Hogan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A small army of people helped with this book. The generals in the army were Jim Donovan, president of Jim Donovan Literary in Dallas; Mike Towle and Lawrence Stone of Rutledge Hill Press; and my family—Cheryl, Clay, and John.

Author John Strawn, Texas Golf Hall of Fame curator Frances Trimble, and historians Peter Bown, Dan Greenwood, and Mike Brown dropped whatever they were doing when I called for help and advice, and I am extremely grateful to them.

Invaluable medical insights were provided by Dr. Fran Pirozzolo, Dr. Cheryl Sampson, Dr. Craig Farnsworth, Dr. Rob Hillery, Dr. Greg Pearl, Dr. Rob Rutledge, and Sylvia Foladare.

Among the golf professionals whose help and insight I depended on were Byron Nelson, Jack Nicklaus, Jay Hebert, Herman Keiser, Jackson Bradley, Henry Picard, Jack Burke Jr., Sam Snead, Jack Fleck, Don January, Ken Venturi, Freddie Hawkins, Frank Wharton, Hal Underwood, Tod Menefee, Shawn Humphries, Gilbert Freeman, Jimmy Gauntt, Larry Box, Mike Morrow, and Dan Strimple.

David Hueber, Gene Sheeley, Elgin Berry, Jerry Ostrey, and Charles Harris of the Ben Hogan Company explained Hogan the businessman, eloquently and affectionately.

Guy Yocom of Golf Digest, whose knowledge of Hogan is unsurpassed, was wonderfully open with his opinions and information. Jim Frank and Mike Purkey of Golf magazine helped get me started—and finished. Herbert Warren Wind, the Shakespeare of golf writers, was kind and helpful as usual. Jim Apfelbaum, the Sam Levenson of golf writers, spent an entire day finding and reading Follow the Sun star Glenn Ford’s autobiography. It turned out to be about gardening. Rare golf book dealer Dick Donovan ferreted out facts I would never have found on my own.

I also appreciate the help of Robert Atkinson Jr., Marte Bassi, Troy Baxter, Tom W. Blake, Jon Bradley, Hal Brewer, Walter Buenger, John Capers, Nancy Castiglione, Bill Cowan, Mike Daniels, Burt Darden, John David, John Derr, Lester Epps, Bill Gray, Gaylen and Sally Groce, Merle Hancock, Johnny Henry, Francisca Hernandez, Frances Hirsh, Blake Hodges, Carolyn Holden, Clem Jensen, David Johnson, Julie Ketterer, Joy Lynn King, Chuck Kocsis, Mike Kondrat, Mary Margaret Lashbrook Kowalski, Christy Krames, Bo Links, Mike and Mary Long, Margaret Maves, Janet Maynard, Chris Millard, Ed Moughon, Tim Murphy, Barbara K. Ordway, Tom Otteson, David Parker, Russ Pate, James Peebles, Ann Peeler, Steve Pike, Jim Reed, Matty Reed, Bob Rickey, Dennis Roberson, Judy Ross, John H. Sampson, Robert and Ann Sampson, Bill Sebelin, Tom Steinhardt, Carlton Stowers, Jerre Todd, Peter Walsh, and Bob William.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

INTRODUCTION

Ben Hogan hit golf balls until his hands bled. How many hundreds of times did I hear that when I was a kid?

The first time I heard it must have been at the overgrazed public course a few miles from our house. One of the regulars, Ed Romito or Bernie Washko or Jim Lacina, or the pro, Bill Shoaf, would spot me as I walked from the rock-strewn practice range to the putting green, a putter in one hand, a Mr. Frosty root beer in the other, and three or four of my best balls in my back pocket. They knew I was mesmerized by golf.

They all smoked. You know, Ed or Bernie or Jim or Bill would say, exhaling blue clouds, Hogan used to hit balls until his hands bled.

