WITH BYRON NELSON NOW a full-time rancher, Sam Snead approached 1947 believing that only Ben Hogan stood between him and domination of the PGA Tour. Sam had already concluded that Ben was the premier ball striker of their day and perhaps all time. “Nobody was ever better at eliminating mistakes from a golf swing than Hogan, and knowing exactly which shot to hit when it was needed,” he once said. “That’s what set him apart from the rest. He intimidated the pants off most of the other guys out there because he never gave up ground. But he brought out the best in me. My record shows that. Anytime I played head to head with Ben, why, I felt there was something special on it.”
Ironically, Ben told friends he felt Sam was the premier ball striker of all time, lacking only in the decision-making department. “If I’d caddied for Sam,” he once told friends at Shady Oaks, “no one else would have been in the record book.”
Coming off a season-ending win at the Miami Open in early December, Sam believed he’d finally worked things out with a balky putting stroke that had cost him half a dozen tournaments that year alone. But his optimism proved premature. At the start of the ’47 season in Los Angeles, a pair of 69s broke the event’s thirty-six-hole scoring mark but an old nemesis suddenly returned, the jerky putting stroke he labeled “the yips,” producing one of the largest scoring free falls in years. “I broke down completely.… The yips took me then and tore me apart,” he recounts in The Education of a Golfer. “The rest of my game was never better but on the carpet I was a zombie. Over the ball, I felt like someone else’s hands held the putter. All control was gone. No such thing as a straight line to any cup existed.” He finished tied twenty-fifth in a tournament he’d won just two years before.
A week later in the relatively cloistered privacy of the Monterey Peninsula, he desperately experimented with a variety of grips and techniques on putts: cross-handed, reverse grips, stiff-armed, even putting one-handed as Joe Turnesa suggested. He saw slight improvement but finished third in the Crosby Clambake and was happy to climb aboard another Constellation for a flight to Africa for a series of exhibition matches against the gnomish and knickered Arthur D’Arcy “Bobby” Locke, who’d tied for second in the Open Sam, won at St. Andrews, and brassily proposed a $10,000 challenge match over a series of courses on his home turf. Fred Corcoran was happy to oblige, and the South African Tourism Board and a diamond company put up the funds.
After their first nine holes at Locke’s home club near Johannesburg, Sam had his host five down. “I thought I’d run him right out of Africa,” he remembered, “but then he went to work, and after thirty-six holes he had me eight down with seven holes to play.”
It was the height of irony, perhaps, that the particular genius of Old Baggy Pants—as Sam liked to call him—was Locke’s brilliant and wildly unconventional putting stroke, which required him to grip his putter high and lightly and take the putter head back sharply on the inside path, then hood the face at impact, producing a distinctive “hooking” spin on the putt, a technique he claimed he’d picked up from a dipsomaniacal Englishman while serving in the South African Air Force in Egypt during the war. In doing so, Locke violated every commonly accepted principle of putting. He had a closed stance, “swayed like a Bloomer Girl” instead of staying still, and claimed to be able to hook or, conversely, fade any putt into the hole by manipulating the putter head with his hands, meant to neutralize the effect of the grainy Bermuda greens of the warm-weather courses where he grew up playing. Moreover, he could read a green superbly, and went on to capture four Open Championships of his own. And he certainly made a true believer out of Sam, whom he blitzed in twelve of their sixteen matches over three weeks. At the Bulawayo Club in Rhodesia, a large gray monkey sauntered onto the green and leaned against the flagstick as Sam struck a short approach shot. “Here, buster,” the Slammer quipped, trying to hand him his putter, “you can do better than me.”
Before they parted company, the genial Locke asked his victim if he thought he might make some money on the American tour. “With that putter of yours,” Sam said with his usual candor, “you could get rich.” In his estimation, the only putter equal to him was Ben Hogan and his sidekick Demaret.
Sam’s frank appraisal led to unexpected grief back home when, within weeks, Locke was winning tournaments right and left on American soil, pocketing more than $27,000 with his unconventional putting stroke during his first five months in America. Despite his late start in 1947, he finished in second place on the PGA money list behind Demaret, and in the fifty-nine events he played over the next two and a half years, he won eleven times and finished in the top three in more than half of the other events, leaving his American competitors increasingly resentful. In 1949, ostensibly because of his alleged failure to fulfill several playing commitments, the tour took the unusual step of banning Locke from the American circuit. Claude Harmon, the Winged Foot pro and ’48 Masters champion, came closest to identifying the real motivation when he candidly told an Augusta reporter, “Locke was simply too good. They had to ban him.” Not until 1951 did the tour yield to complaints of unfairness in the American press and rescind the decision. But by this point the colorful Locke, who favored long-sleeve shirts and four-in-hand ties, had collected two Open titles en route to seventy-two international career wins that established him as the world’s first truly international golf star, and certainly the patriarch of a distinguished line of South Africans from Gary Player to Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, among others.
Sam’s African adventure only deepened his gloom and marked the beginning of a classic “dark night of the soul” in which he actually stopped competing for several months. He went hunting and fishing, dug up boulders in the new pasture, and worked in the barn at the handsome new home, Old Snead Links, that he and Audrey built in a lovely vale just south of the village of Hot Springs. “I was a walking nervous breakdown,” he said. “Hanging up my clubs, I swore I’d never play like a dog in public again.… Six years of good putting during which I’d won forty tournaments followed by three years of yips made no sense. Off by myself on the Old White Course at the Greenbrier, I started experimenting all over again.”
