6

1958

WINNER:

St. Petersburg Open

Masters

Pepsi Open

“For some reason he was at his meanest with Arnold.”

“ARNIE AND I FIRST met at George S. May’s old Tam O’Shanter in Chicago,” Gary Player said. “Jimmy Demaret introduced us.”

May was a snake oil impresario and door-to-door Bible salesman with the accumulating paunch of a sportswriter and the entrepreneurial instincts of Phineas T. Barnum. He paid an unheard-of $50,000 to the winner of his self-proclaimed “World Championship” that carried an additional guarantee of 50 paydays, $1,000 a toss, for exhibitions spaced out over the year at obscure locations throughout the globe, which helps explain why many of May’s champions were never heard from again. Almost every pro golfer, young and old (except of course Hogan, too dignified for carnivals), was drawn to the song of the calliope and the smell of the midway.

“I’m a young guy from South Africa,” Player said, “and Demaret, a Texan, three-time Masters champion, and a wonderful, wonderful man, always smiling, always laughing, always joking, said, ‘C’mon, there’s another young fellow here you have to meet.’ Today’s players might not have even heard of Demaret, but he was a hell of a player, a hell of a player. Would more than hold his own with anybody now. And he was the most colorful performer, dresser, and talker in the game.”

Palmer was slamming drivers on the practice tee, spinning those helicopter blades over his head. But the uniqueness of Arnie’s swing wasn’t what jumped out at Player. “It was those forearms,” he said. “I thought, ‘Man, this guy is strong.’” The balls were rocketing down the range.

“It was quite a breezy day, and he bent down, yanked out a few bits of grass, and tossed them up in the air. But he didn’t look to see which way the wind took them. I asked him, ‘Why do you do that?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘All the good players do it, so I do it, too.’ Jimmy stood there, in his purple socks, laughing like crazy.”

Player was born in 1935, six years after Palmer, but as Arnold got his start in the profession relatively late, at 25, Gary’s came astonishingly early, at 17. His mother, Muriel, from whom he inherited his miniature features, died when he was eight following the cruelest siege of cancer. “She never saw me hit a golf ball,” he said with a sadness that could still call him to the edge of childhood. Unlike a lot of tough guys, Player was utterly unafraid of sentiment.

If he didn’t look like a tough guy at five feet six, consider the experience of a six-three Ohioan who during a round with Player replied to a sincere compliment by saying, “I’m not having any of that gamesmanship today, Gary.” Player stopped in his tracks. “If you say so much as one more word to me the rest of this round,” he told the man, “I’m going to fuck you up.”

His father, Harry, was a gold miner with corrugated hands but a smooth disposition. “‘The best friend I have in the world,’ my dad used to say, ‘is a rat.’ Down in the hole, he would break off little pieces of his sandwich and feed them to the rat. You see, that rat knew when the cave-ins were coming. Never in his life did my father make more than two hundred dollars a month. We lived in a crummy little house. One day in nineteen fifty-two, Dad rolled up with a set of Turfrider clubs from Wilson. He shrugged and said, ‘I had a bit of money.’ Eight years later the bank manager told me how an overdraft had to be taken to buy those clubs. When I began to win golf tournaments, my dad would put his arms around me and just cry.”

At one of Player’s earliest competitions, nobody could understand why the grim boy in the oversize sweater hadn’t jettisoned his heavy wool as a chilly morning turned into a scorching afternoon. The reason was, under Harry’s old sweater, Gary was wearing Harry’s old trousers, and the belt line washed up practically to his armpits.

Player said, “When I told my father I was turning pro at seventeen, he said, ‘That’s crazy, son. You can’t. You just can’t. I promised your mother you’d get an education.’ ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I’m going to get an education, a world education. See these hands? They’re going to hit more golf balls, and I’m going to travel more miles to do it, than any man who ever lived.’”

