1912-1997 HOGAN

Ben Hogan, whose endless striving for perfection made him one of the greatest strikers of a golf ball in the sport’s history, died in Fort Worth on Friday. He was 84.

Hogan, who had colon cancer surgery two years ago and Alzheimer’s disease, died at his home, according to his secretary, Pat Martin. Byron Nelson, a lifelong friend, said Hogan had suffered a major stroke Thursday.

Hogan has been out of tournament golf for 26 years, but his legend is still a topic of conversation wherever golf is played. He won 63 PGA Tour events, nine majors, and was the only player to win three Grand Slam events in a single year.

Between 1946 and 1953, the Wee Ice Mon--as the Scots dubbed him when he won the British Open in ‘53--was the favorite nearly every time he entered a tournament. Although he stood only 5 feet 8 and weighed 138 pounds in his prime, Hogan was one of the game’s longest and straightest hitters.

In February 1949, he nearly lost his life in a head-on automobile-bus accident and didn’t return to competitive golf until the next year. His return to the highest levels of tournament golf after the accident was one of the most compelling comebacks in sports.

Much of Hogan’s success came in Southern California, and particularly at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades--a course that became known as Hogan’s Alley.

It was there in 1948 that he won the first of his four U.S. Opens, and it was in the L.A. Open there in 1950 that he came back from the accident to play in his first tournament, which he lost in a week-delayed playoff to Sam Snead.

Hogan also won L.A. Opens at Riviera in 1947 and 1948, plus the L.A. Open at Hillcrest in 1942, the Glendale Open in 1948 at Oakmont and the Long Beach Open in 1949 at Lakewood.

His greatest year was 1953, when he won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open. He did not play in the PGA that year because the match play was too tough on his legs. The player nicknamed Bantam Ben because of his size and called the Hawk by fellow players because of the way he studied a course was selected male athlete of the year by the Associated Press. Only three other golfers--Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson and Lee Trevino--have received the honor.

During his long career, Hogan won four U.S. Opens, two Masters, two PGAs and one British Open. Only Jack Nicklaus and Walter Hagen have won more major championships, and only Nicklaus, Sarazen and Gary Player also won all four majors. He was a charter member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

What set Hogan apart from his fellow professionals was his mind-set, his steely determination to attain perfection in a game that does not lend itself to such an achievement. Hogan became a machine, a master of seemingly minuscule elements of the golf swing that enabled him to become one of the most feared players in history.

Hogan once said that a factor in his swing was the pushing off with the big toe of his right foot at impact--not the pushing off with his leg, or foot, or toes, but the big toe.

He never used a glove because he said he wanted the “pure feel of the club in his bare hand.”

Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams once said after meeting Hogan: “I just shook a hand that felt like five bands of steel.”

Hogan’s penchant for practice is best illustrated in a U.S. Open article by Grantland Rice: “I’ve seen Hogan finish a hard morning round, grab a sandwich, and then go out for an hour’s practice before starting the afternoon round.”

Even as his mind faded with Alzheimer’s disease in his later years, Hogan still thought of practice.

“He talks about hitting balls,” Valerie, his wife of 62 years, said in a 1995 interview with the Associated Press, “then he forgets.”

In the pre-television era when Hogan played, Opens concluded with 36 holes on the final day.

Hogan was born Aug. 13, 1912, in Dublin, Texas, and was educated in the public schools of Fort Worth. From the time he worked as a caddie with Nelson at the Glen Garden Golf Club while in high school, he never strayed from golf as his career.

Unlike other Texans of his era, such as Nelson, Jimmy Demaret, Ralph Guldahl and Jackie Burke, Hogan was not gifted with natural ability. Born left-handed, he played golf right-handed because he could not afford left-handed clubs when he was a youth.

Early in his career, he was haunted by a hooking driver, but through weeks and months and years of work on the driving range, he eliminated the problem. Practice was his trademark.

“To me, there’s not enough daylight in a day to practice all the shots you ought to be practicing every day,” he said. “I’m talking about practicing chip shots, sand shots, all kinds of shots. It takes eight hours a day to do it right. Seven days a week.”

After turning pro at 17, Hogan tried several times unsuccessfully to make a living playing golf. It wasn’t until 1938 when he was 25 that he won enough money ($380) with a second-place finish in Oakland to enable him to stick to the tour. Two years later, he first gained national attention by winning four tournaments and the Vardon Trophy for low scoring average. During one stretch from August 1939 to September 1941, he finished in the money in 56 consecutive tournaments.

His scoring consistency earned him two more Vardon trophies in, 1941 and 1942, before he left to serve as a lieutenant in the Army Air Force during World War II.

After his service discharge in 1945, Hogan was more dominant than before, winning 10 tournaments, including the PGA Championship. He was the leading money winner with $37,877. Then, by his own admission, he got better.

“I feel I am a much better golfer than I was even two years ago,” Hogan said when he started the 1948 season by winning the L.A. Open. He climaxed the year with victories in both the PGA in St. Louis and the U.S. Open at Riviera, where he shot a record eight-under-par 276. It was the first time since Sarazen in 1922 that anyone had scored such a double.

“Nobody covered the flag like Hogan,” Sarazen said after watching Hogan at work.

