American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Late on the afternoon of June 23, the Hogans arrived at their fully staffed private manor house in Dundee called Tay Park, an estate house arranged by Ben’s Wall Street friend Paul Shields and owned by the National Cash Register Corporation. A Humber automobile and driver would chauffeur him wherever he chose to go, and during the ten days prior to the Open he made daily trips to reconnoiter vaunted Carnoustie and reacquaint himself with links-style play at nearby Panmure Golf Club, safely insulated from the rapacious British press. Meanwhile, Valerie was looked after by the staff at Tay House as if she were visiting royalty. On the recommendation of amateur Pinehurst stars Dick Chapman and Harvie Ward, Ben also secured a local caddie named Cecil Timms, a talkative young man everyone called Timmy.

  Perhaps sensing the historic nature of his undertaking—and its valedictory implications—Ben invited John Derr to follow him through every step of his preparation and the tournament itself. The broadcaster’s bosses at CBS had initially balked at the idea of footing the bill for a fortnight in golf’s holy land, but eventually sprang for the airline ticket and the hotel when some executive realized the potential bonanza of having their man on the scene if Hogan somehow accomplished the impossible. A deal was quickly hatched to use BBC equipment and engineers to transmit Derr’s daily evening updates back to the States.

  At the height of British summer, with daylight lingering until ten o’clock, Ben spent several evenings practicing on the Panmure course with Timmy and Derr as his sole companions. He never hit a ball, the latter remembered, from the gorse or heather. “Anyone who hits into that,” he explained, “won’t be contending anyway.” Among other adjustments, he nipped shots off the firm wind-seasoned turf and hit low runners onto the greens using the smaller British balls he’d recently begun practicing with back home in Texas, also adjusting upward or downward in club selection depending on the strength and direction of the wind. One tranquil evening, he invited Derr—no slouch himself, a single-digit player—to borrow some clubs from the pro shop and play along with him, and even offered to give him a few pointers. But Derr politely declined, insisting he didn’t want to risk distracting Ben from his meticulous preparation routine.

  “I saw a new Ben that first week,” he recalls, “or maybe it was the kinder and gentler Ben Hogan I’d heard really existed beneath his tough public reputation. I’d known him a fairly long time and perhaps because Sam and I were close—and Ben liked Sam and felt much closer to him than to Byron by that point—he felt he could open up and tell me a few things going on in his head. For instance, I learned this was likely to be his final championship before he announced his retirement, and that he intended to go into the equipment business very soon, although he didn’t yield many details.”

  What Ben did relate, however, during one brief interlude, were several fundamental things he believed were essential for every golfer to master in order to play his best golf. He planned to feature these essentials, he said, in a new instructional book he’d agreed to do with Herbert Warren Wind of Sports Illustrated. “He made it clear that because every golfer was different—owing to variables in weight, height, build, strength and so forth—he had to develop his own game based on these fundamentals,” Derr remembered. “The days after he told me this—we were having a sandwich at lunch at the time—he asked me not to share this secret with anyone until he was finished with tournament golf. Naturally I assured him I wouldn’t. It would be our secret until he was ready to tell the rest of the world.”

  Ben Hogan made no secret of his grave respect for Carnoustie, a proud, tough, straightforward public seaside links course whose local sons prided themselves on being heirs to a distinguished line of players and teachers that included Tommy Armour and a host of fabled teaching pros who’d emigrated to club jobs in America from the Firth of Tay, among them Bobby Jones’s mentor, Stewart Maiden. Claiming to date from 1500—supporting local assertions that it was even more ancient than the Old Course at St. Andrews—it had at any rate been shaped by three of golf’s greatest figures: laid out initially by Allan Robertson in 1850, improved upon by Old Tom Morris two decades later, then brilliantly reconfigured in the early twentieth century by James Braid, the Scottish member of Britain’s fabled Great Triumvirate.

