by James Dodson
As his game dwindled and his appearances grew rarer, Ben’s mind shifted to shaping his legacy in other ways.
Weeks after Ben lost the Masters playoff to Sam, a popular new Time-Life publication called Sports Illustrated borrowed unauthorized images of Hogan from Life and quotes from his peers to try to decipher the “secret” to his incomparable swing. Following the magazine’s launch on August 16, an outraged Ben phoned Time founder Henry Luce and threatened to sue unless he was offered a written apology and a fee of $10,000. The savvy Luce, sensing an opportunity to turn a defeat into a victory, made a counterproposal to purchase Ben’s book publisher, A. S. Barnes, and pay him $30,000 to either revise his best-selling Power Golf or perhaps do a new book altogether. By summer’s end, the terms for an entirely new instruction book were hashed out; Sports Illustrated staffer Herb Wind agreed to serve as Ben’s writing partner, and famed medical illustrator Anthony Ravielli was brought in to do illustrations.
More important to Ben, just days before he appeared at his hometown Colonial NIT in May of 1954, several hundred sets of clubs bearing his distinctive signature and crested emblem came off the assembly line at his newly refurbished West Pafford Street factory. Halfway through the tournament, however, he suddenly withdrew, offering no explanation. The reason, in fact, was his unhappiness over the quality of his clubs. Having taken hundreds of orders from leading pro shops, he made a bold decision to scuttle more than $150,000 worth of his new equipment on the eve of their release rather than allow what he believed to be inferior equipment bearing his name to reach the market. “He threw out castings and shafts and pretty well started from scratch,” one early employee remembered. “Mr. Hogan wanted nothing less than perfection.”
When his leading investor Pollard Simons angrily balked at this decision, Ben went to a Fort Worth bank and arranged to borrow half a million dollars on the strength of his own name. A group of investors that included Marvin Leonard, George Coleman, Paul Shields, San Francisco car dealer Eddie Lowery, Bing Crosby, and Dan Topping, owner of the New York Yankees, rallied to provide the necessary capital for the company to keep going. Leonard reportedly took the largest share.
If his business affairs were a bit more settled by the time he reached A. W. Tillinghast’s splendid Lower Course at Baltusrol in New Jersey for the fifty-fourth U.S. Open in June, Ben’s customary preparation routine and playing rhythm were clearly suffering. In yet another sign of how rapidly the times were changing, with ten former National Open champions in the field, this was the first to be televised nationally by NBC as well as the first where fairways were roped off to keep fans in control and out of the cameras’ view. Most lenses and eyes were trained on the reigning champion, but after a promising 70-71 start the Hawk struggled to a sixth-place finish and confided to Valerie that he didn’t know how many more U.S. Open efforts he could stomach. Though it was of no consolation whatsoever, Sam finished tied for eleventh place.
After his deeply satisfying victory over Ben at Augusta that spring, in fact, Sam’s own competitive edge also appeared to dull rapidly. He entered just six more events that year and won only once—the unofficial Palm Beach Round Robin—and was a distant twenty-sixth on the money list, his worst showing in nearly two decades. “To be perfectly honest,” he explained years later, “I was really questioning at that moment whether to keep playing tournaments or cut back the way Ben did. We weren’t spring chickens, both of us forty-two and counting. I had good deals with the Boca Raton Club and the Greenbrier that provided a nice income. It wasn’t the money that kept me coming back, no sir. It was that missing Open. The fact that Ben came out for just three events in 1955 kind of gave me some added motivation.”
Following a winter of steady practice in Boca Raton before the 1955 season, Sam increased his daily exercise regime and entered twenty-one events, winning three and climbing back to seventh on the money list, a year highlighted by his fifth Greensboro Open title and a respectable third just a week later at the Masters, only a stroke behind Ben, the runner-up. Even as Cary Middlecoff lapped the field by seven strokes, Sam and Ben commanded the lion’s share of attention, drawing record-breaking galleries.
