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Jesse W. "Jess" Sweetser

Jesse W. “Jess” Sweetser
Winner of the Amateur Slam

The 1920s in America was the decade when sport stars became superheroes and celebrities to an expanding mass public culture. Babe Ruth in baseball, William T. “Bill” Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in the ring, and Bobby Jones on the links put spectator sports at the center of American public attention. Bobby Jones is one of the preeminent figures in golf history, and his dominance of the game during the 1920s electrified the nation and propelled the popularity of golf. His feat of winning the “Grand Slam” of all four major championships of the era in a single year (the 1930 US and British Amateur Championships and the 1930 US and British Opens) has still never been matched.

Against this, all other golfers of his time came up short, but several, including Jess Sweetser (Class of 1923 S), earned broad acclaim and enduring accomplishments of their own. Indeed, what Jess Sweetser accomplished in his amateur golf career is unmatched even by Jones, his friend and fellow amateur competitor. In winning all three of the major amateur championships, Sweetser achieved his own slam, the “Amateur Slam” we might say, a trio of victories that no one, including Jones, Jack Nicklaus, or Tiger Woods, has done.

Jess Sweetser was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Exeter Academy before entering Yale in 1919. At both schools he participated in what was considered a “major” sport, track, and a “minor” sport, golf, but it was in the latter that he truly excelled. As a Yale freshman in 1920, Sweetser took the National Intercollegiate Championship at the Greenwich Country Club and was runner-up the following year. He played in the US Open in 1921, finishing in eleventh place while still a teenager. He followed that by winning the Metropolitan Championship in 1922, while a junior at Yale.

Even greater accomplishments were soon in store for Sweetser, who faced a formidable Jess W. Sweetser, New York,line-up of opponents at the US Amateur later in 1922 at The Country Club in Brookline. The event attracted more than sixty reporters, and Sweetser proved to be the talk of golf that year, the “leading giant killer,” as he successively defeated Willie Hunter (the British Amateur champion), then Jesse Guilford (the reigning US Amateur champion), before facing Bobby Jones, already known as the best amateur golfer in the world. Sweetser won easily against Jones, 8-and-7, in a thirty-six-hole match during which he set a new course record with a score of 69. He then completed his sweep by defeating Charles “Chick” Evans, Jr., (winner of the 1916 US Open and US Amateur and the 1920 US Amateur) to take the crown. The press was in awe. J. Lewis Brown, then editor of Golf Illustrated, wrote in the October issue that year, “Although comparisons are odious, I could not but reflect on the same National Championship at Brookline in 1913 (when Francis Ouimet defeated Vardon and Ray). Each of these was alike, in that they produced two new American boys as national heroes, and this is all the more striking, because of the fact that The Country Club was the setting for both of these great events.”

In his senior year and for several years after his graduation in 1923, Sweetser served on the Yale Golf Committee. He was present when the Committee toured the Greist estate on a bitter cold day in February of 1923 to determine if the Tompkins’ gift would be an appropriate site for a golf course. Records indicate that he could subsequently attend only a few meetings of the golf committee because of his numerous golf commitments; pairings with his friend Bobby Jones were especially popular. When he and Jones (then a Harvard Law School student) played against Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, Jess W. Sweetser as the new 1922 US Amateur ChampionNew York, on October 28, 1923, the New York Times reported the next day that “3,000 excited spectators rushed from hole to hole” to see the students beat the professionals 1 up.

Some of Sweetser’s greatest exploits came as a member of the first five US teams in the Walker Cup Match, initiated in 1920 between the usga and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. As a Yale junior, Sweetser played in the first official match in 1922 at National Golf Links of America and then traveled with Jones and others in the spring of 1923 to play the Great Britain and Ireland team at the Old Course. The United States, captained by Robert Gardner, won 6 1/2 to 5 1/2. Thereafter, the Cup Match was played every other year, with Sweetser named to the team in 1924, 1926, 1928, and 1932.

