BEN HOGAN BECAME A CHAMPION BY PRACTICING 12 HOURS A DAY : MASTER OF THE GAME

Hogan! For years, the very name-- Hogan-- made strong men tremble. The men who pioneered tournament golf.

Before and after World War II; before and after the 1949 auto accident that nearly killed him; before Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus--and after Bobby Jones--Texas’ Ben Hogan was the most feared competitor in the game.

They called him the Hawk. And they knew that even on their best days, the Hawk would probably get them anyhow. He once won the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open the same year.

That was 3 1/2 decades ago. So has the Hawk flown away?

No chance. At 75, Hogan was found this summer where he started 65 years ago. On a golf course here. Practicing tee shots. Practicing his irons. And loving it all.

In his prime in the 1950s, interrupted during a three-hour practice session that had begun only minutes after he had shot a tournament-leading 66, Hogan said: “When I’m not playing, I like to be practicing. I enjoy every minute of (either). To tell you the truth, I’d just as soon do this.”

Lucky Ben.

He said the other day: “I don’t play golf anymore, but I still hit a few balls four or five days a week--every nice day. To me, practicing has always been half the fun.”

Thus, in a manner of speaking, Ben Hogan’s career is only half over--and what other sports champion, at 75, can say that?

Golf in the United States originated just 25 years before Hogan was born. And he’s back in the news today because his sport is celebrating a centennial.

Ten player-of-the-decade trophies are to be awarded Monday night in New York by Golf magazine and the Hawk said he’ll be there to accept the one he earned.

For most of the ‘40s and ‘50s, he was that at the least--the player of a decade or two. In fact, most veteran golfers continue to rank him in the century’s top five with Jones, Nicklaus, Palmer and Walter Hagen.

More exactly, comparing achievements and overall impact, Hogan probably belongs in the top three with Jones and Nicklaus--though he could hardly have differed more strikingly from either.

Jones was a gifted amateur who wore many hats as a mechanical engineer from Georgia Tech, an English literature graduate of Harvard, and eventually a lawyer.

By contrast, Hogan, a high school dropout, spent all his time playing and practicing golf before founding the Ben Hogan Co., his Fort Worth golf-equipment manufacturing firm, which now has 500 employees.

Nicklaus is a friendly multimillionaire who made a good thing out of golf in the course of dominating it.

By contrast, Hogan made a living but not much more. His were the difficult early years of the tour. And few ever called him friendly.

As a person and as a golfer, Hogan, in the words of most of the newspaper reporters of his day, was cold, calculating, distant, antisocial, uncooperative, preoccupied, and obsessive in his drive for perfection.

“His forbidding manner ground down the opposition,” one writer said. “To look at him was to shiver in the bones.”

When tournament golfer Al Geiberger once was asked what it was like to play with Hogan, he said: “It was spooky.”

Slender and small-boned, the Hawk weighed no more than 135 pounds as a champion and stood not much more than 5 feet 8 inches. So it wasn’t his size that awed them, it was the Hogan manner. The Hogan look.

He unnerved rivals and reporters alike with the steady, unsmiling, icy approach of a professional gambler. The contemporary celebrity he most resembled was the model Hollywood mobster, George Raft.

These days, Hogan has added a few pounds and subtracted some hair, but he’s still fit, erect, and direct of manner, still neat and formal in a summer sport coat and slacks. The carefully knotted tie is blue, the spectacles gold-rimmed.

He has finally quit smoking, yielding a year ago after an appendectomy.

In the old days when you could pin him down out of sight of a golf course--which wasn’t often--he was usually a cordial enough interview, and so he remains.

In his handsome wood-paneled office, seated behind a leather-topped desk in front of a large portrait of his wife of 53 years, Valerie, he is still a pleasant enough companion.

Though loath to either compliment or criticize other golfers, past or present, he agrees that the tournament field is generally better today.

“Everything (in sports) is better today,” he said. “More athletes are working harder.

“There’s no such thing as a born golfer--as a born anything. Any (duffer) can shoot in the 70s if he applies himself properly. Practicing is the necessary thing. Playing is just an anticlimax.”

Anticlimax? To Hogan, in any case, it was. The other players just got in his way. It was the game that challenged him.

And so, at the start of the second century of U.S. golf, Hogan the perfectionist will be remembered as a somewhat different kind of champion.

He was respected as deeply as, say, Palmer was loved. Two of the most famous two-word phrases in golf are Hogan’s Alley and Arnie’s Army. There are alleys named for Hogan in at least four states--Riviera has one--but the Palmer armies are everywhere. The difference is considerable.

