Once upon a time, Jimmy Demaret culture-shocked the PGA Tour from black and white to Technicolor, the pity being that television wasn't around to record it for rerunning on The Golf Channel. Or The Comedy Channel. Johnny Bulla says he and the rest of the pros dressed in Hogan grays and tans befitting the hard times, while Demaret became conspicuous for his love of bright clothes, not to mention bright lights and bright jokes.

Demaret Story No. 867: The jovial Texan, life of the party on tour from the late 1930s into the '50s, has gathered a group of pros to hear Don Cherry sing in the nightclub of San Antonio's plush St. Anthony Hotel. Cherry is either the best golfing singer in captivity or the best singing golfer; he plays the golf circuit mostly in cities where he can book singing engagements.

Impressed at the turnout of pros, Cherry announces that he would like to dedicate his hit song "Band of Gold" to Demaret and friends. He launches into the tune, and on a prearranged signal from Demaret, the pros unleash golf balls that bounce and pinball across the ballroom and stage. The band, startled, stops playing. The explosive Cherry is furious and knows that only Demaret, convulsed with laughter, could be behind the prank.

As usual, nobody can stay angry at Demaret for long. A professional crooner himself, he is soon on stage singing along with Cherry.

When the dinner show ends, the headwaiter presents Demaret with a sizable check. Demaret tells him the golfers are guests of Mr. Cherry and please take the check to Mr. Cherry in his dressing room, being sure to express Mr. Demaret's appreciation. After a period of failed shuttle diplomacy, Cherry winds up with the check and his second sting of the evening.

The next morning Cherry is on the first tee for a practice round, noticing warily that the group from the night before is gathered along with a few dozen fans. Demaret steps out onto the tee and, raising his mellow baritone with a twist of twang, says he has an important announcement to make: Don Cherry is appearing at the St. Anthony this week. He's been struggling with his golf and, based on the previous night's show, he isn't singing so well, either. So the pros took up a collection to help him along. Demaret pulls out a roll of $20 bills he'd collected the previous evening to pay for his group's dinners, and hands it to Cherry, who now has been had by Demaret for the third time in 12 hours.

"He'd fly places just to needle me," Cherry says with rueful affection for Demaret, who died of a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 73. "When I yelled at him in the St. Anthony, I'd just started wearin' a hairpiece. He told me to shut up or he'd hit me in the hair.

"My father passed away when I was 4, and in a strange way Jimmy raised me. He was unbelievably generous, whether it was givin' you a set of clubs or takin' you to dinner or introducin' you to somebody who could help your career. He always drank, but he was never drunk. Crosby said he was the funniest man ever without a script."
Cherry told Demaret stories featuring air horns and hired hearses, underscoring a problem with Demaret retrospectives: Even when they do justice to his sense of humor, his legacy of hair-trigger wit and zany doings distracts from his stature as a hall of fame golfer who was a pioneer of the modern game.

The Texas caddie crew
Son of a Houston house painter of modest means who inspired his penchant for vivid colors, Demaret dropped out of school early and became prominent in the Texas gang that rode out of hardscrabble caddie yards to plunder the tour in its first golden age, along with close pal Ben Hogan (and how many could claim that fame?), Byron Nelson and Lloyd Mangrum. Texas has won more Masters tournaments than any other state- 12-and the Masters is the touchstone of Demaret's career.

He won it in 1940, '47 and '50-this year heralds the golden anniversary of his becoming the first three-time winner-beating fields that included Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen and Paul Runyan in addition to those fiercely competitive Texans. The tournament wasn't played from 1943 to '45 because of the war, or Demaret might have won it more, but only Jack Nicklaus (six) and Arnold Palmer (four) have surpassed his victory total.

Demaret's victory in 1940, the year the 29-year-old dandy arrived as a star on the national stage, was his sixth in a row on tour. The first day, he played the back nine in 30, a Masters record that wasn't broken for 52 years, but his 67 still trailed Mangrum's record 64.

"The Houston Hurricane"-as sportswriters called him-passed Mangrum in the second round and finally beat him by four strokes, with Nelson third and Snead and Hogan rounding out the top 10. Demaret's winning score was eight-under-par 280; his winner's check $1,500. He went back to a singing job in Texas to supplement his bankroll.

"If I took this game as seriously as some players, I'd go nuts," he said. "When I get off that golf course I want to forget the round and enjoy myself."
Snead remembers Demaret, whose early idol was Walter Hagen, knocking on his hotel door in Augusta at 2 a.m. and suggesting they go for a drink. Demaret was a party animal who never practiced much, Snead says.

