The Age Of Hogan

The Hogan of this period, just prior to his initial victory in the 1948 National Open at Riviera with his record score of 276, was something to behold. When people talk of a man drilling an iron or rifling an approach shot, nearly always that is "golf language" loosely used. But Hogan did drill those irons and his shots did buzz like bullets. My, how they traveled—low, hard, even viciously. In the third round of one Masters, I think it was, I remember Hogan coming to the 13th in the thick of the battle, not far behind the leader. Attempting to cut the corner as closely as possible and set himself up for getting home in two for his birdie, he hooked the ball slightly and it rolled into Rae's Creek. Well, it cost him a valuable stroke to lift and there he was, standing with his hands on his hips and his cigaret wedged truculently between his lips, collecting himself before he played his third. He pulled out what looked like a one-iron, and no one who watched that shot will ever forget it. He hit it with everything. Scarcely had he finished his follow-through, it seemed, when the ball was already on the green, lying quietly 12 feet from the cup—it had gotten there that fast! Hogan was playing a different kind of golf, both in thought and in execution, when he won his first Open and subsequently his three other Opens, his second PGA, his two Masters and his British Open. He had become a better golfer, as his success in itself made clear. But for the pure excitement of watching a man attack a golf ball, no one in our time has generated the clubhead speed and unleashed a shot like Hogan did just before he learned how to win.

Depending on how you look at it, everybody knows or nobody knows the change Hogan mastered in his method of striking a golf ball the season he won his first Open. If one means the exact key to his method of imparting a controlled fade to his shots—the exact key being what is referred to as Hogan's Secret, since he has no desire to reveal it to the rest of the trade as long as he remains in business—then no one knows. If one means more generally doing everything to retain his power and yet everything to guard against a hook, then everyone knows what Hogan does. The swing he compounded and learned so well that he could execute it flawlessly under fire has varied somewhat in its details from season to season, but it had, and has, as its features (bypassing Hogan's true fundamentals of perfect balance and his wide "forward" arc) such antihook staples as the left thumb down the shaft and the right hand riding high, the slightly opened stance, the club taken back a shade outside, the outward thrust of the right forearm at the beginning of the downswing that produces what the pros call the triangulation action, and the maintenance of an anything-but-shut clubface as he biffs through the ball.

Hogan lost some roll as the result of "the slight fade," but what he gained was 10 times as valuable. His approaches became a softer kind of shot. They coasted over the flag and dropped gently onto the green. More important, when he failed to meet his drives just right, the ball did not hook into trouble but merely veered a few yards to the right in a far safer and "slower" parabola than a hook describes. Before effecting this change, when Ben had played an unbroken competitive stretch, he had been prone to tire near the end of a tournament. When he was tired, he hooked. When he hooked, he incurred rough lies and sometimes penalty strokes. When he incurred these extra strokes, it defeated him. His revised swing gave him margin for unpenalized error and proved to be the difference between Ben's becoming a great champion and not remaining just a great golfer.

THE SWING BEN BUILT

Contrasted with a swing like Snead's, which is natural and (because of Sam's exceptional leverage) naturally powerful, the swing Hogan built was not a picture postcard lyric. It was constructed, as its critics pointed out, too much like a stairway of compensations. When these broke down—and they did to some degree in the Masters in 1952 and 1954 and in the last two rounds of the '52 Open—Hogan had his problems. But Hogan's swing, when he had the time to tune it up properly and the physical reserve to maintain it as he wanted it, was so functional and assertive that it had a smooth, efficient beauty of its own.

Hand in hand with Hogan's altered swing went an altered program of participation. In 1948 and in the seasons following his accident, he eschewed his previous habit of playing the tournament circuit almost without a break in favor of picking his spots. He conserved his energy and concentration for the significant events, resting and practicing in between. It helped to make the difference and Ben realized this perfectly. "The most important factor in playing a championship is to be fully prepared," he said in his acceptance speech at Oakmont after his fourth triumph in the Open, picking his words as carefully as he picks his clubs. "I look forward to playing in the Open as long as I am able to prepare my game and myself properly."

Hogan's most unusual effort in preparation was part and parcel of his dramatic invasion of Scotland to play in the 1953 British Open. His subsequent victory has today the aura of a romantic novel about it, it was so utterly triumphant. For a man who had never before played a competitive stroke in Britain (and will probably never return to play another), Ben made a phenomenal adaptation to the foreign conditions. Discovering, for instance, that he hurt his wrists when he played his irons off Carnoustie's hard turf with his usual swing, he modified his hitting action. "He ended," Sir Guy Campbell has said, "taking the ball almost exactly like the great Scottish golfers had done years and years before." To get to know the deceptive course, on the evenings preceding the start of the tournament he walked the holes backward until he had memorized the natural features and the concomitant problems in tactics. He won with 73-71-70-68. "And if he had needed a 64 on his final round," Bernard Darwin has remarked, "you were quite certain he could have played a 64. Hogan gave you the distinct impression that he was capable of getting whatever score was needed to win."

Since his accession in 1948, Ben has provided such a cornucopia of skill and courage that to choose his finest shots, his finest rounds and his finest tournaments would be mighty difficult and would, eventually anyhow, resolve itself into personal choices. We will take Ben's selections, then, in those cases where he has indicated them.

His top tournament: the 1953 Masters which, as he has expressed it, represented the best golf he ever played over a 72-hole stretch. Ben was 70-69-66-69—274, and the game's most erudite camp-followers cannot remember four consecutive rounds of comparable errorless character. On a testing course, Hogan was literally on the pin with just about every shot. (It was after this exhibition that everyone began clamoring what a crime it would be for such a golfer not to take a shot at the British Open; when Hogan was assured of the accommodations he would need at Carnoustie to "prepare himself fully," he went, as we know.)

His best round? He has intimated that it was the final 67 that won him his third Open at Oakland Hills in 1951. Late that afternoon, Clayton Heafner got around in 69, the one other player in a superb field who succeeded in breaking 70 over the four rounds on perhaps the severest layout on which the Open has been played. The chief incubus to the scoring was controlling the tee shot. Robert Trent Jones, who had remodeled the old Oakland Hills specifically for the 1951 Open, had filled in the obsolete traps 220 to 240 yards from the tee and had constructed in their stead new traps which flanked the wasp-waisted fairways 240 to 260 yards from the tee, far enough out so that the long-hitting pros could not carry them. This tight arrangement panicked just about the entire field with the exception of Paul Runyan who would have had a hard time reaching the obsolete traps. Hoping to avoid error, many of the pros switched to brassies, spoons and irons off the tees, leaving themselves a succession of arduous second shots and, all in all, letting the course play them instead of playing the course. Hogan started with an erratic 76. Round by round he improved his figures—a 73, a 71, a 67.