He is remembered for his very slow pace of play, his volcanic temperament and sometimes his nickname, doctor, given to him because he was a dentist. Cary Middlecoff has been one of the few players who was a master golfer as a young man and never lost control of the game.
Middlecoff won his third tournament as a professional in 1947, and at least scored at least one every year until his retirement in 1961. When he finally hung up his golf shoes, his forty career victories made him eighth on the list of players with the most wins on the U.S. Professional Tour, the PGA Tour, and he had also scored two U.S. Opens (1949 and 1955) and an Augusta Masters (1955). Middlecoff won the Memphis City Championship and Tennessee State Amateur while still a teenager, had a 29-stroke collegiate tournament while at the University of Mississippi and later became the first amateur to win the North and South Open in 1945 while playing in the final group with Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen.
“I’d like to give the world a swing that way,” Bobby Jones once said, all the more remarkable considering Middlecoff never took a lesson. Middlecoff was born in Halls, Tennessee, and earned the nickname “The Ghost” as a kid because he always haunting country town clubs, looking for tips on his game. He was a big kid (he was eventually 6’2″), who was more interested in playing the stuffing out of the ball than perfecting a technique. Later in life he would use his enormous length off the tee to dominate golf courses and opponents alike.
Middlecoff had all but given up golfing dentistry in World War II convinced him otherwise. After serving 18 months of active duty and filling some 7,000 teeth, he decided to give the professional tour a whirl with the caveat that if he was unsuccessful in the two years he would return to drill teeth instead of two irons. At the Charlotte Open in his rookie year, Middlecoff tied the course record in the final round and took home a $2,000 winner’s check. He never looked back. Two years later, he won his first major, the 1949 U.S. Open at Medinah. The most dominant performance of Middlecoff’s career came at the 1955 Masters, which he won by a then-record seven strokes, fueled by an 86-foot putt for eagle on 13 during the third round. When he held off Ben Hogan and Julius Boros at the U.S. Open the next year at Oak Hill, Middlecoff established himself as one of the premier golfers of the 1950s.
At the 1957 U.S. Open, Middlecoff replicated-to-back 68s to form eight strokes and force a playoff with Dick Mayer, but it was memorable for other reasons. Mayer entered the postseason with a camping stool, a subtle comment on the slow-playing Middlecoff, who was coming from an unnatural neatness in his lineup. In fact, according to writer Dan Jenkins, Middlecoff’s professional colleagues used to jokingly say that he had given up dentistry, since no patient can keep his mouth open that long. How much Mayer’s trick disturbed Middlecoff is unknown, but he shot a woeful 79 to lose the Open by seven strokes.
Middlecoff was deliberate in other ways. At the top of his languid backswing, he came to a visible stop. Middlecoff was a substantial commentator on the game and worked for several years as a television analyst. Among his most memorable phrases were, “Nobody wins the Open. It beats you,” and “Anyone who hasn’t been nervous, or hasn’t choked somewhere along the line, is an idiot.” Middlecoff’s theories on the golf swing, collected in a book appropriately titled The Golf Swing, are considered among the most accessible ever written. Which is not surprising, considering the game was always so easy for him.
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