by James Dodson
Ben did, however—and right on the first tee, no less.
“I’m going to burn it up,” he advised his referee, Ike Grainger, the same USGA official who’d made the pivotal decision penalizing Lloyd Mangrum’s double-marked ball at Merion, a ruling that punctuated Ben’s heroic comeback. But a costly bogey on the long par-three third was only balanced by a birdie on seven, for an even-par 35 on the front nine, hardly the run he’d been counting on. He heard that others were rapidly falling back, except for hard-charging Bobby Locke and Clayton Heafner, Sam’s old Greensboro practice partner, who held a two-stroke lead. On the brutally long and narrow tenth, Ben lashed a drive of 265 yards and then rifled a two-iron to within four feet of the cup, producing a volcanic eruption from the gallery around the green. He picked up the birdie, then followed it on thirteen with a fifteen-foot side-hiller that tumbled gently into the heart of the cup for a second birdie. “It was my best shot of the tournament,” he allowed afterward. “It went exactly as I played it, every inch of the way.”
Sam, playing a couple of groups ahead of him, wasn’t having much luck, though almost anyone could have predicted this fate. He lipped out several excellent birdie attempts and struggled to find his chipping touch in the Monster’s sticky rough. In this instance, a final round of 69 would only have lifted him to a second- or third-place finish. Ben, meanwhile, closing in on Heafner, played fifteen with a three-wood rather than a driver, which had left him in the fairway rough that morning, and nearly holed out a six-iron on the fly, running home the three-footer for birdie. At sixteen he made an equally brilliant approach to four feet, but singed the hole and stared at it with glacial contempt for several seconds before tapping in for par. After a surgical two-iron and two putts gave him par at seventeen, he came to the seventy-second hole needing one more par to cinch the victory.
With his adrenaline pumping and a slight summer breeze at his back, after taking a little more time than usual he uncorked one of the longest and most accurate final drives he ever hit in championship play, his ball carrying the bunkered ridge of the dogleg, an extremely gutsy play for the game’s most conservative tactician. A roar went up from the gallery once again standing ten-deep around the final hole. Minutes later, he carved a six-iron boldly straight at the pin and left his ball fifteen feet above the cup.
He finished a cigarette on his trudge up to the green, thumbing it away and merely touching his famous white linen cap as the vast crowd greeted him with a thunderous and sustained ovation that grew into a lusty cheer. They quickly fell silent as he stalked the green sizing up the putt, and took his familiar slightly crabbed tripod stance over the ball. The putter eased back and came forward, his ball trickling down the hard, heat-scorched green, gathering speed until it clattered into the cup. There was an instant of silence followed by even wilder cheers on all sides.
One of them came from Bill Campbell, Sam’s young West Virginia protégé who’d trekked back after his cause was lost to follow Hogan in. “The way Ben played those three closing holes illustrated something wonderful about Hogan, something that became his hallmark—namely that he could always hit exactly the shot that was needed at that moment. Great champions can all do that, of course, though I never saw anyone better at that than Ben.”
Ben’s final birdie gave him a 67, the second-lowest finishing round ever by an Open contender, and a 287 total that came nowhere near Guldahl’s mark but was historic nonetheless. His back-nine 32 was by far the most satisfying of his career, making him national champion for the third time. “There have been other great finishes since then,” declared U.S. Open historian Bob Sommers. “Arnold Palmer’s slashing 65 at Cherry Hills in 1960, the 65 by Jack Nicklaus at Baltusrol in 1967, Johnny Miller’s 63 at Oakmont in 1973, and the two 68s Cary Middlecoff put together at Inverness in 1957—but none compared to this one.”
As irony would have it, Robert Trent Jones’s wife, Ione, was among the first to shake the winner’s hand after he’d come off and filed his card. “Ben,” she told him, extending her hand, “I’m so proud of you. You must be very pleased with the way you played.”
He accepted her hand and stared at her. “Mrs. Jones,” he calmly said, “if your husband had to play the courses he designs for a living, I’m afraid you’d be in a breadline.”
