Tommy Aaron - Part 1 (The Early Years and Tour Wins)

Intro Music 0:07

Straight down the middle. It went straight down the middle.

Mike Gonzalez 0:13

Then it started to Welcome to another episode of FORE the Good of the Game. And Bruce Devlin, our guest this morning, is famous for a couple of things that happened at Augusta National.

Bruce Devlin 0:24

Well, that's right. And uh of course, we're talking about our 1973 Masters Champion, a man that finished in the top ten on the money list in 67, 68, 69, and 70. And Tommy Aaron, it is great to have you with us, dear friend. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna enjoy this.

Tommy Aaron 0:45

This will be fun.

Mike Gonzalez 0:46

Yeah, we're we're looking forward to this, Tommy. And and uh before we get going, I'll give a shout-out to the crew because we've got quite a production crew. We typically don't uh uh roll out the red carpet like this, but you've got all kinds of help there with some of the technical aspects of this. And I just want to mention a few of the guys, Neil Armstrong, who's the local coach at uh at Chestate High School, and also an A V teacher, uh Stephen McIntyre, who helping. And they brought along three golfers from Neil's team, one of which is an A V student. So shout out to all those guys, Tommy, at your place.

Tommy Aaron 1:19

That's great. Yeah, I'm glad to have them here. I needed help with this. I'm glad they're here.

Mike Gonzalez 1:25

Well, it was quite nice of them. Tommy, as a Georgian, you probably knew another famous Tommy Aaron who played for the Braves for about 20 years.

Tommy Aaron 1:34

That's right. Well, I did I did have a couple occasions to meet him. Yes, I did. And he hit his record tying home run the week, uh I think it was in 73, the week of the Masters, when he hit his tying home run, I think. Is that right?

Bruce Devlin 1:49

I'll that's appropriate for him to do that, and then you turn around and win.

Tommy Aaron 1:55

Yeah, that's right. That was great.

Mike Gonzalez 1:57

So, Tommy, you grew up in in Gainesville, Georgia, as uh uh we've come to know, which uh is where you still are, so lifelong resident. Tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up as a young man in Gainesville, Georgia.

Tommy Aaron 2:11

Well, uh, I was born here, and then we moved away when I was about five years old to Tocoa, Georgia, which is a small town about 40 miles northeast of here. And that's where I started playing golf. They had a little nine-ho golf course there. My father played. He didn't start playing until he was about 25 years old. He didn't come from a golfing family. And the only reason he played, he was working at a hosiery mill here in Gainesville, and a friend of his talked him into walking across town to playing a public course that was across town that's now at the bottom of Lake Lanier, and he fell in love with the game. He loved it. He wanted everybody to play golf. He was one of the biggest promoters of golf that I knew. So he was the one that got me to play it, and I remember going uh to the core golf course with him and his golfing friends, and they would talk about Ben Hogan, Sam Sneed, Porky Oliver, Mar uh Lloyd Mangrum, Lou Wersham, names that the young guys probably never heard of, but Bruce has.

Bruce Devlin 3:14

Yeah, I sure have.

