| Subject: Ben Hogan, Golf's Iron-Willed Legend, Dies at 84 |
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July 25, 1997
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Date Posted: Wednesday, July 25, 2012, 09:08:54am
Ben Hogan, the flinty-eyed Texan who was perhaps the most creative shotmaker in the history of golf and one of its most accomplished players, died yesterday morning in Fort Worth. He was 84.
He had been in poor health since undergoing surgery for colon cancer two years ago, then contracting bronchitis soon afterward, according to Valerie Hogan, his wife of 62 years. She said he entered All Saints Hospital in Fort Worth on Thursday morning after suffering a fall at home. Byron Nelson, another golfing legend who was a longtime friend, said Hogan had a stroke.
Although he was a very private man who preferred in recent years to remain close to his home in West over Hills, Tex., and his office at Shady Oaks Country Club, Hogan's influence on the game nonetheless was profound and his legacy far-reaching. When he was at the peak of his powers, winning nine major championships -- four United States Opens, two Masters, two P.G.A. championships and one British Open -- from 1946 to 1953, he was considered by many to be the finest player in the game.
He is one of only four players to win all four major professional championships, and his 63 career victories rank third behind Sam Snead (81) and Jack Nicklaus (70). In 1953, probably the greatest year any professional golfer has had, he won the Masters, the United States Open and the British Open, the first three legs of the modern Grand Slam, a feat no other player has accomplished.
His indelible mark on the game stemmed not merely from his ability to control a golf ball, perhaps with more precision than anyone before or since, but also from his enormous will -- a determination that forced him to remake his entire golf game, to come back from a near-fatal automobile accident and to set standards of excellence that were previously only imagined.
''What set Ben apart from everybody else was his inside game -- the unbelievable will to win, the quiet determination, the intense concentration,'' Hogan's old friend, the golfer Jimmy Demaret, once said.
It was that steely sense of purpose and the impeccable technique he developed throughout his career that engendered legions of admirers, many of whom never saw him play. His legendary work ethic and quiet demeanor, combined with an aversion to interviews and public appearances, created what was known as the Hogan mystique, an aura that impressed even the most callous observers.
''All I know is I've seen Jack Nicklaus watch Hogan practice,'' the great Texas golfer Tommy Bolt once said. ''I've never seen Hogan watch Nicklaus practice.''
Hogan was a taciturn man whose conservative and spare attire -- he wore only tans, grays, whites and navy blues topped off by a white cap -- reflected his exacting personality. He earned the nickname Bantam Ben because at 5 feet 8 inches he was short but aggressive, like a bantam. He was also known as the Wee Ice Mon for his steely-eyed approach to the game. But mostly he was called, simply, Hogan.
Although his life and game will always be remembered as straightforward and indomitable, Hogan nonetheless had a flair for the dramatic on the golf course. And his ability to overcome a swing flaw that nearly drove him from the game is an achievement that amazed both his contemporaries and those who followed him. It was something Hogan pointed to with more pride than his record.
''My greatest accomplishment,'' he once said, ''was being able to make a living playing golf after going broke twice starting out.''
He was born William Benjamin Hogan on Aug. 13, 1912, in Dublin, Tex., the son of a blacksmith, Chester Hogan, and his wife, Clara. Chester Hogan committed suicide nine years after Ben's birth, and Clara Hogan moved the family to Fort Worth, where the young Hogan sold newspapers and began caddying at the age of 12 at the Glen Garden Country Club. Among his fellow caddies there was Nelson, who also went on to achieve greatness as a golfer.
Hogan turned professional in 1929, and for the first 16 years of his career, he fought a tendency to hit a hook, a dreaded golf shot that curves uncontrollably from right to left for a right-hander. A professional golfer afflicted with a hook is much like a professional baseball player who cannot hit a curveball. Both are destined to fail. Hogan knew that well, and once said: ''I hate a hook. It nauseates me. I could vomit when I see one. It's like a rattlesnake in your pocket.''
To behead the rattlesnake, Hogan developed a technique that was mysteriously dubbed ''the secret'' by the golf cognoscenti. It was a formula that Hogan never revealed in full, but near the end of his life he said ''the secret'' was ''in the dirt,'' meaning it was simply a repeating stroke that was born of countless hours of practice. He defeated the hook, turning it into a more manageable power fade by beating it into submission, thus becoming the greatest ball-striker of his, and perhaps any, era.
In a 1987 interview with Golf Digest magazine, Hogan said he could not hit a straight shot and he did not believe anybody else could, either. ''You only hit a straight shot by accident,'' he said.
