American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  At this point in his career, not unlike Byron and Sam at their peaks, Ben calculated that there were generally only a handful of players he needed to worry about in a major championship, so the harder the course played, the better his chances. In years to come, employing a variation of this form of psychological warfare, he made a point of granting select interviews following his practice rounds at major championships and expressing mild surprise at the relatively easy conditions. This immediately panicked the sponsoring organization into sending out maintenance crews to double-cut and roll the greens to make them lethally fast, to heavily water the rough and let it grow longer and thicker, to plan tougher pin placements and strengthen all the course’s defenses—all of which, generally speaking, benefited one little gray man far more than anyone else in the field.

  On the Monday morning he and Valerie checked out of the swanky Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he saw a headline that declared him the “Man to Beat” at the upcoming U.S. Open. Riviera, meanwhile, had a new nickname. The press was already calling it “Hogan’s Alley.”

  By April, however, Ben’s game was inexplicably faltering. In six tournaments after the L.A. Open, he won only at Crosby’s unofficial celebrity pro-am. Moreover, in the twelfth staging of the Masters, Claude Harmon, who now divided his year as a club pro at Winged Foot and Seminole, shot a brilliant 279 that tied the tournament record and beat one of the most formidable fields assembled in the pines. Hard-charging but painfully deliberate Cary Middlecoff finished second, perhaps heralding a change in the guard. Ben finished sixth, and Sam fifteenth, prompting fresh buzz about retirement in both cases. Notably, this would be Bobby Jones’s final appearance as a competitor, owing to a mysterious pain and stiffness in his neck and spine.

  A rare flip-flop in the schedule had the PGA Championship being played at the Norwood Country Club in St. Louis in late May that year, and Harmon once again made headlines by surviving an epic forty-two-hole duel with Sam to reach the quarterfinal. Joining them there were Hogan, Demaret, and Mike Turnesa, a delightful thirty-nine-year-old White Plains head pro whose younger brother, Jim, lost to Sam Snead at Seaview in 1942. After eliminating Harmon on the thirty-seventh hole of their match, Turnesa advanced to the finals against Ben, who beat his friend Jimmy Demaret two-and-one shortly after his birthday and quickly retreated to his downtown St. Louis hotel to rest his legs from the marathon finish, declining all requests for interviews. Some in the press expressed dismay that the finale wouldn’t pit Hogan against the reigning Masters champ, since they were known to practice together down at Seminole in the winter. On offer, instead, as one Midwestern columnist put it, was Cinderella against golf’s most “methodical killing machine.”

  Turnesa, who rarely played professional tournaments of any kind, playfully quipped to reporters, “I’ve got to wash out some socks tonight. Didn’t plan on staying this long, fellas.”

  Most of them saw this as a walk in the park for the “Garbo of Golf,” as a rebuffed sportswriter from St. Louis called Ben on the eve of the final. Indeed, Ben’s brilliant 65 in the morning round put him four-up by the halfway mark, a lead he easily held through the third nine holes of their match, at which point he clipped off three successive birdies to end the ordeal and claim his second PGA Championship by a yawning seven-and-six margin. An army jeep picked up the two exhausted competitors on the thirtieth hole and drove them back to the clubhouse. Both looked relieved that it was over.

  The only real surprise came at the presentation of the Wanamaker Trophy. “I know you all think I’m the great stone face,” Ben began, after complimenting Turnesa’s courage and pluck, “but this is a competitive game. I know the other fella doesn’t expect any quarter from me—and I don’t give it.”

  Thus far, vintage Hogan. But then came this unexpected glimpse of Hennie Bogan, the man within:

  “You probably think I’m happy over winning this tournament, but I’m not. I hate to beat these men. They have to go back to their clubs and tell how they were beaten. The physical ordeal of the PGA just takes too much out of a man.” He paused, looking around the room, then added, “I just don’t want to put myself through that anymore.” Reporters exchanged glances, wondering if this could be the anticipated retirement announcement. But true to form, he left them hanging and headed straight for a train home to Fort Worth.