Over the next three months, he ventured out to play in just one event, the Masters, where Byron Nelson, to nobody’s particular surprise, came out of retirement to finish in a tie for second with his former pupil, Frank Stranahan. Demaret claimed the title with a sensational seven-under total, and Sam finished with a wretched tie for twenty-second place. A week before the U.S. Open, however, he registered modest improvement at the National Capital Open in Washington, a tie for fourth, using a heavier blade putter with no offset, making several key adjustments that included a “comfortable wider stance” over the ball, more arm motion to improve his smoothness and a takeaway that emphasized keeping the putter low and encouraged the left hand to “lead” through the putt—a technique more reminiscent of Ben Hogan’s than Bobby Locke’s.
As the national championship commenced at the relatively short and benign St. Louis Country Club in Clayton, Missouri, he was rolling the ball noticeably better, opening with a workmanlike one-over 72 and trailing a group of largely unknown players except for Locke at 68 and Hogan at 70. The book on Sam was that in this event he started like a thoroughbred but finished like a nag, as symbolized by his infamous Spring Mill disaster and a final-round collapse in 1940 when he led going into the final round at Canterbury and could have won with a mere 72. Instead he produced the worst concluding round of his Open career, a horrific 81 that seemed to validate his Open jinx in many minds, worst of all his own.
This time, however, Sam played like a champion to the seventy-second hole and beyond. With Hogan and Locke having blown their chances by ballooning to 75 and 74 respectively in the second round, he cobbled together three solid rounds of 70 and faced a fifteen-foot birdie putt on the final hole to tie relatively unheralded Lew Worsham. The supposed “hillbilly choke artist” calmly holed the putt to force an eighteen-hole playoff. “The crowd roared. Sam smiled, and Worsham walked over and shook his hand,” recounts U.S. Open historian Bob Sommers. “It was as courageous a putt as any man ever holed.” Perhaps his greatest demon had finally been vanquished.
Indeed, over the first fifteen holes the next day, Sam displayed the same power and control that won the Open at St. Andrews while Worsham, a wry and likable twenty-nine-year-old fellow Virginian, was in and out of the rough, scrambling to make pars and keep up. “With three holes to play Lew was two down and it looked like Sam finally had his Open. I think the gallery was really with him at that point, wanting to see him get this jinx thing behind him,” remembers Bill Campbell, the recent Princeton graduate Sam had befriended back when they played together in a pro-am at the Greenbrier in 1936. Just fifteen when they met, Campbell would go on to play in thirty-nine U.S. Amateur Championships—winning in 1964—and anchor eight Walker Cup teams, serve two terms as president of the USGA, and become captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The unlikely rapport between Sam and this worldly, Ivy League paragon of amateur golf ripened over time into one of the game’s most enduring friendships.
On the sixteenth hole, Worsham rolled in a clutch twenty-foot birdie putt to halve Sam’s lead. Owing to nerves, both men hit poor second shots to the par-four seventeenth green. Worsham hooked his to the adjoining eighteenth fairway and Sam’s cut shot left fell short in deep rough. Worsham got his third onto the green but Sam punched his ball over the green into the rough, then chipped to within six feet of the cup. He missed his putt and Worsham holed his and the pair headed to the home hole all square.
For a change in an Open playoff, the estimated five thousand spectators closely trailing both players were treated to one of the most dramatic finishes in history. Sam struck a gorgeous approach shot to the semiblind eighteenth green that left him twenty feet to negotiate for birdie. Worsham’s ball skipped across the putting surface and ran off the back edge, stopping just shy of the thick collar. Wasting little time, however, he chipped a low runner that caught an edge of the cup and stopped two and a half feet past the hole.
With the title in his grasp, Sam calmly stepped up to his ball and rolled it gently down the slope, his only miscalculation being the speed of the putt. His ball stopped short about the same distance away as Worsham’s, only on the upper slope.
“I knew Sam’s body English and personality well enough to know he was zeroed in on that final putt,” recalls Bill Campbell, who was planted on the back portion of the green, as close to the action as he could get. “That’s why he went straight up to it and prepared to putt. Sam had one of the best eyes for distances ever—a hunter’s eye, you could say. He knew he was away. That’s why what happened next rattled him so deeply.”
As he took his stance, Worsham suddenly called out, “Wait a minute, Sam. Are you sure you’re away?”
Sam glanced up, scowled slightly, backed off a few paces and shook his head, convinced he was being gamed—himself being a walking encyclopedia on little things that could unnerve an opponent at a critical moment. He was certain he had the honor, and his mind began to bubble with anger.
Ike Grainger, the wiry chairman of the USGA rules committee, was summoned to determine who was entitled to putt first. “Somehow the story got started that there was a long delay and a lot of confusion over the issue,” he recalled to a reporter in the mid-1990s. “But that wasn’t the case at all. Sam was visibly upset and told me he was obviously away and wanted to putt. I made him wait. He walked off a few yards to wait for a tape measuring device brought by our assistant on the scene.”
One can clearly read Sam’s feelings in a remarkable photograph taken as Worsham and the two USGA officials bend over to measure the two putts. His feet are crossed, his right hand planted on a hip as he leans gently on his putter with his left, radiating an expression of incomprehensible disgust.
“I was so mad I could have spit,” Sam recalled decades later. “But I knew that was exactly what Lew had hoped would happen, I’d be rattled. We both knew what was going on and I just failed to get my mind settled in time to recover my composure.”