What Harry didn’t know was that his son had been practicing signing his autograph for two years, since a teacher inquired, “What do you intend to do with your life?” “That was my art teacher, Mr. Miller, an Englishman,” Player said. “‘Professional golfer,’ I replied. ‘Well, I don’t know what that will get you, my boy, but if you’re any good, you’re going to be signing a lot of autographs. Always keep this in mind: beauty of curvature. It’s important. Here, cup your hand. No, a little more. There, there, there, there, and there. Now go practice that.’”

Player said, “Take a look at my autograph, and then set it down next to Palmer’s and Nicklaus’s, and Hogan’s as well, for that matter. Every letter perfectly legible. Now, don’t tell me those guys didn’t practice, too.” (Palmer did; the one who set him to practicing was his first-grade teacher, Rita Taylor. She taught him the Palmer Method. No relation.)

Before the spring of 1957, Harry Player wrote Augusta National autocrat Clifford Roberts to ask if 21-year-old Gary might be included in the field at the Masters. The young South African tied for 24th that year. He would be the first international golfer to win the Masters (1961) and to win it (1974) and to win it (1978).

Like everyone else on tour, he was mesmerized by Hogan. “They called him ‘the Hawk,’” Player said, “because of those piercing eyes that looked straight through you. He came over to me once in a locker room, wanting to know how much I practiced. [”Hogan invented practice,” Demaret said.] I answered him at some length. And the fact was, with the possible exception of Hogan himself, I practiced more than anybody. ‘Double it,’ he said gruffly, and walked away.”

At an exceptionally weak moment—in Brazil, actually—Player put a call in to Fort Worth to solicit Hogan’s help. He was that lost. Gary was suffering from just the sort of hook Ben had cured. In his follow-through Player was actually crossing his right foot over his left to try to head off the hook. “I hate a hook,” Hogan had said. “It nauseates me. I could vomit when I see one. It’s like a rattlesnake in your pocket.”

Player got right to the point: “Mr. Hogan, I’ve been fighting this awful hook, and if I could just talk with you for a few minutes about my swing. Next to you, nobody has worked harder than I have. But I’m in trouble. I just don’t know what to do.”

“I’m going to be very curt with you,” Hogan replied.

(“I didn’t know what that word meant,” Gary said. “‘Curt’?”)

“Are you affiliated with a club manufacturer?”

“Dunlop.”

“Call Mr. Dunlop,” Hogan said, and hung up.

“I suppose he was a little like that with everybody,” Player said. “You know, ‘The secret’s in the dirt. Dig it out of the dirt, like I did.’ But for some reason he was at his meanest with Arnold. At a Ryder Cup, when Hogan was the U.S. captain, Palmer started to go over with him what he thought might be a favorable pairing that afternoon, and Hogan responded, ‘What makes you think you’re playing this afternoon?’ Talk about mean, man. That’s mean as crap.” As a matter of fact, Arnold didn’t play that afternoon.

In 1958, some weeks before the Masters, Palmer, Player, and Hogan were at dinner together with a gang of other tour pros in New York City. Bill Fugazy, the limousine mogul, was their host. “I’m surprised Hogan went,” Player said. “He didn’t go to many functions like that. During dinner, Ben was very, very rude to Arnold. We were all talking about swings, and Arnold was in the middle of saying something when Hogan cut him off. ‘What do you know about the goddamned swing,’ he said, ‘with that swing you’ve got?’ The whole table went quiet.”

“Ben had to be joking,” Dan Jenkins said, “and was probably a little over-served. In those days, everybody joked about Palmer’s swing.”

But Player and Palmer didn’t think he was joking.

“Arnold just swallowed it,” Gary said. “He could have reached over and snapped Hogan in half. I admired him for not doing so. Not retaliating when he so obviously could. I respected that immensely. It became my model later on, when I was blamed in America for supporting South Africa’s system of apartheid, and blamed in my own country for not supporting it.”