Two months later, Sam launched a quiet assault on the fifty-fifth U.S. Open at San Francisco’s beautiful Olympic Club, and one of the most formidable fields ever. Known for his quick Open starts, he commenced with an uncharacteristic 79 but fought his way back in round two with a brilliant 69 that left him just four off the lead held by Tommy Bolt and Harvie Ward, the sensational amateur out of North Carolina. “This place isn’t a golf course,” Sam quipped to a reporter following his impressive comeback. “It’s a beautiful graveyard by the sea.” His third-round 70 nudged him into second place behind former champion Julius Boros.
Yet once again, though, he was destined to be a forgotten man in the mist at Olympic, once more overshadowed by Ben and an unknown professional from Davenport, Iowa, who tied him with an eight-foot birdie putt on the final hole, forcing a playoff Ben dreaded more than anything.
At thirty-three, Jack Fleck was a journeyman pro who’d promised his wife that after this final shot he would give up a life on tour that had produced largely only frustration. A gangly, quiet fellow who listed a driving range back home among his primary club affiliations, he’d made his best finish on tour that year in Baton Rouge, an invisible tenth place, and unlike every other professional in the field he didn’t have an equipment deal of any kind. On the other hand, the player he admired had given him a special gift—the second set of Hogan clubs ever used in competition.
Several weeks before at the Colonial, figuring the worst that could happen was simply a snub by his hero, Fleck brazenly showed up at the Hogan factory on West Pafford and introduced himself to the boss, explaining this was his do-or-die season. Impressed with his guts and honesty, Hogan gave him one of the first newly retooled sets of irons and woods and refused to take a penny. The only other set of Hogan clubs in play at Olympic that week was used by their maker.
The cruel and indifferent gods of the game decided that Fleck would deny his benefactor a record fifth U.S. Open. The Ben disciple, who prayed all week and claimed that an angel visited him while he was shaving at the modest El Camino Motel, went on to beat Ben in what is broadly considered golf’s greatest upset. When Fleck, who looked shell-shocked, tapped in his final putt to win their playoff by three strokes, Ben Hogan came forward amid a sea of clicking cameras, removed his flat linen cap and shook hands with this sweet-natured man who would soon fade back into obscurity, playfully fanning his red-hot Bulls Eye putter. Later, at the awards presentation, with his face washed and his graying hair neatly combed, Ben’s voice cracked when he said, “I’m through with competitive golf. I came here with the idea of trying to win. I worked harder, I think, than ever before in my life.” He explained that he could no longer put Valerie through this grinding ordeal but left the door slightly ajar for another U.S. Open down the road.
“From now on,” he added, “I’m a weekend golfer. I want to play for the pleasure of it because I want to be around the fellows and I want to be around golf.”
It was his long-awaited retirement announcement. And with that he vanished.
“He’ll be back,” declared Tommy Bolt, disappointed at finishing third, just out of the playoff. “Ben needs this the way most of us need air to breathe.”
For his part, Sam once again made a hash of the critical final round, spoiling an otherwise spectacular championship with a costly final 74. A 69 would have placed him in the playoff with Fleck and Hogan, and as his biographer Al Barkow laments, “What a playoff that would have been.”
Three weeks later, two days before Ben’s forty-third birthday, Life magazine’s cover pictured him mid-swing under the bold headline “Ben Hogan Tells His Secret,” and promised that inside the game’s most mythic star “finally reveals the mysterious maneuver that made him a champion.”
In fact, there was nothing remotely mysterious about it. As collaborator Herb
Wind noted in the article and stressed decades later, the slight cupping of his left wrist at the top of the backswing was a technique that had been used since the days of Old Tom Morris and, accompanied by the weaker grip first shown to him by Henry Picard, was simply meant to open the clubface and thus “make it impossible” to close at impact and produce a “lethal hook.” This revelation was illustrated by a nine-shot, freeze-frame sequence of the star’s legendary swing. The public ate it up, with copies vanishing from the newsstands in record time.
Though the precise terms were never disclosed, Ben was reportedly paid $50,000 for this modest exegesis, the happy result of his tough negotiations with Henry Luce that led to his collaboration with Wind on Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf, the first serialized excerpts of which appeared in the pages of Sports Illustrated beginning in March 1957. The book appeared soon after and became an immediate best-seller.
