Harry Nettelbladt
Head Professional, the Golf Club of Avon; Connecticut Open champion 1950-51; Connecticut Section PGA champion 1948, 1954; Connecticut Section PGA Professional-of-the-Year 1963; President, Connecticut Section PGA; New Hampshire Open champion; Western Mass. Open champion; Manchester Open champion; Rockledge Open champion; Meadowbrook Open champion; nine-time qualifier for National PGA championship; Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame 1973
When
the Golf Club of Avon successfully wooed Harry Nettelbladt away from his native
Massachusetts turf early in 1942, it brought to Connecticut a man who would prove to be
one of this state's outstanding playing professionals and probably one of the golf world's
most skilled putters.
Indeed, the great Tommy Armour often offered to back Harry and Wethersfield's Bob Grant in a putting match for any amount of money against Bobby Locke, generally acknowledged as the game's finest putter, and George Low, perhaps Locke's only realistic rival for that title, anywhere, anytime. Although that classic confrontation never happened, Harry religiously remained ready in daily games of 21 on Avon's practice green against the considerable capabilities of members Stan Matczak and Ev Hanlon, a pair Harry said he would back -- with Armour's money -- against any two except the aforementioned four.
Although Harry's superior deftness on the greens was always at the core of his victories, his field and short game play were of the highest order for regional and state competition, and occasionally for the game's loftiest level, as when he made $1,000 for finishing fourth in George May's 1945 Tam O' Shanter Open, a PGA Tour stop with a field that included winner Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen, Lloyd Mangrum and other PGA Tour standouts of the day.
Early in his competitive days, Harry was a pronounced right-to-left player, leaving himself open to the unpredictable duck hook with the driver that plagued his friend Ben Hogan mercilessly through his formative years. As did Hogan, but not at all secretively, Harry went to a fade and produced a comparatively shorter but much surer tee shot that served him well the remainder of his quality playing years, and was a critical adjustment in winning two consecutive Connecticut Opens and several of the better independent open events. It also made him one of the leading local contenders in the PGA Tour's fledgling Insurance City Open at Wethersfield, where he had won his second state Open in 1951 with 3-under 207.
Yes, Harry Nettelbladt had a comprehensive golf game, but it is for his putting that he'll be most remembered, and just why was probably best stated by then-Hartford Times golf writer Skip Henderson in an account of Harry's first Connecticut Open win: "Last year's Open at Wampanoag boiled down to a duel between Harry Nettelbladt's putter and Frank Staszowki's driver. The putter prevailed -- Harry's scintillating work on the fine Wamp greens produced 284 ... Never in the history of the Open has such a display of putting been presented. Harry went for everything and got almost everything."
Through the mid-1940s to the later '50s, Harry's most competitively productive playing years, it was openly if sometimes grudgingly conceded by his fellow professional competitors that Harry did possess the total game necessary to win regularly. But privately they agreed that much of his success could be attributed to his worriless time away from his golf shop, where the innate felicitous charm of his dear wife Evelyn made the members forget, or be happily reminded, that the valued and respected but often dogmatic and sometimes irascible Harry was away winning another.
-- Jack Burrill