American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  As the couple motored the short distance home that night in the luxurious Cadillac, Ben could be forgiven for believing he’d achieved the American dream. On paper, owing to the flood of deals and income wisely invested by George Coleman and others he trusted, he was close to being a millionaire. He was already thinking about what he might do in a world after competitive golf—possibly design his own golf clubs or even a course of his own where he could practice and play to his heart’s content in privacy. Colonial, after all, had become Fort Worth’s Hogan’s Alley, already something of a shrine where fans and curiosity seekers turned up regularly hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself.

  In short, Ben Hogan was finally on top of the world, without doubt the greatest golfer of his time.

  “Nobody goes through life without something happening to them,” he told his friends that night at Colonial, eerily presaging events to come. “You just have to take those things as they come along, and go ahead with life,” he declared, smiling over at his adoring wife.

  For the moment, at least, not even someone as prescient as he was could have imagined what within days would come barreling at him through the fog.

  13

  HOLLYWOOD COMEBACK

  WHETHER BY SHEER COINCIDENCE or providence, Sam Snead’s luck suddenly changed four days after Ben Hogan nearly died on a foggy highway in the Pecos River Valley of West Texas.

  After finishing a dispiriting twentieth at the Tucson Open, while packing up his gear at the El Rio Golf and Country Club, site of the Tucson Open, the fifth official event of the 1949 season, won by a surging Lloyd Mangrum, Sam found an unexpected gift in his locker: a putter.

  “Nobody in the locker room knew who put it there,” he recalled, “so I took another look. It wasn’t new or fancy. It was a stiff-shafted, brass-headed, straight-faced, center-shafted job which hefted nicely in my hand. I judged it to weigh about sixteen ounces, or slightly heavier than anything I’d been using.”

  He took it along with him without any thoughts of using it, though in a matter of a few weeks this simple putter would rekindle his game and change his life.

  Meanwhile, like everyone else on tour, Sam’s mind was focused on a hospital room in El Paso, where his friend and rival Ben Hogan lay heavily sedated and clinging to life following a devastating collision with a Greyhound bus that took place shortly after sunrise on the morning of February 2 as the couple headed for home on winding U.S. Highway 80. Perhaps one man would have noted the poignant irony of the accident’s timing. Had he survived, it would have been Chester Hogan’s sixty-seventh birthday.

  On the heels of a slow start at the year’s first event, a surprising eleventh-place finish on the same Riviera course he’d dominated just months before, Ben easily captured the Crosby Clambake, then accompanied his host and friend to his ranch in Nevada where he’d impressed Bing with his ease and handling of horses. Eight days later, at the Long Beach Open, he beat another good friend, Jimmy Demaret, in a playoff, a favor Demaret returned the following week at Phoenix, where Jimmy beat Ben in a playoff. Over a beer after the tournament, Demaret playfully proposed a “rubber match down in Tucson.” “No, Jimmy,” Ben replied, “Val and I want to get back to Fort Worth. No sense having a house if we don’t live in it.” He added that a decorator had finished her work and declared the place ready to host a first dinner party.

  As usual, Jimmy gave his best-ball partner the needle. “What’s the matter, Ben? I beat you and you have to run home and practice for a month?”

  Ben smiled. Over the previous twenty-three days, he’d put almost three thousand miles on his new Cadillac sedan and played in four tour events, given two free public clinics and endured half a dozen sit-down interviews with the press about his uncertain career plans, revealing little or nothing newsworthy. He’d also taken time off to discuss the first of several instructional films, won two tournaments and collected enough prize money—$5,800—to take the early lead in earnings. At the start of this Western juggernaut, only a few days into the new year, his smiling, angularly handsome face had even graced the cover of Time magazine, with the story inside, “Little Ice Water,” charting his phenomenal rise from obscurity to a national championship. “If you can’t outplay them,” went the featured quote on the cover, in the chaste idiom of pure Hoganspeak, “outwork them.”