Grainger’s ruling confirmed what Sam already knew. He was 30.5 inches away as opposed to Worsham’s 29.5. Shaking his head, he took his stance again, inhaling and exhaling to try to regain his focus and make the smooth left-hand finish that had served him so splendidly all week. It wasn’t an easy putt, downhill with a significant left to right break, exactly the kind Sam detested. As he leaned over the ball, only the drone of a plane far overhead could be heard. He stroked the putt smoothly but too gently to hold its line. The gallery groaned as his ball missed the cup and stopped two inches away. Worsham, on the other hand, wasted no time in replacing his marked ball and firmly rolling his short uphill putt into the back of the cup to become the 1947 U.S. Open champion.
“Sam looked like he’d been shot through the heart,” Bill Campbell recalls. “I didn’t want to go over and speak to him because I knew he was in absolute agony. I followed him up to the clubhouse and we spoke a little later. By then he was pretty well composed. But coming on the heels of his other Open troubles, that one proved the most devastating. It only confirmed his worst fears about a jinx.”
After a week of farm work back home, he was in Detroit for the PGA Championship, still brooding about the incident, when Ben Hogan—who’d finished tied for sixth at St. Louis—walked over in the Plum Hollow Country Club locker room to say hello. “I was always grateful to Ben for that,” Sam remembered. “He knew what it meant to me more than anybody else because he’d been there.”
According to Bill Campbell, “If Sam had won either of the Opens he blew on the final hole I’m convinced his life would have been, in some ways, quite different. There’s no telling how much more he would have won. He would have had the respect he so desperately hungered for most of his career, especially playing in the shadows of Hogan and Nelson. He once told me a day never passed when he failed to think about that missed putt at St. Louis.”
Curiously, according to Campbell, Sam never held a grudge against Worsham. In fact, at season’s end, they went deer hunting together. “Sam always blamed himself for not keeping his composure that day,” he adds. “But what happened in St. Louis, I’m convinced, ruined the Open forever for Sam, and sent him into a very deep slump that could have ended his playing career.”
Indeed, Sam finished 1947 with no victories and only slightly more than $9,000 in official earnings, less than he’d won his first year on the tour a decade before. The following year was even more nightmarish, with a host of unimaginably bad finishes—a woeful tie for thirtieth at the Crosby and another for forty-third at St. Petersburg, a tournament he’d won twice. He played seventeen events and won just once, slipping past a modest field in the rain-delayed Texas Open in early February to finish a distant eighteenth on the money list, earning a paltry $6,980 for the year. Compounding his frustrations—and touching his greatest fear of all, common to many rural survivors of the Great Depression, the unvoiced terror of going flat broke—were whispers that his endorsement contracts with Gillette razors and Havoline Oil were in jeopardy. Only Wilson Golf and the Greenbrier reaffirmed their commitments to a suddenly struggling superstar. The company’s new mid-range clubs bearing his distinctive signature were, after all, the best-selling off-the-rack sets among the estimated one million golfers who took up the game that year.
One man’s misfortune, goes an ancient Chinese proverb, is another’s golden temple. And so it appeared to be with the remaining active members of the American Triumvirate. Following his PGA triumph in ’46, Ben won four of his seven tournaments, including another North and South Open, concluding the year with thirteen victories and $43,212, the most tour prize money any professional golfer had ever made in a single year. Perhaps more significantly, exactly three months after hoisting his first Wanamaker Trophy the game’s most dominant player appeared behind closed doors at Chicago’s stolid Bismarck Hotel, dressed like a successful Wall Street banker in a summer-weight worsted gray suit, and resumed his case for more self-governance and greater autonomy on the tour. “There’s a big need for young blood,” he argued in an article written exclusively for Detroit’s Free Press that went out over the national wires to four hundred newspapers before the meetings. “It’s wide open for those who can make the grade but that need isn’t being filled.”
As he bluntly put it to the PGA’s executive committee, if the touring pros’ growing resentment and their desire to handle their own affairs and determine their own fate wasn’t soon addressed, promising prospects would either stay put in the amateur ranks or opt for safer club jobs. In order to give professional golf a suitable platform to create new stars that would, he argued, “stimulate interest and grow the game,” the tour’s players needed—in fact demanded—their own governing organization. “If you don’t do this,” he soberly warned, “you’re likely to soon have one hell of a civil war on your hands.”
The PGA board listened to his assessment with clenched teeth, and one of them later remarked that Hogan left the room the most “loathed man in golf.” His remarks sounded more like a manifesto than a discussion, but if anyone had the power to call down the long-threatened rebellion, it was Ben Hogan. So the committee reluctantly voted to create a Tournament Bureau run strictly by the players themselves, essentially independent of direct PGA influence. It was further proposed that Fred Corcoran continue merely as the tour’s promotion director, a clear demotion owing to his close business ties with Sam Snead, though everyone agreed that he was unrivaled at lining up sponsors and generating commercial perks and lucrative exhibitions.
In a fascinating footnote to these negotiations, the genial Corcoran tore up his old contract with the PGA and accepted this diminished role in exchange for a new contract that granted him exclusive TV and radio rights on all tour events. With his marketer’s genius, he saw the advent of commercial television as a potential windfall for professional golf in general and himself in particular. Introduced in 1939 but derailed by the war, the first TV sets reached the consumer marketplace in 1946, and the far-sighted Corcoran understood that this exciting new medium could make Snead, Hogan, and their colleagues (not to mention his other star clients) even wealthier and household names across the country.
