by James Dodson
Amid sweltering temperatures that caused hundreds to faint from heat exhaustion—many assumed the heat would ease the burden on Ben’s fragile legs—he started well, and after two rounds shared the lead with old rivals George Fazio and Johnny Bulla and the easygoing newcomer Julius Boros. With three wins already under his belt that year, Sam opened with 70 and then skidded to 75. He was never close after that, complaining about the heat. Was it a good omen that Follow the Sun opened at two Fort Worth drive-ins that week? Many thought so, including former TCU player Dan Jenkins, who in Saturday’s Fort Worth Press confidently predicted that the “pharaoh of the fairways” would break his own record of 276 and win his fourth national championship.
But Boros had a different idea, going out early and chipping and putting himself into the lead with a masterful 68 in the third round. By the end of Saturday’s morning loop, with temperatures edging into the mid-90s, having uncharacteristically missed several fairways Ben found himself two strokes behind. “Even with that,” Derr recalls, “there wasn’t a thinking person on the grounds who didn’t expect Ben to make a final-round charge and take the tournament. That had always been his way. Once in the lead, he never gave it up. That’s a lesson he passed on to Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.”
But for the first time since his ordeal at Merion, Ben’s legs betrayed him, his fabled iron will buckling under the high expectations and blast-furnace heat. One of the spectators who followed him briefly until things began to go badly was Byron Nelson, wearing his trademark straw hat. “It was apparent to me that Ben was out of gas almost from the start of that final round,” he later said. “And goodness knows, who wouldn’t have been?” Soldiers were ferrying collapsed fans to special cooling stations and hospital emergency rooms as Boros played his way home to claim the title. Ben’s 74 left him in third place. Every move he made in public was now scrutinized for deeper meaning, and this collapse prompted a fresh wave of retirement talk.
For the record, an irritated Sam finished in a tie for tenth place and headed straight for his new Cadillac, though in a typical mercurial mood swing he bounced back the very next week by winning the Inverness Round Robin, where former head pro Byron still played as a special guest. They had a pleasant dinner and were overheard warmly reminiscing about their early days on the tour. Ben’s name, according to Sam, never came up.
While hearing constant rumors about his own retirement, Sam finished 1952 with his second Masters victory and four more titles, clearly attempting to stake his claim before his greatest rival left the game for good.
After Northwood, Ben Hogan didn’t appear in public for months. While he won his third Colonial National Invitational that year, he registered only two other finishes, a third at the U.S. Open and a tie for seventh at the Masters—his worst showing in more than a dozen years. Reaching its own conclusion, the Associated Press confidently reported he would soon announce his retirement, perhaps before Christmas and certainly before the start of the 1953 season.
True heroism is simply the courage to confront one’s destiny.
Owing to his amazing physical prowess and his burning desire for a U.S. Open title and the respect of his peers—not to mention a poor boy’s love of money that was as natural as his swing—Sam Snead was destined to go on playing, brilliantly at times, for the next two decades. With remarkably undiminished skills, and courage, he set records for playing longevity that likely will never be equaled, much less beaten. By the end of his incomparable run, he would be the only player to have won PGA events in six different decades.
Days after Sam won the Baton Rouge Open in March of 1953, A. S. Barnes, the same New York firm that produced Ben’s best-selling Power Golf and Byron’s Winning Golf, rolled out Sam’s own long-awaited instructional book, aptly titled Natural Golf. An immediate hit, the book easily matched the sales of both Byron’s and Ben’s books.
In many ways, as 1953 got under way and Ben remained stubbornly silent on his immediate plans, this long-standing rivalry grew even more intense. Ben and Sam had won six majors apiece, and while Byron had won five, he had neither the ego nor the stomach to chase down another. From this point forward, his greatest legacy wouldn’t be conducted in competition.
Golf Digest, which first appeared in 1951, had begun popularizing the notion long espoused by the cognoscenti that the truest measure of a player’s greatness related directly to how many major titles he’d won. Bobby Jones, with four U.S. Opens and three British, had always been the gold standard of comparison, but he was distinctly from another time, as were Walter Hagen with eleven majors and Gene Sarazen with eight. Now, with professional golf arguably more popular than it had ever been, largely due to this American Triumvirate, millions were watching to see how the ongoing battle between Sam and Ben would wind up.
