HOW UTTERLY TASTELESS it was for so many sportswriters to refer to Ben Hogan as Bantam Ben, the Wee Ice Mon, and The Hawk. The ugly insinuations were obvious—Ben Hogan was shorter and weighed less than some people, and though handsome, he was not as good-looking as Errol Flynn.
I can only imagine how a politically correct correspondent at the 1953 British Open at Carnoustie would have written about Hogan’s masterful victory. His piece may have gone like this:
“Differently sized Ben Hogan, the vertically challenged American who fancies refrigerated items and birds of the wing, finished a golf tournament today with a 72-hole score that was in variance with the rest of the field.
“Among other golfers on the scene who chose to accept a form of gratuity for their efforts were Mr. Tony Cerda of Argentina, which is as good as any other country despite occasions of domestic turmoil, Mr. Dai Rees of Wales, whose name is as it reads and not to be mistaken for a deficiency in his spelling skills, and Mr. Peter Thomson of Australia, a fertile continent that is isolated on four sides by water, through no fault of its own.
“No golfer actually lost the event, and while this tournament was no more important than any other, the trophy was awarded to Mr. Hogan on the basis of the general opinion that fewer of his golf shots wound up in the Firth of Tay, the burns, the moist ditches, or any of the taller growth regions of the Carnoustie golf course, a public facility in the normal scheme of things.”