Tommy Aaron 3:14

And they they they talk about playing the circuit. They didn't call it the tour, they'd say he plays the circuit. And I heard about that from when I was very young, and I love the game too, and I knew at an early age that that that's what I don't want to do. I wanted to be a professional golfer. So we moved from there to a small town in South Carolina where nobody played golf. It was just a little mill town. And my dad, when we left, he had about 30 people playing golf. He'd gotten them golf clubs and encouraged them to play. He'd even gotten a group of people from Seneca, which is near Clumpson and Walhalla and Westminster, to build a little public nighthole course there that was called the O Coney County Golf Course. And then we we moved from there to back to Gainesville in 1950. And uh when I got here, I was excited about moving back to Gainesville because I'd had two uncles that were high school all-star football players for Gainesville High. One was a lineman of the year in Georgia, and so that's all I'd ever heard about was Georgia, Gainesville, Georgia High School football, and the University of Georgia football at all, all I'd heard of growing up. So that's what I wanted to do. I knew to do that. And I did. I would play golf and I'd start wanting to play in April when the weather started getting good. But there was never a place to practice, and this little public course was uh not cared for, that the city didn't care anything about golf because nobody played golf here, very few people. In fact, Gainesville High, where I went to high school, couldn't even field a golf team. They couldn't find two of the boys that had played golf. But uh anyway, a friend of mine said it's pretty unusual you coming from golf background to do what you did. I said, Well, you know, in the summers, uh, I wanted to play in the state amateur, and I'd get there and I'd wanted to play in the state open. In any big amateur tournaments I would get to, my father knew how important it was to get tournament experience. And when I was in college, I wanted to make the Walker Cup team, and I wanted to play in the Sonny Hannah Amateur in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, because it was a well-recognized amateur tournament, and the USGA looked at that tournament when they chose Walker Cup players. And I took the train overnight from Gainesville to Washington. I got off the train to Washington and I called the pro over at Sonny Hann and I said, How'd I get to Johnstown? He says there's a little commuter flying over the mountain. So somehow I got to Washington National and I got over to Johnstown, and he was kind enough to send someone from the pro shop to pick me up. And we go to John to the club to register. He says, Some guys are staying at a fishing club that Bethlehem still has to entertain or so the players can stay there if they want to. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, that's exactly where I want to stay. So I stayed there at this fishing camp. As a matter of fact, Mark McCormick, who started International Management Group, and Bruce knows him, he stayed there. He played in the tournament, and that's where I first met him. I don't know what he shot or anything, but I stayed there, and I was lucky there was a boy from Atlanta named Jerry Greenbaum, whose parents had driven him up to play, and he was a couple of years younger, and they drove me back, so I didn't have to try to drink it back. And they drove me home and dropped me off in downtown Gainesville. So that one worked out pretty good. Yeah, that's great. Some of the other stories I could tell a lot of them. I was in Thomasville. I got a ride to Thomasville to play in a nice tournament there called the Piney Woods Invitational. They had good amateurs from uh Alabama, Mississippi, North Florida, and Georgia come and play. And after the tournament, my ride was gone, and I was out on the highway with my clubs in a little suitcase. Hitch. And and Asa Candler from the Coca-Cola family who was about 10 years older, he saw me, he picked me up, he dropped me off at the bus station downtown Atlanta, so I got home. That didn't work out too bad either. So I managed to do that somehow, but I was determined to do those things.

Bruce Devlin 7:32

That's great.

Tommy Aaron 7:33

And I I won I I won the Sonny Hannah that year, and I won the Western Amateur, and I was finalist in the National Amateur, and I won the State Amateur three or four times in the State Open a number of times. And during that time period, there was no golf course at all in Gainesville. There's a five-year period when the the old public course I talked about is now flooded by Lake Lanier. And the the local course, Chattahoochee Golf Club, is a city-owned course, and it wasn't completed until 1960. So from 55 to 60, there was no golf course at all here. And I would go out behind a textile mill called New Holland. There's an open air, and I'd hit balls out to one end of the field and I'd pick them up and then back to the other end. And that's the way I'd practice. And occasionally I'd get to the Athens Country Club. They have a Donald Ross course over there that I would get to play occasionally, and I would play in as many tournaments as I get could get to in the summer.

Bruce Devlin 8:31

So Tommy, during that during that period, uh I I know your daddy uh loved to play golf. Was he your mentor as far as uh swinging the golf club, or did you have somebody that helped you?

Tommy Aaron 8:43

He was my mentor, but he didn't burden me with a lot of technical instruction. He wasn't he wasn't very big, and he had a flat swing which suited him just fine, but he didn't hit the ball very far, and nobody hit the be ball very far back then. But he's he took me to an exhibition while I was about 14 in Atlanta. They had a pre-master's exhibition on that Monday of Master's Week, and Sam Sneed, Jackie Burke, Frank Stranahan, and Harvey Ward were playing. And I walked around the side of that old clubhouse there, and I saw Sam Sneed swing, and I thought, Oh boy. Oh boy. Excuse me. That looks like the way it should be done. You were right. I I guess subconsciously I tried to mimic his swing in a lot of ways. But my dad dad wanted me to have length to my swing because he had a short swing. He he wanted it to be upright. And there's a period of time that it was too upright. I've seen pictures of myself, and the club was way up over my head, which are probably too upright. But I wouldn't play golf a lot of times from August to March, and I was growing during this time, so the swing would change a little bit when I'd start playing because I'd grown some. And I see pictures of my swing when I was 15, 16, I think God, that looks awful. But uh he was my mentor, and uh he wanted how lengths of my swing, he he wanted me to play in tournament competition, and that was about it. And I I would read any books that I could find about golf. You didn't see golf on TV, and um if I played with a good player, I'd try to watch what he did and emulate him the best that I could. And when I started playing the tour, it was kind of like that too, which is not the best way to learn, but it was kind of a trial and miss thing. If I hit the ball to the right, I just tried not to keep it going to the right, and which is not the best thing to do. And when I was about 54, I met uh uh Manuel Del Torre, who was a pro at Milwaukee Country Club. And I uh Manuel Del Torre was a fantastic teacher, I think the best that I ever met. It was a very simple approach to golf, and I liked his approach, and his focus was more on what you were doing with a golf club and not what your body was doing. Now a lot of teachers teach about what your body's doing, and he was more concerned about what the club was doing. And anyway, I like that approach, and um uh I made a trip to see him uh, like I said, when I was 54 up to Milwaukee, and we walked down to the range, and he said, and I hit a few shots to warm up, and it was a pitching wedge. And he said to me, Were you taught to stay down on the ball as a kid? And I said, Yes. He says, Well, you don't stay down, you stay down long enough for your body to respond to the motion of the club. The club responds your body responds to the motion of the club. Let your body respond. Don't try to resist the club. It was very easy to fix, but I don't know how I got into that issue of staying down too long. He says if you stay down that long, you're flexible, you'll hit the ball to the left, and if you're stiff, you'll hit it to the right. And it was a pretty easy thing to fix. And I had asked some other teachers about this, and they had no explanation how to fix it. And that's no criticism of them. But that's the way Manuel taught. And it was a easy thing to fix, and he liked my swing. He liked a lot of things about it, so he didn't change a lot of things. He did say you have a tendency, your motion is too much at the ball, too much at the ball. The motion should be on the target side with the club. You should swing the club in the direction of the target, not down at the ball. There's no up and down in the golf swing, it's a back and forth motion. Which I've never heard a pro express that uh idea. You may have, Bruce, but that's kind of different too. I agree with you. That's a sw Yeah, he says it's not an up and down motion, it's a back and forth motion. But he he was a great teacher and a very unusual man. And I could tell you many stories about him, but he was a very unusual person. Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez 13:12

