Beating Hogan in Open Was a Fluke for Fleck

It remains one of golf’s great upsets, the day the golf course superintendent from Davenport, Iowa, beat Ben Hogan in a playoff and won the U.S. Open championship.

Jack Fleck, 44 years ago today, was nowhere on pro golf’s radar screen.

Although he had finished eighth in the previous Open, he never won a tournament, his best performance in 1955 had been a 12th place and he’d won $2,700.

He started as a caddie for his high school team, then taught himself to play. He served in the Navy in Europe in World War II. When he was discharged, the city of Davenport hired him to run its golf courses.

And here he was at the Olympic Country Club in San Francisco, locked in a playoff with an immortal to whom he bore a remarkable resemblance.

Fleck, 32, the longest of the longshots in the field, birdied the 18th hole for a final-round 67 to catch Hogan at 287.

On the last hole of the playoff, Hogan drove a ball into the rough, and it took him three strokes to escape. And even after making a curling, downhill 20-foot putt at the 18th green, he took a six. Fleck made a down-the-middle par and golf’s greatest upset was in the can.

Fleck, who used a new set of signature Ben Hogan clubs for the first time in the Open, shot 69, Hogan 72. Fleck earned $6,000.

Fleck, 76, lives in Magazine, Ark. He played on the PGA Tour for 29 years and won two other tournaments: the 1960 Phoenix Open and the 1961 Bakersfield Open.

Also on this date: In 1903, Lou Gehrig was born and weighed in at 14 pounds. . . . In 1946, in a much-anticipated rematch, heavyweight champion Joe Louis knocked out Billy Conn in the eighth round. The fight’s Yankee Stadium live gate was a record $1,925,564. . . . In 1936, in a stunning boxing upset, Max Schmeling knocked out unbeaten challenger Joe Louis. . . . On the same day, at Chicago, at the NCAA track meet, Cal’s Archie Williams broke the world record for 400 meters, running 46.1 seconds.