Ben Hogan: the Man, the Myth and the New Tour

The time was 1931, the place, Brookside Golf Club in Pasadena.

Few people would have guessed they were looking at history when this skinny little youngster with the grim visage, hook swing and what was to become a trademark white cap took his stance on the first tee, teeth clenched, knuckles white.

If someone had told them they were looking at the man who would become the most mythic figure in the annals of golf, they would have laughed.

He was barely 5-feet-7, couldn’t have weighed 125. His butt was so non-existent his hip pockets ran together. His clubs had a remnant-barrel look, and his clothes, while neat, had a mail-order look about them.

The only thing that would give him away were the eyes. Gray-blue, they had a piercing quality. They were the eyes of a circling bird of prey: fearless, fierce, the pupil no more than a dot in their imperious center. They were not the eyes of a loser. They were the eyes of a guy who could play the hand.

The ball, when he struck it--with uncommon ferocity, as it turned out--took off in this little flat arc, a low, biting right-to-left trajectory of the classic smother hook.

You picture in the mind someone in the gallery frowning and peering at a pairing sheet. “Who in the world’s that?” he will want to know. “Someone named W. Ben Hogan,” comes the answer. “Never heard of him,” is the response. “If he doesn’t get rid of that hook, you never will,” comes the retort.

Few ever had a tougher time breaking into golf than Ben Hogan. It is a story almost Dickensian. Or, at least, Horatio Alger.

Four times in the ‘30s, Hogan tried the golf tour. Four times, he had to pack up and go back to Ft. Worth and start cleaning other people’s clubs for a living. His is the story of the most determined, dogged pursuit of a sport dream in history, a refusal to accept failure. Dempsey rode rods, Ruth came out of an orphanage, Knute Rockne was a postman, but no one chased his goal with the single-mindedness of William Ben Hogan.

In the first place, the country was in the grip of the Depression those years. Bread was only a nickel. But nobody had the nickel. You bought day-old loaves for a cent.

When Hogan played in the Pasadena Open, sponsors gave each contestant a bag of oranges. Hogan lived off them for the week. When he arrived in Oakland for a tournament six years later, thieves jacked up his Model-A Ford and removed the wheels. He might still be there--he had nine cents in his pocket at the time--except he won $380 for finishing fifth in the tournament that week.

He went almost a decade without winning a tournament, but there was something about Hogan that uneased the competition. For one thing, he practiced. Oh, how he practiced! He stayed on the course until his hands bled or he had to putt by flashlight, then he went to his hotel room and propped a pillow in a chair and practiced hitting wedges into it until the guy in the next room complained. He putted grooves in the floor rugs. He broke a motel mirror once practicing his takeaway.

It was a hard time. Veterans on the tour did not help the newcomers the way they do today. They even hazed them. You never spoke to a rookie. He was after your money and there wasn’t enough to go around.

Hogan didn’t mind. I once asked him if his peers ever offered any advice on his game when he first came on tour. “I never asked them,” said Hogan, coldly. “I didn’t belong to the lodge.”

In a way, he never did. There was always something about Hogan that set him apart. For one thing, he hit the ball 10 to 15 yards farther than anybody except for the tour gorilla, Jimmy Thomson. For another, there was a purposefulness about Ben Hogan on the course that made you shudder. It was almost as if he were extracting some frightful revenge from it. He didn’t play a course, he stalked it.

He unnerved you. Even early in his career, other pros began an attitude of “Who is this guy?”

He studied his game. He studied your game. He studied the course. He was an agronomist, a geologist, engineer, surveyor. “I watched them fellows like a hawk,” he admits. The other pros got the message. Hogan became “the Hawk” on the tour.

Others played a course. Hogan memorized it. He knew the salinity of the soil and its composition down to the core of the earth. He didn’t just hit the ball, he controlled it. “You have to learn how to manage a round,” he explains. “You can be the best player out there, but if you don’t engineer the round you can’t win.”

When he finally licked the hook, it was all over. Hogan broke the logjam in his career, winning the North-South Open at Pinehurst, N.C., in 1940, and from then on, golf was his.

There are more myths about Hogan than there are about Lincoln. Golfers love to tell Hogan stories far into the night. Everyone has his favorite Hogan story. He’s half-man, half-myth. He was a cult.

The funny part is, it was all true. No one ever struck a golf ball with the precision and authority of a Ben Hogan. Mike Souchak said it best. “Ben Hogan,” he said, “just knows something about hitting a golf ball the rest of us don’t know.”

His record speaks for itself--62 tournaments won, many of them after he had his vena cava removed after his accident. In 1953, he entered seven tournaments and won five of them--the U.S. Open, the British Open, the Masters, the Colonial and the Pan American Open. When Hogan didn’t win a tournament, he didn’t miss the cut, he finished second.

He won a Portland Open once by 17 shots--over Byron Nelson, no less. He was 27 under par.

He has always been a man as careful with his name as he is with his drives. Many years ago, when a promoter came up with the idea of a chain of golf schools using the Hogan name, the real Hogan declined. He could not consider anyone a pupil unless he personally taught them, he explained.

Which makes it special and unique that the name Ben Hogan is going on the newest tour concept, a beefed-up, sanctioned mini-tour for the younger, non-exempt players of the tour, the Ben Hogans of tomorrow, if you will (or if there can be).

Ben has lent his name to this tour because he remembers what it was like to be the new kid on the block with a hook grip and big dreams.

The Ben Hogan Tour, which kicks off in Bakersfield this weekend, is a 30-event series of 54-hole tournaments in which the prize money is $100,000, but the even better news is that the top five finishers on the Ben Hogan Tour get their regular PGA Tour cards for next season.

It is a triple-A league of golf. Says Hogan: “I wish they had something like this when I was coming up.”

I don’t. Anything less than the crucible he went through and Hogan might not be Hogan. And wouldn’t that be a terrible thing for golf! I mean, what would Lincoln be without the log cabin?