Jack Burke Jr.

HE STILL SPORTS a thick stand of curly hair and his engaging smile softens the rapier wit with which he punctures any form of pomposity. At 71, Jackie Burke still has the elfin charm that made him a gate attraction so long ago.

In 1956, Burke edged Ken Venturi for the Masters title and won the PGA. His credentials as a player, however, are only a part of his resume. Caddie, tour player, instructor, club professional, businessman, golf course developer -- Burke did it all, and did it earlier than most.

At 4, he was playing golf. At 12, he could break par, win golf wagers from grown men, and outdrive Babe Zaharias. "Heck, I was teaching at 13," says Burke.

And so he was. His first student, John P. Fusler, gave the lad $350 when Burke helped him lower his scores from 100 to 85 that summer some 58 years ago.

"He thought I was the greatest teacher in the world, but all I was doing was relating what I had heard at the dinner table," Burke said.

Jackie Burke, whose continued use of the "Jr." marks his esteem for "Sr.," learned the game at his father's knee. Today, he carries on his legacy, running the splendid Champions Golf Club, which he developed in Houston with the late Jimmy Demaret.

The Champions is golf, pure golf. At this club, 230 members have handicap indexes of 8 or better, while 55 play at scratch or better. Champions was modeled after the clubs that Burke and Demaret liked -- Baltusrol, Country Club of Rochester, and Winged Foot.

"At Winged Foot, they open up each day for this game and they close each day around the game," Burke said. "They don't have any other function. They've got excellent food, but food doesn't play that big a role, nor does the social aspect play a role. It's the golf."

And Burke can rail on a bit about what he doesn't like.

Jackie Burke's outlook isn't a recent development. It's a legacy from his father. Now and then Burke recalls his boyhood at old River Oaks Country Club, the Houston club where his dad was head professional.

Jackie Burke Jr. and golf as we know it arrived in Houston at about the same time. Burke was 2 when his father, a professional from the East Falls section of Philadelphia, and Willie McGuire, a Boston pro, were brought down to run two posh new clubs.

Golf had been played in 1887 on the parade ground of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, but the game never really gained a foothold in Texas until the 1920s. Then fairways began to emerge in the hard brown plains, threading through the piney woods and along the coastal marshes.

In those years, Texas's rugged rural courses were primitive, their greens surfaced with oiled sand or cottonseed hulls. Lush courses, however, were springing up in the cities, where men with fortunes made in oil, cotton, and cattle imported top architects like Ross and Tillinghast.

Willie McGuire was brought down to run the new Houston Country Club, while a group of Rice University alumni hired Burke Sr. as professional at the new Donald Ross course, River Oaks. It was a wealthy club.

"I've seen as many as 30 limousines in the River Oaks parking lot at any one time, 'cause I used to shoot dice with the drivers," Jack Jr. said. "This was when there were no taxes and you got as much oil as you could get out of the ground. That's when there were really rich people. We have people now that pretend to be rich, but there are no more rich people. If you have any money today, you get your name printed in Forbes Magazine."

Burke's father, winner of some 30 tournaments before there was a true pro tour and runner-up in the 1920 U.S. Open, was hired because he was a fine instructor, good enough that men like Jack Grout, Jack Nicklaus's lifelong teacher, came to his practice tee.

In the hard years of the Depression, Jackie became one of some 200 River Oaks caddies, many of whom were unemployed men, desperate for a bag. With perhaps 100 golfers each day, many caddies were idle and lounged around the caddie yard, shooting dice, pitching coins, or chipping golf balls.

The caddie yard became a sort of day-care center for some of the Burke family's eight children. "It was a great place," said Jackie. "We could put on boxing gloves, or shoot dice. In the yard, you learned quite a bit about life. As they say, 'It's hard in the yard.'"

Young Jack played on Caddie Day, and some members let him hit balls as he caddied. Occasionally, Burke traded shagging favors with another caddie who wanted to practice. At 12, Jackie waltzed around River Oaks in 69 strokes, which put him in great demand as a partner. One playing companion was his father's student, Babe Zaharias.

"She was a player," Burke remembers. "She'd say, 'C'mon Little Jackie, I'm gonna kick your butt out here,' which was just the way she talked. The day that I could out-hit Babe, I knew I was on my way."

