WHETHER BY SHEER COINCIDENCE or providence, Sam Snead’s luck suddenly changed four days after Ben Hogan nearly died on a foggy highway in the Pecos River Valley of West Texas.
After finishing a dispiriting twentieth at the Tucson Open, while packing up his gear at the El Rio Golf and Country Club, site of the Tucson Open, the fifth official event of the 1949 season, won by a surging Lloyd Mangrum, Sam found an unexpected gift in his locker: a putter.
“Nobody in the locker room knew who put it there,” he recalled, “so I took another look. It wasn’t new or fancy. It was a stiff-shafted, brass-headed, straight-faced, center-shafted job which hefted nicely in my hand. I judged it to weigh about sixteen ounces, or slightly heavier than anything I’d been using.”
He took it along with him without any thoughts of using it, though in a matter of a few weeks this simple putter would rekindle his game and change his life.
Meanwhile, like everyone else on tour, Sam’s mind was focused on a hospital room in El Paso, where his friend and rival Ben Hogan lay heavily sedated and clinging to life following a devastating collision with a Greyhound bus that took place shortly after sunrise on the morning of February 2 as the couple headed for home on winding U.S. Highway 80. Perhaps one man would have noted the poignant irony of the accident’s timing. Had he survived, it would have been Chester Hogan’s sixty-seventh birthday.
On the heels of a slow start at the year’s first event, a surprising eleventh-place finish on the same Riviera course he’d dominated just months before, Ben easily captured the Crosby Clambake, then accompanied his host and friend to his ranch in Nevada where he’d impressed Bing with his ease and handling of horses. Eight days later, at the Long Beach Open, he beat another good friend, Jimmy Demaret, in a playoff, a favor Demaret returned the following week at Phoenix, where Jimmy beat Ben in a playoff. Over a beer after the tournament, Demaret playfully proposed a “rubber match down in Tucson.” “No, Jimmy,” Ben replied, “Val and I want to get back to Fort Worth. No sense having a house if we don’t live in it.” He added that a decorator had finished her work and declared the place ready to host a first dinner party.
As usual, Jimmy gave his best-ball partner the needle. “What’s the matter, Ben? I beat you and you have to run home and practice for a month?”
Ben smiled. Over the previous twenty-three days, he’d put almost three thousand miles on his new Cadillac sedan and played in four tour events, given two free public clinics and endured half a dozen sit-down interviews with the press about his uncertain career plans, revealing little or nothing newsworthy. He’d also taken time off to discuss the first of several instructional films, won two tournaments and collected enough prize money—$5,800—to take the early lead in earnings. At the start of this Western juggernaut, only a few days into the new year, his smiling, angularly handsome face had even graced the cover of Time magazine, with the story inside, “Little Ice Water,” charting his phenomenal rise from obscurity to a national championship. “If you can’t outplay them,” went the featured quote on the cover, in the chaste idiom of pure Hoganspeak, “outwork them.”
In truth, Ben was growing weary much as Byron had before him. The pressure to win every week, the fusillade of prying questions from reporters, the struggle to ignore being portrayed by several nationally syndicated columnists as a coldhearted SOB who routinely snubbed fans and offended sponsors, not to mention the relentless mental fatigue that came with days of road travel and unfamiliar hotel rooms—all of it added up to the near breaking point. Among other decisions he’d reached but shared with no one but Valerie, he’d already made up his mind not to return to action until the Masters in April. After that, he planned to halve his playing schedule in order to preserve his strength for the U.S. Open, scheduled for Chicago’s Medinah Country Club in early June.
“It’s the traveling,” Ben told Jimmy rather prophetically in Phoenix, almost like a man who sensed his days were numbered. “I want to die an old man, not a young one.”
Perhaps our words, as the poet Homer said, tempt the Fates. Roughly halfway between Phoenix and Fort Worth, the Hogans stopped to spend the night at the El Capitan Motel in Van Horn, Texas, where they’d first stayed with Byron and Louise back in the days when they traveled together. The modest motel was clean and comfortable and served a robust breakfast of bacon and eggs, Ben’s favorite meal. Valerie skipped eating that morning because she often had a queasy stomach at the start of the day.
The morning was clear but cold, with fingers of ground fog obscuring the highway east of town. They got an early start around 7:45, and within ten minutes Ben detected a skin of ice on the highway and slowed to thirty miles per hour. About forty minutes later, as they approached a small bridge spanning a dry culvert and wreathed by fog, he suddenly saw two sets of headlights just an eighth of a mile ahead. Closing fast upon them in their lane was Greyhound Bus 548 with thirty-eight sleepy passengers aboard and substitute driver Alvin Logan behind the wheel, desperate to make up time lost to bad weather between Dallas and El Paso. Seizing his chance to pass a lumbering freight hauler he’d been trapped behind for miles, Logan, as he admitted to authorities later, had gunned the ten-ton vehicle’s massive General Motors Super V-12 Coach engine and drew even with the truck as they both approached the short bridge.
“Honey,” Valerie recalled her husband saying quietly, reaching over to touch his wife’s knee, “I think he’s going to hit us.”
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Everything happened too quickly. Prevented from veering off either side of the highway by steel guardrails, Ben instantly made a calculation that probably saved their lives, steering the Cadillac to the narrow right-hand shoulder, grazing the guardrail and then, in an instant before impact, hurling himself across the seat to shield his wife. Witnesses reported that the driver’s side of the car took the brunt of the collision, crumpling that side of the passenger compartment like a concertina, shattering the distinctive grillwork and blowing out the curvilinear windshield. In the span of two seconds or less—about the time it takes an average golfer to swing a club—the car’s five-hundred-pound engine was propelled through the protective firewall into the lower half of Ben’s body, while the steering column was driven straight through the driver’s side seat, the rim of the steering wheel smashing his left shoulder, fracturing the collarbone. A split second later, the left side of his face struck the collapsing dashboard and he fell unconscious into Valerie’s lap. Something struck her, too, above the left eye, and she briefly lost consciousness. An instant later, in a shower of sparks, the 3,900-pound car ricocheted off the Greyhound and skidded sideways for a hundred or so feet before slipping backward down the incline into the dry wash, engulfed in steam and smoke.
