in the engaging book Golf in the Kingdom, the mythical protagonist, Shivas
Irons, leaves a journal that contains a section entitled, simply, “A List of
People Who Knew.”
It’s a succession of nearly 130 names in apparently random order, as well
known as Plato, Beethoven, and James Joyce, as obscure as Bishop Isadore
Balls, and Jalal Rumi. All reside somewhere in the world of ideas. Near the
end, after Picasso, Maimonides, and Typhus Magee, is the only golfer on
the list. Ben Hogan.
Somehow, Hogan, who died in July of 1997 at age eighty-four, is a perfect fit. If ever a golfer carried himself as if he had learned something important, something timeless, hard-earned and true, then played with the
nobility and conviction that proved the point, it was Hogan.
When he marched to dominating victories at Riviera and Oakland Hills
and Oakmont and Carnoustie, Hogan, above all golfers, seemed to understand something others didn’t. He knew. If golf’s cognoscenti were asked
to make a list of the three greatest players of all time, the names mentioned
most often would surely be Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, and Ben Hogan.
Hogan won sixty-three times on the PGA Tour, surpassed by only Sam
Snead and Nicklaus, and captured nine major championships, the most
behind Nicklaus, Jones, and Walter Hagen.Significantly, Hogan’s record was compiled almost entirely in an incredible nine-year run from 1946 to 1953 that came to be known as the “Age
of Hogan.” Beyond his victories, it was the way Hogan gave every fiber
of his being to making himself the supreme golfer that is his true legacy.
His unrelentingly dedicated, confoundingly complicated, and utterly selfsufficient persona made Hogan the most distinct golfer who ever lived and
gives him a singular place in the game’s history.
To start with, Hogan’s swing was different from that of other golfers of
his time or before—more honed, more purposeful, more effective. “When
I stood directly behind Hogan,” wrote Charles Price, “I had the feeling that
the shot was nine-tenths over with. He just had to go through the formality of swinging the club, so perfect was his alignment and so poised the
promise of what was coming.”
Once the action began, it was a fast-paced, seamless movement that suggested something mechanized—“stamping out bottle caps,” as once
described in Time magazine. But it was in still photos that Hogan’s swing
was most thrilling: the position he achieved at the beginning of his downswing, the shaft of the club nearly touching his right shoulder, the extreme
angle of his wrists, and the “lateness” of the stored-up hit, so palpably the
definition of golf power that it never ceases to shock the mind.
It followed that Hogan’s shots were considered to have unique properties. “If it were possible to track the height of every shot ever hit,” wrote
Al Barkow, “I have the feeling that we would find that all were at particular levels of high or low except Hogan’s. The man had his own exclusive
channel in the sky.”
Then there was Hogan’s stoicism, which contained a keen intelligence
and hinted at secret knowledge. As lifetime rival Sam Snead once said,
“Hogan gave away less about himself than any man I ever met.” His icy
reticence embodied a “never complain, never explain” code. But when he
did speak, it was with more penetration and pith than the more voluble.
Hoganisms are part of the golf zeitgeist, from “I don’t play jolly golf” to
“You have to dig it out of the ground” to “Watch out for buses.”
Hogan also had a career code all his own. His dismal beginnings, followed by bootstrapping success, followed by disaster, followed by true greatness, made him a classic example of the aphorism “It’s not what a man
achieves but what he overcomes.”
150 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
Hogan achieved that ultimate measure of a great man: he became a concept. The word Hogan has come to symbolize a heroic, quixotic, loving
attempt to master an unmasterable sport. “I know that I have had greater
satisfaction than anyone who ever lived out of hitting golf shots,” he once
said. “I liked to win, but, more than anything, I loved to play the way I
wanted to play.” His golf carried extra conviction, as if it were more valid,
more part of a grand design, more earned. When Hogan won, it was completely deserved. When he lost, it was more poignant, because no golfer
ever gave so much. He was the game’s ultimate warrior, seemingly under a
sacred vow to endure everything golf could dish out. In that way, in providing light to the hardest, darkest, most forbidding parts of the game, he
had more impact than any player who ever lived. As Dan Jenkins wrote,
“Hogan was, Hogan is, Hogan always will be.”