Yeah, long-term, you know, really a long, long time pro at that Milwaukee Country Club. Uh he was there since 1951, passed away in 2016, and this fall, this past fall, he would have turned 100 years old, but he was a fellow Spaniard. That's uh that's my home country.

Tommy Aaron 13:29

I see. Yeah. I'll tell you one story about him. He got uh very ill, and someone arranged him to go to a uh trying to think of where you go when you're prepared to expire to die. Like hospice or something. He said Hospice. He said, I'm not going there. He was 80, 95 or something. I'm not going there. That's for people who are gonna die. He said, I'm not going there.

Mike Gonzalez 13:52

He worked he worked with some other uh noted players, didn't he, Tommy?

Tommy Aaron 13:56

Yes. Uh Carol Mann was probably his most famous pupil, and he worked with a lot of female pros. He did uh get some lessons, and I'm trying to remember his name, and he came to Manuel, and it was right before he was gonna play in an open that he played very well in. And Manuel said to me, Well, he has a good swing, and he says, I'm not gonna tell him something to do that might ruin him for the next tournament. I'm gonna tell him something to do that he can do that will not be that, shouldn't not be that difficult for him. And the only thing he told him is from the top of the swing, the club swing the club in the direction of the target. And or Lauren Roberts, that's that's who he was. And and Lauren played well. He tied for the open one year at Oakmont, I think. And uh he he did some teaching other pros. I I can't remember all their names, but he had a long-term relationship with some of the LPGA players. They were seemed to be more receptive to his teaching ideas than maybe some of the guys. The guys were thinking, well, it's gotta be more complex. It's gotta be more difficult than that. There's a lot more to it than that. So they wanted to make it more difficult. Yeah. He said, he said, that's the way men are. They they don't want a simple explanation, they want a complicated explanation. They don't feel like they're they don't feel like they're getting their money's worth unless it's real complicated.

Mike Gonzalez 15:19

Well, he he wanted he worked with a few major winners on the LPG tour, in addition to Carol Mann. Sherry Steinhauer worked with uh Manuel, and so did Martha Nuss, who Bruce uh Martha just Martha just said she wanted to come on the podcast at some point with us as well, right?

Tommy Aaron 15:34

Oh, good. Good, yeah. That would be great. Yeah, I had forgotten about those two girls. Yes, yes. I was at uh in uh Florida a few years ago. They were doing a week, and the pros around the country that teach the manual uh del Tore's swing thoughts were there. It was like a manual del Tore camp for the teachers.

Bruce Devlin 15:55

Yeah.

Tommy Aaron 15:55

And she was she was there and she participated in it, and she has a fantastic golf swing, beautiful golf swing. I was amazed at how well she swung. I shouldn't have been, but she swung the club very well. Yes.

Bruce Devlin 16:07

The girls swing it better than the men anyhow. Yes, they do. Absolutely, they do. They swing and we hit. That's right.