In his senior year and for several years after his graduation in 1923, Sweetser served on the Yale Golf Committee, and he was present when the Committee toured the Greist estate on a bitter-cold day in February of 1923 to determine if the Tompkins’ gift would be an appropriate site for a golf course. Records indicate after that he could attend only a few meetings of the Golf Committee because of his numerous golf commitments; pairings with his friend Bobby Jones were especially popular. When he and Jones (then a Harvard Law School student) played against Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, NY, on October 28, 1923, the New York Times reported the next day that “3,000 excited spectators rushed from hole to hole” to see the students beat the professionals 1 up.

Some of Sweetser’s greatest exploits came as a member of the first five US teams in the Walker Cup Match, initiated in 1920 between the usga and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. As a Yale junior, Sweetser played in the first official match in 1922 at National Golf Links of America and then traveled with Jones and others in the spring of 1923 to play the Great Britain and Ireland team at the Old Course. The United States, captained by Robert Gardner, won 6 1/2 to 5 1/2. Thereafter, the Cup Match was played every other year, with Sweetser named to the team in 1924, 1926, 1928, and 1932.

Yale was not entirely accommodating to Sweetser, especially in his final year in 1923. Although he was then the reigning US Amateur champion, it took a special meeting of the scholarship committee of the Yale Sheffield Scientific School to get him on the boat for Scotland. Reluctantly, the faculty allowed “absence from his classroom recitations, but he must make up the work before the end of the term.” Furthermore, the committee ruled that he would not be allowed to play with the varsity golf team that spring. This apparently irritated the Athletic Board of Control, which immediately passed a resolution on April 9 that “any undergraduate who wins a national title in tennis or golf (minor sports) would receive automatically a major ‘Y’” (as reported in the New York Times the next day). The importance of this “Y” to Sweetser is clearly seen in the US team photograph taken at the 1923 Walker Cup matches, where he sits in the center, proudly wearing his Yale Y sweater over his jacket and tie!

(from left) Bobby Jones, Jess Sweetser, Gene Sarazen, and Walter Hagen at Winged Foot

Even more than his US Amateur title, perhaps Sweetser’s most dramatic individual victory came in 1926, when he was the first American-born man ever to win the British Amateur. Nothing is more boring than a shot-by-shot description of a golf match, unless it is done by Herbert Warren Wind, Yale Class of 1937, and the dean of American golf writers. The following is his account of Sweetser’s exploits from his book The Story of American Golf (on pp. 189-92 in the 1975 Third Edition).

The odd thing was that Jess, the strong boy, won his British Amateur crown when his body was wracked with flu, and incipient tuberculosis. No man has ever won a major athletic contest in poorer health. It was quite a saga of courage.

Jess had married in February of ’26. Happiness and regular meals at home plus a modicum of golf had put some extra pounds on him. He planned to work them off by exercising in the gym aboard the ship that was carrying the Walker Cup team to Britain. Sweating pleasantly after one workout, Jess decided to take a dip in the pool … and his miseries began. His sinuses began to kick up, and he spent the rest of the passage stretched out on a deck chair, hoping that he would snap back once he was on land again. He didn’t. In the raw air of early spring in England and Scotland, his cold was aggravated into an enervating flu. At Muirfield, where the American team was entered in the British Amateur previous to the Cup Match at St. Andrews, Jess got in only two practice rounds and stayed in his room the remainder of the time trying to nurse himself back into shape. He felt so rotten on the morning he was scheduled for his first-round match that, much as he wanted to play in the championship, he felt that there was no other course than to default. He stayed in the tournament only because his opponent chose to default before Jess did. After lunchthere were times during the tournament when Jess could hold hardly more than orange juicehe forced himself to go out and play his second-round match. He managed to win and staggered wearily into the clubhouse.