It was why the Scots immediately connected with Hogan as he made his
one and only assault on the Open championship at Carnoustie in 1953.
It’s why his fellow pros went out to watch Hogan play. In fact, the better
the player, the greater the influence Hogan seemed to have. Billy Casper
so admired Hogan’s aura that he suppressed his naturally loose, wise-guy
bent in favor of a taciturn on-course persona reliant on a form of selfhypnosis he believed Hogan subscribed to.
Gary Player, who among the game’s best most closely resembled Hogan
in size, work ethic, and skill, dedicated his early professional years to duplicating every facet of his idol’s swing, until even he finally gave up, concluding that Hogan’s talent was that of a physical freak.
Under the tutelage of old Hogan contemporary Jack Grout, teenage Jack
Nicklaus committed himself to sound course management and the more
controllable left-to-right ball flight that had turned Hogan’s career around
in the mid-1940s. When the fledgling pro Lee Trevino witnessed “The
Hawk” hitting soft cuts with a four-wood on Hogan’s now legendary private practice hole at Shady Oaks in Ft. Worth, he junked his own low hook
for a fade and four years later won the U.S. Open.
Johnny Miller admits that “the way I wore my hat and squinted my eyes,
all that was from Ben Hogan.” Nick Price carried a card of a Hogan photo
with all his swing keys noted on it. Nick Faldo, proud to be called
Hoganesque in his approach to the game, spent many hours watching
videos of Hogan’s action. So has Tiger Woods, whose teacher, Butch HarIndomitable Enigma • Ben Hogan 151
mon, used to sit at the family dinner table enraptured as his father, Claude,
and Hogan discussed the game. “There is,” says Harmon, “a lot of Ben
Hogan in Tiger Woods.”
Of course, for every emulator who made a mark, there have been thousands of deluded, hard-practicing, flat-swinging, pronating and supinating, white-cap-wearing, no-talking perfectionists whose identification with
all things Hogan allowed them to believe their failures were simply necessary steps on an inevitable but rocky path to success. Hogan’s methods and
habits were such common knowledge, the jagged curve of his journey such
an inspirational blueprint, it obscured the fact that, like any genius, he was
one of a kind.
“So many things about Hogan were special,” says Nicklaus. “He was the
greatest shot maker I ever saw. He was more determined and could totally
outfocus anyone else in his time of playing. No one seemed to know him
very well, which made him that much more feared as a competitor. He probably worked harder than anyone to reach the top, and it took him a long
time. Then, when he got there, his body was all but destroyed by the car
accident. All he did was start over again at nearly forty and got even better.
“Nobody was like Hogan.”
William Ben Hogan was born August 13, 1912, in a hospital in
Stephenville, near his family home in Dublin, Texas, the same year, in golf’s
greatest harmonic convergence, as Byron Nelson and Sam Snead were born.
He was the youngest child of Chester and Clara Hogan, having a brother,
Royal Dean, and a sister, Clara Princess. Early photos show Ben sitting on
a horse, his blacksmith father standing nearby.
“Ben sat perfectly on a horse,” said his wife, Valerie Hogan shortly before
she died in 1999. “Horses were the way he could be around his father, and
he rode beautifully. When we first met, he would try to get me to ride. He’d
say, ‘Now, just don’t let that horse know you’re afraid of him.’ I told him,
‘Honey, I can’t help it. I am afraid, and I can’t pretend I’m not.’ But my
husband never showed fear.”
When Hogan was nine years old, Chester shot himself in the family
home and died several hours later on Valentine’s Day. The effect on his
youngest child has long been a subject of speculation. Psychologists say the
suicide of a father can leave a son feeling responsible, angry, and carrying
a lifelong distrust of males. Hogan, was indeed, insular around men but
152 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
courtly with women. According to Hogan biographer Curt Sampson, he
once said that if he ever did an autobiography, it would only be with a
woman writer.
Valerie Hogan is certain the suicide had an incalculable effect on her
husband. “I always got the feeling that Ben had been his father’s favorite
and that he had felt very close to his father,” she said. “I’m sure the way he
died had a lot to do with the way Ben’s personality was. I don’t think he
ever got over it.” Asked if she ever talked to her husband about it, Mrs.
