HOGAN HERO

He had been the greatest golfer in the world, the sport’s most mysterious hero. The first American star was Bobby Jones — scion of Atlanta society, Harvard educated, the epitome of the gentleman golfer. Then came Hogan, who could not have been more different: hardscrabble, maniacal, obsessive about everything he touched. Next there was Arnold Palmer, golf’s first television idol, who melted the screen with his charisma and approachability. And after him came Jack Nicklaus, the finest player ever, as even Hogan partisans will admit.

But it was Hogan who did most to develop the modern game. Before him, golf had been a “feel” sport, all art and no science, dominated by grizzled Brits and talented good-time Charlies like Walter Hagen. Hogan determined to make golf systematic and knowable. He was the first pro to make a religion out of practice. Hour after hour he stood on the shag range, experimenting with his swing, “digging it out of the dirt,” as he said. He was a man utterly controlled by golf, and eventually he learned to control it. He could place his shots wherever he wanted, producing a “fade,” a gentle left-to-right motion conducive to accuracy. He won 63 tournaments, including nine “majors,” the tournaments that really count. In his banner year of 1953, he won three of the four majors — the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open (all but the PGA) — an achievement still unequaled. At the time, he was the most famous athlete in the country, along with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. All in all, Hogan defined a new standard and invited his opponents and imitators to meet it.

Every student of golf is familiar with the details of Hogan’s life. He was born in 1912 in Stephenville, Texas, the son of a blacksmith. Ben was 9 when his father took a gun and killed himself, with Ben in the room. Soon, Ben found a job as a caddy at a local club called Glen Garden. There, he threw himself into the game with a desperate abandon. He “practiced until his hands bled” (as innumerable fathers have told their sons). He had no friends to speak of, only an imaginary companion named “Hennie Bogan,” who sat on his shoulder and admonished him to do better. When night came, Ben slept in the course’s sand bunkers. He announced to his mother that he would make himself a champion golfer or die. His boyhood was almost completely devoid of comfort or joy, but he later said, “I feel sorry for rich kids, I really do. They’re never going to have the opportunity I had.”

At 17, he dropped out of school and turned pro. Yet he was far from a brilliant golfer. He was adequate, and burned with a desire, never quenched, to get better. He failed, repeatedly, for some 15 years. He was so poor that he stole fruit from orchards and vegetables from gardens. In one well-known instance, he was robbed of the tires on his car in Oakland, California. He pounded on a brick wall and sobbed to another golfer, “This is the end. I can’t move another inch.” But he made his way to the course, wrapped himself in a mental cocoon, and shot 67, earning him a $ 285 check, the largest he had ever seen. He could go on.

Sometime in 1946, according to lore, Hogan had a revelation. In one version of the story, it came in a dream; in another, it came during one of his incessant practice sessions. He had always been plagued with a “hook” — a right-to-left running shot that leaves a golfer feeling helpless — but now he figured out how to hit a soft, manageable fade. This was Hogan’s “secret,” a much-debated insight about which Hogan himself was endlessly coy. (Sam Snead once remarked, disgustedly, “Anybody can say he’s got a secret when he won’t tell what it is.”) Whatever he glimpsed, Hogan began to win, and win consistently.

There emerged a mighty triumvirate of Snead, Hogan, and Hogan’s boyhood acquaintance Byron Nelson. The three men were markedly dissimilar: Nelson a near-saint; Hogan a bitter perfectionist; Snead a crude, extravagantly gifted country bumpkin. It seemed that one of them would win every tournament on tour. But in time, by some unfathomable force of will, Hogan pulled ahead. He was unstoppable. The rest of the field would look at him and, demoralized, simply know that he would not falter. At 5 feet, 8 inches, 140 pounds, ” Bantam Ben” was the most feared competitor in golf. In January 1949, Time magazine put him on its cover, with the legend, “If you can’t outplay them, outwork them.”

One month later came “the Crash,” as it is known in golf history. Hogan and his wife Valerie were returning home to Fort Worth from a tournament in Phoenix. The fog around El Paso was thick. A Greyhound bus, not seeing the Hogans’ car, tried to pass a truck and barreled straight toward them. A second before impact, Hogan hurled himself across his wife in an effort to protect her. His action probably spared his own life, as the car’s steering column was propelled through the driver’s seat. Valerie was relatively unharmed, but Hogan was close to death. For two months, the nation’s attention was riveted on the hospital. Word was that, even if he survived, he would be an invalid. On April 1, he was taken from his bed on a stretcher and placed on a train back home. There, slowly, in extraordinary pain, Hogan began to sit up and later to walk. Cards, letters, and telegrams poured in to him from every state. No longer was he viewed as a cold, distant golfing machine, but as a valiant, lionhearted battler. Everyone — for a change — was rooting for him. Hogan had never succumbed to anything, and he would not, in fact, succumb to the Crash.