'Almost flawless'
In the '47 Masters, Demaret again led from the second round on, shooting 281 to finish two strokes clear of Nelson and three of Hogan and becoming the first to shoot four subpar rounds. A Masters record book reported that he played "steady and almost flawless golf in a happy, carefree manner."

His third Masters victory was dramatically different. Demaret trailed Australia's Jim Ferrier by four strokes after 54 holes, but won by dint of a seven-stroke swing on the last six holes. His 283 total, posted with Ferrier cruising into the back nine, didn't look low enough until the Aussie unexpectedly bogeyed the par-5 13th (which Demaret played six under par for the tournament), and then bogeyed 14 and 16.

Demaret was monitoring Ferrier's backward progress through a set of headphones in a new radio tower at the 18th green. "If he ties me, I'll beat him tomorrow," Demaret predicted to others on the tower. When Ferrier bogeyed the 17th, Demaret yelped, "He's mine, boys!" Snead was third, Nelson and Hogan tied for fourth.

The Masters was the only major championship Demaret won, though he came close in two U.S. Opens and amassed more than 30 victories over all. To peers who second-guessed his fun-house lifestyle, including in recent times Runyan ("Had he trained and worked at it like Hogan, he would have been the superstar of superstars") and Bulla ("He treated everybody good but himself"), Demaret would say he might not have won as much if he'd enjoyed himself less.

Why did he do so well at Augusta? And do it by fading the ball on a reputed hooker's course?

Jackie Burke, the 1956 Masters winner and Demaret's partner in developing the ultra-successful Champions Golf Club in Houston, says: "He was probably the straightest driver I ever saw. He had powerful Popeye forearms, and he teed it very low and damn near hit it in the neck. 'I eliminate one whole side of real estate,' he'd say."

Charlie Yates, a protege of Bobby Jones, played in the first 11 Masters tournaments as a top amateur and is believed to be the only person who has attended every Masters since it started in 1934. He calls Demaret the best middle-iron player he's seen at Augusta.

"He had a wonderful, confident attitude and stood out as a real dude on the course," Yates says. "He always wore fancy shoes and caps. He'd twirl the club, walking along jauntily. He had adequate length, so it's better to fade shots for control. Hogan said he could hit it as far fading it."

Dave Marr, mentored in Houston by Demaret, once said that behind the self-educated Demaret's "jolly-guy image" pulsed the smartest Texas golfer of them all-whether it was thinking his way around a course or making money away from it or winging through a pilot's exam.

Bob Toski asked Demaret at Augusta how he cut the ball. "He said his hands go left. He was a great hands player, and always talked about the hands being most important. He'd twist the club around addressing the ball, bounce it behind the ball. He had a great feel for distance that paid off at Augusta. He could hit it close from any distance. Then he could make the putts. He was a great putter."

And if the wind came up, Demaret was almost untouchable. He could hit a 2-iron 10 feet high and stop it with air-brakes abruptness.

"He'd murder you in the wind," Hogan once told me. "He knew how to use it."

Hogan said Demaret was the most underrated player he ever saw, and he saw plenty of him. The pair won several tour four-ball events and were unbeaten in two Ryder Cups (Demaret also was unbeaten in singles, downing the estimable Dai Rees twice).
The extroverted Demaret kidded the introverted Hogan as pithily as he kidded everybody else, and Hogan relished it. One day Demaret walked into a clubhouse dining room, saw Hogan eating at a table by himself, and piped: "Hey, look, there's Ben Hogan sitting with all his friends."

It was Demaret who influenced Hogan to weaken his grip and fade the ball, probably saving Hogan's career. He rated Hogan the greatest of all time, but could rise to their amiable rivalry. He and Hogan were 1- 3 on the money list in 1947, and in 1948 Demaret finished second to Hogan in the U.S. Open at Riviera, which Demaret dubbed "Hogan's Alley." Both broke the Open scoring record.

The 1949 season began as the Hogan-Demaret Show. They tied for first at Long Beach, Hogan winning a playoff. Then they tied at Phoenix, Demaret beating Hogan in the playoff.

From Phoenix, Hogan was driving home to Fort Worth when he collided with a bus in fog and nearly lost his life. Demaret coaxed a laugh out of a recuperating Hogan by cracking: "Just because I beat you in a playoff, you didn't have to try to run a bus off the road."

Picking up a check
Demaret would write a book titled My Partner Ben Hogan in collaboration with Jimmy Breslin, who went on to a Pulitzer Prize. Breslin recalls Demaret as a delightful socializing companion and the rare famous athlete who grabbed bar checks, often at Toots Shor's Manhattan watering trough.