In the locker room, smiling cautiously as he sipped a cold beer and the pain in his legs receded, he sounded more conciliatory to the crush of reporters bending over him. “Under the circumstances, it was the greatest round I have played. To be honest, I didn’t think I could do it. My friends said last night that I might win with a pair of 69s. It seemed too much on this course. It’s the hardest course I’ve ever played.”
Twenty minutes later, with his thinning hair neatly combed and showing the rapidly expanding traces of gray at the temples, dressed in an elegant silk blazer from his favorite Manhattan haberdasher, he accepted the gold medal and Open trophy from executive director Joe Dey, then turned to address the huge multitude that ringed the eighteenth green. Perhaps, considering all he’d been through, they expected him to speak frankly about what the historic turn of events meant to him. He now had won the U.S. Open three times, just one shy of the record held by Willie Anderson and his friend and hero Bobby Jones.
“Those of us who were there felt for sure he was going to really open up and talk about what this meant to him,” Bill Campbell remembered. “But you could see him struggling to find the words. I’ve always thought this one meant the most to Ben, given the course and where he was in life. He said as much himself—in true Hogan fashion.”
Faithful to his growing legend as the most self-armored athlete in American sports, Ben simply thanked the USGA and the fans and revealed precisely what was on his mind. “I’m glad I brought this course, this monster, to its knees.”
He remained out of view for the next two months, resting up and planning a future life off the tour, then made a surprising appearance the first week of August at George May’s annual spectacle in Chicago, the World Championship of Golf—where he’d run afowl of sponsors for refusing to wear a number on his back, and vowed never to return. His last-minute entry via the phone baffled the media but visibly delighted May, who warmly welcomed him back to Tam O’Shanter and told reporters that the magical name of Hogan guaranteed twenty thousand more spectators.
Perfectly in sync with Ben’s calculating nature, and known principally only to a select few including George Coleman, Bing Crosby, Dallas tycoon Pollard Simons, and Marvin Leonard—Hogan’s surprising entry was really about just two things: the opportunity to deprive Sam Snead of another Player of the Year honor and, more important at this point, to make money and further his dreams of creating a club-making firm with his perfect signature on them.
The first task was accomplished relatively simply. Ben went out and mugged Tam O’Shanter with four rounds in the 60s, shattering the tournament record and pocketing May’s first-place check for $12,500, then slipping out of town without making a spare comment. Sam finished in a tie for eighth and, having done the math and decided that Ben was a lock for the honor he still coveted, decided to take the rest of the year off. He’d played just fourteen tournaments and won only twice, though this included his third PGA—going one-up on both Ben and Byron in that championship.
Ben, by contrast, won three of just four events—the Masters, the Open, and George May’s Chicago extravaganza. His only disappointment was finishing fourth at the hometown Colonial National Invitational, where Sam had made himself persona non grata. Ben’s strong winning percentage, and two major titles, proved the difference.
“Was the great Hogan even here?” asked one of Chicago’s less impressed sportswriters. “He showed up, teed up, spoke to virtually no one, broke a scoring record or two, then vanished. What is Ben thinking?”
Whatever he was thinking, days before the members of both Ryder Cup teams of 1951 showed up in the Carolina sandhills at Donald Ross’s masterful Pinehurst No. 2, his colleagues named him Playe
r of the Year. During the opening dinner, a rapidly balding Sam Snead, the team captain, graciously joked about having to beat Ben “twice as much as he beats the rest of us to have a decent shot of winning the honors.” Ben only smiled.
The next afternoon, in a cozy interview with broadcaster John Derr and the sports editor from his old paper, the Greensboro Daily News, an unusually relaxed Hogan described the home life he was currently enjoying with his “part-time” playing status, and hinted at “other interests” that were attracting a lion’s share of his attention, refusing to divulge any more about what those might be. “We weren’t sure what his plans were though we both came away from the conversation convinced this would be the last time we might see Ben in any kind of tournament,” recalls Derr, who along with others had begun to take note of Hogan’s struggles with a putter—chiefly by the amount of time he frequently stood over putts, especially short ones. “That only goes to show how we underestimated Ben once again,” Derr added with a grin. “His best was yet to come.”