The Christlike image of bleeding hands on a golf club hit me and stuck, a fly on the mental flypaper of a fourteen-year-old boy. What manner of man or madman or masochist or golf messiah would torture himself like that? Should golf be practiced until it hurt? I began to believe it should. Blood seeped from my knuckles as I hit more and more balls—not really such a big deal, as I bleed easily. But I got the attitude, too. I became (I thought) cold, implacable, unflappable, a golf-ball-hitting machine. Hogan still hits the ball better than anyone else in the world, the four wise men told me, clicking shut their Zippos, blowing their smoke. But he can’t putt. I couldn’t either.

Yesterday, twenty-nine years later, I hit balls with Ben Hogan’s clubs. It felt like clacking out a paragraph on Hemingway’s typewriter—a delicious, guilty, and totally unauthorized pleasure. Strange sticks, too. The rough-textured cord grips are significantly oversized and turned slightly counter-clockwise. The heads are very heavy, with two-degree flat lies that remind you of hockey sticks. The twelve custom-made putters he was trying the last time he played or practiced all have the length, lie, and grip of his six-iron, and all have lead tape, for added weight, under the grips. The most unusual of the putters has little sighting devices epoxied to the top of the offset brass blade, like the eye pods on a hammerhead shark. From the crest of the hill on the eighth fairway at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, I hit Ben Hogan’s one-iron and his black, wooden three-wood, trying to imitate his flat, ferocious slash and the gentle left-to-right curvature of his shots. Then I stabbed a few putts with one of his weird putters. Seven hundred yards away, Hogan sat in his customary chair by the window in the Men’s Grill, a cold, implacable, unflappable old man eating lunch.

Purists, the golf world’s most influential subset, have long regarded Hogan with an almost religious awe. Here was a man who let his clubs do his talking. His clothes and equipment were uncluttered by logos, his swing a work of art. Check the office walls of Ben Crenshaw, Jack Burke Jr., or any of a thousand other defenders of the traditional game of golf, and you will find the same photograph: Hogan in a mythic pose, following through after drilling a one-iron shot to the final green at the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion. He was in terrific pain at that moment, and you can almost make out the bandages on his legs. Some visitors to Shady Oaks watch him eat while pretending not to, like lonely boys in the high school cafeteria, stealing glances while the homecoming queen nibbles her baloney and cheese. But that’s as close as you get because the first rule for a guest at Shady Oaks is to leave Mr. Hogan the hell alone.

Few sports figures have engendered this reverential awe, a respect so heightened we call it the Hogan mystique. His myth derives from far more than mere popularity. The milestones in his life—his failure, his triumph, the accident that nearly killed him, the comeback, and his Secret—resonate like the stations of the cross. Hogan’s fierceness overlaid a great dignity and an instinctive nobility, similar to an unlikely near-contemporary, Indian religious leader Mahatma Gandhi. Before he made the movie of Gandhi’s life, Sir Richard Attenborough was asked to consider using a point of light instead of an actor to represent Gandhi. That’s the way Hogan’s devotees think of him, as a symbol of perfection rather than a man, his commitment to golf pure and undefiled. And to hell with any of that feet of clay stuff.

Yet those whose interest wants more depth and less adulation feel unrequited and slightly troubled by the standard Hogan epic. Anyone who has thought at all about Hogan knows something is missing. While some things about him are known absolutely—he hit balls until his hands bled—so little is really comprehended. The standard golf library won’t solve the mystery. There are thirty-six titles by or about Hogan’s contemporary, Sam Snead, and thirty on Bobby Jones, who retired from competition in 1930, but there are just five Hogan-related books, and two of them are instructionals written by the man himself: Power Golf (1948) and Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (1957). The Jack Nicklaus section contains forty-five volumes and the Arnold Palmer shelf bears forty-six. Hogan’s life is memorialized in two protective, sketchy biographies, the more recent written almost twenty years ago. A later coffee table book, The Hogan Mystique, polishes the myth rather than looking at the man.