SCIENTIST

The summit year for Hogan was 1953, when he activated two dreams, winning the U.S. Open for the fourth time and opening his own manufacturing firm here.

Having launched the Ben Hogan Co. with a partner from Dallas, he was proud of the new clubs they manufactured that first year--at a cost of $150,000--until he tried them out.

“It was obvious that they weren’t up to my standards,” he said quietly. “I had approved the model, but we were training new people, and they were badly made. I said: ‘These can’t go out.’

“Orders were coming in like crazy, but we never shipped any of those clubs. We took them out back and broke every one.”

Accordingly, in his first venture as a businessman, Hogan ate $150,000.

“Actually, I ate more than that,” he said. “My partner had wanted to ship those clubs--he couldn’t see anything wrong with them--and I had to (buy) him out.”

This is the attitude of a perfectionist, and it is perfection that Hogan has always sought, in either business or golf. He often talks about the night that he dreamed he started a round with 17 consecutive holes in one.

“Then at the 18th, the tee shot lipped out,” he says. “And I was madder than hell.”

Hogan’s restless search for perfection has been a result, no doubt, of the struggles of his early years. His father was a blacksmith who suffered from ill health and financial reverses. Giving up, he shot himself to death in the living room one night before an audience of one, Ben’s brother, Royal.

At 9, Ben was selling newspapers at a train station in downtown Fort Worth. At 10, changing careers, he began supporting himself as a caddie.

Few modern sports champions can match Hogan for repeated adversity.

Never really big enough to be a champion, fatherless in his school years, he was a child of the Great Depression.

Next, World War II caught him at 31 and interrupted his career during the nearly three years he served as an Army officer.

Then, at 37, he almost died on a Texas road in the head-on collision that knocked him out of golf for a year.

The accident left him with injuries that hurt his game ever after, though his unreal determination led him to become even more successful. He had won only one U.S. Open before breaking his pelvis, a rib or two, a collarbone, and an ankle bone in the 1949 crash. He came back and won three of the next four, in 1950, ’51 and ’53.

Adversity? Hogan had one other problem that hurt even more: He was born without real championship ability.

He was born to be one of the duffers he speaks of--the golfers who by practicing correctly on weekends, and occasionally at midweek, can learn to shoot in the 70s.

He fooled them by playing and practicing 12 hours a day, ending with putts and swings in his hotel room before going to bed, where he visualized his game for another hour or two, often playing a full 18 holes.

Byron Nelson, the champion who grew up with Hogan, once put it this way: “Nobody had to work as hard to play golf as Ben. Nobody. “

Over the years as Hogan worked at golf, he approached each chore with the care of a medical researcher. If Jones was golf’s greatest artist, Hogan was its greatest scientist.

Harvie Ward, who often played with him, once recalled the day that he came upon Hogan examining a carton of new golf balls with a magnifying glass. After studying them, the Hawk kept a few but threw most into his shag bag.

Asked why he had discarded so many, Hogan said: “Some of the dimples have a little too much paint in them.”

In his book, “Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf,” Hogan compares the gallery’s reaction with his own at the 1950 Open when, at the 72nd hole, his 200-yard 2-iron shot stopped 40 feet from the cup, helping him into the playoff, which he won.

The crowd saw it as an inspired pressure shot.

To Hogan, it was nothing more than another example of what a man can do when his practice objective every day and night is a correct, powerful, repeating swing.

“I didn’t hit that shot then,” he wrote. “I’d been practicing that shot since I was 12 years old.”

Asked about all this the other day, Hogan said: “There are invariably four or five key shots on any tournament course. Normally, they are long iron shots. So you take a good long look at the course (before the tournament)--you find out what you’ll especially need that week--and you practice that. You have to practice the right things.”

Hogan was also the first to make a habit of practicing each day after finishing his tournament rounds.

“That’s the best time because you remember what you just played,” he said. “You can see where you haven’t practiced hard enough.”

This dedication shocked Hogan’s rivals, who admired him almost as much as they feared him. Once when New York writer Dave Anderson asked golfer Tommy Bolt to compare Nicklaus and Hogan, Bolt said that he had seen Nicklaus go watch Hogan practice, but he had never seen Hogan go watch Nicklaus practice.

In Golf magazine a few years ago, Charles Price wrote: “Hogan didn’t come into golf just to win titles. He came into the game to prove to himself and others how well (it) could be played, by anyone, anywhere.”

