Ben Matheson can still remember the days when Texan Jimmy Demaret used to serenade the winner of the Colonial National Invitation, as it was originally known, during a post-tournament party that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
“It brought everyone together and celebrated the victor,” he recalled. “Those were some good times that were had.”
Matheson, 92, grew up in Fort Worth, not far from Colonial Country Club and he watched the 1941 U.S. Open from outside the fence. Damned if he was going to let that happen again when the Charles Schwab Challenge, as it is known as today, debuted in 1946.
Matheson was a student at Texas Christian University at the time and he volunteered to be a marshal, working all four rounds. He still has the black arm band he wore that week as proof. That was his ticket to the beginning of what is the longest-running co-sponsored event still held at its original venue.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Charles Schwab Challenge, one of a handful of remaining invitationals and a tournament steeped in history, with a Wall of Champions (since 1975) by the first tee that reads like roll call for the World Golf Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony: Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Ben Crenshaw, Lanny Wadkins, Tom Watson, Phil Mickelson, and more recently Jordan Spieth and defending champion Daniel Berger.
All those great champions pale in comparison to native son Ben Hogan, who is so synonymous with the tournament that the course is nicknamed Hogan’s Alley. He’s part of the very fabric of the club. Matheson remembers Hogan practicing there all the time. A bronze statue of Hogan greets members and guests upon arrival and overlooks the 18th green.
Located inside the clubhouse is the Ben Hogan Trophy Room, which pays tribute to the golfer’s many accomplishments. Matheson, who spent 13 years on the board of governors after becoming a club member, helped obtain several of the artifacts including a replica of the Hickok Belt awarded to Hogan in 1953 as the professional athlete of the year.
Hogan put the club on the map, etching his name on its Wall of Champions five times. No one else has won more than two titles at Colonial, one of the country’s great cathedrals of golf. Matheson was there when Hogan won the inaugural competition in 1946 and in his victory speech proclaimed that he would “rather win this tournament than the U.S. Open.” He remains the only person to win back-to-back events here, which he did twice. Matheson was there, too, when Clara Hogan, mother of Ben, ran on to the 18th green and hugged her son in 1959 after he won the title for the fifth time. Hogan shot a 69 in a playoff. He came out of retirement to play the Colonial for the final time in 1970. At 58, he opened with 69, but that was all she wrote as he finished out of the money.
“He’s the one who made the tournament,” Matheson said.
If Hogan made it, Marvin Leonard gave birth to it.
Leonard, who turned a tiny storefront into seven city blocks in the north end of town, took up golf at the advice of his doctor, who suggested he needed to exercise regularly. Leonard frequented Rivercrest and Glen Garden Country Clubs, but after playing on bent-grass greens during a business trip to the northeast, he suggested installing them at Rivercrest. He was told bent grass couldn’t survive the Texas heat. If he was so inclined, perhaps he ought to build his own course. Leonard did just that, opening Colonial Country Club, a 152-acre tract along the Trinity River in 1936.
Leonard first met Hogan at Glen Garden in south Fort Worth where Hogan was a caddy. They became like father and son, and Leonard eventually sponsored Hogan’s pursuit of a career in professional golf. When Hogan published his golf instruction book, “Five Lessons,” he inscribed a copy to Leonard that read, “To Marvin Leonard, the best friend I ever had. If my father had lived, I would have wanted him to be just like you.”
Leonard’s daughter, Marty, used to sit on the first tee during the tournament with her father and follow Hogan around, including in 1959 when she was a student at SMU and played hooky on Monday to see Hogan take down Fred Hawkins in an 18-hole playoff. That fittingly was the final victory of Hogan’s Hall of Fame career.
“To me, he was just my father’s friend,” she said.
She had been there when Hogan rallied from six strokes back and received the tournament’s distinctive Scottish Tartan plaid jacket for the first time in 1952, when it was created by tournament chairman S.M. “Bing” Bingham, who sought an identifying garment for champions and club officials that would “shine with the same brilliance as our field for the tournament.”
Colonial made Hogan a lifetime honorary member after the 1953 event, the same year a fire destroyed the clubhouse a month before the tournament. In 21 starts, Hogan posted 15 top-10 finishes, including seven straight.
Marty Leonard later befriended another favorite Texan son, Ben Crenshaw, who went on to success at Colonial.
“I went from one Ben to another,” she said.
Only former champion Keith Clearwater has played as many Colonials as Crenshaw, who won the event in 1977, thanks to a back-nine 31 in which he “got away with murder,” and again 1990. In 2006, he made his 33rd and final appearance – including three times as an amateur (1971-73) – at age 54. Despite being a two-time champion, he also lost two playoffs – in 1980 to Bruce Lietzke, who he recalled “hit the damnedest shot, a 3-iron at 16,” and Lanny Wadkins in 1988.
“I kind of feel about this place like I do Augusta National Golf Club,” Crenshaw said. “You stand on the first tee and you see all the names that are on the Wall, some of the greatest to play of all time. Now my name is up there, and I feel a real sense of honor having my name up there along with so many other great players.”
Even those who mastered Colonial Country Club say the course eventually got the best in them. In 1980, Crenshaw was in contention yet again when he three-putted the 16th green. With his chili running hot, Crenshaw walked over to an oil drum serving as a garbage can and kicked it.
