The Best I Ever Did: Bob Toski

At 98, Bob Toski is the oldest living PGA Tour winner, having succeeded his friend Jackie Burke, who passed away in 2024 at the age of 100.

Both men had magnetic personalities and shared mutually enriching relationships with giants of the game. Toski is now the last member of an era that was eyewitness to the alternately elegant and hardscrabble tour of the 1950s before the Age of Palmer.

Inside his distinctive cedar and redwood treehouse-design home in Boca Raton, Fla., Toski says: “It was tougher but warmer. We played for a lot less but had more fun. Through all those cross-country car caravans and staying three to a room and trying to get better at this beautiful game, I think we got closer than any group of pros ever did.”

Toski’s own contribution to that history was a burst of five victories in a 12-month period beginning with the Insurance City Open in August 1953. In subsequent decades, he became better known as America’s first superstar instructor with his many books, videos and role on Golf Digest’s teaching panel. He was also transformative to the careers of Tom Kite, Judy Rankin, Birdie Kim and Ken Duke, to name some. It’s worth remembering that Toski’s short, intriguing prime as a player clinched his claim to being, at 118 pounds, one of the best pound-for-pound golfers in history.

The exclamation point was Toski’s final win, the 1954 World Championship of Golf, the second year that innovative extravaganza was staged by the impresario George S. May at Tam O’Shanter near Chicago. At a time when the average tour purse was $10,000 and first place $2,000, May offered a winner’s prize of $50,000 plus the opportunity for another $50,000 to do 50 one-day exhibitions the following year. The payoff was as exorbitant and discombobulating at the time as LIV money is today, with more success. In the inaugural version of the tournament the year before, which was the first golf event televised nationally, Lew Worsham holed out for eagle from 110 yards on the 72nd hole to defeat Chandler Harper by a stroke.

Toski’s victory, played before 40,000 fans, was nearly as dramatic. In a dizzying final round, Toski birdied four of the first five holes to take a six-stroke lead but then triple-bogeyed the sixth when he bladed a greenside bunker shot he had visions of holing. After he bogeyed four holes in a row starting at the 11th, he trailed Jackie Burke and Earl Stewart by three and looked finished, but Toski eagled the par-5 15th and then birdied the final hole to win by one.

Toski became the year’s leading money winner with $65,819, some $40,000 more than next-best Burke. Toski and his comely wife, Lynn, who passed away in 2012 at age 80 after 57 years of marriage, went on the Ed Sullivan Show. In the Hickok Belt voting for the best professional athlete of the year, Toski was runner-up to Willie Mays.

In some ways, it was a pyrrhic victory. Toski, beginning to raise the first of his four children, ending up doing 57 of May’s exhibitions. When he returned to the tour in 1955, Toski found that he had lost his motivation and intensity.

“I could never summon that edge; it was gone,” Toski says. “Why? I think because I had proven myself to myself, so I wasn’t just set financially but psychologically as well. I had watched the way my father had always put family first through some very hard times. That stuck with me. After I started teaching full time, I realized I had a natural gift. It became my second love, and helping all those golfers made me a better man, a less selfish person.”

Toski admits that often he thinks of Tam O’Shanter. “Yeah, that was the best I ever did—an incredible day,” says Toski, who no longer plays because neuropathy has robbed him of the feel in his feet. “If I had kept playing, not taken the year away, I would have kept getting better. How good, who knows?” He pauses, pushing down any regret. “I had an amazing journey in this game.”

It began in Haydenville, Mass., as the eighth of nine surviving children to a mother, Mary, who bore 13 and died at age 46 when Bob was 5. To alleviate the burden on his father, Walenty, a brass worker who cut hair on the side, young Bob and his brother Tommy spent summers living in the attic of the clubhouse at the Northampton C.C., where their two older brothers, Jack and Ben, were assistant pros. Bob became a shop boy and a caddie who learned the game with a chipper and a putter before he was allowed to hit longer shots—a process he would incorporate in his own teaching.

After winning schoolboy tournaments around New England, in 1944 Toski was drafted into World War II. His infantry unit was two days away from being assigned jungle warfare in Burma when the atomic bomb ended the war.

Toski turned pro in 1947 but went broke twice on winter tours before becoming a full-time member in 1950. At 5 feet, 7 inches, he was skinny but whipcord strong, and his classic motion and speed, along with his moxie, caught the attention of established veterans like Ted Kroll and Lloyd Mangrum, both highly decorated for their bravery in battle, and Jimmy Demaret, a charismatic bon vivant who Toski considers his most important mentor.

“They adopted me like a kid from Boys Town,” Toski says. “They noticed this little guy hitting it with them or past them and wanted to find out what I was doing right. Then they liked that I was game for anything. Can you sing? Yeah. Can you dance? Yeah. They could tell stories, they could gamble, they could have fun. You had to keep up. I just tried to be like them.

“Those guys and others became my professors. I watched what they were doing and used the good stuff. As someone who had to maximize every part of his body to compete, I was very in tune with exactly what I was feeling and could describe it in an accurate way. As a player, I’m most proud of what I did with this body, and as a teacher, no one taught feel better than I did.”

