"Mason Rudolph: A Golf Prodigy"**
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“I played in a tournament in Knoxville, Tennessee when I was a junior in high school,” says Rudolph. “This guy came up to me and said General Neyland wanted to see me.”
Neyland had built athletics at UT into respectable entities. The baseball team had just finished second in the NCAA. The football team was knocking on the door of national prominence. The basketball team was improving.
The next sport in line for Neyland was golf. His target was Rudolph. He was offered the first golf scholarship at Tennessee, but with a twist. “He [Neyland] said, ‘With the rules of golf, you can’t take a golf scholarship, but you are a legitimate basketball player.’ So I signed a basketball grant with the University of Tennessee that didn’t require playing any basketball, but playing golf.”
Rudolph received a basketball scholarship to play golf at the University of Tennessee. At that same time, the University of Kentucky had a young golfer named Gay Brewer, a fellow amateur who defeated Rudolph in the U.S. Junior final in 1949. Brewer would go on to become the winner of the 1967 Masters.
“They [USGA] called up Coach Bryant at the University of Kentucky, and said we are checking on Gay Brewer,” says Rudolph, who was also very close friends with Brewer. Brewer passed away in August 2007. “Coach Bryant told them he made an extra-point holder out of Brewer.”
The Southeastern Conference, nipping a potential trend in the bud, put a rule into effect the next year that allowed golf scholarships under the guidelines of the NCAA.
Many of the stories in the piece were told by Rudolph in this seven minute video accompanying the video.
**JB also dug up this critical SI "editorial" on Rudolph's infamous Shell's match with Sam Snead where Snead had 15 clubs in his bag and threw the match.
The Rules of Golf are precise and exacting (see page 12). They provide, among other things, that a golfer may not carry more than 14 clubs in his bag. The rules of TV, on the other hand, have been as plastic and pliable as a prostitute's promise.
Caught between these two widely divergent moralities one day last December, Golfer Sam Snead proved to have something less than the wisdom of Solomon. Finding himself at the 12th hole with 15 clubs in his bag during the filming of NBC's supposedly orthodox "World Championship" golf tournament, Sam knew as a golfer that he had automatically forfeited the match, which should have ended then and there with young Mason Rudolph the victor. But then Sam made the worst decision he could have made. He decided to play on, purposely flubbing strategic shots to bring about the result the infraction called for.
A half hour after the match, Sam told what he had done. TV Producer Fred Briskin and the NBC people, who are supposed to be a lot brainier than Sam Snead, sat down in conference and made an even goofier decision than Snead's. They decided to show the film and say nothing. And so they did, two weeks ago, just as though Charles Van Doren and the TV quiz scandals were buried in a distant and forgotten past.
But all these shabby facts leaked out after the match had been telecast, and the TV golf fans knew for the first time that they had seen a shabby show. One of the sponsors then belatedly cried foul and chucked the whole thing.