Some of the men who presumably knew him best remain baffled by him to this day. Henry Picard, a contemporary on the tour, was puzzled when Hogan dedicated his first book to him. Picard is one of my best friends in professional golf, Hogan wrote. We weren’t at all close then or now, Picard says. Ben and I hardly know each other, even today. Writer and golf historian Herbert Warren Wind worked with Hogan extensively on Five Lessons, which was an immediate and enduring bestseller. But he claims no insights into his collaborator, other than to observe, He was a very odd man. Gene Gregston, author of Hogan: The Man Who Played for Glory (1978), says that, as the golf writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from 1948 to 1958, he knew Hogan very well, but the biographer and his subject had not spoken for years before the book was published, did not do so during the writing of it, nor have they since. No, Hogan didn’t cooperate, Gregston says tightly. No, don’t tell him hello for me.

Hogan picked apart everything that was written about him and found almost all of it inaccurate. For a time he took a perverse pleasure in telling writers in blunt terms how stupidly wrong they were. Later he wouldn’t bother to correct the mistakes, even the basic and often-repeated ones such as where he was born, his middle name, and who his friends were. I can’t say anything, he complained privately. Everything I say gets blown up. He spoke so infrequently with writers or for the camera that an interview with him became an event. There was the Time magazine cover in 1949, the Golf Digest feature in 1970, Ken Venturi throwing home run pitches in a CBS interview in 1983, the Golf magazine Q and A in 1987, and the truncated chat with ESPN in 1991. He would answer questions carefully, politely, and quietly, wrote Pat Ward-Thomas of the London Guardian of a talk they had in 1965, but always with a full stop at the end, as if wary of the ebb and flow of ordinary conversation.

He was as mysterious to his colleagues on the tour as he was to the press. Hogan and I played lots of practice rounds together, says Freddie Hawkins, a pro from Illinois who joined the tour in 1947. I knew him as well as anyone. But I didn’t really know him. Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Shelley Mayfield, Gus Moreland, and practically everyone else he competed with tells you the same thing: Knew him. Didn’t really know him.

But what Hogan might anyone claim to know? From a distance his life looks like a patchwork quilt, with some matching or complementary squares and others that clash and contradict. In one patch he is a bewildered nine-year-old boy standing nearby as his father shoots and kills himself. In another he is a kid with a downturned mouth looking for an excuse to punch another paperboy or caddie or schoolmate. In a third he rides down Broadway in flurries of ticker tape, perched above the back seat of a big black Chrysler convertible, America’s conquering hero. That little bastard, was about the nicest thing a lot of people had to say about him. Finest gentleman I ever knew, said others. Hollywood made a movie of his life, a compliment not bestowed on Churchill, Eisenhower, or Arnold Palmer. But the movie and the parade were expressions of admiration and respect, not of love and affection. How could you love a man who made it plain he didn’t give a shit what you thought of him?

"I could [sic] care less, he said in 1970 about his reputation as a cold, machinelike person. I get along with everybody I know. . . . Life’s too short for me to go around explaining myself. A lot of people don’t understand modesty. Not everybody wants publicity, you know." But by daring to become great at a game, Hogan exchanged his natural right to privacy for a certain amount of wealth and notoriety, a deal with the devil he struggled with all his life.

He had always been secretive. Nelson, who practically grew up with him, didn’t know the tragic circumstances of the death of Hogan’s father until he read about it in a book in 1992. Hogan sometimes intentionally misled writers and the curious, and made a fetish of his secrets and a publicity bonanza out of his secret—the Secret—the key to perfect ball-striking.

I’ve always had the feeling he was laughing at us, Golf magazine editor Jim Frank says.

I think he secretly enjoyed exploiting his legend, agrees Guy Yocom of Golf Digest. " ‘I try to hit it on the third groove.’ He couldn’t have been serious."

The widely held presumption that he was infallible on anything related to golf brought out an amused cynicism in him. An example of what former Hogan Company president David Hueber calls managing the mystique occurred when then-PGA tour commissioner Deane Beman sat in the visitor’s chair in front of Hogan’s desk, and the talk turned to how much farther the modern golf ball flies compared to the old one. Hogan’s lower lip came up. You know, if I were playing today, I’d play Surlyn.