To loud criticism in the States, Player accepted an invitation to play golf with South African prime minister (and president-to-be) John Vorster (a white supremacist with bushy eyebrows), but Player had an ulterior motive. “Once I had established a relationship with Vorster, I was able to go to him later and say, ‘I’d like to invite the black American golfer Lee Elder to come to South Africa and play.’ He stared at me under those stupid eyebrows like I was a crazy man. But then he said just two words: ‘Go ahead.’ Activists in America pressured Lee not to come, but he came. It took a lot of balls. He did it to change lives. How I admired him.”

Player paused a moment to look at the sky.

Then he said, “Whenever I got picketed on a golf course in the U.S., whenever a cup of ice was thrown in my face, whenever a telephone book slammed me in the back, I thought of Palmer at that dinner in New York, and I took it.”

At the Masters a few weeks later, Palmer and Dow Finsterwald played a Tuesday practice match against Jackie Burke and Hogan. Weary and disappointed from an 18-hole playoff loss (78 to 77!) to Howie Johnson at the Azalea Open the day before, Palmer was still searching for his game against Burke and Hogan. But Dow carried him, and they won their bet, $35 apiece. “Afterward,” Player said, “Arnie and Finsty got to the lunchroom first. The other two came in, and Hogan went to a different table. Arnie heard him say to Jackie, ‘How the hell did he get in the Masters?’”

(“Just loud enough to make sure I heard it,” Palmer said, seated at his desk.)

“Well,” Player said, “you know what happened next, don’t you? That was the first year Arnold won the Masters.”

“There was a tremendous rainstorm Saturday night,” Palmer said. “I reached the twelfth tee Sunday with a one-stroke lead over Ken Venturi, my playing partner. That’s when everything hit the fan.”

The 12th hole, a par 3, represented the middle of “Amen Corner” on the far end of the course. The expression was coined at that tournament, maybe at that instant, by Herbert Warren Wind, borrowing from a 45-rpm jazz recording (“Shouting at the Amen Corner”) by Chicago clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow. As Wind reckoned it, the corner began with the approach to the par-4 11th and ended after the drive at the par-5 13th.

Only players, caddies, and officials were permitted inside the ropes surrounding the 12th tee. From their tee shots at 12 until their second shots at 13, the golfers broke off from the crowd for a quiet interlude of relative privacy.

“My tee shot at twelve [155 yards, six-iron] flew the green,” Palmer said, “and embedded itself in the mud between the fringe and back bunker. To me, an obvious drop without penalty. But the official standing there, Arthur Lacey, said, ‘It’s only half-plugged.’ I said, ‘That’s like being half-pregnant.’ Because of the heavy rain, just for the Sunday round, we were playing wet-weather rules ‘through the green’ [taking in all parts of the course except the tees, greens, sand bunkers, and water hazards]. I knew I was right. ‘I’m going to play two balls,’ I told Lacey. He said, ‘You don’t do that here.’

“‘Huh?’”

Palmer barely moved the indented ball, into a puddle of casual water, from where he received an uncontested free drop. But he required a chip and a couple of putts from there for a double bogey 5. Returning to the embedded scratch, he dropped another ball over his shoulder. Rolling nearer the hole twice, it was eventually placed, and this time he got up and down for 3. “We’ll let the rules committee sort it all out when we get in,” he told Venturi.

“I agreed with Palmer on the original call,” Venturi said. “That ball was absolutely embedded. But he didn’t declare he was playing a provisional until after he made the double bogey. To me, that was wrong. Dead wrong.”

Arnold said, “I did declare the second ball, to Lacey, before I played the first. Ken didn’t hear me.”

The killer for Venturi came in the 13th fairway as Palmer was in the go-or-layup position, weighing the considerable risk of a 230-yard second shot over water to the par 5. Had he known the score, he might not have gambled. He looked across the fairway at Ken, who was either one behind or one ahead and had already laid up with his own second.

