Will Rogers In Old Pinehurst
The Cowboy Philosopher and American Legend
By David Sowell
In late March of 1928, a plane carrying one of the most popular and influential figures in America landed in Pinehurst. This gentleman had come to promote a sport. It wasn’t golf. In fact, he had once been at the forefront of those who held the game in disdain. Seemingly at every opportunity, he lampooned golf and those who played it. His name was Will Rogers.
Part Cherokee Indian, Rogers was born in Native American Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. His story was not a rags-to-riches one. It was more like riches to mega-riches. His father was a very successful rancher, but it appeared that Will was going to have a rough time equaling that success. He was a poor student and received a bare-bones education as he bounced from boarding school to boarding school.
His father hoped to give young Will a leg up by providing him with his own cattle ranch. Rogers soon sold it and went off to Argentina. He tried to make it as a rancher there, but in just five months, he was broke. Too embarrassed to write to his father for help, he took a job tending a load of livestock on a freighter bound for South Africa.
Once ashore, Rogers was hired by the ranch where the livestock were destined to go. The owner was a wealthy Englishman who was very demanding and boisterous, characteristics that didn’t match up well with Will’s laid-back attitude. Rogers quickly found himself on the move again. He hooked on with, of all things, a Wild West show. After a stint there, he moved to Australia, where he worked in a circus.
Rogers eventually returned to the United States and began appearing intermittently on the vaudeville circuit, doing rope tricks with his lariat and offering his humorous observations on the American scene. In 1904, he was one of the performers at a Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in New York City when a huge steer broke loose. The steer jumped over the guard rail and into the stands. Pandemonium ensued. The audience scattered. With his lariat in hand, Will and several of the show’s other performers were in hot pursuit. The steer reached the upstairs balcony where Rogers was able to rope it and guide it back onto the arena floor.
His heroic actions made the front page of The New York Times, and Rogers’ career skyrocketed, eventually turning him into an early 20th century multi-media darling. He made motion pictures and wrote one of the most successful newspaper columns in that medium’s history. He toured the country doing live shows that sold out wherever he appeared.
Through his folksy commentary in his newspaper column, Rogers captured the hearts of ordinary Americans. The same could hardly be said for the game of golf. It had the look of an activity for those who also yachted as they summered. Two of the country’s most talked about golf zealots were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two richest citizens. Carnegie’s name was bandied about as a potential president of the United States Golf Association, a nascent organization born three days before Christmas in 1894.
Golf’s deep connection to the nation’s upper crust resulted in much of the country’s rank and file looking at the game with contempt, if they looked on it at all. This contempt was fueled by the stance taken by one of America’s most popular presidents — Theodore Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was the quintessential man’s man. While president, he hunted. He boxed. He chopped down trees. On more than one occasion, he took winter swims across the Potomac. Roosevelt let it be known widely and often that he viewed golf with scorn. He called it a game for dudes and snobs.
After Roosevelt’s passing in 1919, Rogers took the point for the anti-golf crowd, drawing huge laughs about the game in his stage act and his writing. Some of his more notable barbs included:
Golf is good for the soul. You get so mad at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.
Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it’s called golf.
Rail-splitting produced an immortal president in Lincoln, but golf hasn’t produced even a good Congressman.
Golf antipathy even spilled over into the 1920 presidential election. During the Republican Party convention in Chicago, a deal was cut by the party’s bosses that gave the 1920 nomination for president to Warren G. Harding, a United States senator from Marion, Ohio.
Harding’s team decided that for the general election, they would utilize a “front porch” campaign. Instead of barnstorming the country, their candidate would remain close to home and let supporters and the press come to him.
This homey approach was augmented by a well-orchestrated use of print media and a thorough stroking of the newsreel distributors. (Newsreels were shown in movie houses before the main feature.) One of the first newsreels featuring their candidate showed Harding, adorned in fancy knickers, teeing off and putting at a golf course near his home.
As soon as the golf newsreel began to roll in movie houses around the country, the Harding campaign was inundated with negative reactions to it. One United States senator who was backing Harding said he’d been in a packed theater where the newsreel was shown and there was not one applauding set of hands in the entire place.
It was clear to the Harding team that they had ingested a huge dose of political poison. Desperate to get back on track, they hatched a plan involving baseball that would show the country their man was as mainstream as it gets.
In late August, the Chicago Cubs were on their way to another lackluster finish in the National League pennant race. Sticking to their front porch strategy, the Harding campaign’s plan was to bring the Cubs — whose owner was a Harding backer — to Marion, on one of their off days for an exhibition game.
The Cubs took on a team of locals and a crowd of 7,000 showed up at the rickety Marion ballpark to watch the game. The campaign sent out press releases a few days before chronicling Harding’s playing days as a bare-handed first baseman in his youth and detailed how he was once a major stockholder in a professional team in the Ohio State League.
Harding arrived at the game with the newsreel cameras rolling and received a rousing welcome from the crowd. He then warmed up the Cubs starting pitcher, future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. After the warm-up session, Harding threw out the first pitch and then whooped it up in the stands for the benefit of the cameras the rest of the afternoon. When the game’s newsreel footage reached the movie houses, the favorable reaction it received more than canceled out Harding’s golfing blunder. He won the election, handily defeating his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox.
Harding’s frequent golfing and the criticism he received about it would dog him all through his presidency. It started the first Sunday he was in the White House, when he skipped church and headed to the course. By 1922, it was a public relations nightmare, and it was about to get even worse because Will Rogers had rolled into town.