  Having played in twenty-seven PGA Championship matches over seventeen years, some 718 holes of intensely competitive golf that included twelve qualifying rounds and produced two trophies, and a winning average of 81 percent, Ben not only wanted to go home and rest up for the U.S. Open at “Hogan’s Alley,” now less than a month away, he also wanted a change in the grinding match-play format, the last tournament of this kind, or else he might simply skip the championship altogether, having nothing further to prove to anyone.

  By the time his train reached the Texas & Pacific Railway station in Fort Worth, the national press wires were humming with such headlines as “Hogan Hates Winning—Gives PGA Shove” and “Bantam Ben to Quit PGA Forever.” Surprised by the negative backlash, believing that his remarks had simply once again been distorted by the media, Ben attempted to clarify his position in his hometown newspaper, telling the Star-Telegram, “I still think the tournament is too long, but they can’t do anything about it. But I may try again next year.”

  This halfhearted walk-back convinced nobody. Most insiders expected Ben Hogan would never show up anywhere near a PGA Championship again.

  And they were right.

  He played in only one tournament between the PGA and the Open—his hometown Colonial, now called the Colonial National Invitational, where he finished tied for second with Skip Alexander. Sam returned to Virginia in this same period and didn’t play competitively except for a couple of scheduled corporate outings at the Greenbrier. The rest of his time was spent practicing, working in his barn at Snead Links, and fishing with friends. He also made at least one trip up to New York City, to appear on Arthur Godfrey’s national morning radio show and to dine with friends at Jack Dempsey’s on Eighth Avenue. “Outwardly Sam was Sam,” remembers his friend John Derr, who worked on Godfrey’s show before moving over to CBS Sports full-time. “He loved spinning stories and being with people he knew and trusted. Strangers always made him uncomfortable. But at this moment, his worst year as a professional, I know for a fact he was worrying about his future, trying everything to find his putting stroke again. Hogan seemed to be on a holy mission and Byron was making noises of going into broadcasting. Demaret seemed to be having the time of his life, playing his best golf ever. But the clock was ticking for all of them.”

  “It was a difficult time for Sam,” confirms his friend Bill Campbell, who won George May’s Tam O’Shanter Amateur Championship that same summer. “I think Sam feared his game might really be on the downslide. Approaching forty is when the putting stroke begins to leave most people. Tee to green Sam was as good as ever, maybe even more effective. But the yips—a term he popularized—were driving him crazy. Most reporters associate Hogan with tireless practice. But Sam practiced in those days nearly as long as Ben did, especially with the Open approaching. That was the one he wanted most.”

  Amid a sudden controversy about the depth of grooves in club-faces, the USGA forced more than forty players—including Hogan and Demaret, both of whom showed up a week early to practice together—to moderately alter their irons before the start of the U.S. Open of 1948. On the eve of the first round, Ben agreed to be interviewed by several handpicked sportswriters in his plush suite at the Beverly Wilshire and was asked about the grooves dispute and his thoughts about how golf could be improved.

  “The rules and equipment are fine,” he declared, “the only thing golfers need is more daylight. There isn’t enough time during the day to practice and play, to key one’s game up to where it should be.”

  The reporters laughed; Ben didn’t.

  “You’re not joking,” one of them said.

  “No, I’m not,” he replied,
as Valerie sat there primly on a brocaded couch, hands folded in her lap.

  After the interview, a man from the Los Angeles Times asked if a photographer could get a picture of Ben and Valerie together. Very few photographs were ever taken of the couple in public, and none whatsoever that reflected the fruits of Ben’s recent success, largely because Valerie had a growing aversion to publicity that rivaled her husband’s—no small irony in a woman whose college ambition was to be society editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

  “I don’t see why not,” a surprisingly relaxed Ben Hogan agreed, picking up the wedge he’d used to show what alterations had been made, and walking over to stand beside his silent wife. She glanced up adoringly at him; he smiled affectionately down at her. The photograph went out over the wires and appeared in hundreds of newspapers on the morning the U.S. Open got under way.

  “Sam is running out of time and hair,” one columnist concluded in his cheeky handicapping of the top dozen contenders. “And there’s maybe only one man in the field who’s as hungry as he is to win this thing—Hogan.”