Clearly, Hogan didn’t come in to putt. He had his worst trouble on the green. In fact he says that golf is two different games--golf and putting. He also credits his wife for the putting tip that changed his life when he was 27 and still winless after nearly a decade as a pro.

Sam Snead, who roomed next to the Hogans that winter in Los Angeles, told the story to Gene Gregston, author of “Hogan: The Man Who Played for Glory.”

Snead said that one night when Ben was complaining as usual about his putting, Valerie Hogan shut him up with one piece of advice: “Hit the ball a little closer to the hole.”

That did it. As a scientist, Ben could see instantly what he had to do. He just began lagging up with his irons.

CHAMPION

Tournament golfer Tony Penna used to talk about the time that he played with Hogan in a four-ball match at Minneapolis, where the Hawk asked his partner to serve as captain.

According to Penna, “(That meant) I’d decide on conceding any putts.”

At an early hole, taking his responsibilities seriously, Penna knocked away a putt of several inches by one of their opponents.

Hogan was livid. “You can’t give anybody a putt that long!” he said. “You’re not the captain anymore.”

His competitive instinct made Hogan what he was. Which is a reminder that in any sport, it takes more than skill--even great skill--to be a winner.

There were times on the tour when Hogan was so charged up that he could hardly sleep. Nelson, who occasionally roomed with him in the early years when they lived on doughnuts and hamburgers, tells about the night that a strange noise awakened him. He jumped out of bed apprehensively, fearing that a pack of rats had invaded their cheap room.

Not until he hunted around closely did Nelson discover the truth. “It was only Ben gnashing his teeth,” he said.

Today, Hogan concedes only one thing. “I suppose it was my (competitiveness) that drove me to those 12-hour days as a young golfer,” he said. “But I soon found that I liked it.”

For him, the payoff in tournaments won or nearly won was extraordinary. Hogan’s record:

--He won 63 times on the U.S. tour.

--In his six years at the top, 1948-53, he won seven major tournaments: two Masters, four U.S. Opens and the only British Open he played.

--He also won two PGA championships, 1946 and ‘48, when the PGA was a match play event.

--From 1942 to 1956, Hogan was first or second six times in the U.S. Open and first or second six times in the Masters, although he spent 3 of those 15 years in the Army and most of another in the hospital.

--He finished in the top 10 in 14 straight U.S. Open tournaments.

--He also finished in the top 10 in 14 straight Masters.

--And he was in the top four in either the U.S. Open or the Masters 18 times.

--Before the 1949 auto accident, he was golf’s leading money winner five times.

--He was PGA golfer of the year in 1948, ‘50, ’51 and ‘53, and U.S. athlete of the year in 1953.

Two other things made Hogan unique.

First, he was a late starter who didn’t win his first tournament until he was 28, when he had been trying for 10 years. He won his first U.S. Open at 36. By contrast, Bobby Jones, who also won four U.S. Opens, retired at 28.

Second, when Hogan finally got the hang of it, he was a success almost every time out. Winless until 1940, he won three straight tournaments that year and thereafter won in bunches.

This suggests that Hogan was a self-made champion who until his late 20s had everything but self-confidence. A great but erratic pitcher who suddenly starts winning at 28 is usually a man who has developed everything but control, which is to say confidence. And golf can be like that.

Reinforcing the thought that Hogan was an uncommonly competitive, self-made champion, he kept his career going until he was 59--the year he entered his last tournament.

From the same generation, Hall of Famer Ted Williams quit baseball at 42 the day he hit the home run that proved he was quitting prematurely.

Had Hogan had Williams’ rather narrow outlook, he would doubtless have retired at 41 after winning the 1953 U.S. and British opens and the Masters--for he never won another major event.

The truth is that Hogan only won twice in his last 18 years in tournament golf. He was like another baseball Hall of Famer, pitcher Warren Spahn, who at the end--nearing 50--kept trying, even in the minors. The great competitors always keep trying.

Tournament golfer George Fazio once said that he could never forget the eagle 2 he made one day when paired with Hogan. The gallery, which had come to see the Hawk, broke into a long cheer for Fazio that was heard as far away as the clubhouse.

But not, apparently, by Hogan, who as usual was grimly focusing on his own game. At the next tee, picking up his scorecard to record his opponent’s score, Hogan asked: “What did you have on that last hole, George?”

