The Golf Book
Jim McCabe
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Bruce Chalas knew that changing careers at age fifty-seven was unconventional at best, risky at worst. But he offered a smile, said he trusted the road he was now going down. The two of us were in line for coffee during a break in festivities of an annual banquet saluting the Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund. "Golf has never failed me," Chalas said. "It won't this time, either."
This decision to end his business career and embark on a life of golf instruction was wild, Chalas conceded. But he explained that the seed had been planted four decades earlier, the day one of golf's greatest names came to his rescue.
"I told you that story, didn't I?"
When I told him he had not, Chalas shook his head. He then recounted a trip to West Palm Beach in the winter of 1972, that of a young man in pursuit of employment.
Chalas had never exactly dreamed of a career in glue, but this wasn't exactly like Dustin Hoffman being told about plastics in The Graduate. Permatex was a leading glue manufacturer and the chance to talk to company officials about a possible job opportunity was something this twenty-year-old college senior couldn't turn down.
It was just that, well, Chalas was a college senior and felt there was no need to spend every minute of his whirlwind trip to Florida pondering work. Having handled the interview, Chalas surveyed the brilliant Florida weather and decided golf was in order.
No rental car? No worries. Chalas had a thumb, so standing outside the Holiday Inn on the corner of PGA Boulevard and Military Trail, the young man from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts waited for a ride, golf clubs by his side. Oh, if he really had to, Chalas could have walked, for the PGA of America's 54-hole facility is not much more than a mile away. But within minutes, a car pulled over. Young Chalas tossed his clubs in the back and hopped in the front passenger seat.
At which time he cast his eyes on an American icon. None other than Byron Nelson was sitting behind the wheel.
"I'm a golfer, too," said Nelson. "Where are you going?"
Dumbfounded, Chalas could only stare. All through his youth Chalas had read about the game's legends and studied what had made them so great. Chalas knew that Nelson had done unthinkable things on the golf course—eleven straight wins, eighteen in a season, five major titles—and now, he sat not four feet away. Searching for some sort of response, Chalas could only come up with, "I know you're a golfer, and you're quite a good one."
A chili-dip of comments, thought Chalas, but Nelson laughed. The great man was a few weeks shy of his sixtieth birthday and more than twenty years removed from his 52nd and final PGA Tour win, but the dignity for which he was renowned shined through.
Nelson asked again where he was going. Chalas explained his situation, how he felt a slight interruption in his job search to play some golf was not being irresponsible. Nelson smiled and told him that it was a very short ride to the PGA of America's facility, John D. MacArthur's monument to himself and a safe haven for professional golfers looking to escape a winter's embrace. He was pleased to be able to assist.
The close proximity between the hotel and the golf course had at first seemed ideal, but Chalas now wished it were a twenty-mile ride. Two hundred, even. He had inhaled the Ben Hogan books, but Ben Hogan never would have picked him up thumbing and offered a ride to the golf course. Chalas told himself to act quickly, to think of something to say because this opportunity surely would never cross his way again.
"Mister Nelson," said Chalas, "when we get to the golf course, would you mind watching me hit a few balls?"
Chalas had learned the game as a young boy in the country town of Millis, thirty miles west of Boston. And while he harbored no thoughts of a professional career, he loved the game and wanted to be as competitive an amateur golfer as he could. Charlie Shephard, the longtime club pro at Glen Ellen Country Club in Millis, had been Chalas' mentor for many years, telling the young boy on countless occasions that golf would deliver great joy. But after putting forth such a bold request of Lord Byron, Chalas wondered if he wasn't in line to be embarrassed or disappointed.
"Well, I'm not playing today. I'm just must meeting some friends," said Nelson. "So, I'd love to take a look."
The sun never felt warmer, the game never so rewarding as it did that January day in 1972. With a joy that he had never quite experienced, Chalas took hold of his clubs and sent a half-dozen golf balls soaring into the Florida air. After each one he stole a quick glance to the side, just to be sure that the great Byron Nelson was watching. He was, too, quiet at first, until finally he suggested that Chalas think about a slight change in the way he held the club.
"The grip," he told Chalas. "Put some strength in that grip."
More balls were struck under the watchful eye of Nelson, more suggestions were offered to the wide-eyed Chalas. For nearly thirty minutes, two strangers separated by nearly forty years in age—one of them a gentleman farmer who had lived through the Great Depression, the other a college student living at the tail-end of the hippie generation—were joined together by their love of a game. Chalas had developed his passion for golf years earlier, but says that this chance meeting cemented forever his love affair with golf.
"He was such a simple man, a consummate gentleman," said Chalas. "He told me stories that day, of his years on the PGA Tour and his trips to Massachusetts where his pal, Jug McSpaden was a club pro. The tips he offered were basic stuff, but even now, all these years later, I fall back on them."
Chalas returned to his native Massachusetts after that trip to Florida, graduated from Babson, and set off on a career in sales as an independent manufacturer's representative. It provided some wonderful means and afforded him the opportunity to marry and raise two children, but he wouldn't deny that an added bonus to his independence was the ability to maintain an avid golf schedule. Chalas was the Massachusetts Golf Association's Player of the Year in 1980, a two-time winner of the State Four-Ball Championship, the 1985 New England Amateur champion, and fourteen times a competitor in a United States Golf Association event, including the 1980 U.S. Open at Baltusrol. The mix of work and golf always worked well, but in the winter of 2008, some thirty-six years after his chance lesson with Nelson, Chalas made a decision.
"I love to teach and I love golf," he told me. "So I told my wife, Lorraine, I'm going to teach golf."
Just like that, Chalas was a professional golfer. No, not the one you'll see stalking million-dollar purses on network TV, but the kind who'll stand quietly to the side and watch players from ages eight to eighty-eight swing a club, then offer advice to make it easier. An unconventional career move, yes, but to his delight, Chalas has had students come his way at one of Boston's true blue-collar munis, Fresh Pond Golf Course in Cambridge, right there in the shadows of that bastion of education, Harvard University.
"Of course, you'll advertise yourself as one of Byron Nelson's former students, right?" I asked.
"No," he said, laughing, "but I'll always remember how I pleaded with him to take a look and how one of the greatest players ever was kind enough to do so. He was so sincere, so willing to help, and things he told me I find myself telling my students."
A one-mile ride turned into thirty minutes, "but it has carried over forty years," Chalas said.
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