“They’re going to give me a five back there, aren’t they?” Palmer said.

“You’re goddamned right they are,” Venturi told him. So Arnold went for it with a 3-wood, and got it. “He met the ball squarely,” Wind wrote, “and it rose in a low parabola. There was some draw on the shot, and it curved from right to left as it crossed the creek and landed comfortably on the green.” Eighteen feet from the hole. Straight in the cup for eagle.

Sitting nearby in his green combination wheel chair/golf cart, Bobby Jones experienced a flashback. That night, he would say, “Today I was watching Palmer at thirteen and once more Gene Sarazen was hitting from that mound at fifteen [in 1935]. As Gene followed through, I remember thinking to myself, ‘It’s the perfect golf swing.’ Of course, I had no way of knowing it was going in the cup for a double eagle. When Palmer hit his, I turned to Cliff [Augusta National chairman Cliff Roberts] and said, ‘He really got that one.’ It gave me the exact same feeling of exhilaration I felt all those years before. And this time I was surprised it didn’t go in the cup.”

Shortly, Jones and Roberts came riding up like the cavalry. They heard Palmer out, and after conferring with several other green jackets behind the 15th green, ruled that Arnold had made a 3 at 12. In exasperation, Venturi began three-putting his head off. And when the head comes off, the turnip goes on. Playing together, both Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins had reasonable putts at 18 to tie, but each finished a stroke behind Palmer. As the defending champion, Ford helped Arnie into the green jacket, making him at 28 the youngest Masters winner since 25-year-old Byron Nelson in 1937. Palmer had his first major title.

“The rules of golf are very touchy and troublous things to administer,” Wind wrote (troublous being a typical Herb word; he liked fillip, too, as in “an arm of Rae’s Creek, four or five feet wide, adds a nice fillip of menace”), “and my own feeling on the subject is that if a man is notified he has been appointed to serve on the rules committee for a certain tournament he should instantly remember that he must attend an important business meeting in Khartoum and tender his exquisite regrets to the tournament committee.”

“Two years later,” Venturi said, “Palmer finished three-three-three to beat me by a shot, and I was forced to sit there at the green jacket ceremony as the runner-up. He turned to me and whispered, ‘I’m sorry it had to be you, Ken.’ I looked away and said, ‘Two years too late.’”

Player said, “Venturi started to tell me once how Arnold had cheated him at the twelfth hole, but I stopped him right there. They always yell ‘cheater’ at the end. ‘That’s crap with a capital C,’ I told him. More than once, I’ve said to Palmer, ‘The reason I’m proud to have you as my friend is because you always do the right thing.’ Always doing the right thing was what made him Palmer.”

Many years after the incident, sitting in a locker room at Eagle Creek in Naples, Florida, Venturi was reflecting on his interesting life. “I played baseball with DiMaggio,” he told me. “I roomed with Sinatra. I knew Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., the whole Rat Pack.” He also knew disappointment. “I had three heartbreaks at the Masters,” he said.

The first and worst was in 1956, when he was a 24-year-old amateur and opened the tournament with a 66, the best score by an amateur still. That Saturday night, leading the tournament by four strokes, he was summoned to an audience with Roberts. In those days Masters tradition paired the Sunday leader with Byron Nelson, but Venturi’s close connections to Nelson and Hogan (“I was taught by Michelangelo and shown by Da Vinci”) worried the chairman.

Roberts invited Venturi to pick any other playing companion for the final round. In a typical show of bravado, he chose Sam Snead, with whom he had never been paired before. “Snead’s a tough man to play with,” Roberts warned. “So am I,” Ken said.

Sam was known for intentionally pulling the wrong club, making sure his playing partner saw the number on the back, then hooding it slightly to change the loft. If he wanted to, he could hit all of his irons the same distance. So could Hogan. So could Bobby Locke, the South African. So could Christy O’Connor Sr., the Irishman. So could a lot of the great ones.