TEXAN

To a schoolboy in the central Texas town of Dublin 60-odd years ago, Fort Worth was the biggest city in the world. Ben Hogan’s lifelong perception of Fort Worth has been colored by the fact that he first saw it at age 9. He realized instantly that it had more to offer than Dublin.

And though he’s seen Los Angeles since then, not to mention London and San Francisco, Hogan has always returned to Fort Worth, where as a young golfer, earning meal money, he sometimes dealt faro and other card games.

He doesn’t like to talk about it now, but his best friend, the late Jimmy Demaret, often did. One night on the tour, according to Demaret, Hogan was pressured into ignoring golf for an hour or so while he dealt a few hands.

“(He flicked) them out so quickly you couldn’t tell how many cards you had or where they came from,” Demaret marveled in the book he wrote about Hogan.

Then, said Demaret, “Ben sat back and named every card in our hands.”

These days, Hogan said, he doesn’t play cards, though he used to sit in sometimes at Shady Oaks Country Club, where several games of gin rummy are in progress in the card room every afternoon for at least two tables of players.

The Hawk had a problem with that. “It was taking too much time away from my golf,” he said.

He does visit Shady Oaks almost every day, though. At noon he lunches in the club’s cool, quiet dining room, whose smoked-glass window walls overlook the steaming golf course outside. Elegant white tablecloths cover the dining room’s large, round tables, and Hogan sits at one of them with the same 10 companions each noon. His friends are oil men, insurance men and other high-income types linked by the pleasures of the links. Anyone who likes golf, Hogan reasons, can’t be all bad.

“Then I hit a few balls, shower, and drive home,” he said, summing up his afternoons. He added that from one day to the next, his routine seldom varies.

Home is only a couple of miles away. For more than 40 years he has lived in the same high-income area of west Fort Worth called Westover Hills. It was the city’s newest residential neighborhood when he picked it out just after World War II, and the mansion that cost him possibly $2,000 in the 1940s looks as if it would be worth about $2 million if set down in Bel-Air today.

Walking up and down stairs seems pointless to many over 60, however. So in their 60s, he and Valerie built another house, a sprawling white brick one-story mansion with the same floor space in the same rolling, tree-shaded hills, and several years ago they moved in. They have moved just that once in 40 years, passing up opportunities to migrate to California, or even Florida.

“Valerie is a Fort Worth girl,” Demaret once said. “She met Ben at the ripe old age of 12, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. They have no children, and live for each other.”

By 9:45 each weekday, Hogan is on his way to work, driving east and then south through the campus of Texas Christian University to his office, where, after 20 minutes on the road, he parks his 1988 black Cadillac in a space reserved for B. Hogan.

There is a Cadillac in the adjacent space, too, reserved for D. Williams. This is Doxie Williams, Hogan’s secretary, whose good nature is matched by her efficiency in watching out for him.

The one-story manufacturing company now occupies an entire block of Fort Worth, since digesting a lumber yard on one side and a roofing company on the other.

A month ago, the present owner, Cosmo World of Tokyo, bought the Ben Hogan Co. for $52 million from Minneapolis financier Irwin Jacobs, who had bought it from the American Machine and Foundry Co., which had bought it from Hogan in 1960 for $3 million.

Hogan still retains supervisory rights over club design, which has always been his priority interest. The company had $58 million in 1987 sales.

Downtown, his brother, Royal, 78, still runs his big office supply company on one of Fort Worth’s best business corners. Asked for an interview, Royal, who is even more close-mouthed than Ben, declined, using one word: “No.”

In Dublin, the three Hogan kids had been named Royal, Princess and Ben for reasons that have eluded Ben.

Today, Ben and Royal are members at Shady Oaks, where, surely, they prefer the cuisine to what they had in the 1920s.

“Royal and I used to sell the (Fort Worth Star Telegram) all evening (at hotels and train stations) before we met for dinner at 11:30,” Ben said. “Dinner was a nickel hamburger and an orange soda pop.

“If the paper had an extra, we sold it after midnight. This was before radio and TV. We walked through the streets calling, ‘Extra! Extra!’ ”

He knew even then that there had to be something better. When an acquaintance told him that caddies got 65 cents a day at the Glen Garden Country Club, his enthusiasm for golf was suddenly boundless--though he had never seen a golf ball.

“I had never even heard of golf,” Ben said. “But I wasn’t making 65 cents a day selling papers. I hustled out there--it was a 7-mile walk from home--and learned that golf was right down my alley.”

Hogan’s Alley.

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.