Ralph Guldahl: The Rise and Fall of the World's Greatest Golfer by Kevin Kenny (review)

Despite having won three major championships in the late 1930s, Ralph Guldahl achieved the unflattering label of "golf's forgotten man" by the early 1940s (5). Indeed, golf historians and fans alike tend to think of other professionals from that era, from Byron Nelson and San Snead to Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan. In the first biography of Guldahl to date, Kevin Kenny attempts to rescue his subject from obscurity. Kenny begs the reader to remember the man "who for a brief period could justifiably claim the title of 'the world's best golfer'" (1).

Kenny's work offers an interesting follow-up to his prior book on American golf during the Great Depression. As Guldahl hailed from Dallas, Kenny's opening chapter fascinatingly describes the rise of golf in Texas in the early 1900s, showing how quickly the game moved west. Chapter 1 covers a lot of ground—probably too much—including Guldahl's initial professional success (last teenage tour winner until Jordan Spieth) and his heartbreaking runner-up finish in the 1933 U.S. Open. Chapters 3 to 5 are named after Guldahl's major wins, and, as with many sports history books, Kenny reverts at times to shot-by-shot accounts and week-by-week tournament results. At some level, this is unavoidable, but the strength of the work is Kenny's ability to show simultaneously both continuity and evolution in the game. For instance, Guldahl endorsed not only Wilson Sporting Goods but also Camel cigarettes. Many courses hosting tour events in Guldahl's prime—Oakland Hills, Olympia Fields, Merion, Inverness, and Pinehurst, just to name a few—remain among the most prestigious golf clubs in the country. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Kenny describes a game before well-known traditions with antiquated rules—for example, no fourteen-club maximum until 1938, no green jacket at Augusta until 1949, and stymied putts in match play—that will undoubtedly captivate anyone with a rudimentary interest in golf.

The book well illustrates an era when the touring professional golfer was often one and the same with a resident country-club professional. The final part of the Guldahl story details his sudden decline, for which Kenny offers several explanations, reminding us that athletic prowess can be fleeting. Kenny suggests that Guldahl's loner personality and lack of appeal also factored into his historical obscurity and inability to attain iconic status like his aforementioned contemporaries. It seems that Guldahl's notoriously slow pace of play trumped fonder memories from both fellow competitors and the press, contributing to his anonymity.

The work as a whole will delight golfers and sports fans, although Kenny might seek out a better editor. The book's subtitle is fairly misleading as "Greatest" suggests longevity that neither Kenny claims nor Guldahl's record confirms. A few factual errors were small but noticeable: Jim Thorpe lost his Olympic medals for playing semi-pro baseball, not football (8–9); Detroit's Oakland Hills was once misplaced in Chicago (50); and Denny Shute won the British Open in 1933, not 1993 (54). Match play scores are awkwardly presented (that is, 5–4 rather than 5&4), as are four-round tournament scores (that is, total strokes rather than in relation to par; 285 vs. 3-under). Chapter 6 is mislabeled as Chapter 5 in the header for thirty-one pages. Despite these editorial shortcomings, Kenny tells a riveting story that further colors the interwar history of American sport.