Venturi shot 80 and lost to Burke by a stroke. A measly stroke.

His father was a San Francisco ship chandler who, when he wasn’t supplying twine and other supplies for the wharf, collected green fees at Harding Park, a public golf course. Ken liked baseball and was good at it, “but golf was easier for me,” he said, “because it was easier to be alone.” He was a stutterer who became a national communicator, for CBS. “I knew I was going to win the U.S. Open [which he did at sweltering Congressional Country Club in 1964 in a double round so delirious it ended the double rounds], but I never thought I’d be able to speak a whole sentence.” With a sheepish smile he said, “I guess I’m the fellow who lost the Arnold Palmer sweepstakes. But then, I was always more of a Ben Hogan guy anyway.” (Isn’t it funny how only the Hogan acolytes—Venturi, Bolt, Gardner Dickinson—were ever able to pull off those flat white linen caps?)

Venturi won his final PGA tournament in 1966, in the Lucky International at Harding Park, where his father had collected green fees and where Ken played his first round of golf. “I guarantee you,” he said, “I wrote that acceptance speech when I was fourteen years old.” By two strokes, he beat Palmer.

After Arnold won the ’58 Masters, did he throw his victory back in Hogan’s face?

“What would have been the point of that?” he said. “I admit, though, I felt an extra touch of personal satisfaction, and maybe he could see it the next time he looked at me. When I first came to Augusta, peeking through all those magnificent trees, it was such a thrill. Seeing Bobby Jones there, and Gene Sarazen, and Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan—those were the guys my dad and I used to talk about. I read Byron’s book, and Jones’s book. I remember things that happened to them. To actually know them, to see them play, to play with them, to eat with them, to have them call me by name, meant so much to me. I wanted to hear my name on Hogan’s lips, too, I’ll admit it. I ached for that. But, to the day he died, he never pronounced ‘Arnold’ and he never pronounced ‘Palmer’—it was always ‘Fella,’ or ‘Hey, you.’ I resented the hell out of it. But there was nothing I could do about it. Also, I didn’t want to spend my life being bitter, especially with all the good fortune coming my way.”

Hadn’t Palmer always been a great one himself for momentarily misplacing names and addressing old friends as “pard” or “pro”? He once propped his arms up on the shoulders of the lovable Brit writer Peter Dobereiner, saying, “I’m worried about our friend, Peter.” “Yes, so am I,” Dobers said, “because I’m he.”

“It’s not the same thing, trust me,” Palmer said. “Hogan had a purpose for everything he did, and he had a purpose for this. I was just never quite sure what it was. I think he wanted me to know that, as far as he was concerned, I wasn’t an ‘entity.’ I was just another player. He and Byron and Snead and I played an exhibition once at Preston Trail [in Dallas]. I played my best that day, and I got the impression it bothered him.”

There’s a photograph of them on the tee, Palmer with his L&M, Hogan with his Chesterfield, looking everywhere but at each other.

“I talked easily with Nelson and Snead,” Palmer said, “but Hogan? Zero. I had more conversation with Valerie [Ben’s wife]. She was a terrific lady. The whole thing between us embarrassed her. He was a great player. He proved he was a great player. But he wasn’t a great guy.”

To try to understand, it might help to know Hogan had a brother named Royal and a sister named Princess and he was just Ben. He was born in Stephenville, Texas, raised by a seamstress (Clara) and a blacksmith (Chester), who shot himself to death in 1922 in their home. If it’s true that Ben was present at his father’s suicide, he was nine.

At the age of 15, playing in the annual caddie tournament at Fort Worth’s Glen Garden Country Club, he lost the finals match (normally a nine-hole game) to Nelson after Byron made a 30-footer on the ninth to tie. Hogan thought he had won a sudden-death playoff at the next hole, but the terms of the match had been redrawn in midstream, to a full 18 holes, and another long putt ultimately beat him. One junior membership was at stake. Nelson got it.