  It was, in sum, a fitting stage for an incomparable player’s final performance, a noble 7,200-yard brute draped in glorious history and impossible gorse, so intimidating that a host of American contenders—including George Fazio, Johnny Bulla, Porky Oliver, and Gene Sarazen—all cabled their regrets to Carnoustie officials at the last moment, choosing to stay home. A few claimed later they wanted Ben to have the stage entirely to himself, though that didn’t quite wash with anyone, nor did it prevent volatile Frank Stranahan and Tam O’Shanter gunslinger Lloyd Mangrum from showing up and registering a pair of nimble 66s in a final practice round that created the first media buzz of the championship. The other missing Americans, including Sam, were off in Michigan the week prior, playing in the PGA Championship at the Birmingham Country Club. With three Wanamaker trophies already on his shelf, Sam figured his odds of gaining ground on Hogan’s total in majors would be greatly improved on home soil.

  Three thousand spectators trailed Ben through the championship’s two required qualifying rounds, an impressive one-under 70 followed by a 75 that made him question if he had the stamina for the duration. Complicating matters, the wind off the firth had shifted and cold rainy weather was forecast.

  The next morning, July 6, wrapped in two cashmere sweaters, Ben started his Open quest. With no ropes holding spectators back, a dozen Scottish policemen needed to keep his path clear through the masses of fans. Unknown to Ben, the staff at Tay House had placed personal good-luck trinkets and amulets in the bottom of his golf bag—personal notes, an ancient British coin, a treasured family locket—that indicated their growing affection for this American the local papers were calling the Wee Ice Man. Owing to Ben’s scratchy throat, the cook even gave him a packet of hard lemon drops to keep his throat moist.

  Ben missed several short putts on the outward nine, causing the lanky and expressive Timmy to bend over and hold a hand over his eyes. At one point, Ben ordered Timmy to knock off the histrionics and stand perfectly still, and to quit eating all his candy. His opening 73 left him three strokes behind Frank Stranahan and one back of Roberto De Vincenzo, Bobby Locke, Dai Rees, and the Australian Peter Thomson, who would win the first of his five Open titles just a year later.

  Following a Thursday morning downpour that rained out the early rounds, under clearing skies Ben shot a 71 that could easily have been three strokes lower. Still, he was just two behind Scotland’s Eric Brown and Ryder Cup veteran Dai Rees at 142.

  At Tay House on the eve of the thirty-six-hole finale, the head cold that had been sneaking up on him for days erupted with a fury, shooting his temperature to 103 and allowing only fitful sleep. In the morning, his feet were numb, his head dizzy, prompting Valerie to insist that he withdraw. When Derr heard about his condition, he chose not to alert his live radio audience back home. “We weren’t even sure Ben would come out to play,” he remembers. “But there he was at the start of round three, dressed in his sweaters and ready to attempt two rounds on the hardest course in Scotland in weather that had turned frightful. Valerie was worried out of her mind—and, truthfully, so was I.”

  A shot of the new wonder drug penicillin, administered by a Dundee physician, seemed to help a bit. Ben plodded under alternately rainy and sunny skies to a third-round score of one-under 70 that tied him for the lead with Argentina’s Roberto De Vincenzo. Afterward, he retreated on aching legs to the men’s locker room across the Links Parade Road, where he sat alone on a bench, took an aspirin with a glass of lukewarm ginger ale, and ate half a ham sandwich with a few orange wedges prepared by the Tay House cook. Feeling better after a brief rest, he calculated that another one-under 70 might secure the championship.

  The gallery awaiting him at the first tee for the afternoon round had grown e
ven larger, by some estimates half again as large as the morning as spectators following their favorites sensed the importance of the moment. After his opening drive split the fairway, they surged ahead and around him and Ben asked Derr to walk closer to him. “They knew they were witnessing history,” Derr says. “They knew this was the greatest player of the age making his final walk into the record books.”

  On the fifth hole, at level par, Ben chipped in for a birdie and took sole possession of the lead. He narrowly missed birdies on eleven and twelve, then claimed one on the par-three thirteenth. When the gallery there released a thunderous ovation, he felt better than he had all week, lifting his head up in a manner Valerie said he always did when he was confident he’d win. Indeed, as he later confided, this was the precise moment he knew he had the Open in his grasp. No champion ever played better with a lead than Hogan. That’s what Henry Picard said about him when he won his first tournament at Pinehurst in 1940, and it was just as true this day.

