The Game of Golf Loses a Gem

Ken Venturi had just won tournaments in St. Paul and Milwaukee in his rookie season as a touring professional golfer and happened to be in the Washington area not long after those career breakthrough victories. One day, he stopped by Burning Tree Golf Club in Bethesda to visit his friend, Max Elbin, the club's widely respected head professional.

"I walked into the shop and Max said to me 'hey, how would you like to play with the president?'" Venturi recalled in an telephone interview earlier this week. "So my first round at Burning Tree, I'm playing with President Eisenhower. Amazing. But that was Max, the epitome of the golf professional. He was always a giver, and that was the perfect job for him."

Elbin, a former caddie who grew up in Cumberland, Md., arrived at Burning Tree in 1940 as an assistant to future U.S. Open champion Lew Worsham. Elbin became the head pro at the age of 26 when Worsham quit in 1948 to play full-time tournament golf after winning the Open in 1947. He never had a contract at the extremely private, all-male club, but stayed in the job until he retired in 1995 and was a constant presence on the grounds for most of the years since.

Along the way, Elbin, who died of congestive heart failure on Dec. 12 at the age of 88, taught the game to six presidents and became the 15th president of the PGA of America in the mid-1960s. Who knows how many cabinet members, Congressmen, big-time lobbyists and captains of industry also benefited from his instruction, not to mention countless other club members, now numbering about 500, and his own five children, including Kelly Elbin, now director of communications for the PGA of America.

"He was always a basics teacher," said Venturi (a 14-time winner on the PGA Tour, including the 1964 U.S. Open at Congressional), who welcomed an occasional swing tip or two from Elbin himself over the years, especially after he became the first and only PGA Tour player ever to join Burning Tree in 1982. "He had no gimmicks. It was all old-school, just the foundation. There were ways to do it, and this is how you do it, very much the way Byron Nelson taught me."

Elbin took the same approach with all those presidents, and played quite a few rounds with them, as well.

When he was inducted into the Legends of the PGA in 1995, Elbin was quoted in one magazine article saying that, "I have pictures in my shop of six different Presidents I've either played golf with or helped teach -- Eisenhower, Ford, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson and Bush. Ford and Eisenhower were the most competitive on the golf course - they played hard and played to win. Nixon was the most determined man. I gave him his first golf lesson (when he was vice president). He wanted to learn so that he could play with Eisenhower. He had a tremendous competitive attitude and determination. He would putt it out rather than accept the four-foot putt the way others would. That said something of his character.

"Lyndon Johnson was a member (of Burning Tree) for a while, but he was someone who really wasn't all that interested in the game....but he was a lot of fun to play with because he just played for fun....John F. Kennedy was the most talented of the presidential golfers, but didn't play as much as the other presidents. He only played nine holes because of his back troubles. And I think he preferred being on the water. (George H.W.) Bush is a tremendous athlete, with all of his running. When he's playing golf he's almost running. He's a fine competitor."

Elbin was a decent player himself, according to Venturi, "but he just didn't play enough because he had so many other responsibilities at the club. When he did go out, he played well, and he played fast. He hated slow play, just hated it."

Outside the gates of Burning Tree, Elbin was best known for his work with the PGA of America, the organization that now services America's golf teaching professionals. During his three-year term, the nation's playing professionals also were under the PGA of America umbrella, at least until the pros broke off in 1968 to create the Association of Professional Golfers, later changed to The Tournament Players Division, and later, to the totally independent PGA Tour.

During Elbin's last year as PGA president in 1968, a somewhat amicable split was brokered, mostly due to his efforts as a statesman-like mediator between the two groups. Elbin did insist that the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup, back then a competition that attracted little attention, remain under the auspices of the PGA of America. Forty years later, both events have become mega-million dollar money-makers from television rights fees, corporate sponsorships and massive attendance.

"Mr. Elbin was probably the best guy in the world to broker that deal," Dick Johns, executive director of the Middle Atlantic section of the PGA of America said in a telephone interview this week. "The players had a great deal of respect for him. Everyone did. Being an old Army guy myself, I always treated him like a retired four-star general."