Sarazen Was a Storied Figure in Golf

For years, part of the enjoyment of attending the Masters at Augusta National was seeing Gene Sarazen, known as “The Squire.” Wearing his customary knickers, he would hit the ceremonial first ball and then retire to the clubhouse veranda, holding forth with stories back to the days when he played his rounds with Harry Vardon, the first golfer to swing a club the traditional way. Sarazen invented the sand wedge. He had a lot of stories to tell. He was 97 when he died Thursday of complications from pneumonia in Naples, Fla.

“I’m going to be buried in knickers,” he once said. “I have never worn long pants on the golf course in my life. Oh, you might have seen me wearing long pants at the Masters, but that’s when I’m socializing and not on the golf course. I must have a couple of hundred pairs of knickers with the stockings to match.”

Only last month, Sarazen teed off at Augusta with Byron Nelson and Sam Snead. He remained as much a part of the place as the magnolias and the pine needles.

At 5 feet 4, and sometimes a fiery personality, Sarazen was a colorful performer and a hard-charger predating Arnold Palmer. Sarazen’s best-known comeback included the four-wood shot that continues to echo throughout the golf world, his double eagle at 15 in 1935 at Augusta. The event was known then as the Augusta National Invitational Tournament, the invitations extended by host Bobby Jones. But Sarazen made the tournament world famous as the Masters. He won that year in a playoff, but that is not remembered as well as “The Shot.”

“I had to step down to an overhanging lie on a wet fairway,” Sarazen once recalled. “I remember telling Walter Hagen, who was in the gallery, ‘This is the one that counts’ when I went to hit a spoon 220 yards from the hole, for the second shot. The ball hit two feet in front of the green, rolled toward the cup and dropped in. I heard a yell from the gallery and I just knew it had made it. People have been telling me for years they saw the shot. Actually, there weren’t 15 people in the gallery.”

“The Shot” overshadowed the fact that he was the first and one of only four to win the four modern major championships. The only others to win each championship were Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.

Photos show Sarazen to have been a handsome figure in 1932, with a broad smile and black hair slicked back as he held the U.S. and British Open trophies he won that year. He considered those two victories his greatest achievement. He rallied to win the U.S. Open by playing the final 28 holes in 100 strokes.

Sarazen was born in 1902 in Harrison, N.Y. He caddied at the Larchmont Country Club beginning in 1910. A few years later, he began practicing at a public course in Bridgeport, Conn., where the course pro encouraged him. One day the two both made a hole in one on the same course and a mention was made in a newspaper. Sarazen supposedly looked at his name in print--he was Eugene Saraceni--and decided: “Not a bad name for a violin player or a school teacher, but a rotten name for an athlete.” He came up with Sarazen.

Sarazen was motivated by national pride and individual pride--that’s why he competed so hard, he said, in the British Open and all other tournaments. “The biggest purse I ever won was in 1930 when I took first place in the Agua Caliente Open and was paid $10,000 in silver dollars,” he said. “Everybody today is judged on how much money he makes, like a horse’s purse. It’s money, money, money.”

When asked to name the greatest golfers, he always put Nicklaus at the top of his list. The rest of it, in no particular order, included Jim Barnes, Jock Hutchison, Hogan, Jones and Hagen. Sarazen was set in his opinion. He’d played the game with all of them.