  On the tee at sixteen, he asked where the other contenders stood, and Derr told him that Stranahan, who’d made a bold charge with six one-putt greens, had finished at 286. Three pars would put Ben in the clubhouse with 283. He then struck a brilliant four-wood shot to within twenty feet of the cup, safely two-putted and told him, “John, you can get ready for that interview. This tournament is over.”

  “It gave me goose bumps when he said that,” the broadcaster remembers. “The certainty in his voice was absolute, almost chilling.” Some twenty thousand spectators had gathered around the eighteenth hole, while an audience estimated at three million was listening to updates on BBC radio. Following a drive of 280 yards down the heart of the home fairway, the exuberant crowd closed around him, and Ben asked Derr to walk in front of him. “He grabbed the back of my pants, slipping his hand under my belt to hang on for dear life. People were trying to touch him and slapping him on the back. It was controlled mayhem. These people, the smartest galleries in the world, knew what they were doing following in his steps, walking with a legend who would never come again … immortality.”

  Up on the green, in a light drizzle, displaying little or no hesitation, Ben Hogan rolled home yet another putt for a birdie that gave him a 68 and a total of 282, which obliterated Carnoustie’s existing tournament record by eight strokes. Hogan acknowledged the crowd’s roar by removing his checked wool cap and giving a small wave and weary smile, slightly bowing to all four sides of the gallery. Future CBS commentator Ben Wright, who briefly went AWOL from his duties at a nearby military base that day just to catch a glimpse of him, recalled, “I’d never see a grayer and more exhausted-looking figure. He looked utterly and completely drained, a man on the verge of collapse. Still, the way the crowd quietly and respectfully parted as he approached—well, it reminded me of passing royalty.”

  Following their radio interview, Ben gave the broadcaster two Titleist balls. The one he’d finished his historic round with was headed for the USGA museum back home. The other, which he’d made birdie with on the thirteenth hole, was given to Derr, who told Ben he would give it to his infant daughter, Cricket.

  Back at Tay House, the butlers, chambermaids, cooks, and grounds-keepers lined up to bid the Hogans farewell. Only then did Ben discover the good luck totems in his golf bag, a moment that visibly moved the Wee Ice Man. The women kissed him on the cheek. The men shook his hand. In the Humber car on the way to a nearby airfield arranged by U.S. Air Force brass for a military flight to London to meet the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth, then on to France for a long-promised vacation, Valerie Hogan took her husband’s hand, and broke down.

  That same afternoon, at the train station in Edinburgh, a homeward-bound John Derr bumped into Bernard Darwin, the famous naturalist’s grandson and himself the dean of British golf writers, a man who’d known the Great Triumvirate in their prime. Adding to the air of valediction, Darwin had just filed his final official story for the London Times. “You know, John,” he was moved to say, “I don’t think we’ll ever see the likes of Hogan again. I distinctly got the feeling he could have done whatever was required of him in order to win. He could have shot 65 if he had needed it.”

  “That’s what makes him Ben Hogan,” Derr told him.

  America agreed.

  On July 21, when the Hogans arrived in New York harbor aboard the luxury liner United States, there was an impromptu press conference after they disembarked. As usual, Ben was peppered with questions about his immediate plans, and confirmed only that in 1954 he planned to play in the Masters and possibly the U.S. Open and certainly the Colonial Invitational. Asked if he would reconsider his decision to skip the Ryder Cup, scheduled that fall outside London at Wentworth, he tersely replied, “No.” When a reporter whimsically asked if perhaps he’d follow his friend Byron Nelson’s lead into cattle ranching, Ben stared blankly at him and dropped a bombshell of sorts—explaining that he was starting his own equipment company down in Fort Worth. This was as close as he would come, for the moment at least, to announcing his retirement.

  “I think I have a revolutionary way of making clubs,” he said. “We have several experimental models and hope to be in production soon.”

  “Won’t this interfere with you playing golf?” an excited newspaperman asked.

  “I don’t plan to be a desk man,” Ben told him, slightly mellowed from his quiet days at sea.