Which explains why—even as he was busy in Fort Worth setting up the infrastructure of his future life, with a new company devoted to making the finest clubs and balls available—Ben Hogan simply couldn’t elude the burden of his own destiny. Entering his forty-first year, though the grind of championship golf was nearly too much to bear both physically and psychologically, his very nature guaranteed that he would do whatever was required to win at least one more major and improve his lead on his two greatest rivals.
Following weeks of practice down at Seminole, and a lucrative second-place finish in the club’s popular Amateur-Professional Tournament, Ben finished in a tie for eighth at the Palmetto Pro-Am, forty miles from Augusta in Aiken, South Carolina. The man he’d tied, predictably, was Sam Snead, who was buoyant over the huge sales of Natural Golf. “Maybe we ought to go have a playoff somewhere down in Georgia,” Sam later claimed to have told Ben. “I could give you a great book to help you with that swing of yours.”
As Burke and Bolt were first to point out, young and veteran players alike often stood for hours watching Ben and Sam practice. This particular year, on the range at Augusta National, Mike Souchak, who’d turned professional in late 1952 but was here as a spectator, happened to observe a fascinating exchange between Ben and Toney Penna, the former tour star who was now a leading field rep for MacGregor Golf, the company Ben had signed on with in 1937 for $250. Violating protocol and Ben’s own sacred practice space, Penna reminded him of the company’s recent mandate that all its players use the new Tourney ball. Eight days after his fortieth birthday, however, Ben had paid a secret visit to rival Acushnet’s factory to see how the Titleist balls he preferred were made.
Not surprisingly, on the practice tee at Augusta, he was hitting Titleist balls to a caddie stationed out on the range with a towel and a catcher’s mitt. Penna was outraged by this bold defiance of company policy, not to mention that Ben was using MacGregor golf clubs that bore little or no resemblance to the ones the company sold under his name, two tiers down from their Tommy Armour Silver Scots and Byron Nelson Classics. These clubs, as it happened, were early prototypes of the new ones Ben hoped to bring to market within a year. Back in Fort Worth, he was already working with one of the game’s most respected club makers to produce a finished model designed for better players.
“It got heated real fast,” Souchak remembered. The recent Duke graduate was one of a handful of newcomers along with Ken Venturi, Gardner Dickinson, and Texan Dave Marr whom Ben would take a shine to about this time. “Penna demanded to know why Ben was being so difficult and Ben told him to tell Mr. Cowan of MacGregor that his balls and golf equipment were junk. That pretty much settled that.”
Ben opened this seventeenth Masters with a steady two-under 70, missing a pair of short putts for par over the final two holes that left him two strokes behind Chick Harbert, and one ahead of Sam, the reigning champ, who drained a monstrous birdie putt on the final hole but erroneously signed his card for par and had to keep that higher score, a 71. Displaying his graceful unchanging swing, Byron went 73-73 but felt sharp pains in his lower back that caused him to withdraw after a third-round 78.
In the second round, where Ben typically
made his move against the field, he hit every green in regulation and shot a 69 that gave him the halfway lead at 139.
Overnight, heavy rains pounded the course and softened up the greens, but ten thousand patrons trailed him and colorful journeyman Porky Oliver through the third round, observing one of the finest shotmaking exhibitions ever put on by two players. “Word spread quick that Hogan and Porky were doing something really special out there,” Mike Souchak recalled. “And by the back nine you had lots of players who’d already finished coming out to watch. They were both on fire and it seemed like some kind of record had to fall.” Between the pair, Ben and Porky accumulated thirteen birdies and one eagle (Oliver’s). Ben’s final 66 was his lowest round ever at the Masters, and he beat Oliver by only a stroke.