The crystal of the new Bulova wristwatch Valerie had given Ben for Christmas was shattered, freezing the moment of calamity at exactly 8:30.
More than ninety minutes passed before an ambulance arrived from El Paso’s Hotel Dieu Hospital, the Inn of God. By then he had been freed from the tangled mass of metal that pinned his legs against the car seat. The first doctor on the scene, an osteopath from Van Horn, found the bus passengers walking around in a daze and Hogan stretched out under a blanket on the rear seat of another motorist’s car. Wreckage was strewn everywhere. According to Valerie, Ben drifted in and out of consciousness five or six times during the interminable wait for help, at first insisting that the men who helped pry him loose attend to his wife instead, later asking if Valerie had managed to save his golf clubs, in each instance growing grayer and colder—clearly slipping into circulatory shock.
A brief initial bulletin, apparently based on sketchy information conveyed by an excited witness who’d rushed to a pay phone in Van Horn, first broke around lunchtime back east, reporting that golf champion Ben Hogan had been killed in an automobile accident near El Paso, which was what Demaret and Snead heard as they were playing in the pro-am in Tucson. “There are moments when golf seems kind of irrelevant,” Sam remembered decades later. “And that was sure one of them for me. When we first heard that Ben had died, hell, none of us could believe it. Nobody wanted to play, either. We all just sat around the locker room waiting to hear more news. I called home to speak to Audrey. I also went off by myself and said a little prayer, hopin’ ol’ Ben was as tough as we all thought he was.”
Taking matters in his own hands, Demaret called an administrator he knew in the Texas Highway Patrol in Houston, hoping to get the full story, but was asked to leave a call-back number. “I hung up and stood there dumbly looking at the wall in front of me,” he recalled. “Then the fellow called me back and said, ‘Yes, Hogan was in an accident. But he’s alive. He’s at the Hotel Dieu in El Paso.’ It felt good, damned good, to know Ben was alive.”
A short time later, the Associated Press followed up with a report that said both Hogans had survived and were at an El Paso hospital where Ben was being treated for three broken ribs, severe chest injuries, and a broken back. This diagnosis was, in fact, slightly more encouraging than the actual one. Ben had also suffered a double-ring fracture of the pelvis, a broken left ankle, and several deep cuts and contusions around his left eye. By the time his brother and Valerie’s sister reached his bedside later that day, his left eye was covered by a large gauze bandage and he was sleeping under heavy sedation.
Rancher Byron Nelson heard the news on his car radio just before noon as he was driving to Denton to meet with an expert in the poultry business, having decided to add several thousand laying hens and possibly even a sideline in turkeys to his herd of some hundred Hereford cattle. He immediately turned around and sped home to tell Louise, who’d already been told about it by a mutual friend and was desperately trying to find Byron. “The first thing we did was say a prayer for Ben and Valerie,” he remembered. “And then I called Marvin Leonard to see what he had heard. By then we knew Royal Hogan and Valerie’s sister were on their way to El Paso and that Ben was likely to pull through.” The first sprays of flowers to arrive at the Hotel Dieu came from the Nelsons, soon followed by others from Demaret, the Sneads, and Fred Corcoran.
Later that day, still wearing the same clothes she’d put on in Van Horn, Valerie displayed a bruised face and a mildly sprained left arm, plus various nicks and cuts from flying bits of glass. As she sat with Royal and Sarah in Ben’s quiet hospital room, she glanced over at her sister and said wearily, “If Ben hadn’t put himself in front of me, you know, I would not be here.” A nurse checking on Ben’s feeding tube heard this remark and smiled and asked if she could do anything to make Valerie more comfortable. A little later, she conveyed this comment to one of the dozen or more reporters gathered in the waiting room for updates. For the next two days, Valerie left her husband’s side for only a few minutes at a time, and she ate little or nothing. That first night, she slept in an armchair next to his bed.
The following day, more and more bouquets arrived. So did Herman Keiser and Dutch Harrison, the first colleagues to lay eyes on the patient, who surprised the former by asking him to check on the whereabouts and condition of his golf clubs. “That told me Ben was feeling better,” Keiser told reporters. “Though he looked pretty bad.”
Later that same day, Hogan’s doctors asked him if he felt like speaking with the press. “I have nothing to say,” Ben replied, sounding remarkably like his old self.
As evening fell, though, and new X-rays were taken and plaster casts were fitted to his mangled legs, Valerie gave her account of Ben’s actions in the vital seconds before the bus hit them, and her account—bolstered by the first horrific photographs of their mangled Cadillac, and even one of her ashen husband strapped to a gurney as he was rushed into the hospital—appeared in hundreds of newspapers the next morning.
The combination of these startling images and intimate details of the crash coming just weeks after Time’s unflattering cover portrayal of a cold-natured and ruthless athlete produced an extraordinary transformation.
“There’s absolutely no question that accident and the stories that came out about it completely changed the image most people had of Ben Hogan,” Tommy Bolt later reflected. “Up till then he’d been seen as a cold and unsympathetic character who didn’t give a damn about anybody but himself. People respected him for the way the little guy played golf, but they sure as hell didn’t love him the way they loved Byron and Sam and Jimmy. Some of us who were lucky enough to see a more private side of Ben soon saw a very different guy. He helped some of us young bucks out there get started—gave us advice, even offered to lend us dough if things got tough—though he never wanted any of that known. I guess he feared people would mistake such kindness as weakness. But that car accident changed everything—even Ben himself.”
Only a day later, reflecting on the avalanche of get-well cards, cables, and letters that filled a dozen cardboard boxes in the hospital’s mail-room, Valerie confided to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “If there’s one good thing out of this accident, it’s been that Ben realizes how many good friends he has everywhere. People have been wonderful.” She paused and smiled, then added, “I guess you don’t know these things until something like this happens.”
Heroes are created, in large part, by displaying their human vulnerability. Prior to what happened on Highway 80, Ben Hogan symbolized what an unflagging work ethic could do for the proverbial underdog, but he was hardly a hero in the classic sense of the word. Suddenly, however, by lurching to save his wife—something every husband and ordinary Joe would like to picture himself doing without a moment’s hesitation—he now took on a mythic status. In the mere two seconds it took Ben to try to save the only girl who ever truly believed in him, he became a national hero.