  By the time the Hogans were riding down Broadway in an open Chrysler limo that afternoon, receiving the first ticker tape parade Manhattan had thrown for a golfer since Bobby Jones’s triumphant return from Britain in 1930, word that he was retiring to make golf clubs had spread to newsrooms across the country via chattering press service machines.

  Mayor Vincent Impellitteri read a congratulatory telegram from President Eisenhower and presented Ben with a citation that renamed Broadway Hogan’s Alley for the day. “Here you are, the world’s greatest golfer, and I am probably the worst,” the mayor declared, fumbling a famous line Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had greeted Jones with in 1930. Almost simultaneously, Texas senator Lyndon Johnson got to his feet in the steamy un-air-conditioned Senate chambers in Washington to read a lengthy editorial from the Lufkin (Texas) Daily News declaring William Ben Hogan the greatest golfer ever. Johnson requested that the editorial and his own remarks be entered into the Congressional Record. Richard Nixon, who as vice president presided over the Senate, approved his request.

  On the steps of City Hall, Ben addressed five thousand sweating spectators, many of whom had skipped work and got more than any stranger ever had before—a genuine glimpse of Hennie Bogan.

  “Only in America and in New York City could such a thing happen to a little guy like me.” He paused, glanced at his smiling wife and added, with a cracking voice, “I have a tough skin but I have a soft spot in my heart and … and … this tops anything that ever happened to me. Right now I feel like crying. This is the greatest moment of my life.”

  Following a dinner thrown by the USGA at the Park Lane Hotel, where Ben was showered with praise by Bob Jones and other dignitaries, the Hogans finally reached the refuge of their luxury suite and Ben pulled off his necktie and sighed.

  “This has been the hardest day of my life,” he told his wife.

  15

  LAST HURRAHS

  AS HERBERT WARREN WIND put it in The Story of American Golf, 1953 was a year unlike any other, in some ways the equal of Bobby Jones’s remarkable Grand Slam year in 1930 and Harry Vardon’s 1920 farewell tour of America for the kind of rich human drama from which the game’s sustaining narrative would arise. “The story of the next three years—the last three years—is the story of [Ben’s] fortunes in six tournaments, three Masters and three Opens.” Though he remained maddeningly silent on his retirement plans, Ben’s near-triumphs in the only tournaments that now meant anything to him would punctuate his extraordinary career.

  Beginning in April 1954, with the worldwide press unleashing every superlative imaginable on the heels of his triumph
at Carnoustie, the last American athlete who somehow looked better photographed in black-and-white appeared as promised at Augusta National and played three brilliant rounds through the tsunami of excitement generated by unknown Billy Joe Patton only to wind up losing to Sam in a playoff.

  As he later confirmed to Marvin Leonard and other intimates, this was one of his most frustrating losses. His concluding 75 was decidedly uncharacteristic, the result of his growing inability to pull the trigger on putts. But on the positive side of the ledger, in honor of his unique contributions, the Golf Writers Association of America unveiled the Ben Hogan Award at its annual gathering during Masters week, presented to the player who persisted despite serious illness or physical impairment. The first recipient, fittingly enough, was fellow Texan Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who was gamely battling cancer.

  Following the Masters, perhaps sensing the sharp winds of change, Valerie Hogan’s faithful newspaper-clipping routine abruptly ceased, almost as if she knew her husband would never attain a greater glory. In fact, he would win just twice more in his career, teaming with Sam to take both the individual and team honors at the 1956 Canada Cup, followed by a fifth Colonial title in the spring of 1959. The U.S. Open and the Masters remained his primary objectives.

  “After 1954,” said Mike Souchak, “every sighting of Ben was a special occasion, almost otherworldly to the younger players, who would always come around to watch whenever he was warming up or practicing. Many of the veterans did the same thing. Ben was living history, after all. We all sensed every time out could be his last. One thing I noticed, perhaps because of this, was that he grew a lot friendlier to people, even strangers who asked him for his autograph, especially kids. Ben loved kids. Most people don’t know this. A lot of kids began showing up at the Masters and the Opens about that time. Golf was becoming a popular recreational sport thanks to the excitement Ben and Sam and Byron generated. It didn’t hurt that you had a guy in the White House [Dwight Eisenhower] who loved the game and urged Americans to play. That combination really lit the fire in this country.”