Hogan said, “I never did, and he never brought it up. I thought it would
be too painful for him.”
The hardship undoubtedly helped shape Hogan into an intense, watchful youth. To help support his mother, he began hawking the Fort Worth
Star Telegram in that rough-and-tumble town’s railroad station. At age
eleven he began making the seven-mile hike from his home to the Glen
Garden Country Club, then a nine-hole course where he could make sixtyfive cents caddying an eighteen-hole round.
In the caddie yard, the undersized Hogan was initially bullied, sometimes rolled down a hill in a barrel, and generally made to run a gauntlet
of a dozen other caddies. Finally “Bantam Ben” picked out one of the larger
caddies and began a fight. That first important victory earned him a fulltime place in the yard.
“I feel sorry for rich kids now. I really do,” Hogan once said. “Because
they’re never going to have the opportunity I had. Because I knew tough
things. I’ve had a tough day all my life, and I can handle tough things. They
can’t. And every day that I progressed was a joy to me, and I recognized it
every day. I don’t think I could have done what I’ve done if I hadn’t had
the tough days to begin with.”
When Hogan was thirteen, a new caddie entered the yard. Byron Nelson vividly recalls that first glimpse of his future rival. “Though he was
short, he had big hands and arms for his size,” Nelson wrote in his autobiography. “He was quiet, serious, and mostly kept to himself. Ben liked
to box, and so did another caddie we called Joe Boy. [At a boxing match
put on for the members’ entertainment] they boxed for about 15 minutes.
I was just watching, because I never did like to box or fight.”
Nelson liked to play golf, and he and Hogan became the best players in
the yard. But Hogan couldn’t quite beat Nelson. In the club’s caddie chamIndomitable Enigma • Ben Hogan 153
pionship in 1927, the two tied with a 39 for nine holes when Nelson made
a long putt on the final hole. Nelson then took the second nine, 41 to 42.
They each won a club, Nelson a five-iron and Hogan a two-iron, which
they immediately traded.
Nelson set a daunting standard for Hogan for the next twenty years. By
1940, when both had been professionals for nearly a decade, Nelson had
won the Masters and the U.S. Open and eight other tournaments. Hogan
had won the Hershey Four-Ball with Vic Ghezzi and nothing else. At the
1942 Masters, Nelson beat Hogan in an eighteen-hole play-off by a stroke,
just as he had at Glen Garden. By 1946, when Hogan was having his first
great season, Nelson was in his last as a regular player. In fact Hogan’s beginnings as a professional would have broken most men.
He turned pro at age seventeen at the onset of the Depression and actually withdrew from his first two tournaments—the Texas Open after a 78-
75 start and a Houston event in which he started 77-76. “I found out that
first day that I shouldn’t have even been out there,” he said years later. By
the time he married Valerie Fox in 1935, his attempts to play the circuit
had twice left him busted. As well as teaching golf without much success,
he worked in the oil fields, in a bank, and as a mechanic. At one point he
even dealt cards in a Fort Worth gambling house. Hindered by an extremely
long backswing, his violent action through the ball too often produced low,
hard-running hooks that he could not control. Later he’d describe such
shots as “a rattlesnake in your pocket.”
But Ben Hogan practiced—on off days, before rounds, even, to the
absolute astonishment of his peers, after rounds. As Jenkins wrote, “Ben
Hogan invented practice.” He improved, but not enough to win. During
the 1938 Oakland Open, Hogan’s last desperate effort to make a living
playing full-time golf, with no more than pocket change left, the tires of
his car were stolen. It was a truly desperate moment, but he was able to
hitch a ride to the club, and under the circumstances a truly miraculous
final-round 69 earned him a tie for third and $280. He would come to say,
“I played harder that day than I ever played before or ever will again.”
While his obsessive practice and solitary personality set him apart from
his peers, his constant companion was Valerie, who believed her husband
was destined for something special. “I never knew that much about golf,
but you could just feel the dedication,” she said. “I just had a strong feel154 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
ing that, whatever he decided in life, he would end up doing something
that mattered. He had so much energy. He just cared too much to not be
very good.”