Mike Gonzalez 16:17

Let's roll the clock back a few years ago, back to your high school days. And uh, you know, what you said about what wasn't available to you in terms of resources, facilities, teaching, everything else, and the fact that Gainesville High School didn't even have a golf team. I marvel at the fact that you were able to win the Class A individual high school championship in high school. That's that's unbelievable. Yes.

Tommy Aaron 16:42

Yeah, well, uh they didn't have a lot of players, very good players back then. Like like they do now. But yes, I did. The uh football coach, uh Bobby Gruin, drove, actually, he found three of the boys, and he formed what you might call a golf team. We drove he drove us to Valdassa, and I don't the other three boys played golf maybe 12 times a year as an afterthought when they got tired of going to the local swimming pool. They'd go down to this old golf course they might play. And I did win the individual there at Valdassa. I don't know what the other guy shot, but I'm sure it was very high because they weren't used to playing in tournaments and they only played about 10 or 12 times a year. It's like if you're in Minneapolis, you say to a guy, Do you play golf? Oh, yeah, I play. I play every 4th of July. Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez 17:30

Did you have many uh colleges looking at you as a high schooler?

Tommy Aaron 17:35

Well, I wrote a letter to all the golf coaches in the SEC inquiring about golf scholarships. And they all wrote me back and said, We don't have anything like that. We'd love you to come to school and play on our golf team. The University of Georgia core coach in Athens, I had played with and I knew him. I called him personally. He said, No, we don't have any golf scholarships, but you get enrolled in school and work something out. Well, he didn't go any further than that. The golf coach at Florida wrote me and said, the golf, the athletic director here has given the golf team one SEC grant in aid, which is a full scholarship. He's given one of those to the golf team, come out and play a practice uh tryout round with me. And so I rode the bus down there and I played with him, and I got that SEC grant in aid, and I had it for those four years. And then when I left, the athletic department took it back. That meant there was one less football player they were could recruit, and they weren't gonna do that. Yeah, yeah. So so anyway, it worked out fine. I guess that my first choice probably would have been the University of Georgia. Uh, and uh they they have good golf, great golf teams. They've sent a lot of guys on tour and they have a great golf program now, but Georgia produces a lot of real good kid players and they just naturally go to school there.

Mike Gonzalez 18:52

Yeah. Uh what you mentioned sort of reminds me of a story we heard just recently from Bobby Nichols, Bruce, where uh you know Bobby was up in Kentucky in Louisville, and uh I think Bear Bryant was at Kentucky getting ready to move to Texas AM. Right and he offers Bobby a football scholarship with Bobby after his accident, knowing full well he can't play football, but he played on the golf team on a football scholarship.

Tommy Aaron 19:16

Yeah. Right. It's a great story. It is a great that's kind of the way I was. I ate in the training room with all the football players. They may have had two basketball players and one track man and one baseball player there. And so I was the same way with that SEC grant and aid. Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez 19:33

So tell us a little bit about your Florida experience because that's where you ended up.

Tommy Aaron 19:37

Well, it was a good experience. Uh we played a lot of golf. Uh we go to school every day till about noon, and then we go to the golf course and play till dark. Now, Florida has tremendous teams. Now they've expanded their golf program so much. They have special teaching centers there, and they do all the technical measuring of ball speed and club speed. We didn't have any of that. You'd pick up a club, it felt pretty good, you'd say, okay, I'll play with it. You didn't might not know the swing way or anything. Right. We played a lot of golf, we played a lot of competition, so the golf program at Florida was very good. And it was very good for me.

Mike Gonzalez 20:16

And there were a few guys that went through that program that our listeners would uh recognize their names too.

Tommy Aaron 20:21

Yes, yes. Dave Dave Reagan was there at the time and played the tour, and Doug Sanders was there. He left about a year before I came there, and of course he had good success on the tour, as did Dave Reagan. And Frank Beard also was at Florida. Pretty good names, eh? Yes, good, very good. A couple of years behind me. Frank was the leading money winner on the tour one year. In fact, he won a tournament his first year on tour, the Frank Sinatra tournament in Palm Springs, I think, in six may have been sixty-two or sixty-three.

Mike Gonzalez 20:56

Yeah, there was some uh Andy Bean, of course, Chris DeMarco. Andy Bean. Right, uh Gary Coke, right? Uh Steve Melnick, Bob Murphy, Andy North. Boy, there were some names come out of that program.

Tommy Aaron 21:08

Absolutely. They all came after me after I had left. I'm older than all those guys. Frank Beard is probably the a couple of years younger than I.