In this sweetheart deal, he retained a full third of any profits that derived from broadcast rights for the next three years. “That was the most valuable document I ever held in my hand,” he lamented years later. “Today that contract would be worth millions. But I was a little ahead of my time.” Among other things, he described calling on Tom Gallery, the sports director of the National Broadcasting Company in late 1948, and offering him exclusive rights to PGA golf for television. Since the early ’40s the network had limited coverage of the U.S. Open, the Masters, and the PGA Championship through its radio network, competing for this privilege with rival CBS Sports—soon to be headed by John Derr, who shared Corcoran’s belief that TV would soon become a factor in the broadcast mix. “All he [Gallery] had to do was sign up and NBC would have owned television golf,” Corcoran said. Instead, Gallery told him, “Listen, Fred. Golf is just not a TV sport. Don’t bother me anymore.”
Derr and Corcoran weren’t the only ones who saw a future in televising golf. In the fall of 1945, Cliff Roberts sent a memorandum to Augusta National’s club manager, James Searle, expressing interest in the emerging medium. Moreover, when upstart CBS Sports declined to renew its radio contract with the Masters—having failed to strike an exclusive deal—Roberts signed a new contract with NBC that gave NBC the option on television as well. “As late as two months before the 1947 Masters,” according to Masters historian David Owens, “Roberts believed they might do so.” But Gallery showed no interest, convinced that the logistics of covering a tournament with unpredictable lighting and stationary cameras were unfeasible. That same summer at the U.S. Open where Sam Snead’s heart was broken again, a St. Louis TV station broadcast the final hole of the fourth round—a first in television history. Little came of it, however.
It wasn’t until six years later—or three years after Corcoran’s new contract ran out—that another visionary, Chicago’s George S. May, decided to give the medium another shot by broadcasting live coverage of the final hole of his World Championship at Tam O’Shanter, a drama that remained in doubt until the tournament’s final shot. Once more Lew Worsham was at center stage, needing to get down in two from the fairway in order to tie journeyman Chandler Harper, who was already perched on the clubhouse terrace enjoying a gimlet cocktail. A single wide-angle lens secured on top of the grandstand (another May innovation) enabled the viewing audience to see Worsham punch a wedge from a hundred yards, his ball disappearing into the cup for an eagle. Unable to contain his excitement, Jimmy Demaret, who was commentating for radio and television, blurted out, “The son of a bitch holed it!” What in time would be called the “shot seen round the world” stunningly illustrated the medium’s dramatic potential, though regular coverage was still three years in the future.
Coming on the heels of his first major championship, Ben’s successful negotiations with the PGA of America in late 1946 serve as an effective birth date for modern professional golf, establishing a working blueprint that would lead to formal separation and a fully independent PGA Tour two decades later. In the meantime, just six days into the new year, Hogan blitzed the field to win his second L.A. Open, wasting little time while his rivals jockeyed for influence in the new self-governing tour and haggled with Corcoran over such minutiae as caddie fees and entry fees. During a dispute over the higher exhibition fees Corcoran set for marquee names—a charge he didn’t deny—Johnny Bulla confronted Corcoran and sucker-punched him in the gut, followed by an equally irate Dick Metz, who poked him in the nose. “I felt like I was under siege all over again,” Corcoran explained to a reporter decades later. “No one really knew what this new independence would mean to the players, or how it would essentially work. So everybody wanted in on the decisions, fearing they’d be short-changed. Eventually it settled down when the boys realized Hogan was a bigger threat to their livelihoods than either me or the PGA of America.”
As Sam disappeared to deal with the worst slump of his career, Ben put together a strong year by anyone’s standards except perhaps his own, winning nine tournaments (two unofficial) and more than $30,000, good enough for second spot on the money list behind his pal Jimmy Demaret, who also captured his second Masters. The real surprise of 1947 came on the eve of the U.S. Open in June, when nationally syndicated sports columnist Oscar Fraley broke some startling news: “Ben Hogan, the miniature Irishman who ranks with the all-time golfing giants, has just about reached the point today where he is ready to retire. Hogan, like many of his illustrious predecessors, is deathly tired of the competitive fairways and greens. Others who reached that breaking point where they actually hated the game were Byron Nelson and Henry Picard—and they didn’t hang around long afterwards.” Declining to name his sources, Fraley concluded, “The bantam Benny is hanging on because he wants one more crack at the U.S. Open and wants to try and defend his PGA title. After those two are over he is expected to say adieu, even though he won’t admit it now.” Weeks before, Fraley and others had begun writing the same thing about Sam Snead, noting that his age—thirty-five, relatively old for athletes of any other sport—and ailing putter might finally be pushing him to the front porch for good.
True to form, Ben made no effort to either confirm or deny Fraley’s claims—though his sixth-place finish in St. Louis did little to challenge them. Just a week later, in a rare back-to-back staging of major championships, both Ben and Sam seemed to confirm Fraley’s clairvoyance, with the former free-falling to a tie for thirty-third at the PGA Championship at Plum Hollow, and the latter struggling home in seventeenth place.
Only the dazzling performance at the 1947 Ryder Cup at Oregon’s rain-swept Portland Country Club in early November briefly stanched the rampant speculation about the game’s biggest stars. Under a new points system that allowed each team’s captain to make two additional selections, Ben invited Byron to play and the American side demolished the visiting Brits 11–1, the largest rout in Ryder Cup history, small consolation being that host millionaire and Oregon fruit baron Bob Hudson picked up the entire traveling tab for the distinguished visitors. In the Saturday foursomes, Sam and Lloyd Mangrum, Ben and Jimmy Demaret, and Byron and Herman Barron won with relative ease, while on Sunday, secretly nursing a severely sore back, Ben sat out and watched Sam destroy Henry Cotton and Byron polish off Arthur Lees in singles matches that sealed the lopsided triumph.