The next year Hogan won his first event, the North and South at Pinehurst, then the next two tournaments in succession. After losing the 1942
Masters play-off, he won the Hale America, the substitute for the U.S.
Open, which had been suspended because of the war by the United States
Golf Association. It forever gave Hogan the strongest case—made by others, of course—for having won five, not just four, U.S. Opens.
His first prime postponed by three years of military service, Hogan
emerged in 1945 to win five events, the same year Nelson won eighteen.
At the age of thirty-three, Ben Hogan appeared to be a player who would
have a good but hardly great career. In fact, the Age of Hogan was yet to
unfold.
In 1946, Ben Hogan won thirteen tournaments, the most ever won in
a season next to Nelson’s epic 1945 total. Remarkably, it was also a year in
which Hogan suffered two of his most devastating losses. At the Masters
he came to the final green needing a birdie to win, put his approach eighteen feet above the cup, then three-putted, missing a four-footer for par. At
the U.S. Open at Canterbury, he again needed a birdie on the final hole to
win and again three-putted from eighteen feet. “Disappointing? Yes, but
you get used to that in this game,” he would say after the second loss.
Valerie Hogan never ceased to be amazed at her husband’s resiliency.
“I’ve often wondered how he handled those things so well,” she said.
“He had a strong heart. I don’t think he got over things quickly, but he
acted like he did.”
In his last major event of 1946, the PGA Championship in Portland,
Oregon (then a grueling six-day match-play event), Hogan got to the final
by beating Jimmy Demaret ten and nine, then claimed his first major
championship by defeating Porky Oliver six and four. The next year he won
seven more times, by which time he was closing in on mastery of his golf
swing. At his physical peak he was five feet, eight inches and 140 pounds
of power and quickness. Ted Williams, who approached the art of hitting
a baseball in much the same obsessive way that Hogan did the golf ball,
was once introduced to Hogan and came away saying, “I just shook a hand
that felt like five bands of steel.”
Indomitable Enigma • Ben Hogan 155
But Hogan’s mental strength was even tougher. Wrote Herbert Warren
Wind, “It would not be amiss to add that the superlative game he ultimately developed depended at least as much on the tireless thinking he put
in over the years as it did on his tireless practicing.” Valerie would see his
preoccupation and wonder, “Aren’t you giving that brain a rest? He’d look
at me and say, ‘Valerie, if you don’t use it, it will go to pot.’”
“I think anyone can do anything he wants to do if he wants to study
and work hard enough,” Hogan once said. “And that’s one of the great
rewards of golf, I think—learning. I’ve seen people play terrific golf, but
they didn’t know anything about it. You see their names in the paper for
two years, then they drop out, because they weren’t schooled in how to propel the club and what was happening all the time and why. I’ve gotten just
great satisfaction, as much as or more than anybody, in learning how to
swing a golf club and what is going to happen when you swing it this way
or that way. There’s nine jillion things to learn. I don’t think anyone knows
all there is to know about the golf swing, and I don’t think anyone will ever
know. It’s a very complex thing. Everything changes.”
Through painstaking trial and error, Hogan happened upon a method
to prevent him from hitting his dreaded low hook while consistently producing a powerful but soft-landing fade. He weakened his grip, opened his
stance, and rotated his left forearm clockwise on his take-away as much as
he could, feeling that, from such a position, he could release the club as
hard as he wanted on the downswing without worrying about the ball going
left. “As far as applying power goes,” he wrote in his bestseller, Five Lessons:
The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, I wish that I had three right hands.”
After Hogan settled on these keys, the game became much simpler for
him, as he explained in his book: “I never felt genuinely confident about
my game until 1946. Up to that year, while I knew once I was on the course
and playing well that I had the stuff that day to make a good showing,
before a round I had no idea whether I’d be 69 or 79. I felt my game might
suddenly go south on any given morning. In 1946 my attitude suddenly
changed. I honestly began to feel that I could count on playing fairly well
each time I went out; there was no practical reason for me to feel I might
suddenly ‘lose it all.’ I would guess that what lay behind my new confidence was this: I had stopped trying to do a great many difficult things perfectly because it had become clear in my mind that this ambitious
overthoroughness was neither possible nor advisable—or even necessary.