He first swung a club again in the autumn. In December, he played 18 holes, with the help of a motor scooter. Two weeks later, he entered the Los Angeles Open. Amazingly, despite his aching and fatigued body, he played Snead to a tie. He lost in the playoff, but, as Grantland Rice famously wrote, he really “didn’t lose — his legs simply weren’t strong enough to carry his heart around.” In June the next year, 16 months after the car crash, Hogan won the U.S. Open at Merion near Philadelphia, an event Dan Jenkins called “the most incredible comeback in the history of sports.” On the 72nd hole — the final hole of the tournament — Hogan laced a 1-iron to the green to cinch the championship. The photograph taken of Hogan’s follow-through on that shot — with Hogan ideally posed, wearing his trademark “Hogan cap” — is a totem of the game, displayed on nearly every golf-shop wall.

In 1951, Hollywood made a movie about Hogan: Follow the Sun, starring Glenn Ford. In 1953, he sailed to Carnoustie in Scotland to participate in the British Open, the only time he did so. The Scots, astonished at the precision and concentration of the peculiar Texan who captured their tournament with ease, dubbed him “The Wee Ice Man.” When his ship docked in New York, the city gave him a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, the first since General MacArthur’s. The next year, Hogan founded a club-manufacturing company, which bore his name and which he was to oversee until 1993. In 1957, he contributed a series of instructional articles to Sports Illustrated, which became the bestselling Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf — a book that, though effective, confused many with its barely comprehensible talk of “pronation” and “supination.” Hogan played creditable golf into the late ’60s, but his putting — the bane of any golfer’s advancing years — gave out on him, rendering his always-superb ball-striking moot.

While an admirable man, Hogan was not a pleasant one. In fact, many would say — even in a time of eulogy — that he was intolerable. Once, when he was sitting alone at his table for eight at Shady Oaks, someone cracked, “There’s Hogan, with all his friends.” Gary Player supposedly called him up from South America one day, suffering from a slump and seeking help. “What clubs are you playing?” asked Hogan. “Dunlop,” answered Player. “Then call Mr. Dunlop,” Hogan replied, hanging up. Nick Faldo once asked him what it took to win the U.S. Open. Hogan answered, with impeccable logic, “Shoot the lowest score.” Similarly, when someone complained, “I’m having trouble with my long putts,” Hogan came back with, “Why don’t you hit them closer to the hole?” He once teased a golfer who yearned to know how to play a particular shot by saying, ludicrously, “I try to hit it on the second groove.” And then there was the time, when President Eisenhower phoned, that Hogan barked to his secretary, ” I’m not going to play with that g — d — hack.” Hogan acknowledged no power above the ability to hit a golf ball soundly and to prevail in important tournaments.

“The Hawk” (this was another of Hogan’s nicknames) was not the kind of hero that we have come to expect: the hero of the Donahue age, telling interviewers of his joys and sorrows, his triumphs and defeats, wearing his emotions on his sleeve. He once said — explaining his refusal to make public appearances, even to inaugurate the minor-league circuit christened the Hogan Tour — “Not everyone wants publicity, you know.” Shrewd man that he was, he probably recognized the dangers of overexposure and the benefits of silence. He gave only one significant interview in the last decades of his life, in 1987 to a golf magazine: “The Hawk Talks!” the cover blared. His biographer, Curt Sampson, writes, “Insular types such as Bennie Hogan have always been drawn to golf, a sport requiring an ability to concentrate for long periods of time but with no mandate for cooperation or closeness with a teammate. He also enjoyed the utter fairness of the game, the way it compelled him to accept all the credit or all the blame. He loved its solitude, the way it absorbed him.”

Hogan was unwilling to play the Senior Tour — on which Snead, Palmer, and others love to entertain and soak up the applause — because he could not stand for the public to see him at less than his best. But he still hit balls, never stopped practicing, never allowed his hands to grow uncallused.

Hogan — almost unique among professionals — did not play for glory (though he achieved it) or for money (though he earned it). He played in order to conquer the game, to solve its riddles, to bring it, at long last, to its knees. Upon hearing of Hogan’s death, Ben Crenshaw said, “He defined the inner will that lives within us.” No, it manifestly does not live within all of us — even dormant — but it lived unappeasably within Hogan, and because of it he was a great player, and a great man.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.