During the Christmas break, Ben saw a specialist in Fort Worth and took heating treatments for his lower back and the mysterious pains radiating through his shoulders and neck; a battery of tests determined there was nothing wrong beyond the draining effects of fatigue and stress on his well-traveled thirty-five-year-old body. His physician prescribed daily aspirin, an improved diet, and plenty of rest and relaxation, advising him to take up a new hobby.
Ben Hogan was not a hobby kind of guy. For two decades every molecule of his being had been dedicated to putting him through the refiner’s fire, transforming himself from a West Texas nobody into the most efficient killing machine in golf. Telling him to find a new hobby was like asking Fred Astaire take up square-dancing for fun, or Humphrey Bogart to try community theater. Even so, he accepted Jimmy Demaret’s invitation to go deer hunting in Arkansas, where for three nights they sat under the stars by a fire and shared views on a variety of subjects, including the touchy one of retirement. Time was also knocking on Jimmy the Showman’s door. For years, he’d implied that Ben, Byron, and Sam were his venerable seniors—when, in fact, he was actually two years older. Taking full advantage of his recent breakthrough and domination of the money list, however, he was already pondering a second career in radio, and possibly television, and was eager to start his own golf club back home in Houston.
“You know, Jimmy,” Ben surprised him by saying on their drive back to Texas, “I feel better than I have in years. This break has been just the thing.”
According to Demaret, they’d spotted several trophy-sized white-tails, but unlike Byron in the Bitterroots two autumns before, neither man had the desire to fire a shot.
Two weeks later, in vivid contrast to the gloomy, unapproachable figure who failed to make any headway at the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship the previous summer, a visibly relaxed and beaming Ben Hogan showed up at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades three days before the start of the L.A. Open. Being in Tinseltown, where he and Val dined with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and his pal Bing Crosby, always elevated Ben’s spirits, a poignant echo of his childhood fascination with Hollywood stardom. As more than one reporter noted, whatever had been chewing at him for most of 1947 appeared to be gone. He granted several relaxed interviews and made self-deprecating jokes about his back and Oscar Fraley’s fortune-telling skills.
Few if any sportswriters had a clue about what made Ben Hogan tick. Like Sam, he was actually a friendly and highly sentimental man whose life was governed by a strong code of honor, though he carefully entombed this part of his nature behind an impenetrable wall of hard work, accomplishment, and an unshakable fear of revealing any more than was necessary about his past. His hard shell and curt responses were merely about self-preservation. Hennie Bogan, on the other hand, had a soft spot for stray animals and a natural compassion for anyone who’d been dealt a raw hand. He sometimes clipped newspaper stories about people facing undeserved setbacks and tragedies, piling them neatly in his office desk drawer, and he always exhibited great personal warmth and almost fanatical devotion to his wife and her family and a handful of intimate friends that included Marvin Leonard, Bing Crosby, and oil man George Coleman, whom he met on tour in the early 1930s and later became Oklahoma Amateur champion.
Two other factors gave Ben’s spirits a lift that week at Riviera. One was the publication of Power Golf, an instructional book that would soon follow Byron Nelson’s book onto the best-seller lists. In gratitude to the man who’d helped him unlock the mystery of his own golf swing, Ben dedicated it to Henry Picard. As this remarkable year unfolded, the fact that his book outsold Byron’s gave Ben untold satisfaction.
The other positive was Riviera itself. Ben had grown to love just about everything about this tight and challenging course with its small, firm, and fast greens and sticky kikuyu grass rough. It’s where he began the 1947 season with a convincing victory, and he naturally hoped to defend his title. Unlike most of his colleagues, Ben generally played his best golf on the most difficult layouts, which made his unsuccessful U.S. Open performances doubly frustrating. Not counting his controversial 1942 Hale America Open victory, which he considered the national championship under a different name, in seven appearances before 1948 he had never finished higher than tied for third—rather pathetic for a man now regarded as the best player in the world. In June, however, the Open was scheduled to return to sweet Riviera, which made the L.A. Open feel a little like a glorious warm-up session, reflected by Ben’s four beautiful rounds of 68–70–70–67 for a record-breaking 275, a mark that would stand for another quarter century.
When asked about his sterling play, he attributed it to the fast greens and superb conditions, then added that Riviera would be a “very different place” for the national championship, playing at least six to eight strokes tougher. Before heading to Bing’s Clambake, while signing books at Bullock’s department store in downtown Los Angeles, he confided to a sports columnist, “I think a score of 282 to 284 will win the Open,” a distinctive Hogan ploy to make a demanding course seem even more intimidating to any would-be rivals. As usual, what he didn’t say was more important than what he revealed. As he confided to Valerie afterward, the more psychologically intimidated other players were by the prospect of Riviera in June—and, not coincidentally, by his mastery of it—the fewer of them he would have to beat.
At this point in his career, not unlike Byron and Sam at their peaks, Ben calculated that there were generally only a handful of players he needed to worry about in a major championship, so the harder the course played, the better his chances. In years to come, employing a variation of this form of psychological warfare, he made a point of granting select interviews following his practice rounds at major championships and expressing mild surprise at the relatively easy conditions. This immediately panicked the sponsoring organization into sending out maintenance crews to double-cut and roll the greens to make them lethally fast, to heavily water the rough and let it grow longer and thicker, to plan tougher pin placements and strengthen all the course’s defenses—all of which, generally speaking, benefited one little gray man far more than anyone else in the field.