In 2002, Byron was sitting on a park bench at Las Colinas in Dallas at 90 years old, the first born and last survivor of the class of 1912. “I never knew there was a game of golf until I was thirteen,” he told me. “I didn’t know the name, even. Do you know what it says on my birth certificate? ‘Rural Area, Ellis County, Texas.’ By fifteen I was caddying at Glen Garden. Contrary to all the stories that have been written, I never once caddied in a group with Ben. He worked mainly for a man named Ed Stewart. I had a regular, too, a judge. At the time I thought he was old. He was probably fifty. The first time I was ever conscious of Ben was at the Christmas party Glen Garden threw the caddies—turkey with all the trimmings—followed by the big caddie tournament where all our regulars caddied for us.

“Ben quit high school to turn pro. He would go off to a few tournaments, run out of money, and come back. Go off again, run out of money again, and come back again. [Before breaking through, Hogan rammed his head against that brick wall for more than a decade, in one tournament finishing 38th and winning $8.50.] He was more determined to be great than any man I ever saw.”

In 1949, Hogan and Valerie crashed head-on into a Greyhound bus on a foggy road near Van Horn, Texas, leaving Ben broken like china from pelvis to collarbone, ankle to rib. He limped his way to U.S. Open titles in 1950, 1951, and 1953. In 1952, two 69s gave him a two-stroke lead in the Open at Dallas’s Northwood Club, but on a 36-hole final Saturday in murderous 98-degree heat, he shot a pair of 74s for third place by himself behind Julius Boros and Porky Oliver. In 1953, Hogan played in six tournaments total, winning five of them (including the Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship), finishing third in the sixth. (You might want to reread that sentence.) Logistically, the British and PGA—at match play then—essentially overlapped. Everyone in the Open field at Carnoustie in Scotland was obliged to play in a qualifier, not that Hogan’s legs were up to trudging 36-hole PGA matches anyway.

“He played his best golf,” Nelson said, “after his automobile accident, after he learned to walk again. Whatever Hogan did to Arnold that hurt Arnie so, I can’t believe he truly meant it. You know, Ben knew that people as a group didn’t like him. Ben had some friends, but most people didn’t like him. He was so driven and he was so good. I think he had, I don’t know, kind of a fear of being close to people. Ben told me finally, ‘Byron, I didn’t realize that so many people liked me.’ You could almost cry.”

Sam Snead did cry. He was kicking back at the Greenbrier with his feet up in front of the television, pleased with his round that morning on the White Course. He had taken $300 off a sportswriter who said, “Don’t think I don’t know you could beat me playing left-handed. I’m going to put it on my expense account.” He laughed and said, “Amateurs still ask me to read their putts. What they don’t realize is I have to walk all the way to the hole just to tell if it’s uphill or down.”

A 1953 clip of Hogan and Snead was replaying on the TV, from the awards ceremony following the U.S. Open at Oakmont. It was Hogan’s fourth and last Open victory, Snead’s fourth and last second-place finish in the only major tournament he never won. In 1937, Sam’s first U.S. Open, he needed just a bogey-6 on the final hole at the Philadelphia Country Club to tie Ralph Guldahl. He made an 8. In the clip with Hogan—Snead had seen it a hundred times—he reaches over wanly to touch the elusive trophy in Ben’s arms. Holding out the large silver pot, Hogan rubs it up and down Sam’s stomach. Rubbing it in, Sam always thought.

“The three things in golf I feared most,” Snead said, “were lightning, downhill-sidehill putts, and Ben Hogan.”

That was one of his stock lines. Another couple were: “If you ever received a blood transfusion from Hogan, you’d die of pneumonia.” And, by the end of Ben’s career: “He had the yips so bad, you could smoke a whole cigarette waiting for him to take the putter back.” But then, in a whisper, Sam said earnestly, “If Hogan had been guaranteed another National Open putting ‘side-saddle,’ like I do, he still wouldn’t have done it. It looks so god-awful.”

