, he was out of the newspaper business before the late edition hit the sidewalks. He worked his way up the coast, spending a little time in Princeton, New Jersey, where he interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer, but by then he already knew his ultimate destination was New York City and his life would be in magazines. Charley wrote for anyone and everyone. The Saturday Evening Post. Esquire. Coronet. The Elks Magazine. Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf. Newsweek. Sports Illustrated. Cosmopolitan. Golf. He eventually finished things off at Golf Digest. He was the voice behind three books, editing the essays in The American Golfer and writing A Golf Story: Bobby Jones, Augusta National, and the Masters Tournament (with a foreword from his friend Arnold Palmer) and Golfer-at-Large (with an intro from his friend Ben Hogan).

In the heyday of magazines, three quarters of the writers scratching out a living as contributors were in Manhattan, and the rest commuted from Connecticut. It was the only way to make a go of it in a business where you had to sing for your supper every month. There were worse things than being young and living in Manhattan. Charley haunted Carnegie Hall and the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, and he had his own seat in the legendary Toots Shor’s watering hole. The offices of Golf were close to the USGA’s headquarters, and he devoured every book in its library.

Charley made it a point to seek out ancient voices. Find the oldest person in the room, he’d say, sit down next to them, then shut up and listen. When he met Fred McLeod, the winner of the 1908 U.S. Open and the Masters’ first honorary starter, he also got an education on Willie Anderson, who was the first man to win four U.S. Opens and died 15 years before Charley was born, because McLeod told him things about Anderson that you can’t learn in books. Price knew Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen and, of course, Jones—he’d held Jones’ fabled putter, Calamity Jane, in the fingers of both hands. He knew Byron Nelson well and played golf with Snead. When Hy Peskin took the iconic photograph of Hogan playing his second shot into the 18th green at Merion in the 1950 U.S. Open, Charley was standing so close to Peskin, he could have changed the film in the camera for him.

Hogan’s post-car-accident article, “How I Came Back,” had Hogan’s byline, but it was told to and written by Charley. He knew Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino. And if Charley hadn’t died in 1994, the year Tiger Woods went to Stanford University, he would have figured out a way to know him, too.

In 1953, before settling into his uptown New York life, Charley worked for Hagen in Cadillac, Michigan, trying in vain to squeeze a book out of him the way you squeeze a lime for a vodka tonic. Charley was 27, Hagen 61. In “The Haig and I,” a chapter in Golfer-at-Large, Price describes his duties: “I was doing the driving. Although The Haig down through the years must have owned a hundred cars of some exotic make or other—Austins, Lotuses, Reos, and some even Detroit had never heard of—he preferred not to drive himself. As a result of this practice, he had made himself into an intolerable backseat driver, and he did not like the way I was handling his Buick convertible. ‘Slow down!’ he’d say every fifteen minutes. ‘We’re not in any hurry.’ In The Haig’s eyes, anybody who drove more than forty miles per hour was a maniac.”

Though Charley’s relationship with Hagen was personal, the one he developed with Jones seems, in retrospect, more profound. While he was the editor of Golf, Charley devoted an entire issue to celebrating Jones’ Grand Slam of 1930. They collaborated on numerous projects and articles, and Price saved every piece of paper he ever got from Jones. The earliest letters are signed with Jones’ full name, but, in short order, the letters began carrying the simple signature “Bob,” which became, through the years, more and more tortured as even the act of writing became difficult for the great man. Most of their correspondence involved minor edits to articles, or straightforward business matters of who owned the rights to what—Jones was, after all, a lawyer—but there were some where Jones’ personality peeks through.

Dear Charley:

I have now got to Chapter 12, page 2, and am surprised you fell for that stupid myth that Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre, was a friend of mine. Actually, I never met her, although I knew of her…

P.S. Zelda must have been at least five or six years older than I was and would not have looked at me sideways.

Though Charley was good on everyone, he was never better than when he could put Jones and Hagen in the same paragraph. 

In Golfer-at-Large, he wrote: 

From 1923 through 1930, Jones played in twenty-one major national championships, passing up eleven others. The Haig played in thirty-two, passing up nothing. In that period, Jones played in only seven tournaments that were not national championships. The Haig played in at least three hundred. Jones played exhibitions only for an occasional charity, perhaps in those years no more than half a dozen. The Haig played more than one thousand, all of them for cash. When not competing, Jones played no more golf than the average dentist, probably not more than eight rounds a year, and this in the comparative solitude of his home club near Atlanta. The Haig, who had no home club, played every day he wasn’t on an ocean liner, often twice a day, usually on a course he had never seen before and always in front of a stampeding gallery.

In a Golf Digest column about Jones and Hagen, Charley wrote that, during his conversations with Jones, if he mentioned Hagen, “Bob would just smile but add nothing to what I already knew. In fact he started asking me questions about Hagen, which I thought was strange. Then it dawned on me. They hardly knew one another.”

Charley spent the last years of his life in Pinehurst. He started playing more golf. Though he hadn’t competed in 30 years, he entered the North & South Senior Amateur Championship once and lost in the finals. When he was 66, he shot 65 at Talamore Golf Club, a Rees Jones design that back then had the rather silly gimmick of using llamas as caddies. The mind boggles at how he would have written that.

It’s not worth debating whether he was at the very top of the mountain of 20th-century golf writers, but every old-timer remaining today can confirm he always worked above the tree line. My lasting image of Charley is of him striding up the neon-green hill at the back of the Augusta National clubhouse as if the ghost of Jones had just summoned him, leaning into the climb, wearing soft shoes and a double-breasted blazer. I’m certain they’re both there yet.