On the Monday morning he and Valerie checked out of the swanky Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he saw a headline that declared him the “Man to Beat” at the upcoming U.S. Open. Riviera, meanwhile, had a new nickname. The press was already calling it “Hogan’s Alley.”
By April, however, Ben’s game was inexplicably faltering. In six tournaments after the L.A. Open, he won only at Crosby’s unofficial celebrity pro-am. Moreover, in the twelfth staging of the Masters, Claude Harmon, who now divided his year as a club pro at Winged Foot and Seminole, shot a brilliant 279 that tied the tournament record and beat one of the most formidable fields assembled in the pines. Hard-charging but painfully deliberate Cary Middlecoff finished second, perhaps heralding a change in the guard. Ben finished sixth, and Sam fifteenth, prompting fresh buzz about retirement in both cases. Notably, this would be Bobby Jones’s final appearance as a competitor, owing to a mysterious pain and stiffness in his neck and spine.
A rare flip-flop in the schedule had the PGA Championship being played at the Norwood Country Club in St. Louis in late May that year, and Harmon once again made headlines by surviving an epic forty-two-hole duel with Sam to reach the quarterfinal. Joining them there were Hogan, Demaret, and Mike Turnesa, a delightful thirty-nine-year-old White Plains head pro whose younger brother, Jim, lost to Sam Snead at Seaview in 1942. After eliminating Harmon on the thirty-seventh hole of their match, Turnesa advanced to the finals against Ben, who beat his friend Jimmy Demaret two-and-one shortly after his birthday and quickly retreated to his downtown St. Louis hotel to rest his legs from the marathon finish, declining all requests for interviews. Some in the press expressed dismay that the finale wouldn’t pit Hogan against the reigning Masters champ, since they were known to practice together down at Seminole in the winter. On offer, instead, as one Midwestern columnist put it, was Cinderella against golf’s most “methodical killing machine.”
Turnesa, who rarely played professional tournaments of any kind, playfully quipped to reporters, “I’ve got to wash out some socks tonight. Didn’t plan on staying this long, fellas.”
Most of them saw this as a walk in the park for the “Garbo of Golf,” as a rebuffed sportswriter from St. Louis called Ben on the eve of the final. Indeed, Ben’s brilliant 65 in the morning round put him four-up by the halfway mark, a lead he easily held through the third nine holes of their match, at which point he clipped off three successive birdies to end the ordeal and claim his second PGA Championship by a yawning seven-and-six margin. An army jeep picked up the two exhausted competitors on the thirtieth hole and drove them back to the clubhouse. Both looked relieved that it was over.
The only real surprise came at the presentation of the Wanamaker Trophy. “I know you all think I’m the great stone face,” Ben began, after complimenting Turnesa’s courage and pluck, “but this is a competitive game. I know the other fella doesn’t expect any quarter from me—and I don’t give it.”
Thus far, vintage Hogan. But then came this unexpected glimpse of Hennie Bogan, the man within:
“You probably think I’m happy over winning this tournament, but I’m not. I hate to beat these men. They have to go back to their clubs and tell how they were beaten. The physical ordeal of the PGA just takes too much out of a man.” He paused, looking around the room, then added, “I just don’t want to put myself through that anymore.” Reporters exchanged glances, wondering if this could be the anticipated retirement announcement. But true to form, he left them hanging and headed straight for a train home to Fort Worth.
Having played in twenty-seven PGA Championship matches over seventeen years, some 718 holes of intensely competitive golf that included twelve qualifying rounds and produced two trophies, and a winning average of 81 percent, Ben not only wanted to go home and rest up for the U.S. Open at “Hogan’s Alley,” now less than a month away, he also wanted a change in the grinding match-play format, the last tournament of this kind, or else he might simply skip the championship altogether, having nothing further to prove to anyone.
By the time his train reached the Texas & Pacific Railway station in Fort Worth, the national press wires were humming with such headlines as “Hogan Hates Winning—Gives PGA Shove” and “Bantam Ben to Quit PGA Forever.” Surprised by the negative backlash, believing that his remarks had simply once again been distorted by the media, Ben attempted to clarify his position in his hometown newspaper, telling the Star-Telegram, “I still think the tournament is too long, but they can’t do anything about it. But I may try again next year.”
This halfhearted walk-back convinced nobody. Most insiders expected Ben Hogan would never show up anywhere near a PGA Championship again.
And they were right.
He played in only one tournament between the PGA and the Open—his hometown Colonial, now called the Colonial National Invitational, where he finished tied for second with Skip Alexander. Sam returned to Virginia in this same period and didn’t play competitively except for a couple of scheduled corporate outings at the Greenbrier. The rest of his time was spent practicing, working in his barn at Snead Links, and fishing with friends. He also made at least one trip up to New York City, to appear on Arthur Godfrey’s national morning radio show and to dine with friends at Jack Dempsey’s on Eighth Avenue. “Outwardly Sam was Sam,” remembers his friend John Derr, who worked on Godfrey’s show before moving over to CBS Sports full-time. “He loved spinning stories and being with people he knew and trusted. Strangers always made him uncomfortable. But at this moment, his worst year as a professional, I know for a fact he was worrying about his future, trying everything to find his putting stroke again. Hogan seemed to be on a holy mission and Byron was making noises of going into broadcasting. Demaret seemed to be having the time of his life, playing his best golf ever. But the clock was ticking for all of them.”