Day after day it was the same story. A masseur from Edinburgh, contacted by Henry Lapham of the American party, would work up Jess’ circulation before he went out against his morning opponent. At lunch Jess would drink fruit juices and try a slice or two of beef, and push himself out to the tee for his afternoon match. He did no partying in the eveningtook a hot bath and went straight to bed. His attitude was good. He wasn’t expecting to win and he didn’t worry when it took him six or seven holes to warm up. He kept hitting his shots, and eventually he caught and passed his opponents, although quite a few of Jess’ matches went to the eighteenth hole. He defeated Ouimet on the eighteenth by pumping a beautiful second shot through the mist to the green. Against Robert Scott, he played another clinching approach on the home hole, toeing in his favorite 4-iron and punching it low and hard. Jess didn’t have the energy at Muirfield to goad himself on with fight talks, but he hummed to himself as he went along, usually “Somebody Loves Me.” He kept on winning.The first US Walker Cup team to compete outside the US, in 1923. In the first row,

 

In the semi-final round Jess came up against the Honorable W. G. Brownlow (later Lord Lurgan), a good golfer albeit a chap of weird sartorial tastes. Brownlow played in a small peaked cap, a long clerk’s coat, and black silk gloves. Jess, for once, started fast and picked up two holes on Brownlow early in the match, but he could make no further headway against his opponent’s neat if not spectacular golf. On the seventeenth, however, this two-hole margin became dormie for Jess, and the match looked as good as over when he laid his third twelve feet from the pin with Brownlow forty-five rolling feet away in the same number of strokes. The game Irish dandy had been putting, and putting well, with an orthodox blade putter. Now, as he eyed his long route to the cup, he switched to a wide-soled, wooden-headed Gassiat model and proceeded to hole his cross-country putt. Jess then missed his, but was still dormie one with the home hole coming up. Once again Jess played the eighteenth perfectly. He was nicely inside Brownlow on the green, eighteen feet away from his opponent’s thirty-five. His half seemed certain. And then the incredible Brownlow took his Gassiat in his black silk gloves and sent his ball trickling over the subtle rolls of the home green and into the very center of the cup. Jess made a courageous try for his putt but slid it by the rim of the cup.

By this time, the match had taken on an unreal atmosphere. Jess exhausted by the sudden turn of events, Brownlow unnaturally serene, both of them performing as if they were caught in the webbing of a dream. On the first extra hole, Brownlow had a big opening when Jess found a trap on his second, but Brownlow misfired with his Gassiat, taking three from twenty-five feet after slipping fifteen feet by on his first. On the 20th Jess went ten feet past the cup on his approach putt but Brownlow, timorous after his error on the 19th, fell nine feet short on his. Jess knocked in his 10-footer, and Brownlow stepped up and coolly holed his 9-footer. On the 21st tee the young Irishman finally cracked. He looked up badly on his drive. Jess smashed his two hundred and sixty yards down the fairway, and his faultless approach closed out the dramatic duel between two dead-game golfers.

The final between Jess and Archie Simpson, an East Coast Scotsman, was bound to be a letdown after the Sweetser-Brownlow match. Simpson didn’t play nearly as well as he had against Andrew Jamieson in the semi-finals, and Jess won 8 and 6 after a dull match in which the outcome was never in doubt.

It may have been a dull finals, but Wind curiously doesn’t relate the considerable drama at the outset. Sweetser was indeed feeling sicker and sicker, but when he arrived at the tee for his finals’ match, his opponent, Simpson, was missing. The rules required that Simpson forfeit, but Sweetser thought it would be an unsporting resolution. Rather than seizing on the opportunity, he took himself off to the clubhouse W. C. and refused to come out until Simpson showed up. In fact, as Steve Eubank recently described in Sports Illustrated (July 14, 2008), Simpson’s car had broken down just out of town, and he finally came toiling up to the tee on a borrowed bicycle with his golf bag jangling over his shoulder. The match took place because of the generous gesture and the quick thinking Sweetser.
He had little time, though, to savor his success, and, indeed, brought further suffering upon himself by insisting on heading to the Walker Cup matches at St. Andrews. Wind goes on to relate:

Jess’ condition became worse after he was driven to St. Andrews on a very cold day. He asked to play and managed to win both his singles and foursome in the Walker Cup Match with a continuation of his impeccable golf, and then suffered a severe chest hemorrhage. Jess pleaded with the doctors to let him sailhe was frightened that he might not come home aliveand the doctors at length gave in. They shot him full of heroin and gave O. B. Keeler instructions on how to inject the drug if Jess suffered a relapse on board ship. Jess did have one more hemorrhage, but the heroin kept him going …. He reached home so utterly shattered that only after a full year of convalescence at Asheville did he begin to look and feel like the Jess Sweetser of old.

While Sweetser was a member of the National Golf Links of America from 1935 to 1945, he finally met C. B. Macdonald, although he never had an opportunity to play with him. Sweetser later described Macdonald as a “great fellow and great character,” although Sweetser confirmed in an interview late in his life that, to his knowledge, Macdonald never had an opportunity to visit the Yale Golf Course after its ­construction.
Sweetser’s professional career was in business. He began as a stockbroker in New York and later joined the Martin Marietta Aircraft Corporation, from which he retired as a vice-president in 1967. But his passion was always golf. He re­mained an important figure in the usga (serving as treasurer for much of the 1940s) and with the Walker Cup teams. In 1966, he captained the Eisenhower Trophy team and in 1967 and in 1973 served as captain of the USA Walker Cup team. In 1986 Sweetser was honored by the usga with its Bob Jones Award, given annually since 1955 to recognize distinguished sportsmanship in golf.

Sweetser had treasured his time in Asheville and later visited often. He was a member at the highly regarded Biltmore Forest Country Club, which had opened in 1922, the year he first arrived in Ashville. Each Memorial Day weekend, the club holds a popular tournament in Sweetser’s honor and retains some of his memorabilia and records.

Shortly before he died in 1989, David Paterson interviewed Sweetser who again expressed his lifelong admiration for Jones, insisting, “During the 1920s, my record in amateur play was as good or better than all others, except for Bob Jones.” Paterson later asked where he wished his most prized trophies to be displayed. Sweetser had decided that his British Amateur trophy would go to Golf House, the usga headquarters, and his Amateur trophy and Bob Jones award to Burning Tree. He was a member of the Burning Tree Club from 1950 until his death. He was a good friend of fellow member, Robert Trent Jones, and sponsored the membership of Ken Venturi, the first professional golfer to join the club. After Sweetser died, Robert Sommers memorialized him in the USGA Golf Journal of July 1989.

I only saw Jess Sweetser play once. It was 1957, and he was 55 years old, a vice president of the Glen L. Martin Com­pany, a manufacturer of aircraft, out for a round with some friends at the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club, a pleasant although not particularly demanding course on the outskirts of Baltimore. I tagged along to watch. He shot 69 with little effort. A week or so earlier he had shot 64 at the Elkridge Club, another Baltimore course, and 66 at Burning Tree, near Washington. A burly man, standing a bit over six feet, with huge forearms and bushy eyebrows, he did not have a picture swing, but it was efficient. Jess had left competitive golf long before I met him, and he played only weekend mixed four-balls at his club and annual invitation events, but watching him that day left me certain he could have beaten anybody.

Herbert Warren Wind once wrote that there are three kinds of golf—golf, tournament golf, and major championship golf. Through the decades, Yale golfers have won their share of tournaments and regular championships, but Sweetser’s “Amateur Slam” of the National Intercollegiate Champion­ship in 1920, the US Amateur Championship in 1922, and the British Amateur Championship in 1926 remains a unique accomplishment in golf history. It puts Sweetser at the pinnacle of Yale golf history.

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