Mike Celizic

It’s been a long time since anyone brought up Old Tom Morris or his son, Young Tom, when talking about the greatest golfers ever. Nor do the old-timers at the club sit on the veranda in the magenta shadows of dusk trading whisps of memories about Harry Varden and Francis Ouimet.

The book on that first great era of golf died when the people who starred in it and those who watched them passed on to that great golf course in the sky, where every drive finds the fairway and no one ever three-putts. In their day, people said we’d always remember them, but for most of us, it wasn’t so. We vaguely recognize the names, but most of us aren’t sure why.

And now, with the passing of one of the finest people ever to play this or any game, the cover on what may be the greatest era in the history of golf has also dropped shut. They’re gone now, all of the greats who packed their clubs, wives and families into their cars and drove from tournament to tournament, thinking of $400 as a princely sum for winning a tournament, paving the way for the Palmers and Nicklauses and Watsons and Trevinos and Woodses who came after them.

The death at 94 of Byron Nelson, known in his heyday and forever as “Lord Byron,” thus is a watershed moment in golf, in sports and in American culture. He learned the game as a caddie at Garden Glen County Club in Fort Worth, Texas, where he beat a kid named Ben Hogan for the bag-toters’ championship, and the great amateurs Ouimet and Bobby Jones ruled the game. He broke in as a pro against the dapper dandies of the Roaring Twenties, Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen. He came to greatness with Hogan and Sam Snead.

And he retired to the Texas ranch his golf earnings purchased at 34 and the height of his singular powers.

He took with him a record that may never be broken — 11 straight tournament wins in 1945 and 18 wins overall that year. Along the way, he went 113 straight tournaments without ever finishing out of the money, which in those days meant finishing in the top 20. He went 65 straight finishing in the top 10. His 68.33 scoring average in 1945 lasted for more than 50 years until Tiger Woods finally knocked it down.

Those are the stats, and as much as they strain credibility, they say little about the golfer and less about the man. The greatest testament to the former is that when the U.S. Golf Association built a robot to put a perfect swing on a ball for its club- and ball-testing programs, it named it “Iron Byron.” To address the latter, one need say no more than what those who knew him said, that he was perhaps the finest human being ever to play the game.

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There’s so much more, of course. When learning the game, Nelson played with hickory shafts, whose characteristics required a different swing that what’s seen today with a lot of hands and a little movement below the waist. When he became a pro in 1932, he took up the new-fangled steel shafts that Bobby Jones had invented and immediately adopted the swing that remains the standard.

He never found it necessary to practice and never tinkered with that flawless swing. He could take two weeks or two months off, then take a club to the first tee and hit a perfect drive. If he had a weakness, he confessed to being just average with putts in the 12-15-foot range — the “scoring circle” as he called it.

As a young pro of 33, he took a job for a couple of years as an assistant pro at Ridgewood County Club in Bergen County, N.J., where he got to hang around with A.J. Tillinghast, the legendary golf course architect and learned to associate easily with the movers and shakers of the world.

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Part of Ridgewood legend is the day a member challenged him to hit the flagpole in front of the clubhouse with a 1-iron; Nelson was so good with that obstreperous club, when he retired it, it had a dime-sized circle worn smooth in the exact center of the club face. Whatever the distance, it was substantial, and Nelson hit the pole square on. When word of his feat got around, he was predictably asked to do it again for the Thomases who hadn’t seen the original. Nelson demurred, resisting all prodding on the grounds that he’d done it once and had no need to do it again.

That speaks to a man who didn’t boast, didn’t show off, didn’t hold his enormous talent over anyone. As he once told an interviewer on Golf Channel, “I didn’t think about being the best player in the world. I loved to play the way I played. It was comfortable and that’s what I did.”