Demaret had been hanging out at Shor's the day he was to appear as the mystery guest on the TV show "What's My Line?" Running late, he forgot instructions to take a CBS service elevator to protect his identity. The first panelist guessed almost immediately that the mystery guest was Demaret. How could he have known so fast, wondered moderator John Daly. Easy, said the panelist. A man with a beaming smile got on the elevator, thrust out his hand and said: "Hi, my name's Jimmy Demaret!"

Says Breslin, a former Queens caddie, "I don't remember one sour moment with Demaret. He was an entertainer who attracted funny people. Golf is as solemn as church-it should be banned on television-but he was life."

Hogan at the delayed end of his career played tournaments at Champions largely out of fondness for Demaret-the 1971 Houston Open at age 58 proving Hogan's sad tour farewell.

Something went out of tour life for Demaret with Hogan's 1949 accident, and he began scaling back his schedule, devoting himself to club-pro work and to broadcasting, as one of the first color commentators. Color was the word.

Reporting on Lew Worsham's famous 1953 wedge shot to win George S. May's World Championship, Demaret described it approximately as follows: "It looks short, it's rolling, but I don't think it has a chance, it's still rolling . . . well I'll be damned! The SOB went in!"

In the second half of the 1960s, he starred on the popular "Shell's Wonderful World of Golf" series, a dashing presence on camera. His wavy hair, parted high and sleeked back, was turning silver, following the lead of his tongue. Shirts that were exuberantly patterned and loose- fitting concealed most of the pet paunch he habitually massaged off camera.

A legend and the Legends
Demaret and Shell producer Fred Raphael later founded the Legends of Golf, played initially at the Onion Creek course Demaret co-owned and designed near Austin, and the Legends led to the formation of the senior tour, for which they don't get enough credit.

Says Ben Crenshaw: "Jimmy didn't do many courses, but he had a very, very good eye for design. His philosophy was like his personality: extremely friendly and somewhat challenging. Champions, where he had a lot of input, is still a wonderful test, built with great foresight. The players can use driver nearly everywhere. You hit a lot of shots."

That was Demaret's game. Longtime Champions members tell how he shot 34 for nine holes to win a match. On one foot. Another time a member bragged to Demaret after hitting a par 3 with a 6-iron when Demaret used a 5-iron. "Tell you what," said Demaret, competitive to his core, "I'll bet you $100 a club I can hit that green with every club in my bag." He collected to the max.

Crenshaw remembers his father, a good amateur golfer, playing in the Odessa Pro-Am and Demaret singing at night, accompanied on piano by Crenshaw's mother. "Jimmy's personality was radiant-when he entered a room, everybody started having a better time," says Crenshaw. "His humor was the most original I've heard. Like that time he woke up at the Crosby, looked out to see it had snowed overnight and said, 'I knew I was loaded last night, but how did I end up in Squaw Valley?' He was the best foul-weather player I ever saw. He loved to see it get miserable at the Crosby."
Bob Hope was Demaret's amateur partner, and often called Demaret for comedic material. Of Hope and Crosby, Demaret said,

"I always forget which one thinks he's funny and which one thinks he can sing." Crosby-Demaret duets were a highlight of the annual Clambake parties. Says Tom Fazio, whose uncle George was a contemporary of Demaret: "Jimmy was a celeb-rity's celebrity."

Raphael could talk about Demaret until he loses his voice. Arnold Palmer once shot an unsightly 40 on the front nine of a Shell match. It being the show's custom to interview players at the turn, Raphael cautioned Demaret and his announcing partner, Gene Sarazen, that Palmer wasn't keen to talk and should not be asked about the 40. Sarazen ducked the task, so Demaret breezily opened with: "Well, Arnold, when was the last time you shot 80?"

Raphael glumly reports that a video of Demaret outtakes has been lost.

In his waning years Demaret spent most of his time at Champions, playing high-spirited matches with the members and holding court at the bar in the locker room, a vast and handsomely appointed area that dominates the understated, one-story brick clubhouse. He died leaving the club one crisp December day to get a haircut from his favorite stylist down the street. The last thing he said to Burke was: "I hope she didn't have a bad night."

Demaret had left a final request with the priest who would conduct his funeral. He told the priest, a golfer, to invite everyone to the parish hall for a drink after the funeral. The priest did, and just about everybody in the capacity crowd came, and don't you know the Demaret stories flowed then.

-Nick Seitz