Snead’s victim on the course that day said, “You know what he’s doing with the trophy, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You want to touch it. It wants to touch you.”

And Sam began to weep.

Hogan’s final Masters, at the age of 54, was writer Dave Kindred’s first, at 26, in 1967. In Saturday’s third round, Hogan shot a course record 30 on the back nine, birdieing 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 18 for a score of 66 that brought him within two strokes of the leader, Bobby Nichols. “I’ve had standing ovations before,” Hogan said in the Bartlett Lounge, “but not on nine consecutive holes.” His left knee and his left shoulder throbbed like toothaches, from the new cortisone shots as much as the old injuries. He said, “I left blood out there in every cup.”

After Hogan’s birdies-and-bogeys session, Kindred and a few others trailed him back to the locker room, where Ben said, “There’s a lot of fellas [there’s that word, ‘fellas’] who have got to fall dead for me to win tomorrow. But, I don’t mind telling you, I’ll play just as hard as I’ve ever played in my life.”

“Palmer sat off in a corner,” Kindred said, “changing his shoes and listening.”

Of course, nobody fell dead Sunday. Hogan shot 77 to tie Snead for 10th place, a full 10 strokes behind the winner, Gay Brewer. That morning Bob Drum and Dan Jenkins set the over/under on Ben’s score at 75, and even Jenkins took the over. Palmer shot 69 to finish solo 4th.

Among the writers, maybe only Dan knew Hogan well. They played numerous rounds together, usually just the two of them in Fort Worth, where Jenkins was the beat writer at the old Press. “I’d be watching him practice,” Jenkins said, “and he’d say, ‘Let’s go.’

“In nineteen fifty-six, Ben called me up and said, ‘I want you in a foursome for an exhibition at Colonial benefiting the Olympic Games.’ I said, ‘OK, I guess, but there must be somebody better than me.’ ‘No, I want you,’ he said. I worked half a day at the paper, came out, didn’t even have a golf shirt, wore a dress shirt, rolled up the sleeves, changed my shoes, didn’t hit a practice ball, got to the first tee, and five thousand people were waiting. Now, what do you do?

“Somehow I got off a decent drive into the fairway, and proceeded to top a three-wood fifty yards—it was a par five—then topped another three wood, then topped a five iron. All I wanted to do was dig a hole and bury myself in the ground forever. As I was walking to the next shot, still a hundred yards from the green, Hogan came up beside me and said, ‘You could probably swing faster if you tried hard enough.’ I slowed it down, got calm, and shot seventy-six. He shot his usual sixty-seven. That’s the Hogan I knew.”

In 1993, Kindred and I went to Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth to ambush Hogan, who had just turned 81. Most days he sat alone in a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie knotted to his neck looking out a grill room window at the 18th green, sipping white wine and smoking. Shady Oaks’s young pro, Mike Wright, told us, “I’ll introduce you, but I’m not making any promises.”

Ted Williams once shook Hogan’s hand and said, “I just shook a hand that felt like five bands of steel.” When I shook his hand, it still did. British broadcaster Henry Longhurst’s old description of Hogan was holding up fairly well, too. “A small man,” said Longhurst, “normal weight, no more than a hundred and forty pounds, height about five feet nine inches, with smooth black hair [now gray and largely gone], wide head, wide eyes, and a wide mouth which tends, when the pressure is on, to contract into a thin, straight pencil line. You could see him sitting at a poker table, saying, expressionless, ‘Your thousand and another five.’ He might have four aces or a pair of twos.”