With Sam as captain, the Americans routed Britain and Ireland 9½ to 2½, prompting Henry Longhurst to ruefully lament in his Times Sunday column that the only real surprise in Pinehurst was Jimmy Demaret’s announcement that he was retiring from Ryder Cup competition with a perfect 6-0-0 record, prompting many on both sides of the water to wonder whether Great Britain and Ireland would ever win the cup again. Ben, who actually wore his pajamas beneath his golf clothes owing to the unusually cold weather, occasionally donning a topcoat between holes, teamed with pal Jimmy to decimate Fred Daly and Ken Bousfield in the opening Foursomes, and went on to beat Charlie Ward three-and-two in the Singles. In a subsequent article for Golf Illustrated, Longhurst gave his impressions of the Hawk: “Among the gallery in the fourth match, bearing no outward and visible sign connecting him with the proceedings, is a small dark man with grey raincoat, grey cap, grey trousers, and inscrutable expression, looking like a Pinkerton detective on watch for pickpockets. This is the world’s greatest golfer, Ben Hogan, participating in a Ryder Cup match.” Cup historian Dale Concannon concluded that this helped shape the British golfing public’s enduring image of Ben.
In the event’s aftermath, on the other hand, ebullient captain Sam Snead all but guaranteed his friends and fishing pals that 1952 would be his year. “There’s no question that even Sam heard the clock ticking,” says Bill Campbell. “Just like Byron and Ben, Sam was turning forty that year, which was particularly old for a player back then. Sam didn’t drink or smoke, and he was the first player I ever knew who carried weights and did sit-ups and push-ups every morning. He was careful about what he ate long before that was fashionable. Gary Player and Frank Stranahan were said to be the tour’s big health nuts. But it was really Sam Snead who showed them the virtues of staying in good shape. That’s why all three—especially Sam—were able to extend their careers far beyond the norm.”
Nobody sympathized with Ben’s vexations on the greens more than Sam, who had determined that Ben’s problem was an inability to initiate the takeaway, almost as if he simply couldn’t decide on either the line or the strength of the stroke, often resulting in an abbreviated stab at the ball not terribly unlike Sam’s own yips. Others who witnessed Hogan’s lengthy pauses over the ball assumed he was merely taking more time to refine his thoughts.
Unknown to anyone but Valerie and his doctor back in Fort Worth, however, the cornea in his left eye had been damaged in the accident, and as he stood over putts that eye often lost focus along with depth perception. In these moments, he would wait until his right eye and brain could compute the line and distance, but by this point his tensing muscles were refusing to cooperate as they once had, causing an abbreviated stroke that sent his ball skidding toward the target. Since his comeback, he’d tried everything from tranquilizers and hypnosis to a host of new grips and putting techniques to subdue the effects of this steady deterioration, but to little or no avail. This proved costly when he showed up in 1952 to compete in his favorite tournament, the Masters.
For the stubbornly silent man who was at the center of all sorts of speculation in the press about his impending retirement plans, the lone highlight of this trip to Augusta was the Champions Dinner Ben proposed to Jones and Roberts and hosted on Tuesday evening, paying for the dinner for the next two years out of his own pocket until, as he put it, he “realized the tab came to more than the winner’s share of the purse.” Nine former champions showed up for the inaugural fete: Horton Smith, Henry Picard, Ralph Guldahl, Byron Nelson, Herm Keiser, Craig Wood, Jimmy Demaret, and Sam Snead—who reportedly broke the ice during cocktails by telling one of his blue jokes that got everybody laughing except Byron, who just shook his head.
In time, as younger Masters champions joined the dinner, Sam would illustrate his remarkable physical dexterity by standing flat-footed in the doorway of the upstairs dining room and then kicking the frame overhead, a feat that never ceased to amaze and amuse the newcomers. “Sam never grew weary of his role as clown prince of the dinner,” says Arnold Palmer, who was invited after winning his first green jacket in 1958. “Some of us loved it, others not so much.”