A record did indeed fall that day, with Ben’s 205 beating Byron’s 54-hole mark by two strokes. In the clubhouse, Byron was among the first to congratulate him. Given his four-stroke lead over Oliver, not known to be a strong closer, the only real question in most minds was how badly Ben would beat the seventy-two-hole record of 279, shared by his friend Claude Harmon and Ralph Guldahl. Masters tradition dictated that the tournament leader be paired with Byron Nelson in the last round. But since he couldn’t play, Ben got Porky instead, with Byron following as a spectator.
This was also a thing of beauty, a solid 69 that brought the vast Augusta gallery roaring to its feet with the final putt. Ben removed his cap and smiled, author of a new fourteen-under-par total of 274 that bettered the old record by five strokes and would stand for a dozen years. Byron was among the first to shake his hand and congratulate him. Sam, who shot 75 and finished tied for sixteenth, also congratulated the winner in the locker room. Ben reportedly thanked him and offered to send him a copy of his next instructional book. And so it went.
Before he left Augusta, reporters asked Ben if there was any truth to the rumor that he planned to play in the British Open at Carnoustie later that summer. That very week, both Bob Jones and Gene Sarazen had told him that he owed it to himself and the fans and the game to make a run at the Claret Jug, and he said that he would think it over. But the answer he gave reporters was typically Hoganesque—an emphatic “No.”
Fearsome Oakmont was on Hogan’s mind, that unclaimed fourth U.S. Open title that would tie him, at least by the USGA’s math, with the great Jones himself. By his own calculus a victory in Pittsburgh in mid-June would be his fifth national championship, counting the disputed Hale America Open in 1942. Whatever else was true, he now had one more major title than Sam did, and two more than Byron.
Two weeks after the Masters, after riling fellow pros by demanding appearance money to play in the Pan American Open, he captured that event, too. Seven days later, at the new Sam Snead Festival in West Virginia, he three-putted the final hole from eighteen feet to finish third; fittingly Sam won with a record 268. Fourteen days later, the day after Native Dancer ran away with the Preakness, as questions about his British Open plans approached fever-pitch in the national sports columns, Ben won his fourth Colonial National Invitational. Accepting the runner-up check, Cary Middlecoff quipped, “I feel honored to play in the Ben Hogan Benefit here once again.”
“Do I get to keep it?” Ben asked Marvin Leonard upon being handed the trophy.
“No,” his mentor replied. “But you already own it.”
In his mind, the year’s only unfinished business before he got back to club making awaited him at Oakmont, that unforgiving masterpiece built by steel magnate Henry Fownes on the bluffs of the Allegheny River, with its 350 “sand pits,” or roughly twenty bunkers per hole, and a well-earned reputation for having the toughest greens in championship golf. Shortly before the Hogans set off for Pittsburgh, Henry Picard phoned Ben to give him a bit of strategic advice. “The only way to handle those greens is to play for the collars in front,” Henry said. “Otherwise you’ll have no chance.”
Heading east, the Hogans stopped briefly in Cincinnati so Ben could meet with MacGregor’s head man, Henry Cowan, who made his pitch and showed him the results of detailed tests conducted on the new Tourney golf ball using a state-of-the-art mechanical robot—a prototype that the USGA would later refine and use for its own equipment testing, the aptly nicknamed “Iron Byron.” Ben wasn’t persuaded.
When Cowan angrily demanded to know how he could possibly deny all this scientific data, an equally irritated Ben reportedly looked at him and said, “If it’s so good, I recommend you enter that machine in the U.S. Open,” and walked out. Unknown to anyone outside his close circle, he already leased a fifteen-thousand-square-foot office building on West Pafford Street in Fort Worth. He’d also hired two talented club makers who were improving the prototype that had gotten him in trouble at the Masters.
Facing a new wave of stars including Burke, Bolt, Middlecoff, and Boros, Ben predictably didn’t alter Open preparations one iota. He arrived at the club at nine o’clock sharp, signed a few autographs, then put on his spikes and walked with a caddie to a remote corner of the practice tee, where he smoked an entire pack of Chesterfields and went through his bag hitting every club for ten minutes. He also played practice rounds with Burke, Bolt, George Fazio, and young Mike Souchak, whose golf swings and personalities he liked. “One reason he liked us,” Souchak said years later, “was we played fast and said little. Nobody wanted to be the guy who got in Hogan’s way. We were all in awe of him.”
