Hardly anyone wanted Johnny Bulla to win the 1941 Los Angeles Open at Riviera.
Bulla, his fellow players asserted, had committed an egregious crime. Three years earlier, he had befriended Charles Walgreen, founder of the Walgreens drugstore, and agreed to an endorsement deal to promote the store’s discount golf balls that were sold over the counter to the public for 25 cents a pop.
It came at a time when golfers – and all athletes, for that matter – virtually never ventured into the space of commercial partnerships. Pro golfers were to play equipment sold exclusively in golf shops. Competing with a bargain ball sold outside the pro shop system while earning money for such a thing bordered on blasphemous.
The PGA of America tried to blackball Bulla at every step, going as far as barring him from the 1941 U.S. Ryder Cup team. Wilson Sporting Goods threatened Sam Snead, a close friend of Bulla’s and a Wilson staff member, with termination of his contract should continue to spend time with Bulla. The PGA threatened Snead, too. He stuck by his friend and held off punishment. But it didn’t stop the animosity from raining down on a perceived turncoat.
In that 1941 L.A. Open, Bulla’s only PGA Tour win in a lengthy career, the hate reached a level that is unthinkable today. During the third round, one of his playing partners walked up to a ball in the fairway, looked down to check the brand and then walked away, presumably because that wasn’t his ball.
It was the equivalent of the hidden ball trick in baseball. Bulla hit his approach assuming it was his Walgreens Golden Crown ball, but that wasn’t the case. He incurred a two-stroke penalty because of the trickery but still won by two strokes over Craig Wood.
“Every inch of a player has got a logo now,” Bulla’s son, Robert, told the Beaver County Times. “In those days, that was not the thing to do. Walgreens was going to sue (the PGA) for antitrust, so they backed down. The manufacturers really put pressure on the PGA. The PGA really did a number on (Bulla), basically destroyed a lot of his records.”
Johnny Bulla’s name is mostly forgotten in golf history, especially because some of his tour accomplishments were essentially whitewashed. But what he did for the game, and the defiant way he did it, makes him one of the true hidden gems in an era of golf dominated by players like Snead, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Jimmy Demaret, Cary Middlecoff and Lloyd Mangrum.
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