Buoyed by his role as host, Ben opened the tournament with a pair of two-under-par 70s, but Sam vaulted to the lead with rounds of 70-67. Then the spring winds danced across the course on the weekend, wreaking havoc on everyone’s score. Sam skied to a woeful 77, Bolt and Mangrum posted 75s, Julius Boros a 76, Jackie Burke a 78. Ben’s 74 still gave him a decent chance, while Byron’s 77-78 finish ended any hope he had of winning a third Masters title.
Ben’s awful 79 on that windy Sunday was the talk of Augusta after Sam had held off Burke to win his second Masters. “Sam was walking on air,” Derr recalled, “but the real buzz around the press tent was whether this was the end of Ben that everyone had been expecting. The fact that it appeared to be his worst finish in a major championship where he was contending spoke volumes to everyone on hand. There was a definite sense that the guard was changing in a big way. Ben was just the perfect symbol of that.”
He also noted that Bob Jones, already suffering from syringomyelia, the acute muscular disease that would eventually kill him, had begun relying on a motorized cart to ferry him around his club, and that Mangrum, Demaret and Harmon were all making noises about giving up the chase for good. Young guns like Burke, Bolt, Middlecoff, and Boros now featured routinely on the leaderboard, and others would follow.
“The idea that a Hogan or Snead might someday quit coming to the Masters was damn near unthinkable, something none of us wanted to believe,” Tommy Bolt echoed some years later. “Given all they’d done, they didn’t seem all that human to us. But time takes its toll on all of us, brother, and you didn’t have to look too hard at either Sam or Ben to see their games were on the slide. Golf’s an old man’s pleasure, someone once said, but it’s a young man’s game.”
Two months later, the inaugural National Golf Day held at the Northwood Club in Dallas—an ambitious fund-raiser sponsored by the PGA and Life magazine to capitalize on the significant growth of the game’s popularity spurred by Ben’s heroics and his ongoing rivalry with Sam—quickly became known as Beat Ben Hogan Day by the estimated 100,000 players who shelled out a buck at designated clubs and courses around the country to match their net scores against the reigning national champion’s practice round at Northwood, a fairly new layout Ben considered unworthy of the U.S. Open scheduled there that summer. Those whose scores “beat” Hogan’s would win a special medal from the sponsors.
Beginning at eleven sharp, Texas time, on May 31, 1952, as would-be giant killers from Bangor to Bakersfield teed off simultaneously, John Derr followed Ben around the five-year-old course built on rolling ranchland, once owned by the husband of actress Greer Garson, just north of the Dallas city limits. Displaying machinelike precision and no emotion whatsoever, Ben hit every fairway and green in regulation on the front nine. His only slip came when he pulled a one-iron into the cottonwood trees on the par-thre
e sixteenth, prompting him to drolly remark to Derr, after the resulting bogey, “That should cost Life another 10,000 medals.” He finished with an even-par 71.
Only 1,400 players across the country managed to beat him. But the organizers proudly pointed out that participants included General Omar Bradley, beloved TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy, four sitting governors and one senator, not to mention the entire cast of the Broadway hit South Pacific. None beat Ben. A decent two-digit handicapper, Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, offered that playing in such a “wonderful democratic enterprise” probably didn’t hurt his chances of gaining the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in a few weeks. He was mistaken. A good friend of Cliff Roberts’s and Bob Jones’s paid his first visit to Augusta National about this time, and was chosen at the convention that summer and went on to win the election, taking his high-handicap game to the White House for the next eight years. Ike’s passion for the game would dovetail beautifully with his country’s growing ardor for the sport.
Despite his poor Masters finish, many oddsmakers calculated that the relatively flat and featureless terrain of Northwood would make this national open something of a cakewalk for Ben, and just days before the championship commenced, stars that included Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby showed up to help him celebrate his induction into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, prompting Charles Einstein of the International News Service to breathlessly predict that “this is the Open Hogan can’t lose and Snead can’t win.” At his induction dinner, Ben singled out Valerie as the greatest inspiration of his life, crediting her faith and loyalty and good judgment with “seventy-five or eighty percent of my success.”