As the players made their usual howls about Oakmont’s difficult setup, Ben went out on a pleasant sunny opening day dressed in a gray sweater and his signature white cap, carving a masterful 67 out of the course, a round that included five birdies, and seizing a commanding three-stroke lead. Every other big name, it seemed, had a rough beginning. Host pro Lew Worsham could manage only a 78, while the seemingly ageless Sarazen and Runyan shot 82 and 79 respectively. The defending champion, Julius Boros, three-putted three of his last four holes for 75. Sam managed a 72. Meanwhile, a skinny, hard-swinging, and somewhat unorthodox young amateur from nearby Latrobe, who’d qualified on leave from the coast guard, also had a great deal of difficulty battling Oakmont’s murderous rough. In his Open debut, Arnold Palmer slashed his way home in a discouraging 84 strokes.
In the second round, Sam recovered some of his old touch and needed only eleven putts on the back nine to shoot 69, edging two strokes closer by the end of the day to Ben, who shot 72 and took more time than usual over short putts as the tournament unfolded, oblivious to the slow-play penalties being handed out by officials.
Oakmont produced even slower play on Saturday, and the chorus of complaints grew louder. At one point, a disgruntled Middlecoff hooked his drive onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, picked up his tee and stalked off the course. By then Ben Hogan was already in the clubhouse with the lead, having a light lunch of ginger ale and fruit salad in hopes of losing some of the fifteen pounds he’d put on since the accident.
Sam, meanwhile, after another 72 that allowed him to pick up another stroke on Ben, grabbed a sandwich and went to Worsham’s pro shop to look at putters. “I was kind of agitated with my putting,” he remembered, “but I was mostly worried about, well, the usual thing—the hex, the jinx, whatever you want to call it. Something always got me in the final round. I figured this might be one of my last good shots at the thing. And I was hoping Ben and I would be paired together that afternoon.”
Most everyone else on the grounds was probably hoping for the same thing. “It was shaping up to be a classic U.S. Open in which the two reigning titans of the game, Hogan and Snead, would have the ultimate one-on-one for the biggest championship of them all,” Al Barkow notes. “Sam’s record against Ben in such situations was better than anyone else’s in golf. In the three head-to-head major championship matches they had in their careers, Sam won all three. Joe Dey, an unapologetic Hogan fan, knew this. His personal dislike of fellow Virginian Snead was perhaps the worst-kept secret in golf.”
When Sam arrived at the first tee for the afternoon round, he w
as dismayed to see that Ben had been sent out almost ninety minutes ahead of him and, in fact, was already on the ninth hole. His heart sank and his temperature rose.
What followed that afternoon was unforgettable for fans of both men.
Ben fired a brilliant 71 for a 283 that bettered the Oakmont tournament record by eleven strokes and officially tied him with Jones, whereas Sam was once more undone by the demons of self-doubt and staggered home with a 76 to his fourth runner-up finish in the Open. During the presentation, Ben playfully pushed the trophy toward Sam, who grabbed it and pretended to swoon, rolling his eyes. “I never felt worse than that moment,” he said years later.
Outside Oakmont’s elegant timbered clubhouse, reporters peppered a departing Hogan with questions about playing at Carnoustie, widely regarded as the toughest and most unforgiving course on the British Open rota. On the eve of play at Oakmont, Hogan had finally ended the suspense by announcing his intention to play the British Open, and one reporter pointedly demanded to know why he would want to subject himself to that. What he chose not to say was that wily Walter Hagen had tracked Ben down by phone and told him his greatness would never be assured until he won the oldest championship in golf—a feat Sir Walter had done four times.
“Oh, I don’t know, fellas,” he replied almost jauntily, eager to deflect any glimpse into his thinking. “Maybe because Sam probably won’t be there.”
Ben bought cashmere long johns from Abercrombie & Fitch for what he knew would be his final competitive trip abroad. Sam briefly considered going, too, but instead went home to focus on the PGA Championship.