To this day some critics doubt the sincerity of his hospital room epiphany, but the hospital staff reported seeing their famous patient sitting up in bed for hours reading intimate messages from total strangers, prompting him to shake his head and sometimes grow visibly emotional. A local secretary was hired to record names and addresses so Ben could personally write these well-wishers back, which indeed over time he did. “If I ever get out of here,” he reportedly told Valerie the day his doctors reported to the press that he was making an unexpectedly speedy recovery, “I’m going to be more aware of people—and their kindnesses to me.”
Ben’s closest friends insist the accident only stimulated his deep-seated compassion for any honest hardworking soul who was struggling to rise above misfortune, as if another’s tale of adversity simply reminded him of his own lifelong trauma over his father’s suicide. Whatever else is true, it’s indisputable that Ben’s close brush with violent death served to loosen his affections for friends and family, certain fans and even a few reporters. In the aftermath, he deepened the rituals of practice he found so comforting and strengthened his exercise of his faith. Following long months of recovery at home, for instance, he began showing up at Granville Walker’s Sunday morning services on a more regular basis.
“To a man who stared death in the face the way Ben did,” observed Ken Venturi, whose stellar career benefited mightily from his close friendships with both him and Byron, “battling to win a golf tournament and deal with all the distractions that go with it was suddenly nothing. That wreck made Ben pause and appreciate life a bit more, no doubt about it. But in the long run, it also only made him even more fearless in competition.”
But all of that was yet to come.
Four days after Valentine’s Day, the secret anniversary of his father’s suicide, while preparing to go home to his new house in west Fort Worth, Ben felt a sharp pain in his chest and urgent X-rays revealed that blood clots were moving toward his lungs and heart, floating time bombs in his circulatory system. All talk of a speedy recovery was moot. Less than twenty-four hours later, as the staff struggled to thin his blood and halt the advance of the killer clots, his condition grew critical, his blood pressure plummeting and his pulse erratic. After consulting with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, his doctors contacted a renowned Tulane University specialist named Alton Ochsner to discuss an extremely risky procedure that involved tying off the vena cava artery, which carries blood from the heart and lungs to the legs and pelvic region. Though Ochsner was a pioneer in vascular surgery—credited, in fact, with introducing blood transfusions to the United States—this radically invasive surgery required that a large incision be made through the abdominal wall in order to reach a large vein about the diameter of a half dollar, whereupon it would be cut and tied off “like closing a faucet.” In theory, he explained to Valerie and Royal Hogan over the phone, the procedure was relatively simple; in practice, there was little or no guarantee the patient wouldn’t bleed to death.
It was perhaps their only hope, however. Royal Hogan arranged to have Ochsner flown to El Paso. Hours later, as the risky surgery was under way, the Associated Press alerted its seventeen hundred subscribers, sending out a sixteen-paragraph obituary, “intended for use in the event of his death.”
Two hours later, a weary but smiling Ochsner told Valerie the surgery had been successful. With surprisingly little bleeding, the artery was now secured. Furthermore, he predicted her husband would begin to recover in about a week’s time and possibly be “up and around with limited mobility in several months.” On the downside, he advised her that Ben’s long-term mobility would also be greatly diminished—perhaps even his ability to walk a golf course. When Royal bluntly asked Ochsner when or if his brother might ever be able to play competitively again, the famous surgeon shook his head and reportedly replied, “I just don’t know. Only time will tell.”
Sam Snead loved the Greensboro fans because they treated him like a native son. He had fishing buddies in the galleries of the Gate City and enjoyed a productive relationship with a gifted Pinehurst caddie named Jimmy Stead who appeared to understand his complicated game even better than he himself. According to Sam, they met when Sam won the North and South Open at Pinehurst in 1941 and Stead regularly drove two hours up the road from the Sandhills whenever he played in the Greater Greensboro Open, an event that alternated between two fine old clubs.
It was there, inside the Starmount Country Club’s locker room, that he solved the mystery of the brass-headed putter he’d found in Tucson, which belonged to a popular Chicago club pro named Stan Kertes. How it wound up in his locker was never determined, though both men agreed a locker room attendant probably mistakenly put it there. When Sam confessed that he liked the putter’s heft and had in fact been practicing with it for several weeks, Kertes invited him to keep it. “See if it brings you any luck,” he said, and Sam decided to give it a shot.
He drained putts from every direction and length to tie Lloyd Mangrum for first place and then beat him in a playoff, 69 to 71. Sam’s “hometown” galleries were ecstatic.
A few days later, on the eve of the Masters, he took a lesson from Vic Ghezzi that helped him visualize shorter putts and smooth out his yips on shorter distances. He also began to “blot out the world” in his mind over critical putts, something he’d long heard Hogan talking about. With Jimmy Stead on his bag and a hot flatstick in his hands, he put together a pair of brilliant closing 67s in a biting spring wind to capture the season’s first major, including eight birdies in the final eighteen, winning the first of his three Masters titles. Not at all surprising to seasoned patrons, one of his victims was Byron Nelson, who returned as promised and gamely gave chase but finished ten strokes back.
For Sam, this breakthrough marked the beginning of the greatest run of his career, during which he won twenty of forty-two events.
Three weeks after his stunning display in Augusta, where he donned the first green jacket, armed with his magical new putter and comforting Jimmy Stead on the bag, Sam sauntered past Jackie Burke Jr. and Jimmy Demaret to reach the semifinal of the PGA Championship in his own backyard, Richmond’s lush Hermitage Country Club. In the final match, he trailed fellow Southerner Johnny Palmer until the twenty-second hole, where a monstrous birdie putt tumbled into the cup and vaulted him into the lead. He closed Palmer out on the thirty-fourth hole and then put on a new houndstooth sports jacket and beautifully knotted silk tie for the presentation of his second Wanamaker Trophy. He was the first man in history to win both the Masters and the PGA in the same year. “The only difference in Snead is that he’s getting hump-backed from picking balls out of the can,” Demaret quipped.