  Sam, who had a history of fast starts, began by putting like the Snead of old, crafting a pair of sterling 69s that established a new thirty-six-hole championship record and propelled him to a one-shot lead over Hogan and Locke, and two shots over Jim Turnesa, whose silken swing tempo rivaled his own. Three shots back were Jimmy Demaret and Sam’s nemesis of the year before, Lew Worsham.

  With the excruciating thirty-six-hole Saturday finale looming, most observers believed it was a three-man race between Ben, Sam, and Jimmy. The fourth player who might have figured in that mix was, in fact, tagging along in the gallery, taking pictures for his own scrapbook with a new camera. Byron Nelson was just a friendly, familiar face in the crowd—wearing a smile wire to wire, as some wag pointed out, for the first time ever at a U.S. Open.

  Sam made his statement early on Saturday, dropping a fourteen-foot putt on the first hole for an eagle, then followed this with a gutsy birdie on the difficult second that sent an electric charge through the record gallery of seventeen thousand that roamed over Riviera’s scruffy, eucalyptus-shaded ridges. Weeks later, reflecting on what happened next, Sam confided to a reporter than he “foolishly felt like I had the thing well in hand” at that moment—opening the door to disaster.

  As the yips began to creep into his stroke, he struck half a dozen brilliant approach shots only to three-putt, several times from short distances, missing at least two easy birdies and finishing with a disappointing 73. After the lunch break, which he spent most of on the practice green trying to smooth out his stroke and calm his mind, he went out and battled the same jumpy nerves, never gaining traction and struggling home in 72. As putts failed to drop and sudden cheers rose from other holes, he later said, it made him heartsick to notice fans peeling off to go watch the other leaders. “It’s like they can smell when you’re losing it,” he later said. “It can make you feel like a true has-been out there.”

  Hogan and Demaret, on the other hand, were a fans’ delight, creating a two-man road show of matching 68s in the morning loop that provided Ben with a two-stroke cushion over the field and his best opportunity yet to claim the championship. Playing half an hour ahead of him in the afternoon’s final round, however, Jimmy caught fire and rolled home a succession of birdies between the seventh and twelfth holes, grinning and twirling his clubs as he went four under for the stretch and seemed to seize the momentum. At thirteen, he struck a gorgeous eight-iron to four feet but missed the short birdie attempt that would have drawn him into a tie with his friend. As shadows began to crowd Riviera’s narrow fairways, he failed to mount a charge but parred his way home to an impressive 278 total that lopped three strokes off the old Open mark set by Ralph Guldahl at Oakland Hills in 1937—or as Sam Snead like to put it, “the first one that got away.”

  Unfortunately, Demaret’s record lasted only about thirty minutes. Despite a three-putt hiccup on the sixty-ninth hole, Ben completed his business as coldly, methodically, and implacably as any U.S. Open champion ever had, finishing with a 276 that further bested Guldahl’s mark by five. The victory meant far more than the $2,000 first-place prize money, and Ben Hogan, beaming like a Hollywood matinee idol, removed his signature flat linen cap and acknowledged the wildly applauding masses in the natural amphitheater around Riviera’s famous eighteenth green. Then he hurried on to the scorers’ table to methodically total up his card and sign it, eager to leave nothing to chance or error, then vanished into the bowels of the locker room to water-comb his sleek black hair, already showing traces of gray at the temples. Finally he climbed the carpeted stairs to the members’ lounge where Valerie kissed him on the cheek and they briefly embraced, their usual post-victory ritual. In this instance, the club’s kitchen staff appeared in the doorway to applaud the new National Open winner and a young boy walked over and politely asked for his autograph. Ben smiled and obliged, carefully signing his name on the cover of a program like a man whose signature was worth millions.

  Indeed, this title was worth even more than the estimated $100,000 it would produce in the form of commercial endorsement opportunities and future paid appearances. His standard exhibition price instantly jumped to $1,500. Like Byron, Ben had a lawyer go over all his business details but personally negotiated his own appearance fees and commercial opportunities. Unlike Sam—who allowed Fred Corcoran to exploit his homespun image in a stream of commercial opportunities—a model of the modern player-agent relationship to come—Ben didn’t want anybody to influence his public image or make money off his success. Within days back home in Fort Worth he was fielding calls from representatives for Milton Berle, Jack Benny, and Perry Como, all eager for the Garbo of Golf to drop in as a guest on their shows. He did, too.