“It was a difficult time for Sam,” confirms his friend Bill Campbell, who won George May’s Tam O’Shanter Amateur Championship that same summer. “I think Sam feared his game might really be on the downslide. Approaching forty is when the putting stroke begins to leave most people. Tee to green Sam was as good as ever, maybe even more effective. But the yips—a term he popularized—were driving him crazy. Most reporters associate Hogan with tireless practice. But Sam practiced in those days nearly as long as Ben did, especially with the Open approaching. That was the one he wanted most.”
Amid a sudden controversy about the depth of grooves in club-faces, the USGA forced more than forty players—including Hogan and Demaret, both of whom showed up a week early to practice together—to moderately alter their irons before the start of the U.S. Open of 1948. On the eve of the first round, Ben agreed to be interviewed by several handpicked sportswriters in his plush suite at the Beverly Wilshire and was asked about the grooves dispute and his thoughts about how golf could be improved.
“The rules and equipment are fine,” he declared, “the only thing golfers need is more daylight. There isn’t enough time during the day to practice and play, to key one’s game up to where it should be.”
The reporters laughed; Ben didn’t.
“You’re not joking,” one of them said.
“No, I’m not,” he replied, as Valerie sat there primly on a brocaded couch, hands folded in her lap.
After the interview, a man from the Los Angeles Times asked if a photographer could get a picture of Ben and Valerie together. Very few photographs were ever taken of the couple in public, and none whatsoever that reflected the fruits of Ben’s recent success, largely because Valerie had a growing aversion to publicity that rivaled her husband’s—no small irony in a woman whose college ambition was to be society editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“I don’t see why not,” a surprisingly relaxed Ben Hogan agreed, picking up the wedge he’d used to show what alterations had been made, and walking over to stand beside his silent wife. She glanced up adoringly at him; he smiled affectionately down at her. The photograph went out over the wires and appeared in hundreds of newspapers on the morning the U.S. Open got under way.
“Sam is running out of time and hair,” one columnist concluded in his cheeky handicapping of the top dozen contenders. “And there’s maybe only one man in the field who’s as hungry as he is to win this thing—Hogan.”
Sam, who had a history of fast starts, began by putting like the Snead of old, crafting a pair of sterling 69s that established a new thirty-six-hole championship record and propelled him to a one-shot lead over Hogan and Locke, and two shots over Jim Turnesa, whose silken swing tempo rivaled his own. Three shots back were Jimmy Demaret and Sam’s nemesis of the year before, Lew Worsham.
With the excruciating thirty-six-hole Saturday finale looming, most observers believed it was a three-man race between Ben, Sam, and Jimmy. The fourth player who might have figured in that mix was, in fact, tagging along in the gallery, taking pictures for his own scrapbook with a new camera. Byron Nelson was just a friendly, familiar face in the crowd—wearing a smile wire to wire, as some wag pointed out, for the first time ever at a U.S. Open.
Sam made his statement early on Saturday, dropping a fourteen-foot putt on the first hole for an eagle, then followed this with a gutsy birdie on the difficult second that sent an electric charge through the record gallery of seventeen thousand that roamed over Riviera’s scruffy, eucalyptus-shaded ridges. Weeks later, reflecting on what happened next, Sam confided to a reporter than he “foolishly felt like I had the thing well in hand” at that moment—opening the door to disaster.
As the yips began to creep into his stroke, he struck half a dozen brilliant approach shots only to three-putt, several times from short distances, missing at least two easy birdies and finishing with a disappointing 73. After the lunch break, which he spent most of on the practice green trying to smooth out his stroke and calm his mind, he went out and battled the same jumpy nerves, never gaining traction and struggling home in 72. As putts failed to drop and sudden cheers rose from other holes, he later said, it made him heartsick to notice fans peeling off to go watch the other leaders. “It’s like they can smell when you’re losing it,” he later said. “It can make you feel like a true has-been out there.”
Hogan and Demaret, on the other hand, were a fans’ delight, creating a two-man road show of matching 68s in the morning loop that provided Ben with a two-stroke cushion over the field and his best opportunity yet to claim the championship. Playing half an hour ahead of him in the afternoon’s final round, however, Jimmy caught fire and rolled home a succession of birdies between the seventh and twelfth holes, grinning and twirling his clubs as he went four under for the stretch and seemed to seize the momentum. At thirteen, he struck a gorgeous eight-iron to four feet but missed the short birdie attempt that would have drawn him into a tie with his friend. As shadows began to crowd Riviera’s narrow fairways, he failed to mount a charge but parred his way home to an impressive 278 total that lopped three strokes off the old Open mark set by Ralph Guldahl at Oakland Hills in 1937—or as Sam Snead like to put it, “the first one that got away.”
Unfortunately, Demaret’s record lasted only about thirty minutes. Despite a three-putt hiccup on the sixty-ninth hole, Ben completed his business as coldly, methodically, and implacably as any U.S. Open champion ever had, finishing with a 276 that further bested Guldahl’s mark by five. The victory meant far more than the $2,000 first-place prize money, and Ben Hogan, beaming like a Hollywood matinee idol, removed his signature flat linen cap and acknowledged the wildly applauding masses in the natural amphitheater around Riviera’s famous eighteenth green. Then he hurried on to the scorers’ table to methodically total up his card and sign it, eager to leave nothing to chance or error, then vanished into the bowels of the locker room to water-comb his sleek black hair, already showing traces of gray at the temples. Finally he climbed the carpeted stairs to the members’ lounge where Valerie kissed him on the cheek and they briefly embraced, their usual post-victory ritual. In this instance, the club’s kitchen staff appeared in the doorway to applaud the new National Open winner and a young boy walked over and politely asked for his autograph. Ben smiled and obliged, carefully signing his name on the cover of a program like a man whose signature was worth millions.