Mike Gonzalez 21:16

Yeah, so you were two-time conference champ, I believe, in the SEC back in 57-58, two-time All-American in 58 and 59, and you'd mentioned a few of your amateur successes. Uh you, of course, won the Georgia Amateur a couple of times, won the Southeastern Amateur a couple of times, uh, and maybe uh, you know, a couple of the big deals uh uh for starters. Uh let's talk about the U.S. amateur because you did pretty well in 1948.

Tommy Aaron 21:43

Yeah, yeah, that was a great experience for me. When I went there, I thought, well, if I can go to the quarterfinals, I'll get an invitation to the Masters. And actually, the quarterfinal match I beat a real good player named Phil Rogers, which uh did Dave Bruce remembers. And so I and I went on and uh went to the semifinals. And um I remember the night before the semifinals, I'm in a uh small motel out there, all the players had gone. I was probably the only one there, and I'm 2,000 miles away from home, and that was kind of a uh uh kind of a scary experience. The next day I was going to play for a national championship, and Charlie Coe beat me in the 36-hole final. I was one down at lunch, and then I started driving in the rough, uh, and that didn't work in U.S. Open. So he ended up beating me six and four in the finals. And I had met uh a member there at uh at uh I'm trying to remember the name there in San Francisco.

Mike Gonzalez 22:49

Uh the lake course at the Olympic Club, which is where you play that's where you played your first U.S. Open a few years later, right?

Tommy Aaron 22:56

Absolutely, at the Olympic Club. And I had met um a member there, and after I paid my caddy, I had a return air flight ticket back, but I didn't have any I didn't have any money. So so he drove me over to San Francisco airport and I had that flight back home, so I got home. But it was a great experience, and I I'll always remember that.

Mike Gonzalez 23:20

Was that your uh probably longest trip from home at that point in your life?

Tommy Aaron 23:26

Oh yeah, oh yeah, by far. By far I played in the Western Amateur and Duluth, and that was a pretty long trip, but San Francisco was by far the longest.

Bruce Devlin 23:35

Yeah.

Tommy Aaron 23:36

And I I turned pro in uh no November of 1960 and I played a few tournaments in uh about three or four tournaments in 61. I played uh some in 62, I'm trying to remember. And then uh it looked like I might be drafted for two years. So I joined the uh Army six months program. You go on active duty for six months, and then you're in the Army Reserve for 14 and a half years after that. And I did that program and I I didn't want to spend the two years in the Army, so I spent those six months on active duty. I I almost quit playing golf because there was no competition to play in. I didn't have a lot of interest in playing. So when I started back in '63, it was kind of slow getting started out there on the West. But as I ended up 13th on the money list, uh that was my second full year on the tour. And um it wasn't a lot of money, but I did finish 13th on the money list, and I was proud of that. And I remember being at home during the December and I was at the local club here, and I heard one of the local members see, Gainesville wasn't a golf team. They didn't even know what I was doing playing the tour, they'd never heard of the tour. And so I heard a guy say, Well, you know, Tommy Air's not doing too bad playing that professional golf. The other guy says, Yeah, but he ought to be doing a lot better. And here I finished second. I thought, well, you can't you can't please these people. You finish second or second or third in the tournament, that's no good all of a sudden. But anyway, that that's another story. But I just remember that guy making that comment. And I said, you know, I'm gonna remember that, and I'm gonna throw that right back in his face. And I did about 20 years later. You sure did. I said, I heard that I said I heard the dumbest comment, some dumb guy, dumbest guy I've ever met. He said, Well, who was that? I said it was you. And he says, Well, that's not like me. I said it's exactly like you.

Bruce Devlin 25:45

You didn't let him forget, huh?

Tommy Aaron 25:47

I I was not gonna forget that one.

Mike Gonzalez 25:49

Yeah, so before you fast forward too quickly into your pro career, I want to bring you back to your amateur career because there's still a few things to talk about. Uh uh, you know, taking back to that U.S. amateur experience you had, uh, you had guys like Nicholas Beaman, Guyberger, Bobby Nicholson that field. And uh Charlie Coe kind of comes up again in your amateur career in particular. Right. Nicholas beat Koe the following year at the Broadmoor to win the U.S. Ams. Right. And Charlie, of course, uh uh goes back a little bit before you guys. He was born back in 1923, but uh he also won the U.S. Amateur as a lifetime amateur in 1949, was won back a player at the 1961 Masters. And Bruce, you'll remember this. He played in the inaugural Eisenhower Trophy in 1958. He certainly did and was on six Walker Cup teams, but you you remember him back in 5058 at the old course.