Beman’s mouth opened. Surlyn is a hard plastic golf-ball-cover material. Virtually all serious players use balata, a softer, rubberlike compound.

Why, Mr. Hogan, why would you use Surlyn? Beman asked.

Pause.

Because it’s better.

But why is it better? Beman pleaded.

Longer pause.

I’m not telling.

Obfuscation in all things, even trivial ones. Many golf fans are surprised to learn that I learned to play golf left-handed when I first took up the game, Hogan wrote in 1948 in Power Golf. I changed over when I was a small boy. The only clubs I could get were right-handed. Moreover, most of the fellows I played with then were very convincing in telling me that left-handers never made good golfers. At that age I was gullible enough to believe them and to make the change, but I wouldn’t now.

So, an interviewer asked him in 1987, you were left-handed?

Hogan replied, No, that’s one of those things that’s always been written, but it’s an absolute myth. The truth is, the first golf club I owned was an old left-handed, wooden-shafted, rib-faced mashie. His explanations were often meant to mystify.

Myths and undenied misinformation were accepted as fact. He didn’t care. And he didn’t turn pro when he was nineteen, as he had always allowed us to believe. He was seventeen. The middle name is Ben, not Benjamin, and he was born in Stephenville, Texas, not Dublin, Texas. He was an excellent amateur golfer and at least pretty good as a young pro, not the duck-hooking dud as he was usually portrayed. He did not adore his British Open experience or Augusta National. Jimmy Demaret was supposed to be his great friend; he wasn’t.

If you don’t mind waiting, you can get his autograph, although he might require the obviously mercenary to make a donation to the SPCA in lieu of payment. Although he seemed incredibly stoic, when under stress he showed a bizarre nervous habit: repeated grunting, as if he couldn’t get his throat cleared. He didn’t react to poorly hit shots, but mis-clubs made him furious. He never walked off yardages and didn’t care where the 150-yard markers were.

He never fully recovered from the accident that almost killed him in 1949. Pain enveloped him like a second skin for more than half his life. He abhorred cheapening his name, but he didn’t blow off every endorsement opportunity. He pitched Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, coffee (for the Pan American Coffee Bureau), Toro lawn mowers, Timex watches, MacGregor clubs, Slazenger balls, and, appropriately for one of the world’s foremost chain smokers, cigarettes: I’ve been a Chesterfield smoker for seven years. I know they’re best for me. Try them yourself, said a 1953 print ad, quoting Ben Hogan, World’s Greatest Golfer.

Opposites attracted him. The grim, gray man’s partner in team competitions was golf’s most garishly dressed extrovert, Sunny Jim Demaret. His favorite writer was a frequently hilarious smart aleck and Fort Worth homeboy named Dan Jenkins. He liked a fistfight and he liked to dance. He attended church for much of his life, but what Ben Hogan believed in most was Ben Hogan. He swore like a marine—or like a typical golf pro—and in his later years drank like a sailor, yet he never gave offense and was in fact obsessed with correctness in comportment, clothing, and speech. At times Hogan was the most polite man you ever met, but at others one of the world’s greatest putdown artists.

You might as well be doing calisthenics, he told a competitor who bragged about how hard he had been practicing.

Nick Faldo asked him for the secret to winning the U.S. Open. Shoot the lowest score, Hogan said.

Hi, Mr. Hogan! I read your book—but it didn’t help me much, a smiling stranger said in the dining room at Colonial, his right hand extended. Better read it again, Hogan said, ignoring the hand and continuing his slow, limping walk to his table.

Opposites: He was both rude and polite, desperately poor and quite wealthy, and prouder of having been poor than of his money. His beautiful, ten-tooth smile helped make him the most photogenic athlete around, but a look into his opaque gray blue eyes made even the strongest men uneasy. He failed miserably and repeatedly, then succeeded beyond imagining. No public person since Greta Garbo was more private. That of course only increased the clamor for his time, his attention, or his autograph. He was short with fans and the press—especially anyone with a camera—yet late in life he had become quite affable. After decades of hearing our questions and not answering them, he knew us better than we knew him.