  In truth, Ben was growing weary much as Byron had before him. The pressure to win every week, the fusillade of prying questions from reporters, the struggle to ignore being portrayed by several nationally syndicated columnists as a coldhearted SOB who routinely snubbed fans and offended sponsors, not to mention the relentless mental fatigue that came with days of road travel and unfamiliar hotel rooms—all of it added up to the near breaking point. Among other decisions he’d reached but shared with no one but Valerie, he’d already made up his mind not to return to action until the Masters in April. After that, he planned to halve his playing schedule in order to preserve his strength for the U.S. Open, scheduled for Chicago’s Medinah Country Club in early June.

  “It’s the traveling,” Ben told Jimmy rather prophetically in Phoenix, almost like a man who sensed his days were numbered. “I want to die an old man, not a young one.”

  Perhaps our words, as the poet Homer said, tempt the Fates. Roughly halfway between Phoenix and Fort Worth, the Hogans stopped to spend the night at the El Capitan Motel in Van Horn, Texas, where they’d first stayed with Byron and Louise back in the days when they traveled together. The modest motel was clean and comfortable and served a robust breakfast of bacon and eggs, Ben’s favorite meal. Valerie skipped eating that morning because she often had a queasy stomach at the start of the day.

  The morning was clear but cold, with fingers of ground fog obscuring the highway east of town. They got an early start around 7:45, and within ten minutes Ben detected a skin of ice on the highway and slowed to thirty miles per hour. About forty minutes later, as they approached a small bridge spanning a dry culvert and wreathed by fog, he suddenly saw two sets of headlights just an eighth of a mile ahead. Closing fast upon them in their lane was Greyhound Bus 548 with thirty-eight sleepy passengers aboard and substitute driver Alvin Logan behind the wheel, desperate to make up time lost to bad weather between Dallas and El Paso. Seizing his chance to pass a lumbering freight hauler he’d been trapped behind for miles, Logan, as he admitted to authorities later, had gunned the ten-ton vehicle’s massive General Motors Super V-12 Coach engine and drew even with the truck as they both approached the short bridge.

  “Honey,” Valerie recalled her husband saying quietly, reaching over to touch his wife’s knee, “I think he’s going to hit us.”

  She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Everything happened too quickly. Prevented from veering off either side of the highway by steel guardrails, Ben instantly made a calculation that probably saved their lives, steering the Cadillac to the narrow right-hand shoulder, grazing the guardrail and then, in an instant before impact, hurling himself across the seat to shield his wife. Witnesses reported that the driver’s side of the car took the brunt of the collision, crumpling that side of the passenger compartment like a concertina, shattering the distinctive grillwork and blowing out the curvilinear windshield. In the span of two seconds or less—about the time it takes an average golfer to swing a club—the car’s five-hundred-pound engine was propelled through the protective firewall into the lower half of Ben’s body, while the steering column was driven straight through the driver’s side seat, the rim of the steering wheel smashing his left shoulder, fracturing the collarbone. A split second later, the left side of his face struck the collapsing dashboard and he fell unconscious into Valerie’s lap. Something struck her, too, above the left eye, and she briefly lost consciousness. An instant later, in a shower of sparks, the 3,900-pound car ricocheted off the Greyhound and skidded sideways for a hundred or so feet before slipping backward down the incline into the dry wash, engulfed in steam and smoke.

  The crystal of the new
Bulova wristwatch Valerie had given Ben for Christmas was shattered, freezing the moment of calamity at exactly 8:30.

  More than ninety minutes passed before an ambulance arrived from El Paso’s Hotel Dieu Hospital, the Inn of God. By then he had been freed from the tangled mass of metal that pinned his legs against the car seat. The first doctor on the scene, an osteopath from Van Horn, found the bus passengers walking around in a daze and Hogan stretched out under a blanket on the rear seat of another motorist’s car. Wreckage was strewn everywhere. According to Valerie, Ben drifted in and out of consciousness five or six times during the interminable wait for help, at first insisting that the men who helped pry him loose attend to his wife instead, later asking if Valerie had managed to save his golf clubs, in each instance growing grayer and colder—clearly slipping into circulatory shock.