Bruce Devlin 26:46

He was he's a he was a great player, Charlie Cohen. Uh I wouldn't feel bad, Tommy, with him beating me in the final of an amateur, I can tell you that, because he could he could golf his golf ball, I can tell you. He was great. He could.

Mike Gonzalez 26:59

And Tommy, he capped in your he captained your Walker Cup team then in 1959, which uh I think that whole Eisenhower trophy team of 1958 was represented on that Walker Cup team that year.

Tommy Aaron 27:12

Yeah, I think you're right about that. There was, as you said, Beeman, Nicholas, Ward Wetlaufer, uh Harvey Ward, Charlie Cove, Bill Joe Patton, Bud Taylor, and uh uh Bill Hinman. The guy from Philli Bill Bill Heinmann, that's I couldn't remember him.

Bruce Devlin 27:28

Yeah.

Tommy Aaron 27:28

Yeah, that was a that was a good team. Most a few of us were college guys, and those were of course businessmen. Now I guess the Walker Cup team comes from all college players, virtually.

Mike Gonzalez 27:39

Uh that was at Muirfield. Was that your first overseas trip?

Tommy Aaron 27:43

Yes, it was.

Mike Gonzalez 27:44

Tell us about that.

Tommy Aaron 27:46

Well, um I'm trying to remember. It was uh Bill Hyman and I played in the first match, the alternate shot, which we won. And then um I I played with um I think Bill Hyman again in the best ball. We seem seem to have won that. I can't remember all the details, but I remember it was a great week. I it was a great week I enjoyed, associating with Harvey Ward, who had a great, great amateur career. Boy, didn't he? And Bill Bill Heineman did, and Charlie Coe. And of course, Billy Ch uh Billy Joe Patton set the world on fire that year at the Masters when he uh finished second behind Hogan and Sneed, one shot behind, and he put his ball in the water on 13 and made a six or a seven, he put his ball in the water on fifteen and made a six, and he finished one shot behind. I remember hearing Kerry Millikoff tell that story. He said he gets over to 13, he'd driven way up to the right in that pine straw, and uh he's trying to decide whether he'll go for the green or not, and the crowd's saying, Come on, Billy Joe. Come on, Billy Joe, go for it. Come on, Billy Joe. So he says, Well, I didn't come here to play it safe, I'm going for it. He's right in the creek. He gets old to 15. Come on, Billy Joe. Come on, Billy Joe. And Karen Milkoff said he could not have reached the green if hit a driver in a pitch shot and he hit it right in the water and made six there. So you go for it only if you can reach the green. You can't reach it, there's not much sense in going for it. So, anyway, there are great stories about Billy Joe, and he set the crowd on fire because he said, I'm going for it.

Mike Gonzalez 29:33

Well, what did you think about your first taste of lynx golf over there?

Tommy Aaron 29:38

I loved it. It's very different, as you know. It takes a while to get accustomed to it, but I love the Lynx golf. And you had to adjust to uh the hard grains and the hard fairways, and with the ball behind you, you had to learn to play the ball well short of the grain and have it bounce in. And if you're going into the wind, the wind would stop the ball sometimes, even on that hard grain. So you you had to learn those kind of things, but I liked Lynx golf a lot.

Mike Gonzalez 30:06

Well, let's go ahead with your professional career, just for our listeners uh uh tell you a little bit about uh Tommy Aaron's professional career, turning professional in 1960 at age 23. He had nine professional wins, uh including three PGA Tour victories and one PGA Tour champions win. He was in the top sixty from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen seventy three. And you guys can remember or remind our listeners that you know the the the exempt status back then was a little different than it is today, isn't it?

Bruce Devlin 30:36

A lot different.

Tommy Aaron 30:37

Yes, a lot different. Yes, it was a top sixty, and there wasn't a lot of money to play for, so you had to play a lot of tournaments to get to uh win enough money to finish in that top sixty, so a lot of guys were playing every week.

Bruce Devlin 30:51

Yeah, the interesting part of it too in the early days, Tommy, was it it was top sixty, but even if you made the cut some weeks, if you didn't finish in the top thirty, you didn't make any money. That's right. I I've pointed that out to some local people.

Tommy Aaron 31:07

Um LA in 61 was my first tournament, and I think they only paid maybe 50 people, and then they went to 60. So you may have 80 guys make the cut, and there'd be 20 guys that play all week and make no money. Yeah, right. And Nicholas's first tournament was in LA. Correct. The next and he finished in the last money spot, which is $33.33. I look at these tournaments now and I look at last money, it'll be thousands of dollars. $20,000, $6,000.

Bruce Devlin 31:40

Yeah.

Tommy Aaron 31:41

And you didn't make that much for winning a tournament back then. No. So it's very different. It's I can't believe the money they play for. It just blows my mind.