A fortnight later at the U.S. Open at Medinah, where, even without Jimmy Stead along to help, Sam played solid golf through seventy holes and reached the penultimate green tied with pleasant Cary Middlecoff, a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee Dental College. Facing a lengthy chip shot from the fringe just off the green, however, Sam opted to lag putt and rolled his ball eight feet past the cup. Then, after taking an unusually long time over the ball, clearly attempting to clear his mind of past Open disasters, he grazed the hole and finished a thin stroke out of a playoff, tied with Clayton Heafner for second place, a runner-up for the maddening third time.
Undeterred by the jinx, and eager to make hay while Hogan remained on the sidelines, Sam responded by winning three of his next six tournaments including the Western Open, finishing no worse than third place, to claim the money title, his second Vardon Trophy, and Player of the Year honors for 1949.
“Given that I’d been largely written off as dead by many of the scribes,” he was moved to remember some years later, “that was the most satisfying year I’d ever had up till then. It takes a lot out of a fella to reach the top of the heap the way Ben and Byron and I all did. Nobody gets to stay there long. But as Ben and I both proved, it’s a helluva lot harder to climb back up there once you’ve tumbled off because you know what it takes out of you to get back.”
His friends spent years trying to decide if his mysterious putter or Ben Hogan’s absence was the key that revitalized Sam Snead’s ailing game, though most agreed it was undoubtedly a combination of both and the steadying presence of Jimmy Stead. Sam himself was quick to point out that he was destined to earn more than $100,000 with Kertes’s putter, establishing a postwar record for tournament wins that would endure for several decades.
By his own estimation, he didn’t yip another putt until late 1952, when an assistant at the Greenbrier leaned on his beloved putter and snapped it off at the hosel, sending Sam into conniptions. As he later said, he recovered well enough to “nearly convince myself my putting problems were cured for the time being”—only to see the dreaded yips return with a vengeance in 1960.
When word leaked out that Ben Hogan had quietly registered for the Los Angeles Open of 1950, the tournament instantly became one of the most anticipated events in modern sports. Ticket sales soared above the ten thousand mark within days, and Riviera’s staff was besieged by requests for press credentials from as far away as Spain and Germany, with newspapers from Pinehurst to Pasadena hailing the second coming of an American hero, a brave little man who’d returned from death’s doorstep.
This breathless anticipation was understandable. With a predictable and impenetrable curtain of silence cinched around the pretty colonial house on Valley Ridge Road in Fort Worth, the public and press knew little or nothing about Hogan’s convalescence. By late spring of 1949, however, Ben began taking short morning walks around his house with the help of a cane, trying to strengthen the atrophied muscles in his severely damaged legs, which now relied on smaller veins to carry blood to his lower extremities, every step producing sharp pains. On April 5, he put a topcoat over his pajamas, a fedora on his head, and hobbled slowly around his yard. The next afternoon he ventured a little farther to inspect the plant beds Valerie’s yardman installed over the winter. Ben chatted with him, and Valerie detected a noticeable improvement in his mood over the days and weeks that followed. Ben’s interest in gardening was marginal, but even so, he sometimes surprised and impressed Colonial golfing partners by his knowledge of certain plants, using their proper Latin names.
At the end of April, he returned from a comprehensive checkup with Dr. Ochsner in New Orleans buoyed by his optimistic suggestion that by midsummer he might even be able to walk a golf course, albeit with heavily bandaged legs. Hoping for the best, weeks later he filed for a spot in the field of the U.S. Open at Medinah though by early June his uncooperative legs couldn’t carry him farther than a few blocks around leafy Westover Hills. He was reportedly so depressed about not being able to defend his national open title that he skipped the radio broadcast and subsequent TV highlights of Sam Snead’s most recent gallant failure to win the Open.
By August, however, Ben was hitting wedge shots and putting at the Colonial course on a daily basis, using a golf cart to get around, a new development largely popularized by the far-thinking George S. May. Still, during these brief outings, his legs continued to swell and, at month’s end, a sharp recurring pain in his right knee was diagnosed as a torn cartilage by Ochsner, who recommended surgery. Ben slept on it before rejecting any further surgery, fearing that would only slow his recuperation, opting instead for stronger bandaging and a single aspirin for the pain.
In September, the public had its first view in nine months of a somewhat gaunt Ben Hogan, who was strong enough to serve as nonplaying captain and travel with his American Ryder Cup team to the Ganton Golf Club (Harry Vardon’s old club) on board the Queen Elizabeth. During a rough crossing, Henry Longhurst of the Times and Leonard Crawley of the Daily Telegraph had lengthy conversations with him, and both thought he seemed noticeably more approachable and pleasant. Among other things, Hogan assured them that he would eventually claim another championship. “Longhurst and I looked at one another,” Crawley later wrote, “and when Hogan left us, we said in the same breath, ‘How pathetic.’ ”
Any suspicion that Ben had gone soft was quickly dispelled by the assault he orchestrated on British golf. At Ganton, he ran his team as he had as a second lieutenant drilling raw recruits for war, imposed strict meetings and curfews, and practice sessions before every match. He also insisted that his players eat every meal together. With rationing still in effect across England, the fact that he brought along a cache of fresh eggs and butter, half a dozen Virginia hams, thirty pounds of smoked bacon, and six hundred pounds of iced-down prime Texas sirloin beef to feed his squad produced howls of indignation on Fleet Street.
The insult grew when Ben ordered his charges to go easy on the time-honored traditions of drinking in the pub and fraternizing at night. “Hey, Hawk,” Demaret asked at one point, “we training for golf or for the army?” A prominent London editorialist wondered if Captain Hogan planned to “post a sentry guard by the door” to guard his “splendid rations.” Feathers were only slightly smoothed when Ben, sensing his team’s growing discomfort, eased his iron rules a bit and, on the eve of the first matches, shared his larder with the home team. “How gracious,” sniffed one Fleet Streeter. “Hogan has offered us what Americans like to call their ‘leftovers.’ ”
Motivated by the perceived snubs or sheer pride or the memory of the shellacking administered by the Yanks just two years before—all three factors, most likely—Arthur Lees and Dick Burton upset the “unbeatable” team of Mangrum and Snead in their opening Foursomes match, striking a positive note for the hosts, who by the final days of Singles needed just three and one half points to return Sam Ryder’s venerable cup. With a giddy British press all but declaring victory, however, Ben delivered a tongue-lashing that sent the Americans out like a winter gale off the North Sea. “It was tough words from a tough little man who’d been through hell,” Sam remembered. “We listened pretty good, I reckon. Nobody wanted to be the one who lost that damn cup.” Playing with quiet fierceness and resolve, they dominated the day’s matches and retained the cup, 7–5, carrying it home aboard the Queen Mary to a robust New York reception.