When Rogers arrived, he was extended an invitation to the White House to meet the president. His visit was cordial and friendly. Harding even expressed an interest in seeing Will’s show. Rogers’ golf and political jibes quickly became the talk of the town. After just a few shows, one of Harding’s aides went to see Rogers and asked that he not do so many golf jokes about the president because the newspapers were making too much of it.
Although surprised at the request, Rogers agreed to it and eliminated several golf jokes from his act. A couple of nights later, it was announced that Harding was going out to the theater — there were only two shows in town — and Rogers took this to mean he was coming to see him. When the curtain rose, Harding was nowhere to be seen. He had gone to the other show. The following night, Rogers turned the heat back up, putting the previous jokes about Harding’s golf back in his routine and adding more.
One turned out to be quite prophetic. There had been a fire that damaged the Treasury Department building, and Rogers used it for comedic effect. “The fire started on the roof and burned down to where the money was supposed to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it,” Rogers said.
Soon after Rogers’ show left Washington the biggest and most sensational scandal to hit American politics, to that point, broke: Tea Pot Dome.
In 1923, an effort was made to bring Rogers to Pinehurst for a show at the recently opened Theater Building. Due to other contractual obligations, Rogers doubted he could work Pinehurst into his schedule and, on the Pinehurst end, it was felt that Rogers’ fee of $500 was too mercenary.
Five years later, in the spring of 1928, Leonard Tufts, the owner of the Pinehurst Resort, footed the bill for Rogers to make an appearance, and the entertainer was more than happy to make the trip. It would involve two things he had become very passionate about: aviation and polo.
Rogers’ affection for aviation had turned him into the country’s first frequent flyer. Air travel was just what he needed to accommodate his demanding schedule. Paying by the pound, Rogers flew in mail planes to destinations across the country. He became good friends with aviators Charles Lindbergh and Billy Mitchell, regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Rogers was flown to Pinehurst from Atlanta, where he was performing, by Pinehurst’s Lloyd Yost, a well-known aviator and the manager of the local airfield.
Rogers’ second passion, polo, was a sport every bit as highbrow as golf, the game he had mocked and made fun of for so many years. A fellow performer with Rogers in the Wild West show that fateful day at Madison Square Garden had a decade later begun training horses for polo in New Jersey. Rogers visited him and became hooked on a sport that allowed him to saddle up and get back to his cowboy roots. He became so “all-in” for polo that when he purchased the property for his ranch in Santa Monica, California, a polo field was laid out before the design for the ranch’s house.
Rogers hosted matches on the weekends whenever his travel schedule permitted. The regular participants were some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Hal Roach, Walt Disney.
Rogers played polo with reckless abandon and had the broken bones to show for it. He once said of the sport, “They call it a gentlemen’s game for the same reason they call a tall man Shorty.” Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch wrote of Rogers, “He erased the tea-drinking, ‘High Society’ ideas about the mallet sport by appearing at swank polo clubs donned in overalls, cowboy boots, hatless and coatless, his $1.98 shirt open at the throat.”
The polo match in Pinehurst that Rogers saddled up for took place on the grounds of the harness track. The contest featured two local teams. Rogers took part as a member of the “The Yellows.” The match ended in a 3-3 tie with Rogers scoring all three of the Yellow team’s goals.
That evening Rogers put on his one-man show in the Theater Building. His appearance had been highly promoted with ads appearing in local newspapers since early February and was a sold-out performance.
Well before his trip to Pinehurst, Rogers’ jokes about golf seemed to be tapering off. The sport had turned something of a popularity corner. Another icon who, like Rogers, was a hero to the common man had become the country’s most high-profile golf fanatic — Babe Ruth. The baseball slugger’s exploits on the golf course flooded newspapers during the off-season.
And, two years prior to Rogers’ appearance in Pinehurst, Bobby Jones had been celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned from winning the British Open and British Amateur. In 1930 Jones would collect all four championships in a calendar year — the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, British Open and British Amateur — to complete his Grand Slam, earning a second ticker-tape celebration. Jones and John Glenn, the fighter pilot, astronaut and senator from Ohio, are the only people to have been so honored twice.
Over the next few years, Rogers developed a friendship with Jones. When Jones was in Hollywood to make a series of short films titled How I Play Golf, he spent time at Rogers’ ranch. Jones would hit golf balls around the ranch’s vast open spaces while Rogers accompanied him on horseback.
Rogers’ career continued to reach new heights. In 1935, he signed a movie contract with Fox Studios that would pay him $8,000 a week — the equivalent $176,000 in 2023. By late July of 1935, he had made four movies that were playing across the country and had just wrapped up the production of a fifth, titled In Old Kentucky. After that stretch of moviemaking, he was ready to get back to traveling.
Two weeks later, near Point Barrow, Alaska, an Eskimo man made a rapid trek on foot, covering 15 miles over rugged terrain in three hours to reach the Army Signal Corps station. So exhausted he could hardly speak, he told the personnel that a plane had crashed and its two occupants were dead. The pilot of the plane was renowned aviator Wiley Post. His passenger was Will Rogers. PS
David Sowell writes about golf history. He has written for the USGA’s Golf Journal and he is the author of the book The Masters: a Hole-by-Hole History of America’s Golf Classic. He moved to Pinehurst in 2020.