The Loop
The man who invented the yardage book
Deane Beman won the U.S. Amateur twice and the British Amateur once, and between 1969 and 1973 he won four times on the PGA Tour.
Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
He became the tour’s commissioner in 1974, and he built the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass -- where the Players Championship, the fifth major, will be held next month, and which you can read about in my column in the current issue of Golf Digest -- and he is largely responsible for transforming the tour into a robust modern enterprise. He was also the first player to methodically measure and record key yardages on the golf courses he played, beginning in 1954, when he was still a junior:
"I'd pace off the golf course during a practice round, and make notes on a scorecard," he told me recently. "It was quite unsophisticated, but pretty effective. Doing that was a little more difficult back then, because golf courses had single-row irrigation, so there weren't as many sprinkler heads as you have today. I used trees and bunkers and things like that. A championship course usually had bunkering in the landing areas, and I could use either the front or the back of a bunker as my mark to the front of the green. And then I'd measure the green."
"I played a lot of golf with Jack Nicklaus when we were amateurs, and he would laugh when I pulled out my card," Beman continued. "But then he got married to the idea. The first time Jack copied what I did was at Pebble Beach, for the 1961 U. S. Amateur." Nicklaus himself said later, "I was playing a practice round with Deane in 1961 and he said, 'Why don't you try it one time, just walk off the golf course?'" He did, and blew away Dudley Wysong in the final. "After that," Beman continued, "I don't think Jack ever played a round without having the ability to really, really know the length of any shot he was facing."
“Now, I will say this," Beman went on. "I was not a popular guy with caddies, because I required them to go walk the golf course before every round, and pace off every pin position. I had my yardages to the front of the green, and I knew how deep the green was, so I would give my caddie a pad on which I had marked the dimensions. I wanted to know how deep the pin was that day, and he would pace that off. Nobody had any pin sheets in those days -- but I did.”
Nowadays, tour players and their caddies carry extraordinarily sophisticated yardage books, which contain not just distances but also topographical details, and even lousy golfers can determine the length of just about any shot within a few feet, if they own a laser rangefinder. But players at all levels were skeptical at first, and Beman's idea didn't really catch on until the 1970s. Arnold Palmer, among many others, though it was dumb. Ha!
"My notes became much more sophisticated once I turned professional," Beman said. He saved those scorecards, too -- but the ones in the photos above show how it all began.