156 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
All you needed to groove were the fundamental movements—and there
weren’t so many of them.”
It was in this period that Hogan developed his aura of inevitability.
Hogan became so dominating in the late 1940s that his peers began to suspect he had a “secret”—some magic move that made him better than anyone else. The theories were numerous, but Hogan never acknowledged any
of them. Snead, who took pride in twice defeating Hogan in eighteen-hole
play-offs, wouldn’t go along with what he felt amounted to a psychological
edge for his rival. “Anybody can say he’s got a secret if he won’t tell us what
it is,” he remarked. But Snead did allow that he believed Hogan became a
better player as he accentuated right-arm extension through the ball.
Most probably the secret was mental. Said Valerie Hogan, “I think there
was something that he felt was a secret. He never told me; I never asked. I
didn’t want to know, because I might have given it away. He wouldn’t have
discussed it with anyone. It was something he did that others didn’t do.”
The best Hogan ever played on a day-in and day-out basis came in 1948.
He won eleven tournaments that year, including his first U.S. Open and
the PGA Championship. When he won two of the first three events of
1949, it gave him eleven victories in the last sixteen events entered. Since
returning from military service in 1945, he had won thirty-eight tournaments, the highest victory total over four straight years ever witnessed on
the PGA Tour.
Then it was over.
After losing a play-off to Jimmy Demaret at the Phoenix Open, Ben and
Valerie headed to Fort Worth, where they were going to settle into the first
home that they owned in fourteen years of marriage. But on the foggy
morning of February 2, 1949, a Greyhound bus attempting to pass a large
truck crossed a center divider on Highway 80 near El Paso. Hogan saw the
headlights coming at him but could not get off the right side of the road
because of a concrete abutment. The bus slammed into the left front of his
Cadillac, pushing the steering wheel into the backseat and the engine into
the driver’s area. Hogan survived only because he flung himself across his
wife before impact.
His injuries were massive. His collarbone was broken where the steering wheel had hit it. His pelvis, a rib, and his left ankle were also fractured.
At first he appeared to have recovered rapidly and was scheduled to leave
the hospital on February 16. But when a blood clot from his left leg reached
Indomitable Enigma • Ben Hogan 157
his right lung, Hogan’s condition became grave. The world’s leading vascular surgeon, Dr. Alton Oscher, was brought from New Orleans on emergency to tie off the vena cava so that no more blood clots would be carried
to Hogan’s heart or lungs. As a result, his circulation was permanently
impaired. His legs would swell and ache for the rest of his life.
After returning to Fort Worth, Hogan began his recuperation by walking laps around his living room. Toward the end of 1949 he played eighteen holes of golf for the first time but needed a cart. Two weeks later he
walked a full round, the effort sapping him so much he spent the rest of
the day in bed. Nevertheless, he filed his entry to play in the Los Angeles
Open in mid-January—less than two months away in a still uncertain
future. At Riviera, Hogan shocked the world by tying for first place with
Snead, then losing in a play-off. As Grantland Rice wrote, Hogan didn’t
lose; “his legs simply were not strong enough to carry around his heart.”
Just five months later, at the U.S. Open, Hogan achieved his most memorable victory. At Merion, to relieve his swelling legs, Hogan soaked in a
hot bath for an hour before every round but still suffered searing cramps
walking to the twelfth tee during the second round. Even so, he limped in
with a superb 69. The ultimate test for his uncertain legs, he knew, would
be Saturday’s double round. Sure enough, they seized up again on the thirteenth hole of the morning eighteen.
He nearly withdrew but struggled inward, hole by painful hole, for 72.
In the afternoon the other contenders faltered, giving him a three-stroke
lead, but after driving on the twelfth he again staggered from pain. By the
time he reached the eighteenth tee, the lead was gone. But after a good
drive on the 458-yard par-four finisher, he hit an epic two-iron forty feet
from the pin and two-putted to tie Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio.