  A brief initial bulletin, apparently based on sketchy information conveyed by an excited witness who’d rushed to a pay phone in Van Horn, first broke around lunchtime back east, reporting that golf champion Ben Hogan had been killed in an automobile accident near El Paso, which was what Demaret and Snead heard as they were playing in the pro-am in Tucson. “There are moments when golf seems kind of irrelevant,” Sam remembered decades later. “And that was sure one of them for me. When we first heard that Ben had died, hell, none of us could believe it. Nobody wanted to play, either. We all just sat around the locker room waiting to hear more news. I called home to speak to Audrey. I also went off by myself and said a little prayer, hopin’ ol’ Ben was as tough as we all thought he was.”

  Taking matters in his own hands, Demaret called an administrator he knew in the Texas Highway Patrol in Houston, hoping to get the full story, but was asked to leave a call-back number. “I hung up and stood there dumbly looking at the wall in front of me,” he recalled. “Then the fellow called me back and said, ‘Yes, Hogan was in an accident. But he’s alive. He’s at the Hotel Dieu in El Paso.’ It felt good, damned good, to know Ben was alive.”

  A short time later, the Associated Press followed up with a report that said both Hogans had survived and were at an El Paso hospital where Ben was being treated for three broken ribs, severe chest injuries, and a broken back. This diagnosis was, in fact, slightly more encouraging than the actual one. Ben had also suffered a double-ring fracture of the pelvis, a broken left ankle, and several deep cuts and contusions around his left eye. By the time his brother and Valerie’s sister reached his bedside later that day, his left eye was covered by a large gauze bandage and he was sleeping under heavy sedation.

  Rancher Byron Nelson heard the news on his car radio just before noon as he was driving to Denton to meet with an expert in the poultry business, having decided to add several thousand laying hens and possibly even a sideline in turkeys to his herd of some hundred Hereford cattle. He immediately turned around and sped home to tell Louise, who’d already been told about it by a mutual friend and was desperately trying to find Byron. “The first thing we did was say a prayer for Ben and Valerie,” he remembered. “And then I called Marvin Leonard to see what he had heard. By then we knew Royal Hogan and Valerie’s sister were on their way to El Paso and that Ben was likely to pull through.” The first sprays of flowers to arrive at the Hotel Dieu came from the Nelsons, soon followed by others from Demaret, the Sneads, and Fred Corcoran.

  Later that day, still wearing the same clothes she’d put on in Van Horn, Valerie displayed a bruised face and a mildly sprained left arm, plus various nicks and cuts from flying bits of glass. As she sat with Royal and Sarah in Ben’s quiet hospital room, she glanced over at her sister and said wearily, “If Ben hadn’t put himself in front of me, you know, I would not be here.” A nurse checking on Ben’s feeding tube heard this remark and smiled and asked if she could do anything to make Valerie more comfortable. A little later, she conveyed this comment to one of the dozen or more reporters gathered in the waiting room for updates. For the next two days, Valerie left her husband’s side for only a few minutes at a time, and she ate little or nothing. That first night, she slept in an armchair next to his bed.

  The following day, more and more bouquets arrived. So did Herman Keiser and Dutch Harrison, the first colleagues to lay eyes on the patient, who surprised the former by asking him to check on the whereabouts and condition of his golf clubs. “That told me Ben was feeling better,” Keiser told reporters. “Though he looked pretty bad.”

  Later that same day, Hogan’s doctors asked him if he felt like speaking with the press. “I have nothing to say,” Ben replied, sounding remarkably like his old self.

  As evening fell, though, and new X-rays were taken and plaster casts were fitted to his mangled legs, Valerie gave her account of Ben’s actions in the vital seconds before the bus hit them, and her account—bolstered by the first horrific photographs of their mangled Cadillac, and even one of her ashen husband strapped to a gurney as he was rushed into the hospital—appeared in hundreds of newspapers the next morning.

  The combination of these startling images and intimate details of the crash coming just weeks after Time’s unflattering cover portrayal of a cold-natured and ruthless athlete produced an extraordinary transformation.