Bruce Devlin 31:50

Crazy, isn't it?

Tommy Aaron 31:51

It is crazy.

Mike Gonzalez 31:52

Yeah. So Tommy Aaron won the 1973 Masters, which we'll talk about. So next year will be the 50th anniversary of that win. But Tommy, let's just take a trip down memory lane and uh we're gonna walk you through some of your victories and have you uh give us some of your recollections. Uh let's start off with the 1969 Canadian Open at Pine Grove Golf and Country Club. Uh, this was in a playoff with 57-year-old Sam Sneed. And by the way, our listeners, this was back when the Canadian Open was looked at as the fifth major.

Tommy Aaron 32:25

Right. Right. Well, um, actually it was opposite the um American golf classic in Akron. And uh I chose to play there at the Canadian Open for a lot of reasons. And uh after three rounds, uh he had a Sam had a six-shot lead over me and five over the nearest player. I don't remember who that was. And if someone had said to Sam before he teed off the last round, it was a difficult golf course in difficult conditions, you're gonna shoot 70 today, he probably would have bet all his money that he'd win the tournament. Well, I managed to shoot 64 to tie him, and we had an 18-hole playoff the next day, and that was a very stressful playoff for me against someone like Sam Sneaker.

Bruce Devlin 33:15

Absolutely.

Tommy Aaron 33:16

The Canadian Open people would love for him to have won. So the gal was definitely on his side, and it was a very close match, and um there was a turning point, I think, on about the 13th hole. It was a long par three, well over 200 yards, over a valley, and to the right was a a clump clump of trees, and to the left was a bunch of bunkers, and I played first. I hit some kind of iron to the right in those trees, and Sam hit a one iron, I think. He left it just off the fringe on the left side of the green. I get in the trees, I find my ball, I try to play up on the green, and I put it in a greenside bunker, and then I played past the hole about eight feet, and Sam played a pitch inside that, and then he went out up to putt out, and an official stopped him, and he said, Well, I thought I'd finish. And I know what he was thinking. If he gets three, I'm putting for four. If I miss it, he's got a two-shot lead. Well, I ended up making my putt, and he missed. So we tie the hole. So that was a big turnaround to tie that hole with him. And he I knew what he was doing, and an official stopped him. He wanted to get that five-footer in before I put it my eight-footer. It'd been a big turnaround. And um we were, I think I may have been one shot ahead, and the last hole was a par five that you could reach in two. We both reached it in two, and I knew it made a putt. I made three, and I think he made four. So it was a big thrill for me and and a shock to win under under those conditions.

Mike Gonzalez 35:00

Uh Sam Sam was known for a little gamesmanship occasionally, wasn't he? Yes. He could do that.

Tommy Aaron 35:05

Yeah. Off the course he was okay, but on the course he could be tough to deal with. He could be.

Bruce Devlin 35:12

We remember a story about that, don't we, Mike? Remember Dave Stockton's story about uh him and Sneed. They got into a little contest out on the golf course.

Tommy Aaron 35:25

At LA? Was it at LC? Yeah, I think I think it was LA, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I heard a little bit about that. I don't know all of it, but I heard a little bit about it. Yeah, it was very interesting.

Mike Gonzalez 35:34

He got up in his face at the end of the at the end of the round, didn't he?

Tommy Aaron 35:37

Yeah, he sure did. Well, I I didn't witness that, uh, but I did hear some stories about it.

Mike Gonzalez 35:43

Yeah, we heard that we heard it from the horse's mouth. They've they've took us through all the details. It was quite interesting.

Tommy Aaron 35:48

Yeah. Okay. I did hear uh JC kind of ribbing Sam once in the locker room, and he said something that Stockton said. He said, well, he can say whatever he wants to, but I don't care. This is the way it happened. So he had his side of the story, too. Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez 36:06

Well, let's move ahead if we can to uh the following year, which might have felt like a hometown victory. It was the Atlanta Classic at Atlanta Congress. Oh, yes, 12 by three over Dan Sykes, another Florida grad, right?