Among his awards at the close of the 1948 season was his selection as the first PGA player of the year. It was expected he would win it again in 1949 before a horrifying accident in the early morning hours of Feb. 2 sent him and his wife to the hospital. It was Hogan’s heroic attempt to save his wife--throwing himself in front of her as a Greyhound bus loomed dead ahead on a foggy stretch of highway near Van Horn, Texas--that saved him from being impaled on the shattered steering wheel and probably saved her from serious injury. Valerie walked away from the accident.

The Hogans were driving home from a West Coast swing during which he had won the Crosby National Pro-Am and the Long Beach Open in a playoff with Demaret and lost a playoff a week later to Demaret in Phoenix.

Hogan suffered a broken pelvis, collarbone, ankle and ribs. A life-threatening blood clot developed in his leg. His weight dropped to 95 pounds.

Doctors said he would never play tournament golf again.

He was bedridden for two months and it was August--almost seven months after the crash--before he even tried to hit a golf ball. He played his first practice round in December.

But on Jan. 6, 1950, Hogan teed off in the L.A. Open in what he called an “experiment” to see if he could play tournament golf again. His answer was a four-under 280 for 72 holes and a tie with Snead, who had to birdie two of the final three holes to catch Hogan. Playoffs were 18 holes in those days and when rain delayed it another day, the players took off for the Crosby Pro-Am--where Hogan was defending champion--and did not return to Riviera until a week later.

Snead’s 72 defeated a tired Hogan, who shot 76, without making a birdie.

Even though he hadn’t won, that L.A. Open signaled the start of the little Texan’s second reign of pro golf. In June, his legs still bandaged from ankle to thigh because of the accident, he won his second U.S. Open by beating Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio in a playoff at Merion. A year later, at heavily bunkered Oakland Hills, near Detroit, Hogan won again after uttering his famous challenge to the course: “I will bring this monster to its knees.”

Hogan never played in more than seven tournaments a year after the accident, though he won 13 times, including six majors.

If 1948 had been his landmark year before the accident, 1953 was to be the finest of his second career. In that summer, he won the Masters with the lowest score in its history at the time, followed by the U.S. Open at Oakmont, and the British Open at Carnoustie, Scotland.

It was his only British Open. He had not wanted to play because of the travel involved, but friends prevailed after he won the two major American tournaments.

Once the decision was made, he approached it in typical Hogan fashion. He arrived two weeks ahead to attune himself to the smaller British ball, which he had never played, the Scottish weather and the nuances of the long and flat seaside Carnoustie course. He improved with every round, shooting 73-71-70-68--282 to win by four strokes over Frank Stranahan, Dai Rees, Tony Cerda and Peter Thomson.

“I putted awful all week,” he said, but confided that his final 18 holes was “one of the finest rounds I ever played.”

There was no talk of a Grand Slam at that time, so it didn’t seem significant that he skipped the PGA because it conflicted with British Open qualifying and Hogan considered its match-play format too demanding on his still-tender legs.

Because of the wear on his legs, Hogan entered only six tournaments in 1953. He won five.

“I’m not sure,” he told Nick Seitz of Golf Digest when asked years later if it was his best year. “I’m trying to weigh 1948 against that year. And in ’49 I started off with two wins and was in a playoff in another. I just don’t know.”

Never a popular figure such as Snead, the hillbilly from West Virginia who arrived on the scene with a picture-book swing, or Demaret, the fun-loving swinger who was best known for his colorful attire, Hogan’s image was of a chain-smoking little man with an unsmiling stare, a white cap and an almost demonic dislike of photographers.

“No pictures or no play,” Hogan at times informed tournament officials. Usually, the promoters were so fearful that Hogan might withdraw they acquiesced to his wishes.

During his successful season of 1953, Hogan founded the Ben Hogan Co., which manufactured golf equipment under his personal supervision. The company produced handcrafted forged irons; persimmon, metal and graphite woods; patented Apex steel and graphite shafts, golf balls and sportswear.

“My vision was to establish a company to make the best golf clubs in the world,” Hogan said years later. “Anything less, in my estimation, would have disappointed the people who have supported me.”

Curiously, it was a set of Hogan’s clubs, in the hands of journeyman professional Jack Fleck, that prevented Hogan from winning a record fifth U.S. Open in 1955 at Olympic Club in San Francisco. Fleck defeated Hogan in an 18-hole playoff.

Hogan continued to play a few tournaments into the 1960s, but his interest in the manufacturing side of golf caused him to gradually cut down his play. His last tournament win was in the 1959 Colonial National Invitational, a tournament in his hometown of Fort Worth that he won five times. His last event was the 1971 Champions in Houston.

After expanding his company four times, Hogan sold it to the American Machine and Foundry Company in 1960 but remained as president of the board and supervisor of the design, testing and production of his clubs. In 1988, the company was taken over by Cosmo World Corp. of Los Angeles.

Also in 1988, Hogan and the company lent his name to the newly formed Ben Hogan Tour, which was introduced by PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman to give young players an opportunity to play professional golf on a minor-league level while preparing for the major PGA Tour. The Hogan name was dropped last year and it is now the Nike Tour.

Although Hogan continued to play golf with friends around Fort Worth after leaving tournament golf, he steadfastly refused to play in any senior tournaments or charity exhibitions after retiring from the regular tour.

He said he felt it would be inappropriate to display talents less than those he had during his heyday as the finest golfer of his era.

* AN EPIC PLAYER

Ben Hogan was more than an athlete to Jim Murray. He was a mythic figure. A1