That same year Marvin Leonard purchased two hundred rolling oak-shaded acres a mile or two from where Ben and Valerie Hogan were building a house in a prestigious neighborhood just off Roaring Springs Road in west Fort Worth. Robert Trent Jones was hired to design a golf course at this club Leonard planned to call Shady Oaks, his own private getaway from the more public Colonial.
To no one’s surprise, Ben was the first member, and he also drove Jones crazy by constantly tinkering with his layout. Upon completion, Shady Oaks’s beautiful clubhouse featured a large round table by the large window in the men’s grill, where Ben and his closest friends and invited guests would have lunch together every day, five days a week, for the next thirty-seven years.
After the high drama at Olympic, Ben’s next appearance would be at the centerpiece of events that would reshape the landscape of golf. Naturally, it involved his old friend and rival, Byron Nelson.
While touring the Northwest doing a charity exhibition in late 1952, purely at the suggestion of Eddie Lowery, Byron showed up at the National Amateur in Seattle to follow a promising young player named Kenny Venturi, whose father was the starter at San Francisco’s public Harding Park course. After the polite, soft-spoken Venturi was eliminated in the first round of match play, the cattle rancher proposed that they play a round at the San Francisco Golf Club, where the youngster fired 66, and expected the legend to praise his game. Instead, Byron told him, “Kenny, Eddie said he wanted me to work with you, and if you’re not busy tomorrow, you come out early because we’ve got six things to work on right away.”
“But Byron had a way of putting things across like a Sunday school teacher,” Venturi remembered. “Everything he said had a ring of absolute sincerity and truth. Naturally I agreed. It was one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Not only did I make friends with the finest gentleman golf ever produced, but I found a teacher who understood the golf swing better than anyone ever had. He also stressed how important it was to be the best you could be in anything you chose to do. The way you handled yourself in this world, and what you left behind, was really what mattered to Byron Nelson. That impressed me from the beginning.”
In 1956, on the eve of Bing Crosby’s Clambake at Pebble Beach, not long after the Seminole Golf Club made Ben Hogan an honorary member, Byron and Louise turned up at a cocktail party thrown by George Coleman at his home on the Peninsula, where another guest was his longtime friend Eddie Lowery, who rose to fame as Francis Ouimet’s hustling caddie and later made a fortune with the most successful Lincoln-Mercury dealership west of the Mississippi, a three-showroom extravaganza that not only allowed him to invest in the upstart Hogan Golf Company but also to employ both young Venturi and Harvie Ward as floating salesmen, enabling them to compete on the national amateur stage.
In 1948, Edward Harvie Ward from tiny Tarboro, North Carolina, had knocked off an overconfident Frank Stranahan in the North and South Amateur Championship in Pinehurst, where he was hoisted onto the shoulders of his jubilant and rowdy Zeta Psi brothers from Chapel Hill, prompting an irked Stranahan to tell him, “If you couldn’t putt, you’d be just another pretty fraternity boy.” After his new boss Lowery arranged for him to begin working with Byron, he went on to win the British Amateur at Prestwick in 1952, beating Frank Stranahan six-and-five in the scheduled 36-hole final. Known for his brilliant touch with a hickory-shafted putter he’d found in the locker room of his father’s golf club back home, and a playing style that was as silky as the cashmere sweaters he liked to wear, Ward demolished Bill Hyndman nine-and-eight in 1955 to capture the first of his consecutive U.S. Amateur titles. Many considered him the most promising golfer in the country—possibly the next Hogan, as one national magazine put it.
Complicating matters for Lowery and both his protégés that winter evening, however, was a cancer growing inside amateur golf. This stemmed from a state and federal investigation that commenced following a widely publicized fixing scheme at New York’s Deepdale Golf Club, where a pair of artful sandbaggers had waltzed off with thousands of dollars in the annual big-money Calcutta. Within weeks, while the USGA debated what to do behind closed doors, the scandal spread like wildfire. High-rollers everywhere suddenly found themselves being chased by state and federal tax authorities, especially those who spent lavish amounts on golf to entertain clients or woo customers and claimed those costs as deductions. (The tax code was maddeningly fuzzy on these matters.) Inevitably, Eddie Lowery, who didn’t hide his liberal spending habits in golf and was underwriting the careers of Venturi and Ward, soon fell under suspicion in California.