The Ben Hogan who showed up at Riviera between Christmas and New Year’s to practice for the 1950 Los Angeles Open was, in many respects, very different from the “Little Ice Water” depicted in Time magazine.
Though he’d managed to put on some weight, he still looked haggard and was ten to fifteen pounds shy of his normal playing weight of 140. As a favor to Valerie and his doctor, he’d agreed to address his cigarette habit of three and a half packs a day, and by the time he appeared for his first official practice round in eleven months, with a portable shooting stick seat like those used at steeplechase races, he’d more or less ditched cigarettes, at least for the moment. But like the Hogan of old, he had yet to officially confirm that he would play in the tournament.
His choice of practice partners that morning was also no accident. One was George Fazio, the smooth-swinging Pennsylvania pro whose easy style and graceful manner Ben found greatly appealing, whereas the other was Sidney Lanfield, a portly high-handicapper with an ungainly, abbreviated punch-swing. Ben loathed playing with hackers of any sort, but Lanfield had a special dispensation. On the morning the Hogans checked into their usual suite at the Beverly Wilshire, a reporter asked him if there was any truth to an item in Louella Parsons’s popular gossip column that a movie script was being written about his remarkable life and heroic comeback.
As usual, Ben refused to comment, but in fact a script had already been written for Twentieth Century Fox, and a director selected, to whom he’d been introduced years earlier by Bing Crosby: Sidney Lanfield. Moreover, a dozen leading actors had already been screen-tested for the lead role. Ben’s first choice was rangy, stoic Gary Cooper. Lanfield, however, had settled upon young Glenn Ford.
In this initial outing, having played his first complete round since the accident only a month before, supported by adhesive bandages swaddling both legs, Ben walked slowly through an impressive 33 on the front nine, coming home in 36—sending a seismic charge through the press room. Afterward, he appeared far more relaxed and generous with his time, answering questions from a large contingent of reporters, even pausing for photographs with tam-wearing Billy Seanor, twelve, the tournament’s cute Mascot Trophy winner.
“Say, Ben, that 69 is quite a score,” one of them said. “You really tore up the place out there.”
He gave a wintry half smile. “I did a lot better than I expected. But my legs bothered me.”
“Still, you’ll play …”
“Tough to say.”
As he’d complained to Fazio halfway through the round, his legs were killing him. But he indeed finished better than he’d expected to, faced his brief press inquisition with surprising ease, then went straight back to the Wilshire for a warm bath with Epsom salts, and an aspirin and ginger ale, followed by a soothing Ben-Gay rubdown and rest—in theory still undecided about playing. Valerie strenuously argued against it. But by now he’d more or less made up his mind to play. This was, after all, Hogan’s Alley.
On New Year’s Day, following one of rest and seclusion, he declined an invitation to watch undefeated Cal and Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, and played an afternoon round at Riviera with only his caddie for company, shooting 70. The next day, he played a third round with Demaret, former PGA champion Bob Hamilton, and reigning Open champion Cary Middlecoff. They had a ten-dollar Nassau going, and several times between holes on the second nine Ben had to stop and rest on his portable stool for several minutes, admitting that his legs were feeling the strain. Middlecoff suggested knocking off, but he refused and hobbled home with a 75, telling reporters he was “satisfied” with his game. Following another day of rest, he put together a fourth round of 67 that hardly went unnoticed; his aggregate score of 281 was three strokes better than Lloyd Mangrum had won with the year before. Finally, following a fifth round of 68, Ben ended the suspense and announced he would compete.
Meanwhile, the hottest player in the game had arrived, playing only a single practice round with Mangrum and Herm Keiser. Sam shot 67 and gave a lazy catfish smile when told about Hogan’s decision to play. “If he keeps them legs under him,” Sam drawled to the reporters, “Ben’ll be damn hard to beat out there. As you know, Ben loves this place.”
And with that, he climbed into a rental car to take Audrey and actor Randolph Scott to dinner at the Brown Derby.
The city announced it was adding a dozen buses out to the Pacific Palisades course to accommodate spectators, a record-breaking crowd of nine thousand passing through the gates for the first round, most of them following Ben and Sam. Despite handheld signs prohibiting cameras, the click of shutters was constant, and on the first fairway a visibly annoyed Ben exchanged sharp words with a small group of foreign press photographers. Perhaps because of this problem, Ben’s opening round of 73 was no thing of beauty. “Ben is a walking miracle,” Middlecoff gushed to one of Lanfield’s roving writers, hired to gather extra bits for the script. “He couldn’t possibly be on his game after that long layoff. If he wins this thing, believe me, it won’t be with his game,” Cary added. “It will be with his heart.” This gem was dutifully jotted down.
In Saturday’s second round, Ben finally settled down and shot a 69 that could have been at least two strokes better had a pair of putts not lipped out, while Sam opened with 71–72. A biblical downpour washed away Sunday’s scheduled third round, however, flooding barrancas and forcing the tournament rules committee to scrap every round after only fifty-seven players managed to reach the safety of the clubhouse and seventeen others, including Ben, were forced to pick up their balls. Out in the tumult on the course, Snead and Demaret picked up their balls and headed for the clubhouse even before play was officially suspended, risking disqualification, and Ben eventually found himself stranded by a raging creek on the eleventh fairway, hands on hips, glaring at the swollen waters like an Old Testament prophet. After briefly waiting for a tournament official to assess the situation, he, too, set off with a slow hobble to the clubhouse beneath his umbrella, grim-faced and puffing a Chesterfield, a blessing, as it turned out. His total after just nine holes was an untidy three-over 39 and his fingers felt a creeping numbness. The greatest misfortune of the day belonged to former Pasadena glove salesman Jerry Barber, whose ten-stroke lead was wiped away by officials.