Frequently, Jackie was drafted by his father as a partner.

"I played a lot with my dad," Jackie said. "I could make a lot of birdies as a kid because I could always putt pretty well. Wagering was about the only money he was making during the Depression. It wasn't just little 50-cent Nassaus. They didn't play beyond their means, but they had some pretty nice days."

Jackie filled out afternoon four-ball matches with members: the cotton men Lamar Flemming, William C. Hunt, and S. M. McAsham; oilman George Strake, who discovered the Conroe oil field; and Commodore Brian Herd, a good amateur who had competed against Bob Jones.

"Commodore Herd had acres of cups," said Jackie. "He was a gentleman, a real banker-type little guy, very astute at everything he did. I played with him when he was well up into his 70s. He'd walk every day and was still a good player, still hit the ball down the middle."

Burke was golf's Tom Sawyer, loving his idyllic boyhood at River Oaks, where grown men admired his precocious talent. At night, he listened wide-eyed to the pros as they gathered around the dinner table and pondered the game.

Boyhood came to an end at the start of World War II when Burke left River Oaks and went into the Marine Corps. Stationed at Camp Pendleton, in California, he managed to see a lot of Demaret, who was stationed at San Diego in the Navy.

In 1941, Jack Burke Sr. won the PGA Senior Championship, but during the war, the respected River Oaks professional passed away.

Jackie was in the service when his father died. In 1945, when he was mustered out of the Marines, he returned to old River Oaks one last time. One of the friends he wanted to see was Oscar Collins, the River Oaks locker room attendant.

"Oscar Collins was a black man and probably the most famous man at River Oaks," said Burke. "Oscar could recall the name of anybody who came to River Oaks, even if he hadn't been there in 10 years. He was a brilliant, brilliant man. He used the money he made from tips to buy stock in Humble Oil, which eventually became Exxon, and Oscar died a very wealthy man. I knew him all my life.

"I had maybe $300 when I got out of the service," Burke remembered. "I went out to see everybody at the club. Oscar asked me what I was going to do. I told him I might like to try a couple of professional tournaments. Oscar said, 'How are you gonna get there?' I told him I really didn't know. He said, 'I'm going to go talk to Dick Mack.'"

Collins explained Burke's plight to D. B. McDaniel, a wealthy member, and returned with a check for Jackie. McDaniel had signed it, leaving the amount blank.

Burke will never forget it.

"Without Oscar, I'm history," he said. "I think about him all the time."

When Jackie played badly in a tournament and lost faith in his ability, a friend of his father's stepped in.

"I was riding in a cab in St. Louis with Craig Wood and he told me he had a job for me. He called Bobby Jacobson, a great amateur in New Jersey, who gave me a job at the Hollywood Golf Club in Deal. I took the train to New York that night and Bobby met me at the train. For a year, I worked as an assistant to a Scottish pro, George Fotheringham. A year later, Craig got me a job at Winged Foot with Claude Harmon."

After a stint as head professional at the Metropolis Club in White Plains, N.Y., Jackie went back on the tour. His friendship with Demaret allowed him to fall in for practice rounds with Lloyd Mangrum and Toney Penna. But it was the memories of his father -- the good player and famous teacher -- that drove him. Burke became the player his father had known he could be. He won the Vardon Trophy in 1952, and in 1956 he captured the Masters and PGA Championship and was Player of the Year. He played on five Ryder Cup teams and was captain twice.

His old River Oaks ties held fast. In 1957, Burke and Jimmy Demaret shook hands in a partnership that would build and run The Champions Golf Club. The U.S. Open was played there in 1969, and Ben Hogan chose the course for the final tournament appearance of his career, the 1971 Houston Champions International.

Golf is it at Champions, Burke claims. "We put all of the money into conditioning the course, keeping it in constant up-to-date repair with regard to turf. We just resurfaced the Cypress Creek Course, and I'm getting ready to do Jack Rabbit. We'll have the best playing surface we've ever had."

Even without Demaret, who died in 1984, the Champions remains a haven for the golf purist. Burke works hard to promote the same atmosphere his father fostered in the old days at River Oaks, the course where Jackie grew up and learned to love pure golf, where the game was all and the competition was fierce, and friends lasted forever.

-- Rhonda Glenn