Indeed, this title was worth even more than the estimated $100,000 it would produce in the form of commercial endorsement opportunities and future paid appearances. His standard exhibition price instantly jumped to $1,500. Like Byron, Ben had a lawyer go over all his business details but personally negotiated his own appearance fees and commercial opportunities. Unlike Sam—who allowed Fred Corcoran to exploit his homespun image in a stream of commercial opportunities—a model of the modern player-agent relationship to come—Ben didn’t want anybody to influence his public image or make money off his success. Within days back home in Fort Worth he was fielding calls from representatives for Milton Berle, Jack Benny, and Perry Como, all eager for the Garbo of Golf to drop in as a guest on their shows. He did, too.
Still, the deepest satisfaction of this championship was that it proved he’d finally reached the summit of the game, following perhaps the longest, most arduous climb any athlete ever made from the grim anonymity of a childhood shot through the heart.
In a summer that saw the mighty Citation win the Triple Crown, Babe Ruth die of cancer, and Joe Lewis knock out Jersey Joe Walcott, Bantam Ben Hogan became a poster boy for America’s undersized underdogs, the loser turned champion by dint of relentless self-improvement, commanding the biggest headlines of them all, closing in on his own brand of immortality. He was no thoroughbred or icon who’d enjoyed the limelight from the moment he stepped into the arena, just a tough little cuss pushing forty whose heart and will to win, after years of bitter failure, had far more in common with Seabiscuit than Citation.
And he wasn’t done yet.
Over the next seven weeks, Ben captured five straight titles, including Byron’s Inverness Invitational and the Western Open, prompting Hogan cheerleader Grantland Rice to point out—as Ben and Val barn-stormed the upper West—that neither Byron nor Sam had won more golf tournaments in a shorter period, forty-nine victories since 1940. “Who can possibly stop Ben Hogan?” he wondered.
Between the Western and Denver events, they began house hunting in the Westover Hills district of northwest Fort Worth, a neighborhood home to many of the city’s cultural elites. Ben also special-ordered a new Cadillac sedan that featured a state-of-the-art, two-piece tinted windshield, tailfins inspired by Lockheed’s famous P-38 fighter, and a purring Hydramatic transmission that was the talk of the automotive industry, a $3,000 dream car for the American road.
During the same week, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, reflecting on Ben’s long climb from rural obscurity to worldwide fame, wrote in her nationally syndicated column, “Hi Ya,” that “If some bright person in Hollywood can find time to find the forest through the trees, he will make a movie of the life of Ben Hogan.”
In mid-October, after Ben claimed a final win—his tenth for the season—at California’s Glendale Open, by shooting a course record 64 in the final round, the Hogans boarded a train home. The win gave him a third Vardon Trophy and the money title for 1948, $35,812 in official and unofficial tournament earnings. That same week, Hogan’s publisher, A. S. Barnes, announced that sales of Power Golf had surged through the roof, more than 25,000 copies.
On a cool, overcast Sunday evening after Thanksgiving, 1,500 of Fort Worth’s finest stood in a long reception line at Marvin Leonard’s Colonial Country Club to greet and congratulate the new undisputed king of golf—even as rumors continued to circulate, not hurt by his own cautiously dropped hints, that Bantam Ben was preparing to say goodbye. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” he told a reporter from Dallas. “In fact, don’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes or I tell you about it.”
All of Ben’s family was present that magical night at Colonial: his mother, Royal and his wife, Margaret, and their two children, also Valerie’s sister, Sarah Fox, and her precocious ten-year-old daughter, Valerie. A new Hogan friend was there, as well. Granville Walker was the spellbinding preacher from the nearby University Christian Church near the TCU campus, a man Ben greatly admired. Unknown to even some of Ben’s closest friends, he frequently slipped into a rear pew of the church during the eleven o’clock worship service and exited before the final procession just to listen to Granville’s powerful sermons. Meanwhile, Marvin Leonard had proudly displayed Ben Hogan’s medals and trophies in the club’s foyer for everyone to admire.
Underscoring the evening’s happy mood and sense of homecoming, the Hogans then drove to their beautiful new home on Valley Ridge Road, a pretty, two-story colonial set beneath mature live oaks in one of Forth Worth’s finest neighborhoods. Valerie Hogan spent weeks getting the place ready and hiring a pair of African-American maids she insisted on dressing in the style of French servants. The dominant color scheme throughout the house was white. “Aunt Valerie loved everything French,” says her niece, Valerie Harriman. “And in her book everything that was French and elegant was white.”
As the couple motored the short distance home that night in the luxurious Cadillac, Ben could be forgiven for believing he’d achieved the American dream. On paper, owing to the flood of deals and income wisely invested by George Coleman and others he trusted, he was close to being a millionaire. He was already thinking about what he might do in a world after competitive golf—possibly design his own golf clubs or even a course of his own where he could practice and play to his heart’s content in privacy. Colonial, after all, had become Fort Worth’s Hogan’s Alley, already something of a shrine where fans and curiosity seekers turned up regularly hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself.
In short, Ben Hogan was finally on top of the world, without doubt the greatest golfer of his time.
“Nobody goes through life without something happening to them,” he told his friends that night at Colonial, eerily presaging events to come. “You just have to take those things as they come along, and go ahead with life,” he declared, smiling over at his adoring wife.
For the moment, at least, not even someone as prescient as he was could have imagined what within days would come barreling at him through the fog.