  “There’s absolutely no question that accident and the stories that came out about it completely changed the image most people had of Ben Hogan,” Tommy Bolt later reflected. “Up till then he’d been seen as a cold and unsympathetic character who didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself. People respected him for the way the little guy played golf, but they sure as hell didn’t love him the way they loved Byron and Sam and Jimmy. Some of us who were lucky enough to see a more private side of Ben soon saw a very different guy. He helped some of us young bucks out there get started—gave us advice, even offered to lend us dough if things got tough—though he never wanted any of that known. I guess he feared people would mistake such kindness as weakness. But that car accident changed everything—even Ben himself.”

  Only a day later, reflecting on the avalanche of get-well cards, cables, and letters that filled a dozen cardboard boxes in the hospital’s mail-room, Valerie confided to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “If there’s one good thing out of this accident, it’s been that Ben realizes how many good friends he has everywhere. People have been wonderful.” She paused and smiled, then added, “I guess you don’t know these things until something like this happens.”

  Heroes are created, in large part, by displaying their human vulnerability. Prior to what happened on Highway 80, Ben Hogan symbolized what an unflagging work ethic could do for the proverbial underdog, but he was hardly a hero in the classic sense of the word. Suddenly, however, by lurching to save his wife—something every husband and ordinary Joe would like to picture himself doing without a moment’s hesitation—he now took on a mythic status. In the mere two seconds it took Ben to try to save the only girl who ever truly believed in him, he became a national hero.

  To this day some critics doubt the sincerity of his hospital room epiphany, but the hospital staff reported seeing their famous patient sitting up in bed for hours reading intimate messages from total strangers, prompting him to shake his head and sometimes grow visibly emotional. A local secretary was hired to record names and addresses so Ben could personally write these well-wishers back, which indeed over time he did. “If I ever get out of here,” he reportedly told Valerie the day his doctors reported to the press that he was making an unexpectedly speedy recovery, “I’m going to be more aware of people—and their kindnesses to me.”

  Ben’s closest friends insist the accident only stimulated his deep-seated compassion for any honest hardworking soul who was struggling to rise above misfortune, as if another’s tale of adversity simply reminded him of his own lifelong trauma over his father’s suicide. Whatever else is true, it’s indisputable that Ben’s close brush with violent death served to loosen his affections for friends and family, certain fans and even a few reporters. In the aftermath, he deepened the rituals of practice he found so co
mforting and strengthened his exercise of his faith. Following long months of recovery at home, for instance, he began showing up at Granville Walker’s Sunday morning services on a more regular basis.

  “To a man who stared death in the face the way Ben did,” observed Ken Venturi, whose stellar career benefited mightily from his close friendships with both him and Byron, “battling to win a golf tournament and deal with all the distractions that go with it was suddenly nothing. That wreck made Ben pause and appreciate life a bit more, no doubt about it. But in the long run, it also only made him even more fearless in competition.”

  But all of that was yet to come.

  Four days after Valentine’s Day, the secret anniversary of his father’s suicide, while preparing to go home to his new house in west Fort Worth, Ben felt a sharp pain in his chest and urgent X-rays revealed that blood clots were moving toward his lungs and heart, floating time bombs in his circulatory system. All talk of a speedy recovery was moot. Less than twenty-four hours later, as the staff struggled to thin his blood and halt the advance of the killer clots, his condition grew critical, his blood pressure plummeting and his pulse erratic. After consulting with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, his doctors contacted a renowned Tulane University specialist named Alton Ochsner to discuss an extremely risky procedure that involved tying off the vena cava artery, which carries blood from the heart and lungs to the legs and pelvic region. Though Ochsner was a pioneer in vascular surgery—credited, in fact, with introducing blood transfusions to the United States—this radically invasive surgery required that a large incision be made through the abdominal wall in order to reach a large vein about the diameter of a half dollar, whereupon it would be cut and tied off “like closing a faucet.” In theory, he explained to Valerie and Royal Hogan over the phone, the procedure was relatively simple; in practice, there was little or no guarantee the patient wouldn’t bleed to death.