Though certain ultra-private clubs like Seminole chose to simply ignore the growing controversy and still held their big-money games, among those who were seriously worried about appearances was Bing Crosby, who canceled his tournament’s popular Calcutta in 1956, leaving Lowery—a guy who loved to make a bet—looking for a little action to fill the void.
Accounts vary on how one of the greatest competitive four-ball matches of all time came together. Byron remembered that not long after everyone sat down for dinner, Lowery and Coleman fell into a gentleman’s friendly debate over Eddie’s contention that his employees Ward and Venturi could beat anybody in golf.
“Anybody?” Coleman asked.
“Yes,” said Lowery. “Anybody.”
“Including pros?”
“Even pros.”
Byron remembered that Coleman looked Eddie straight in the eye and said, “In that case, I’ll take Nelson and Hogan.”
This both surprised and pleased Byron—a match with his oldest rival against two of his own protégés.
“I’ll do it if Ben will,” he told them.
“What do you want to bet?” Coleman asked the car dealer.
“Five thousand,” Lowery suggested. Coleman revised it downward to fifty dollars.
They phoned Ben at Bing’s house and he agreed to skip a practice round at Pebble Beach and meet a few miles away at the Cypress Point Club. But he booked a tee time at Pebble anyway, purely as a diversionary tactic. According to Venturi, he didn’t want the press or public to know that he and Byron were playing against amateurs, though Byron recalled that several hundred spectators caught wind of it and showed up to watch. Venturi’s memory aligned with his mentor’s, though Harvie recalled only a small cluster of folks at the start—Cypress members and friends of all four men. Whatever the truth of the matter, “The bet was down to just five or ten dollars,” Byron said later, “far more about pride than money.” Moreover, both Lowery and Coleman played along.
After Venturi rolled in a twelve-foot birdie putt on the final hole to potentially tie the match, Byron supposedly said, “Knock it in and we win, Ben.” In the popular mythology surrounding the event his partner reportedly studied his final putt and mumbled, “I’m not about to be tied by a couple damn amateurs in front of all these people,” though Ben’s closest friends all dismissed this as totally out of character. Byron didn’t hear this remark, though Ward and Venturi later recalled it. In his re-creation of this legendary match, writer Mark Frost relates that hundreds of
fans hurried out to watch as it went along, culminating in a gallery worthy of a major championship at the final green, Ben’s worst nightmare. Whatever the precise facts, the more important detail is that he took scant time to size up his slightly uphill ten-foot putt and, using a putter borrowed from the club pro shop, knock it into the heart of the cup for the winning birdie.
Cumulatively, the players were twenty-six under par, an extraordinary total that included twenty-seven birdies and an eagle. Just three holes were halved with pars. Ben tied his own course record at Cypress Point with a stunning 65; Byron had 68. Venturi and Ward finished with 69 and 70, respectively. And when they took out their wallets to pay off their wager, whatever it was, the Texans waved them away. One account has Coleman and Lowery canceling the bet on the spot.
Within twenty-four hours, the story was already spreading like an urban myth through the shops and watering holes on the Monterey Peninsula, and out into the wider world. The principals briefly considered a follow-up match, but it never evolved. Ben, according to Byron and Harvie, was uninterested.
“Ben and I talked about it, off and on, for several years,” Venturi says. “Coming when it did, at the start of my playing career and the end of his, what happened at Cypress Point was deeply meaningful to us both. People have never stopped asking me about it. Whatever else can be said, I don’t think the world will see anything quite like that again.”
Wondrous as it was, the postscript to this otherworldly four-ball was merely the opening act of a much larger drama involving all four players, one that would force a sea change in America’s perception of the game.
Weeks later, at the first Masters ever televised, in his second appearance there, Venturi took the first-round lead and established a new amateur record with a 66. The next day, playing with three-time champion Jimmy Demaret, he shot 69 to equal his mentor’s record for the lowest score through thirty-six holes, and Byron was the first to congratulate him. Despite heavy winds that caused him to shoot 75 on Saturday, Venturi entered the final round with a four-stroke lead—instantly evoking fond memories of Billy Joe Patton.