Rising with a bounce, Hogan said, “Welcome, welcome, it’s good to see you,” but he didn’t sit back down because he didn’t want us to sit down. He intended for this to take 10 minutes, not the entire afternoon. It was only the second time I ever saw him. At the Masters in 1977, Hogan came back to Augusta just for the Champions’ Dinner that he had started in 1952 with a letter to Cliff Roberts:

Dear Cliff:

I wish to invite you to attend a stag dinner at the Augusta National on Friday evening, April 4th, at 7:15 p.m. It’s my wish to invite all the Masters Champions who are going to be here, plus Bob Jones and Cliff Roberts. The latter has agreed to make available his room for the dinner party and I hope you can be on hand promptly at 7:15 p.m. My only stipulation is that you wear your green coat.

Cordially yours,

Ben Hogan

Because sponsors of the upcoming Liberty Mutual Insurance Legends of Golf tournament (precursor to the 50-and-over senior tour) were tossing his name around loosely to advertisers and writers, Hogan dropped by the press barn to straighten everybody out. “I don’t know what these people have been telling you,” he said, “but I want you gentlemen to know that I will not be putting my game on public display under any circumstance.”

“But we heard you just shot your age [64] at Shady Oaks,” someone said.

“Ah, well,” he mumbled.

Someone else wanted to know, “Have you ever had a perfect round of golf?”

“No,” he said, “but I almost dreamt it once. I made seventeen straight holes in one and lipped out at the eighteenth. I was mad as hell.”

Kindred and I came to Fort Worth from Scotland, where we played Carnoustie. The highlights of Hogan’s victory there (in his only Open Championship appearance) were four 4s he made at the par-5 sixth, known as “Hogan’s Alley,” one of many holes at Riviera, Colonial, and other places so designated. Even for me, I played woefully at Carnoustie, but I had an eight-footer at the sixth for eagle. Missed it, of course.

“Tom nearly made a three at the sixth hole,” Kindred told Hogan, who said, “I can’t remember individual holes anymore.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Hogan,” I said, “they all remember you.”

In 1997, when 21-year-old Tiger Woods was running away with the Masters, Kindred, Jenkins, and a bunch of us wrote down our top ten golfers of all time and threw the lists unsigned into the center of the table. Dan might as well have signed his:

Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Doak Walker.

Before 1958 ended, the reigning Masters champion, Palmer, and the recent PGA champion, Finsterwald, came together at storied Athens Country Club in southeastern Ohio for “Dow Finsterwald Day.” Arnie’s old friend had won his major just weeks before by two strokes over Billy Casper in the first PGA since the format was switched from match play to medal. (In 1957, Dow had lost the last match of the match-play era to Lionel Hebert.) Two amateurs were along in Athens: 37-year-old Ohio State Hall of Famer Howard Baker Saunders, and 18-year-old Jack Nicklaus.

“Jack was included,” Dow said, “because he had won the Ohio Open at Marietta and, not just throughout the state but all across the country, was sort of recognized as the coming guy. There wasn’t any doubt about this kid’s talent. The only question was: What did he have between his ears and inside his chest? Well, we found out, didn’t we? I can’t say I knew then the historic significance of Jack’s and Arnie’s first round of golf together, but time did kind of stop there for a second when they shook hands. I can still see them.”

A nine-hole course with two sets of tees, Athens Country Club was designed in 1921 by Scioto pro George Sargent, then renovated in 1928 by the saintly Scottish architect Donald Ross. “Someone proposed a driving contest,” Dow said, at the 338-yard par-4 first hole. “Arnold led off, knocking it right on the green. Then Jack stepped up on those tree trunks of his and drove his ball thirty yards over the green. It’s true the ground dropped off pretty steeply back there, but still.”

Jack made four, Arnie three. Nicklaus went out in 35, Palmer 30. Thinking back, Arnold said, “I shot sixty-two that day, and I tried to shoot sixty-two [to sixty-eight for Jack]. I wanted to impress him. I was certainly impressed by him. I never was surprised by anything Jack did, only in some cases by how soon he did it.”

By the way, the date was September 25.