Tommy Aaron 36:19

Yes, that's right. Um Well, I I started the last round uh playing well, making a lot of putts, and I was well under par, and I got to the um uh 14th hole, which is a short par four, and we were playing lift clean in place because the Bermuda grass, the summer grass, hadn't grown in, and the fairways weren't very good, and they had lined off the sides of the fairway and up around the green and tied it in with a line straight across the fairway, which designated the tee up area. I hit an iron off the tee on that hole, and I saw it hit out there in the red clay. I saw this big puff of dust go up, and my thought ran through my mind that ball didn't run out like it usually does here. So I was kind of late getting to my second shot, and I was in a hurry. It was right in what normally is the fairway, but it was short of this line where you could. So anyway, I was in a hurry. I just reached down and placed my ball, and I looked up and I saw that line. I thought, oh my God, I've just given two shots back to the field. Which happened was true. And my playing partner, of course, he didn't know, he didn't see this, he was on the other side of the fairway. So I hit my second shot on the grade and I hold the putt for television and the whole world again. They thought I'd made a three. That goes back to the old scoring rule. The player is the only one that knows what he made. Yeah. So I said to my playing partner, no, I made five, and I picked up my ball. I explained this to him, and we called for an official, and he said, Yes, that's a two-shot penalty. So I thought, if I don't win this tournament now, the press will absolutely kill me. How can you be they'll they don't know the condition? How can you be so dumb? You know, they don't understand. Some of them don't even play golf.

Bruce Devlin 38:11

They don't, yeah.

Tommy Aaron 38:12

So that was a great amount of pressure playing there, and I managed to par 16, 17, and 18 is a par five, and I knew that Weisskopf behind me was very close. I didn't know exactly how close, but I desperately wanted a four on that hole. And I was so tempted to go for the green, but I didn't hit a very good drive. I was so tight that I hit his drive, it just didn't go very far. I and it was not a good decision to play for the green, so I played up. And the television people took me to test because of that. They didn't know how long I shot, they didn't know the decision. So anyway, there you go with the press again. And I made I made five. Well, I was lucky Weisskoff on the last duck hooked his drive into the lake and helped me win the tournament. But the players around you have to play in such a way to let you win. That that has to play out, too. Absolutely. So anyway, it was a very stressful situation. But what surprised me, the writers never mentioned anything about this two-stroke penalty I called on myself. Yeah. They never wrote about it. And I thought, well, this is a pretty good story because hell in April a guy signed a card reverted in Vincenzo for a bad score. And everybody thought he had made a three. And he, well, I forgot what he'd made. But it goes right back to the heart of the scoring rule. The writers could have written a great story about that, but they didn't. But anyway, that's another story, too.

Mike Gonzalez 39:38

Yeah, well, we're gonna talk about that. Uh, but uh uh let's move on to the following, or I guess two years since you uh we're gonna take you over to Paris now, where you win the 1972 Trophy Lancome by three over Mr. Weisskoff.

Tommy Aaron 39:54

Right. Yes, that was a great trip. Uh the people sponsoring that term, the Leninco people treated us great. They played us in the George Sank Hotel. We had a Daimler-driven automobile at our disposal 24 hours a day with a driver. And so it's a great week. And we played at a golf course outside of town that I, as I remember, was like Louis XIV Stables, and they built a clubhouse, and I think there may have been 36 holes there. And uh starting the last round, I was, as I recall, maybe a shot or two ahead of Gary Player. He birdied the first two or three holes, and he was really strutting down the fairway then. So I thought, oh my God, I can't let this happen to be again. But anyway, I turned that around, and I did win the tournament, and which is a big thrill to win there. And um they I think that Lancome turned into uh a European tour event on the their their schedule. And I don't remember I may have played the next year, I don't recall, but it went on the European tour.

Mike Gonzalez 41:04

Bruce did did you get over there for that event, Bruce?

Bruce Devlin 41:08

No, I I never did play that. I played the French Open a couple of years, but I I didn't get to play Lancome.

Mike Gonzalez 41:15

Well, the the inaugural event was 1970, a couple years before uh before Tommy won this. But but listen to the winners in the first seven years, Bruce. Um 1970, Tony Jacqueline Hall of Famer, 1971, Arnold Palmer Hall of Famer, 1972, Tommy Aaron, 1973, Johnny Miller Hall of Famer, 74, Billy Casper Hall of Famer, 75, Gary Player Hall of Famer, 76, Sevy Biasteros Hall of Famer. How's that for a lineup?

Tommy Aaron 41:49

Oh boy. That's that's that's that's quite a lineup. Yeah. I didn't realize all those guys had won that. I lost contact with that tournament after that.

Mike Gonzalez 41:58

Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Good of the Game. And please, wherever you listen to your podcast on Apple and Spotify, if you like what you hear, please subscribe, spread the word, and tell your friends until we tee it up again for the good of the game. So long, everybody.

Intro Music 42:20

Whack down the fairway. It went smack down the fairway. Then it started to slice just smidge off line. It headed for two, but it bounced off nine. My caddies, as long as you're still in the state, you're okay. Yes, it went straight down the middle, quite away.