The next day, Hogan forced his unwilling legs into action yet again and
dominated the eighteen-hole play-off by four strokes. His victory remains
one of the greatest comebacks in the entire history of sports.
Ben Hogan was not the same golfer he had been prior to the accident.
His left shoulder hurt constantly, and the sight in his left eye was impaired,
eventually leading to terrible putting problems. Tournament golf required
so much effort that from then on he would never again play more than six
events in a year. And he never again played in the PGA Championship,
which until 1958 required thirty-six holes of daily match play.
158 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
But Hogan adapted. Although he was not as long a hitter as before or
as good a putter, he made fewer mistakes than ever. Whereas the old Hogan
had often gone low, the revised version almost never went high. It was a
game made for the majors, where, on the toughest courses, he could reel
off par after par, interspersed with timely birdies, to outlast the field.
In 1951, Hogan won his first Masters and his third U.S. Open, where
he closed with a 67 at Oakland Hills in perhaps the finest round of his
career. In 1953 he achieved his pinnacle: another victory at the Masters,
his fourth U.S. Open with a dominating performance at brutal Oakmont,
and finally, in his first and only try at the British Open, a nearly flawless
performance at Carnoustie. When he returned to the United States, it was
to a Broadway ticker-tape parade. The only other golfer to receive that
honor had been Bobby Jones.
Hogan then was forty. The Herculean effort he had put forth to regain
and sustain his game had taken a huge toll. He came excruciatingly close,
but he never won another major championship. Playing an abbreviated
schedule, he won his last event, and his fifth victory at the Colonial in his
hometown, in 1959. He had continued to play superbly at the U.S. Open,
suffering heartbreaking losses in 1955 and 1956. His near miss at the 1960
championship at Cherry Hills was the most poignant.
Immaculate in his ball striking, Hogan put himself in contention for the
thirty-six-hole final and proceeded to hit the first thirty-four greens in regulation. Tied for the lead on the seventy-first hole, a par five, he laid up a
four-iron second shot some fifty yards short of a creek that guarded the
tiny green like a moat.
With the pin cut in front of the putting surface less than fifteen feet
from the water, and knowing that a play-off would probably be too much
for him physically, Hogan took out a wedge and rolled the dice.
“The way I was putting, I knew I had to get within two feet or I couldn’t
possibly make it,” Hogan said later. “I had the most beautiful lie you could
have. I tried to put as much stuff on the ball as I could to hold it on my
side of the hole. I played what I thought was a good shot. It was hit exactly
as I intended, but I just misjudged the shot.” The ball hit on the green but,
loaded with backspin, sucked back into the water. Hogan made a bogey,
then, gambling to cut off the dogleg on the eighteenth, drove into the water
again and finished with a triple bogey. “It was the saddest thing, and it devIndomitable Enigma • Ben Hogan 159
astated him,” said Valerie Hogan. “It would have been such a wonderful
ending.”
Hogan continued to play the odd tournament, finally ending his competitive career at the 1971 Houston Champions International. He
remained active as president of his club company and played what his
friends say was his last eighteen-hole round in 1980 at one of his favorite
courses, Seminole, in Juno Beach, Florida.
He continued to practice at Shady Oaks CC near his Fort Worth home,
often picking up his own shag balls, until he stopped around 1990. In those
later years he was rarely seen in public.
“Underneath everything, my husband was very emotional,” said Valerie.
“Although I believe he was happy in his later life, he missed hitting golf
balls and trying to figure it all out. He loved his club company, and that
gave him a lot of fulfillment. He was creating something, the same way he
created something when he hit golf shots. Of course, I don’t think anything
could completely replace the satisfaction he got from that.
“When he was in too much pain to hit practice balls anymore, he would
come into the living room with a club and swing it a little. My sister would
say, ‘Valerie, I’ve never seen a man who loved anything like Ben loves golf.
It’s hurting him that he can’t do what he loves to do.’ She was right. Ben
was cheated out of years of golf by the accident. He always looked at it as
how fortunate he was to play again, that God let him live. But, as he got
older, there was a sense of loss. There was sadness. He would have loved to
have played forever.”
Of course, on every practice range and every golf course—wherever and
forever—Ben Hogan lives on.
