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Published November 23, 2008 12:34 am - McSpaden, Laffoon deserve hall of fame consideration New Zealand lefthander Bob Charles, golf writer Herbert Warren Wind, amateur Carole Semple Thompson, architect Pete Dye and past tour stars Craig Wood and Denny Shute are members of the World Golf Hall of Fame’s 2008 induction class..
Bravo to each. It was well deserved. But I have a couple of nominations of my own. My guys were quality players, but they didn’t win bushels of tournaments and were shut out in the majors (although one of my nominees should have an asterisk behind his name for winning two substitutes for the U.S. Open during the war years). Their records are pretty good, they had plenty of charm and charisma and they were important figures on the young professional tour at a time when the golf circuit needed all the color and talent it could get. Harold (Jug) McSpaden and Ky Laffoon clearly were among the cream of their generation of professional golfers in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a time of a few dozen widely scattered tournaments offering small prize money, of players sharing rides and expenses as they traveled narrow, often bumpy roads from one site to the next and of more than a few interesting, slightly off-beat characters. McSpaden, who resided in Kansas City, was a 17-time winner on the fledgling PGA tour and was the prime rival as well as best friend of Byron Nelson. Together they form what was called by the media and their peers as “The Gold Dust Twins” because of their successes. In 1945, when Nelson had his incredible run of 11 straight victories and 18 wins overall, McSpaden finished second 13 times. A few putts here and a drive in the fairway there and the golfing world might have been talking about and revering Jug rather than Lord Byron. Because of World War II, the USGA suspended the U.S. Open. Its place was taken by the All-American Open in 1942 and the George S. May World Championship in 1943. Jug won both. Laffoon, who was born in Zinc, Ark., and held club pro positions at Miami (Okla.) Country Club and Oak Hill Country Club (now Twin Hills in Joplin), not only won 10 times on the pro tour, but did quite well in the U.S. Open, PGA Championship and Masters. He had a dozen top-10 finishes from 1936 through 1948. His best efforts were a 4th in the 1946 Masters, a tie for 5th in the 1936 U.S. Open and a tie for 3rd in the 1937 PGA Championship. I got to meet and eventually become good friends with McSpaden when I did an article on him for PGA Magazine in the 1970s. He was owner of Victory Hills Country Club in Kansas City, where he lived at the time, and of the 8,100-yard Dub’s Dread Golf Course in Piper, Kan. Although he had a degree from the Wharton School of Business and had been a vice president of the Palm Beach Co., McSpaden was more at home on the golf course than in a board room or office. He often could be found operating a bulldozer or a backhoe leveling a teeing area, contouring a green or digging out a spot for a sand trap on his own golf course creation, Dub’s Delight, a shorter, friendlier version of his back-breaking Dub’s Dread. As an entrepreneur, Jug knew the value of promotion and publicity. For several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he held exhibitions at Dub’s Dread featuring himself and Nelson against such teams as Ben Hogan and Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. By the way, even in his 60s, McSpaden was a player. The course record at Dub’s Dread, which featured 500-yard par fours and 250-yard, uphill par 3s, was 69 from the tips. It was set by McSpaden and later tied by Nicklaus. That was back in the days before high-tech equipment and golf balls, training aids and strength-flexibility gurus made 7,100-yard courses obsolete. Laffoon’s nomination might be in a little different category. Where Jug was ruggedly individualistic and pretty much even-tempered, Ky was more tempestuous. He could lose his temper in a split-second and do something rash. It cost him. 
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