After a soak in Epsom salts, an early dinner with friends from back home in Texas and a good night’s sleep, however, Ben seemed refreshed and proved it by bagging three birdies in the first seven holes of the replayed third round, recording a 69 that put him within two strokes of Barber’s lead, as the citizens of Hogan’s Alley roared their approval. Five strokes back and all but forgotten was the oddsmakers’ favorite, Sam Snead.
“I’m plenty tired. I’m not even sure these old stems can go another eighteen,” Ben confided to a crush of reporters in the locker room. But the next day, tapping into a reservoir of adrenaline and mental strength perhaps only he possessed, he finished his first tournament back with a third round of 69—a 280 total that seized the tournament lead. Coming off the famous eighteenth green, surrounded by worshipful fans packed into Riviera’s natural amphitheater, he tipped his flat linen cap to the sustained and thunderous cheer. “The second coming of Lazarus,” a Mutual Network radio commentator declared over the din. “Why, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!” Lanfield’s secret battalion of scriptwriters couldn’t have written a better Hollywood ending.
At that moment, with Barber and Demaret having fallen back, the only player with a reasonable chance to catch Ben was his archrival, Sam Snead, who was three under after fourteen holes and needed two birdies in the final four holes simply to tie. After failing at fifteen and sixteen to get them, Sam turned to his playing partner, Jack Burke Jr., and quipped, “Guess I’ve got to knock a couple in the hole to catch the little man.” A clutch ten-footer for his fourth birdie in six holes at the next hole drew him one shy of the lead, but he suddenly faced one of the most daunting finishing holes in golf, Riviera’s difficult 445-yard, par-four eighteenth, a hole that yielded precious few birdies.
“I had no doubt in my mind that I could catch Ben,” Sam recalled years later. “My hands were just itchin’ for the next chance to putt. That old putter of mine was magic that day.”
On the final green, following a brilliant six-iron approach that left him a fifteen-footer for birdie, the vast gallery fell to hushed silence, and Sam took his good sweet time assessing the putt from various angles. “For three full minutes I quartered the green,” he explained, “looking for major and minor breaks, estimating the speed needed and inspecting the turf around the cup.”
As he stood over his ball, a limb in the large eucalyptus tree just below the green snapped, sending a zealous fan tumbling into the bushes. “I’m all right, I’m all right!” he hollered, leaping to his feet, and everyone laughed.
A year or two earlier, Sam would have blown his stack, but now he was playing the finest golf of his life. In fact, the producers of Ben’s movie hoped to convince him to play himself in the forthcoming biopic. Yet in this instance he rewrote the script by smiling and briefly backing off to take a final read on his putt. Finally, he calmly stepped up and smoothly stroked the ball, rolling it into the center of the cup to force a playoff.
“The sound that went up at that moment was pretty amazing,” Middlecoff remembered. “Half of it was Sam’s fans cheering like crazy, the other half—or maybe more—belonged to Ben’s fans, groaning and cursing.”
Pandemonium erupted on the hillside as rain-loosened sod gave way and spectators tumbled onto the green. Several rushed to swarm and congratulate Sam, who grimaced and shoved a few out of the way in order to reach Jackie Burke and shake hands. Sam quickly checked, signed, and submitted his card to officials and fled into the safety of the locker room where he found his rival already showered and dressed, sitting with Middlecoff and Fazio, smoking one of his forbidden Chesterfields.
“I figured you would make that putt, Sam,” Ben told him with an icy little smile, dreading the very idea of an additional round.
“Well, Ben, I can’t miss ’em all,” Sam said with a grin.
A few minutes later, a knot of reporters gathered around Ben as he draped his topcoat over his arm. “I wish Sam had won it out there,” he told them. “I don’t feel bad about Sam tying me. I just don’t want to play another round. I’d rather Sam had won.”
Someone asked, a bit inconsequentially, if he planned on driving himself and Valerie up to the Crosby after the playoff. Media access would be more restricted there and he could relax a little more with his friends Crosby, Coleman, and Eddie Lowery, the San Francisco car dealer, before the tournament got under way on Wednesday.
“I don’t drive anywhere but home anymore, fellas,” Ben explained, excusing himself and heading up the stairs to where Valerie was waiting for him in the foyer. Left by himself to face a barrage of questions, Sam swigged a Coke and was only too happy to hold forth, having finally finished off an important tournament as well as he knew he could—with a scintillating 66.
One major wire service went slightly overboard that evening in describing the next act as the “Golf Match of the Century,” an echo of Hagen’s ballyhooed matches against his triumvirate rivals, Sarazen and Jones. But the gods clearly had something else in mind after dense Pacific rains swept in overnight and flooded the course a second time. The playoff was postponed for a week, dampening the Hollywood ending Lanfield and the media hoped to record.
To complicate matters, by the time Ben reached foggy Monterey, he had a nasty head cold. And by the time he finished up the three days of play with his partner, Bing, who ironically gave him an engraved cigarette lighter, a late Christmas gift, his miserable 223 left him in a tie for nineteenth place. Naturally, Sam won the affair for the second time in his career. Boarding the train back to Los Angeles, craving a smoke, Ben’s only comfort was provided by his lawyers back in Texas, whose settlement with the Greyhound Bus Company granted him $25,000 a year for life. Even if he never swung a club in competition again, he was financially secure.
Neither man distinguished himself in their predictably anticlimactic playoff encounter, which only 2,091 fans paid sixty cents to witness on an overcast and cool Monday afternoon following Bing’s Clambake. Sam managed an uninspired 72, while Ben, swaddled in two cotton sweaters, hobbling badly and repeatedly pausing to blow his nose, scored a wretched 76. They scarcely spoke but shook hands afterward, displaying all the enthusiasm of longshoremen who’d been forced to work on a national holiday. They split the modest gate receipts—pocketing an additional $500 apiece—and parted ways. Hogan made no excuses. “I’ve obviously got more work to do,” he told reporters before vanishing into a hired car. Sam lingered a little while longer, making little jokes, savoring as best he could another victory over his greatest rival.
