The Age Of Hogan

The winner of the 55th National Open Championship this weekend could very possibly be Ben Hogan. It is almost a simple matter of presence. Over the past eight years, regardless of how muddy other affairs have turned out to be, it has become remarkably clear that if Ben Hogan is entered in a tournament, there is an extremely strong likelihood that the winner will be Ben Hogan.

In the opinion of golf's most thoughtful observers, however, the chances of another Hogan victory loom somewhat less overwhelming than they have in the past on the eve of the Open. On one hand, his opposition should be tougher. There is considerable ground for believing that the players comprising the Young Guard and the Middle Guard—a number of whom are included in the color portrait gallery beginning on page 33—have gained sufficient confidence not to rush headlong away from the responsibility of being crowned champion, should they play themselves into a position where that heavy burden presents itself. In recent months, on the other hand, there have been a few fairly definite indications that Hogan, a human being despite the colossal evidence to the contrary he has exhibited in his mastery of one tournament after another, is at length, and at 42, slowing down just a trifle. He now misses the fairway off the tee occasionally, like other fine golfers. He now pops an occasional approach a few yards short of the green, like other fine golfers. He even occasionally fails to hole a five-foot putt. Ben, as we should know by now, is so consummate a strategist, shotmaker and competitor that when he is 50 he could still "take it all," but in the event he does not carry off the Open this week (when Ed Furgol defends the title he has carried like a true champion), it will be of more than passing significance. It will be the first time since the war that he will have gone two consecutive years without winning at least one major championship—the Open, the British Open, the Masters and the PGA—and this will mark the end of an historic period in golf, the Age of Hogan.

Celebrated as Ben's reign has been both by the golfing and the non-golfing public throughout the world—for after his comeback from his near-fatal accident Ben became a human-interest story and a powerfully popular figure for thousands who "never swung a tee"—we are probably still too close to his separate triumphs, still too bedazzled by his commanding, combative, concentric personality, to appreciate how phenomenal he has been over a period of years purely and simply as a golfer. In years to come, I am sure, the sports public, looking back at his record, will be struck by awe and disbelief that any one man could have played so well so regularly. The boosters of that age will resort to explaining that Hogan could only have cut the swath he did in a period when he had no competition and so on and so forth, just as they do today when trying to comprehend the consistent dominance of earlier super-champions like John L. Sullivan, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Jim Thorpe, Howie Morenz, Walter Johnson and Paavo Nurmi. Ben Hogan, the outstanding sports personality of the postwar decade, has, to be sure, secured a place among the very great athletes of all time.

Perhaps as good a way as any, particularly on the eve of a National Open, to begin to understand Hogan's genius as a tournament golfer is to set down without flourish his record over the past 15 years in this most important of all tournaments:

1940—tied for 5th
1941—tied for 3rd
1942—'45—no Open
1946—tied for 4th
1947—tied for 6th
1948—first
1949—injured
1950—first
1951—first
1952—third
1953—first
1954—tied for 6th

Two other men have records in the Open which compare with Hogan's. Willie Anderson, a dour Scottish pro transplanted to Apawamis, took the event in 1901, 1903, 1904 and 1905. The second man, of course, was Bobby Jones, and since his is the only other modern record in the same class with Hogan's, we might do well to set it down year by year again.

1920—tied for 8th
1921—tied for 5th
1922—tied for 2nd
1923—first
1924—2nd
1925—2nd
1926—first
1927—tied for 11th
1928—second
1929—first
1930—first

As documents of sustained brilliance over a period of years Hogan's and Jones's records speak for themselves. But just as the two men are quite different personalities, their careers were shaped differently, as one or two brief elaborations on the tables above incisively demonstrate. When Jones first cracked through in 1923, for example, he was a young man of 21 playing in his fourth Open. Bob had been a helluva golfer back in 1916 when, at 14, he had gone to the quarter-finals of the Amateur. The period between 1916 and 1923 struck him as "the seven lean years," for he was so good so early, a bonafide child prodigy who never lost his stuff. When he retired in 1930 after his Grand Slam, Bob was only 28. Hogan, in contrast, was 35 (almost 36) when he captured his first Open. Twelve years before, in 1936 at Baltusrol, he had qualified for the championship but had failed to "make the cut"—that is, he did not finish among the top 76 scorers for the first two rounds and so was not eligible to play the last 36 holes. In 1939 he finished the Open in a tie for 62nd place. He was almost 27 at this time, an age when a golfer must expect some success or get out of the profession, and it would not have been beyond reason for the name Ben Hogan never to have become better known to the sports public than the names George Slingerland and Frank Gelhot, the only two men who played the final 36 holes in that Open and did not bring in lower totals than Hogan's. The point is not a new one, that Hogan was anything but a born wonder, but it is worth the remaking. No athlete ever worked harder, or waited longer, to become a champion. It explains an awful lot about the man.

By 1940 Hogan was an accomplished enough golfer to have won the Open. He was ripping through everything else but "the big ones" and led the money-winners for three consecutive seasons before entering the Service in 1942. When he returned to civilian life and combat golf, he quickly reaffirmed his position of standing with Snead and Nelson as the country's best. And at length, in 1946, years behind schedule, he won his first prestige championship, the PGA. I doubt if ever in the long line of fierce and fiery spirits who set out to win at "games" anyone matched the smoldering intensity of the Hogan of this period, a volcano always on the brink of eruption, so white-hot in his over-determination that you were charred by propinquity and yet so controlled, so inflexible, and so terribly purposeful that it gave you a chill to watch him at his work.

Hogan's opponent in the final of that PGA was Ed Oliver. At lunch Oliver stood 3 up but in the afternoon Hogan rushed out in 30 strokes and by the 31st tee stood 5 up. The two drives on the 31st finished about equidistant from the green and the referee resorted to tossing a coin. Hogan won the toss and elected to play first. He put his approach three feet from the hole—finis, 6 and 4. He played like a killer that afternoon, and many afternoons afterward, for earlier that year—and you can imagine the depth of the anguish and self-recrimination a person like Ben underwent—he had taken three putts on the 72nd green in both the Open and the Masters when two putts would have enabled him to have tied for the top and opened up the chance of victory via a play-off. After these crucial disappointments he seemed always to be goading himself to relax not for an instant, to make every shot count, to show the other fellow (and himself) no mercy.