  Still, the deepest satisfaction of this championship was that it proved he’d finally reached the summit of the game, following perhaps the longest, most arduous climb any athlete ever made from the grim anonymity of a childhood shot through the heart.

  In a summer that saw the mighty Citation win the Triple Crown, Babe Ruth die of cancer, and Joe Lewis knock out Jersey Joe Walcott, Bantam Ben Hogan became a poster boy for America’s undersized underdogs, the loser turned champion by dint of relentless self-improvement, commanding the biggest headlines of them all, closing in on his own brand of immortality. He was no thoroughbred or icon who’d enjoyed the limelight from the moment he stepped into the arena, just a tough little cuss pushing forty whose heart and will to win, after years of bitter failure, had far more in common with Seabiscuit than Citation.

  And he wasn’t done yet.

  Over the next seven weeks, Ben captured five straight titles, including Byron’s Inverness Invitational and the Western Open, prompting Hogan cheerleader Grantland Rice to point out—as Ben and Val barn-stormed the upper West—that neither Byron nor Sam had won more golf tournaments in a shorter period, forty-nine victories since 1940. “Who can possibly stop Ben Hogan?” he wondered.

  Between the Western and Denver events, they began house hunting in the Westover Hills district of northwest Fort Worth, a neighborhood home to many of the city’s cultural elites. Ben also special-ordered a new Cadillac sedan that featured a state-of-the-art, two-piece tinted windshield, tailfins inspired by Lockheed’s famous P-38 fighter, and a purring Hydramatic transmission that was the talk of the automotive industry, a $3,000 dream car for the American road.

  During the same week, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, reflecting on Ben’s long climb from rural obscurity to worldwide fame, wrote in her nationally syndicated column, “Hi Ya,” that “If some bright person in Hollywood can find time to find the forest through the trees, he will make a movie of the life of Ben Hogan.”

  In mid-October, after Ben claimed a final win—his tenth for the season—at California’s Glendale Open, by shooting a course record 64 in the final round, the Hogans boarded a train home. The win gave him a third Vardon Trophy and the money title for 1948, $35,812 in official and un
official tournament earnings. That same week, Hogan’s publisher, A. S. Barnes, announced that sales of Power Golf had surged through the roof, more than 25,000 copies.

  On a cool, overcast Sunday evening after Thanksgiving, 1,500 of Fort Worth’s finest stood in a long reception line at Marvin Leonard’s Colonial Country Club to greet and congratulate the new undisputed king of golf—even as rumors continued to circulate, not hurt by his own cautiously dropped hints, that Bantam Ben was preparing to say goodbye. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he told a reporter from Dallas. “In fact, don’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes or I tell you about it.”

  All of Ben’s family was present that magical night at Colonial: his mother, Royal and his wife, Margaret, and their two children, also Valerie’s sister, Sarah Fox, and her precocious ten-year-old daughter, Valerie. A new Hogan friend was there, as well. Granville Walker was the spellbinding preacher from the nearby University Christian Church near the TCU campus, a man Ben greatly admired. Unknown to even some of Ben’s closest friends, he frequently slipped into a rear pew of the church during the eleven o’clock worship service and exited before the final procession just to listen to Granville’s powerful sermons. Meanwhile, Marvin Leonard had proudly displayed Ben Hogan’s medals and trophies in the club’s foyer for everyone to admire.

  Underscoring the evening’s happy mood and sense of homecoming, the Hogans then drove to their beautiful new home on Valley Ridge Road, a pretty, two-story colonial set beneath mature live oaks in one of Forth Worth’s finest neighborhoods. Valerie Hogan spent weeks getting the place ready and hiring a pair of African-American maids she insisted on dressing in the style of French servants. The dominant color scheme throughout the house was white. “Aunt Valerie loved everything French,” says her niece, Valerie Harriman. “And in her book everything that was French and elegant was white.”