Following a six-day rest at Dallas friend Pollard Simons’s house in Palm Springs, Ben arrived at the Phoenix tournament and found the event this year renamed the Ben Hogan Open in his honor. He limped to a twentieth-place finish, smoking like a chimney again, and thanked the generous fans of Phoenix for turning out in such large numbers. Within minutes he and Valerie were headed to the train station and home. Sam, continuing his tear, placed second.
By the start of Masters week in April, Sam’s red-hot putter had carried him to record-breaking wins at Texas, Miami, and Greensboro. Ben looked rested and much better, too, fresh from two weeks of practice at the ultra-private Seminole Golf Club with his friends George Coleman and Paul Shields, a Wall Street banker and a close friend of Cliff Roberts’s. Coleman would eventually join and be elected president of the cloistered seaside club where Ben and Valerie now made their annual late-winter retreat from the Texas cold, hobnobbing with the likes of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson and Chris Dunphy, a colorful former Hollywood agent who ran the club like a genial Irish despot, arranging daily matches between millionaire members that often ran into staggering sums. His friendships with Ben, Sam, and Byron meant all three became regulars at the unofficial Seminole Amateur-Professional where as much as $150,000 exchanged hands in its famous Calcutta, played out of sight of the celebrity-hungry press and agents for an even more interested Internal Revenue Service. Not until agents posing as caterers were able to penetrate the Pinkerton security force that Dunphy hired to keep unwelcome guests off the property—and jot down the names and winnings of players they could present with tax bills—did the full scope of Seminole’s invitational become known. While other well-publicized Calcuttas began running afoul of authorities about this time, Seminole’s beautifully run event—independent of the personal tax issues it generated—never had a whisper of scandal due to Dunphy’s imposing presence.
In March of 1950, just days before the Hogans set off for Augusta, Dunphy even managed to convince Ben to commit to the new Spring Golf Festival he helped orchestrate at Sam’s Greenbrier in early May. As Dunphy knew, the thought of taking one back from Sam the way the Slammer had taken the L.A. Open in Hogan’s Alley was simply too attractive to resist. Ben showed up at the Bon Air in Augusta looking tanned and unusually relaxed. Chatting with reporters, he explained he was working on a new “strategy of course management,” a phrase that quickly became attached to the growing Hogan mystique. Asked about this strategy, Tommy Bolt quipped, “New words for the same old Ben. He hits balls wherever he wants. We should just aim for his divots.”
Ben’s opening round was a disappointment, however, with his stamina giving out early in the round due to the course’s hilly terrain and a putter that never got on track. He finished the Masters with an embarrassing 76 and a total of 288 that left him five strokes behind the winner, Jimmy Demaret, who claimed his third title and first green jacket—a tradition that had begun just one year before. Sam finished one stroke better than Ben, tying for third at 286, his putter giving him trouble, as well.
A month later, however, with the Duke of Windsor and Chris Dunphy in the gallery, Ben evened the score by putting the lights out at the Greenbrier’s famed Old White Course, recording eye-popping rounds of 64–64–65–66 for a breathtaking 259 that equaled Byron’s historic 1945 mark and lifted the trophy of the inaugural Spring Festival right out from under Sam’s slightly out-of-joint nose. The closest competitor was, of course, Sam himself, who finished second but ten strokes back. “If Ben’s gonna putt like this,” he quipped at the gala dinner following the tournament, “I’d just as soon he’d go on back to Fort Worth and take it easy for the rest of the year.”
That spring, over lunch at Colonial, Ben heard from his mentor, Marvin Leonard, that he was thinking of building a private members golf retreat somewhere in California, and had even inquired into purchasing the Pebble Beach Golf Links but found the $20 million asking price too rich for his groceryman’s blood. This conversation, however, would eventually lead to a discussion about building a course somewhere in the city’s prosperous western suburbs. During this same luncheon, Ben aired his dissatisfaction with MacGregor, his longtime equipment provider. “They can’t seem to make a club to suit my specifications,” he complained to Leonard. Ever the entrepreneur, Leonard wondered if this meant he was contemplating a company of his own that would compete with the club-making titans of Wilson, MacGregor, and Spalding. The idea seemed almost incomprehensible. The big three had factories, after all, not to mention great distribution in pro shops across the country and generations of expertise in club manufacturing.
“It’s something I’m looking into,” Ben confirmed. “I don’t give a damn about their histories. I’ll make clubs better than they do, for anybody who wants to play golf the way it ought to be played.”
After the Greenbrier event, Sam successfully defended his Western Open title at Brentwood Golf Club in Los Angeles, his sixth victory of the year, and then moseyed down to Fort Worth and shot a pair of nimble 66s to snatch the Colonial Invitational trophy from under Ben, who tied for third and wryly remarked that he wished Sam would consider taking the rest of the year off to hunt and fish back home in the hills.
The good-natured public banter hid an almost palpable desperation in each man to beat the other, and this now came to a head as the year’s largest prize hove into view.
The fiftieth United States Open, the golden anniversary of golf’s second oldest championship, was scheduled for the Merion Golf Club, the Hugh Wilson gem outside Philadelphia where Jones captured the U.S. Amateur in 1930 to complete his fabled Grand Slam and where Ben had played miserably in his first national championship back in 1934.
Sam had his own sizable issues, of course, namely his Open jinx.
But he also had a plan to keep the great Jimmy Stead on his bag here: several of his Merion admirers had arranged for Stead to slip quietly into the pool of Open caddies. Unfortunately, however, the USGA disallowed this move and Sam was forced to pick a caddie from the registered pool, which reinforced his growing belief that he’d been singled out by executive director Joe Dey for treatment that diminished his chances of winning the prize he most coveted. Several USGA officials, including at least two former presidents, would ultimately agree with Sam’s interpretation.