As a swing model, Toski identified with Ben Hogan because of his stature and dynamic action, and Toski began to wear the same style of white cap. Perhaps a dozen times he watched Hogan’s entire practice session, always from a safe distance and wordlessly. Eventually, Hogan began acknowledging him in the locker room. “Never more than a nod or a ‘How you doing, Bob?’ but him using my name, and me after a while feeling comfortable to call him Ben, that meant a great deal.”

Sam Snead, who christened Toski “Mouse” after the cartoon character Mighty Mouse, was closer. “Sam was like an older brother. When I would try to make my swing flatter to be more like Hogan, Sam would say, ‘Mousey, what the hell are you doing? Dammit, you are Bob Toski. Swing like Bob Toski. You have a helluva golf swing. Quit screwing around with it.’”

Toski got to know Byron Nelson when the semi-retired great played in the Crosby Clambake in the 1950s. One year during a practice round at Cypress Point, Nelson acceded to Toski’s request to hit all the combinations of draws and fades, high and low, with a driver off the ground. Nelson’s demonstration was flawless. “He finished with the hardest shot of all, a high draw with a driver off the deck, and hit it perfectly,” Toski says. “Greatest exhibition I’ve ever seen. It made me think that of everybody, maybe Byron was the most talented.

“All that exposure created composure,” says Toski, using the kind of easy-to-remember rhyming phrases he became known for in his teaching. “By 1953, the timing, the rhythm, the balance, the confidence, everything started to come together. When you play golf, the most important thing is that in those moments before you start your swing, your conscious mind and unconscious mind are not in conflict. You don’t think about mechanics. You think about the ball flying through the air and what it’s going to do. It’s a rare combination to be totally free of conflict, but I had that, and it gave me the confidence to begin to love being in contention.”

In short order, Toski won three tournaments in the first half of 1954— the Baton Rouge, Azalea and Eastern Opens. By the time he got to Tam O’Shanter, where he had finished T-16 the year before, he was primed for a life-changing week.

His victory also gave us a quintessential 1950s moment with that rakish, strapping scalawag, a young Al Besselink, whose legend was forged in part when he would room with Toski when they were both single men on the loose.

Before the tournament, Besselink, who had won the 1953 Tournament of Champions but was in one of his periodic slumps, usually brought on by various vices, asked Toski if he would be willing to agree to split the purse should either of them win. Toski chuckled at Besselink’s typically lopsided proposal for a big score but offered a compromise: If one of them won, the other would get $10,000.

As it happened, Besselink played well enough to get within a few shots of the lead and was paired with Toski and Burke in the penultimate threesome on Sunday. However, after a slow start, Besselink spent more energy urging Toski to the finish line than worrying about his own score.

The two had their own Dead End kid sort of frankness together, as if calling out something with cold negativity—the kind of language that will get a caddie fired—would activate the kind of gritty response from the subject to keep the worst from happening. When Toski pushed his opening drive and hit his approach long, Besselink said, “Man, the way you’re playing, you’re going to shoot 75 and blow this thing.” Far from bothered, Toski took it as normal conversation. “That’s the way we talked to each other back then,” Toski says. “You had to be able to take it and respond, so I chip it in for birdie, and Bessie nods, like, ‘You’re welcome.’”

When Burke, who was leading by three, hit his drive on the 15th out of bounds, Toski followed by teeing his ball extra low for his driver to hit a ’50s version of the stinger. “No way I’m blowing it over the fence like Burke did, but Bessie looks at it and says, ‘Don’t top it.’ I burn a good one out there and flush a 3-wood and make eagle, and Bessie says, ‘The game is on.’ ”

With visions of riches making him inappropriately giddy, Besselink took a detour after hitting his drive to watch Stewart in the last group. He returned to report that Stewart had made double bogey on the 16th, meaning that Toski and Burke were tied with Stewart going into the last hole.

Toski takes it from here: “Now Bessie is cheering me on, nervous as hell, telling me before I hit my second shot how I’m the best in golf at playing a hard fade, so I’m ignoring him, and I carve this 8-iron around an elm tree guarding the final green to eight feet.

“Burke doesn’t birdie. Now I have this putt probably to win the whole thing. Bessie is running his mouth, telling me I’m the greatest putter who ever lived, and I’m blocking him out. My practice strokes feel good, but it’s a tense moment. Just as I’m over the putt, he says, ‘Do me a favor. Don’t leave it short.’ The absolute worst thing to say, except between Bessie and me. It relaxed me, and that putt was in all the way.

“I write Bessie a check for $10,000 but tell him not to cash it for a few days. Three weeks later, I see him. He says, ‘Tosk, can you spare $500.’ I say, ‘Geez, I just gave you $10,000.’ He says, ‘Yeah, the horses got me at Arlington.’ ”

Toski laughs. “You know, me and Bessie were talking and conferring so much during that round, before we signed our cards, I asked Burke if he wanted to make a complaint about Bessie giving me advice. He said, ‘Bob, you were the one that had to hit the shots. Don’t worry about it.’ That was Burke, and that was how it was back then.”

May Toski continue to transport us to that bygone time.

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