“I hobbled to the tee and just crumpled over. Thankfully I just had two holes to play, but it was almost broken,” he recalled. “I had to have two surgeries. I broke the sesamoid bone in my toe on my right foot.”
Colonial Country Club could do that to the best of them. But Crenshaw, who became one of the leading course designers as his playing days waned, long admired the John Bredemus, Perry Maxwell layout. He appreciated how it is a true shotmaker’s course that demands full control of all shots and doesn’t favor a particular style of play. Long hitters, short hitters, short-game wizards and masters of the dark arts of putting have all won here. To do so, they all had to survive the stretch from Nos. 3-5, the Horrible Horseshoe, a stretch of diabolical holes shaped like a U.
“It’s one of the hardest three-hole stretches on the PGA Tour,” said CBS Sports commentator and past champion Ian Baker-Finch. “It asks players to hit a hard draw at the dogleg par-4 third, a high, long iron or wood to a raised green at the 247-yard par-3 fourth, and a controlled fade at the 481-yard, dogleg par-4, fifth. If you’ve played that stretch in 1-over par, you’ve done well.”
“The fifth hole is one of the scariest tee shots you’ll ever want to see,” Crenshaw added. “I actually made a two there one day with a 2-iron.”
Mostly, though, what the best golfers in the world say about Colonial is don’t pay any attention to its size. The layout, stretched to 7,209 yards, still is short by today’s standards, but don’t be fooled.
The course is celebrating its 85th birthday and it has stood the test of time. It is a triumph of design over distance. When the wind blows, single-digits-under par has been known to win, such as in 2014 for then World No. 1 Adam Scott.
Baker-Finch made Colonial his first victory on the PGA Tour in 1989, not long after he moved to the U.S. with his family from his native Australia.
“I knew it was a big event, one of the biggest outside the majors and I knew it was a big deal to get my name on the Wall of Champions,” he said.
Baker-Finch enjoys returning for the past champions dinner on the eve of the tournament and still broadcasts the tournament for CBS in his winner’s jacket.
“It was a 42 long in 1989 when I won, became a 44 long and now it’s a 46 long,” says Baker-Finch, who owns a matching tie and was given matching boxer shorts after he stripped down to his shorts in 1993, to play a shot from the water in front of the 13thhole.
Matheson and Leonards have witnessed nearly all of the tournament’s signature moments, including a pair of errant approach shots in 1962 that turned an anonymous water hazard into Crampton’s Lake.
On consecutive days, Australian Bruce Crampton made a deposit into the greenside pond and costly double bogeys as he finished a stroke behind eventual winner Arnold Palmer, christening the hazard as “Crampton’s Lake” and giving Colonial a defining landmark.
In 2003, Annika Sorenstam made history competing against the men at Colonial.
As a player, Sorenstam sought the unseekable, reached what had seemed unreachable and then looked higher. That was her inspiration to compete in the Bank of America Colonial tournament and become the first woman to play a PGA Tour event since Babe Didrikson Zaharias—who won the Texas Women’s Open at Colonial three times—in 1945. Though Sorenstam missed the 36-hole cut, it was immaterial compared to the new-found respect she earned.
“I’ve climbed as high as I can,” Sorenstam said at the time. “It was worth every step of it.”
In the last decade, nobody has climbed higher at Colonial than Zach Johnson. In his rookie year competing at Colonial in 2004, Johnson was paired with Steve Flesch and watched how he navigated the golf course en route to victory.
“There are some courses where you can get away with just bombing it anywhere and overpowering it, but this isn’t one of those courses,” Johnson said. “It was one of those places where I thought I could compete.”
With a soft course and benign conditions in 2010, he set the tournament 72-hole-scoring record at 21-under-par (65-66-64-64). His 259 winning score was 20 strokes better than Hogan’s best. Two years later, Colonial was Zach’s Alley again as he won despite a final-round 72 that included a two-shot penalty on the final green for not properly replacing his ball mark.
Phil Mickelson thrilled in 2000 and 2008, Sergio Garcia became the first European champion in 2001 with a sizzling Sunday 63, Kenny Perry went low in 2003 and 2005, and in 2016 Jordan Spieth became the first Texas winner in 24 years. Colonial has come to mean so much to its champions.
“Ever since I won there, I’ve felt like I was part of the club, a member of a Fort Worth family. It’s almost like a going home party,” Johnson said. “My respect and reverence for the club keeps growing.”
Tom Watson, who’d win his final PGA Tour title of a Hall of Fame career at Colonial in 1998 at age 48, remembers registering for the tournament for the first time in 1973 and being told that lunch was being served.
“That was unique in those days. We had to pay for our own meals,” Watson recalled. “Not only was lunch provided but breakfast and dinner, too. That was much appreciated. The way they treated us made you feel special.”
What would Marvin Leonard think of the tournament he created to bring championship golf to his beloved city? Could he have ever imagined it would evolve into a civic treasure on par with the Stock Yards? Or that like the course itself, the tournament would stand the test of time, enduring heavy rains and flooding, a clubhouse fire, a dispute with players over invitation criteria, soaring purses and sponsorship changes?
“He’d be very pleased at what is has become,” says daughter Marty.
Matheson can’t match Marty’s perfect attendance at the first 74 Colonials. There were a few years he was away on business, but not even a global pandemic could keep these two from missing this year’s celebration of an event that has meant so much to their lives.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Matheson said.
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