By Open standards, Merion was short—just 6,700 yards—but a target shooter’s dream with narrow alleys of fairway and small greens fringed by thick, unyielding rough and strategic bunkering that recalled its spiritual antecedents, the great heather courses of Britain. Ben’s planning, as usual, was meticulous. Playing alone, hitting three shots on every hole in the practice rounds in welcome June warmth, he determined that his seven-iron was pointless, and replaced it with a one-iron, a move that proved critical as events unfolded.
Ben’s two-over 72 in the opening round left him eight strokes behind Lee Mackey, an obscure Alabama pro whose 64 tied the eighteen-hole Open record. Sam, still stewing over what he considered roughshod treatment by Dey and company, opened with 73 and declined to comment when a Philadelphia reporter asked him about the flap over Jimmy Stead.
The next day, as often happens to unknowns who briefly catch lightning by the tail, Mackey shot himself out of contention with a woeful 81, and a scowling Sam came home with 75. The halfway lead was shared by Dutch Harrison, Jim Ferrier, and Johnny Bulla. Young Julius Boros, a darkly handsome accountant from Connecticut playing in his first national championship, held the lead. Ben, whose improved 69 placed him in fifth place, was being chauffeured from the grounds to the luxurious Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square by Frank Sullivan, a crusty lawyer who worked for the publishers of his best-selling Power Golf, when he suddenly asked him to pull over so he could throw up. A little while later, following his soak in Epsom salts and a glass of ginger ale, he confided to Valerie and Sullivan over an early dinner that he wasn’t sure his ailing legs would hold up to the thirty-six holes he faced the next day.
Saturday dawned beautiful and warm, and Ben’s early-morning prep was precisely the same as it had been since Los Angeles—a warm bath followed by stringent leg massages with Ben-Gay, followed by an extensive bandaging routine from ankle to crotch, and an aspirin washed down with a glass of orange juice and a splash of ginger ale. After this two-hour ritual came a thirty-minute drive to the club in suburban Ardmore. Because of the Merion’s limited practice facilities, he reduced his customary warm-up period and spent more time putting on the practice green.
The contenders all played cautiously that morning. Ben’s 72 inched him forward into a tie for second with Middlecoff and Johnny Palmer, two strokes behind Lloyd Mangrum at 211.
After having a bowl of chicken broth for lunch on the terrace with Valerie, he trudged through an outward nine in 37 strokes, suffering such acute pain that he often stopped to rest and even clasp his legs as he ascended the steeper slopes. But the other leaders, fighting their own wars of Open attrition, all gave up ground in the first nine of the afternoon round—allowing Ben to hobble to the top of the scoreboard.
After he lashed his drive at the twelfth hole, his legs spasmed so badly that he was forced to grab a spectator’s arm. “I thought for sure he was going to collapse,” Middlecoff, his playing partner, later told a reporter. But he didn’t. Despite several more severe leg cramps, he arrived at the last hole having squandered a three-stroke lead over the previous six, needing to make par to tie Mangrum and Fazio, already in the clubhouse with 287.
Following a perfect drive to the heart of the home fairway, he was pinching a Chesterfield when he spotted Fred Corcoran and the pro Jimmy Hines in the gallery and asked them for the low number. Hines said it was him at 286. But Corcoran corrected him.
“No. It’s 287. Fazio.”
“And Mangrum,” someone else chipped in.
Hogan studied the uphill green for a long moment. The very thought of a Sunday playoff made him queasy.
As Sam said more than once, nobody ever knew which club to hit at any given moment better than Ben Hogan. Without much hesitation, choosing wisdom over valor, he opted for a one-iron instead of his four-wood and executed a beautifully balanced swing that was captured by Life’s Hy Peskin in a photograph destined to become the most famous golf shot in history, in more ways than one.
Ben’s ball finished on the left side of the green, forty feet from the cup, and the gallery standing ten-deep in places exploded. After looking over the putt from three different angles, he firmly rapped it four feet past the hole, producing a wave of anxious murmurs. Moments later, taking much less time than usual, he stepped up and stroked the ball into the left side of the cup, igniting another monstrous cheer that followed him off the course.
As he departed the grounds in Sullivan’s car, stone-faced and silent, Valerie Hogan was convinced her husband was finished, had no more strength left in him. “I had given up on him being able to play in the playoff,” she confided to sportswriter Dave Anderson decades later. “But I couldn’t tell him that.”
From the spectator’s standpoint, as events proved time and again, U.S. Open playoffs are almost always a disappointing anticlimax. In this instance, starting a little later than normal owing to Pennsylvania’s Sunday blue laws, Hogan and Mangrum finished Merion’s first nine in 39 strokes, Fazio two better. On the back side, however, with five holes left to play, obviously weary but appearing to draw strength from some other dimension, Ben Hogan caught up to his competitors and began to pull away.
Fazio’s nerves caused him to overshoot several greens and make bogey; Mangrum’s indecisive approach shots resulted in similarly wasted strokes. When Lloyd was assessed with a one-stroke penalty by referee Ike Grainger for illegally marking his ball for a second time on the sixteenth green, Ben went to the penultimate hole with a three-shot lead. Summoning something for the ages, he sealed this extraordinary victory with a long uphill birdie putt that sent what was believed to be the largest gallery to ever witness a U.S. Open playoff into a joyous frenzy.
Seated on the terrace, Valerie Hogan listened to the roar, sipped her iced tea, and began to cry. “I knew then that Ben had won it,” she allowed later.
It was, at last, the Hollywood ending that just about everyone had hoped for.
Perhaps the only man unhappier than Lloyd Mangrum or George Fazio was Sam Snead, who concluded the championship with a baleful 74 and hit the road for Hot Springs without saying a word to anyone. Despite his brilliant finish to the year—four more victories that gave him a total of eleven, a new postwar record—he was narrowly defeated for Player of the Year honors by a man who won only one official event in 1950.
“In some ways,” Sam conceded many years later, “that was the toughest thing I ever had to swallow. I’d had the greatest year of my career—better than anyone had had since Byron Nelson’s run—and Ben got all the honors.” He paused and added, “For a while, I seriously considered hanging it up. I couldn’t do any better than I’d done. Once I got home to Virginia and thought about it some more, though, I decided to keep on going. But between you and me, the tour was never quite the same for me after that.”