If getting a handle on how the various Hogans were stitched together is a puzzle, the immediate problem is in finding someone to solve the mystery. Hogan will not explain himself and never has, as the paucity of books about him and interviews with him proves. And now it is too late. Age has caused the memories to fly away one at a time or in little groups, like birds leaving a power line. I don’t remember, I don’t remember, he says when cornered by the inquisitive.

Perhaps psychology provides the common thread. Losing his father like he did must have had a tremendous impact, says Dallas-based counselor Sylvia Foladare, who often treats the survivors of suicide. [In general] If the child doesn’t have a support system, there’s a loss of the capacity for intimacy and trust. There’s increased detachment and bitterness. The child often becomes a loner. A lot of them I see become workaholics, much like the overachieving children of alcoholics. There’s usually a lot of guilt, too, especially for children. . . . And when the means of accomplishment goes away, the survivors of suicide often turn to drugs or alcohol.

All of this might apply in Hogan’s case in varying degrees, but a single event does not explain a life, certainly not Hogan’s. A single psychologist may be inadequate to explain the complex web of his mind and emotions. Like Ted Williams, the moody, perfectionistic baseball player to whom he was often compared, Hogan had an active relationship with an alter ego. Williams had silent conversations with an invisible friend named Teddy Ballgame. Hogan often referred unashamedly to the little man on his shoulder he called Hennie Bogan. Both were lonely boys with weak or absent fathers. The boys’ imaginary playmates nagged them to work harder, accomplish more, practice longer. Both turned pro before they were old enough to vote. Neither could abide a stupid question from a writer. And each worked harder at his respective sport than anyone else before or since.

Batting practice was nothing new in baseball, of course, but Hogan virtually invented practice in golf. Was his incessant drilling a symptom of something else? Maybe. In his book Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, Steven Levenkron writes, These repeated activities, or rituals, are actually self-soothing devices used to fill an emotional emptiness caused by underparenting or impaired receptivity to parenting in early childhood. What is the magic of repetition? Repetition brings familiarity, and familiarity is the opposite of the unknown.

Hogan seems to fill the obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior bill in a variety of ways, especially in his disconnection from others and his preoccupation with his rituals. As for the cause, no one is sure if nature or nurture is to blame.

Another aspect of Hogan’s behavior might take it out of the realm of OCD. The actions of the compulsive hand washer or dieter or worker or shopper or underwear changer are ultimately pointless, but Hogan’s behavior was anything but that. His main rituals were purposeful. No indecisive wretch in the throes of a disorder ever had Hogan’s bulletproof confidence. His perfection of the world’s least perfectible game was not a disease; it was a triumph. His single-mindedness turned the negatives of his past into a future filled with glory. Inquiry into how he did it has been a cottage industry for years, but unfortunately, it leads right back to where you started.

Why did you practice so much? he was asked in his TV interviews in ’83 and ’91.

I had to. My swing was so bad.

Is that all?

No, he allowed. I loved it.

Why he loved the brain- and back-numbing torture of nonstop drill he does not say. Was practice a shield against his fear of failure that was the same as his fear of the past? If he hit five hundred balls, was he five hundred steps closer to a future faultlessness? Was the practice tee an oasis of control in a world of chaos? Hogan does not say.

I have baseball players come up to me in the middle of a game and tell me about the anger they have toward their fathers, says neurologist and sports psychologist Dr. Fran Pirozzolo, who has devoted a good chunk of his life to the study of the Hogan psyche. "I think Hogan felt the same way. Everything he did was a response to the loss of his father: his mistrust of any male; his need to achieve; his becoming this distrustful, cynical semanticizer. I think you could give him ten U.S. Open trophies and he would be the same way.

On the other hand, his story was tremendously positive. He was a survivor. The adversity he faced led directly to his achievement. And he always took the high road.

Perhaps no one aspect of