Straight or not, Hogan always knew what shots he would need to hit, and he worked on them meticulously. His devotion to practice was legendary, and his intense focus was complemented by his raw strength.
Ben Crenshaw, the accomplished touring professional and golf historian, once wrote of Hogan: ''His hands were as powerful and forceful as the man himself. No one swung at a golf ball with more force and authority than Hogan. His hands were like a pair of vises that transmitted the force from his body to the ball with absolute control.'' Crenshaw spoke with awe of watching Hogan hit iron shots that would hit the middle of the green and then spin left or right, depending on the pin placement.
''They really couldn't hide a pin from Hogan,'' Crenshaw said.
Perhaps because of his unremitting determination to subdue golf by working at it harder than anyone else, Hogan is identified with the United States Open more than any other tournament. With brutally thick rough and slick greens, the Open is the tournament that demands more than any other of its winners, and it was an accepted fact of the 1940's and 50's that no one was better able to meet the demands than Ben Hogan. No one prepared for a United States Open the way Hogan did, nor did any player have the ability to analyze a course the way he did.
The principal chronicler of the United States Open, the author Robert Sommers, wrote that Hogan ''seemed to know every flat spot on a golf course and how a ball would bounce wherever it landed.'' This was the key to an amazing streak in which Hogan competed in 16 United States Opens from 1940 to 1960 and never finished out of the top 10. It was how he won four United States Open championships, with perhaps the most memorable of them being the 1950 victory at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa.
That victory came just one year and four months after Hogan's automobile accident in 1949 on a dark desert highway outside Van Horn, Tex., a dot on the map some 110 miles west of El Paso. In a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus, Hogan was hurt so badly that it was widely assumed he would never play competitive golf again, or at least not at his previous level.
His life probably was saved because he dived across the seat to shield his wife, Valerie, from the impact. The column from the steering wheel was driven through the driver's side seat, but the diving Hogan avoided it. Still, he suffered a double fracture of the pelvis, a fractured collarbone, a fractured left ankle and a chipped rib.
He spent the better part of a year rehabilitating from that accident, and returned to competition at the 1950 Los Angeles Open, where he shot four-under-par 280 and ultimately lost in a playoff to Sam Snead. He was back, but he still had difficulty walking six months later during the Open at Merion. Each day after his rounds, Hogan loosened the bandages that covered his legs from his ankles to the top of his thighs, and soaked his legs to relieve the pain. But he tied for the lead after 72 holes with perhaps the most famous shot of his career, a 1-iron to the 18th green that set up a par and a playoff. He won that by shooting 69 to Lloyd Mangrum's 73 and George Fazio's 75.
''Merion meant the most,'' he once said, ''because I proved I could still win.''
His comeback was dramatized in the 1951 film ''Follow the Sun'' in which Glenn Ford played Hogan.
Hogan never again played without some amount of pain, but his greatness only increased. In 1953, he came closer than anyone has to winning golf's modern Grand Slam, capturing the Masters, the United States Open at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh and the British Open at Carnoustie in Scotland, the only time he played in a British Open. He was unable to compete in the P.G.A. championship because the dates for the P.G.A. and British Open overlapped.
Hogan's last victory was in 1959, and by the mid-1960's he was semi-retired. His last great hurrah came in the 1967 Masters when, at age 54 and hobbled by the ever-increasing pain in his legs, he shot a 66 in the third round, including a 30 on the back nine.
After he stopped playing competitive golf, Hogan continued to go to his Fort Worth office until his surgery two years ago, said Valerie Hogan, his only immediate survivor. Even after that, he would report several days a week.
But he continued to protect his privacy, and had no use for tributes or testimonials to his career. He declined a chance to be honored at Nicklaus's Memorial Tournament in Ohio, saying, ''I don't want to go up there to be eulogized.''
Into all areas of his life, Hogan brought an unswerving commitment to excellence and a willingness to work harder than anyone to achieve his goals. He brought that same sense of purpose to the design of his golf clubs at the Ben Hogan golf equipment company, where he once had $100,000 worth of new irons thrown away because they did not meet his exacting standards.
He once told a golf writer that any endorsement that bore his name would be associated only with unassailable value. That disposition had to do with something his mother told him when he was a boy. ''Your name is the most important thing you own,'' Hogan said. ''Don't ever do anything to disgrace it or cheapen it.''
In a game that never quite allows perfection, the name Hogan was synonymous with the quest to achieve it.
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