Ben Hogan

Ben Hogan
Hogan in New York City in 1953
Personal information
Full name	William Ben Hogan
Nickname	The Hawk, Bantam Ben, The Wee Iceman
Born	(1912-08-13)August 13, 1912 Stephenville, Texas, U.S.
Died	July 25, 1997(1997-07-25) (aged 84) Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.
Height	5 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1.74 m)
Weight	145 lb (66 kg; 10.4 st)
Sporting nationality	United States
Spouse	Valerie Fox (1911–1999) (m. 1935)
Career
Turned professional	1930
Former tour(s)	PGA Tour
Professional wins	71
Number of wins by tour
PGA Tour	64 (4th all time)
Other	7
Best results in major championships (wins: 9)
Masters Tournament	Won: 1951, 1953
PGA Championship	Won: 1946, 1948
U.S. Open	Won: 1948, 1950, 1951, 1953
The Open Championship	Won: 1953
Achievements and awards
World Golf Hall of Fame 1974 (member page) PGA Tour leading money winner 1940, 1941, 1942, 1946, 1948 PGA Player of the Year 1948, 1950, 1951, 1953 Vardon Trophy 1940, 1941, 1948 Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year 1953
(For a full list of awards, see here)

Ben Hogan
Allegiance	United States
Service/branch	U.S. Army Air Forces
Years of service	1943–1945
Rank	Captain
Unit	Fort Worth Army Air Field

William Ben Hogan (August 13, 1912 – July 25, 1997) was an American professional golfer who is generally considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game.^[1] He is notable for his profound influence on golf swing theory, inventing the idea of practicing golf^[2] and his ball-striking ability.^[3][4][5]

Hogan's nine career professional major championships tie him with Gary Player for fourth all-time, trailing only Jack Nicklaus (18), Tiger Woods (15) and Walter Hagen (11). He is one of only five players to have won all four majors: the Masters Tournament, The Open Championship (despite only playing once), the U.S. Open, and the PGA Championship. The other four are Nicklaus, Woods, Player, and Gene Sarazen. Hogan's first major win came at age 34.

Hogan was born in Stephenville, Texas, the third and youngest child of Chester and Clara (Williams) Hogan. His father was a blacksmith and the family lived ten miles (16 km) southwest in Dublin until 1921, when they moved seventy miles (110 km) northeast to Fort Worth. When Hogan was nine years old in 1922, Chester committed suicide by gunshot at the family home. By some accounts, Chester committed suicide in front of him, which some (including Hogan biographer James Dodson) have cited as the cause of his introverted personality in later years.^[6]

The family incurred financial difficulties after his father's suicide, and the children took jobs to help their seamstress mother make ends meet. Older brother Royal quit school at age 14 to deliver office supplies by bicycle, and nine-year-old Ben sold newspapers after school at the nearby train station. A tip from a friend led him to caddying at age eleven at Glen Garden Country Club, a nine-hole course located three miles out of town.^[7] One of his fellow caddies at Glen Garden was Byron Nelson, later a tour rival. The two would tie for the lead at the annual Christmas caddie tournament in December 1927, when both were fifteen. Nelson sank a 30-foot (9 m) putt to tie on the ninth and final hole. Instead of sudden death, they played another nine holes; Nelson sank another substantial putt on the final green to win by a stroke.

The following spring, Nelson was granted the only junior membership offered by the members of Glen Garden. Club rules did not allow caddies age 16 and older, so after August 1928, Hogan took his game to three scrubby daily-fee courses: Katy Lake, Worth Hills, and Z-Boaz.

Hogan dropped out of Central High School during the final semester of his senior year. He turned pro six months shy of his 18th birthday at the Texas Open in San Antonio, in late January 1930. Hogan met Valerie Fox in Sunday school in Fort Worth in the mid-1920s, and they reacquainted in 1932 when he landed a low-paying club-pro job in Cleburne, where her family had moved. They married in April 1935 at her parents' home.

Hogan's early years as a pro were very difficult; he went broke more than once. He did not win his first tournament (as an individual) until March 1940,^[8][9] when he won three consecutive events in North Carolina at age 27.^[10][11] Although it took a decade for Hogan to secure his first victory, his wife Valerie believed in him, and this helped see him through the tough years when he battled a hook that he later cured.

Despite finishing 13th on the money list in 1938, Hogan took an assistant pro job at Century Country Club in Purchase, New York. He worked at Century as an assistant and then as the head pro until 1941, when he took the head pro job at Hershey Country Club in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

During Hogan's prime years of 1938 through 1959, he won 63 professional golf tournaments despite the interruption of his career by World War II and a near-fatal car accident. Hogan served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from March 1943 to June 1945; he was stationed locally at Fort Worth and became a utility pilot with the rank of lieutenant.

Driving home to Fort Worth after a Monday playoff loss at the 1949 Phoenix Open,^[12] Hogan and his wife Valerie survived a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus east of Van Horn, Texas. On the morning of Wednesday, February 2, Hogan had reduced his speed in the limited visibility ground fog; the bus was attempting to pass another vehicle on a narrow bridge, which left no place to avoid the crash. Hogan threw himself across Valerie to protect her. He would have been killed had he not done so, because the steering column punctured the driver's seat of their new Cadillac sedan.^[13][14]

This accident left Hogan, age 36, with a double-fracture of the pelvis, a fractured collar bone, a left ankle fracture, a chipped rib, and near-fatal blood clots: he would suffer lifelong circulation problems and other physical limitations. His doctors said he might never walk again, let alone play golf competitively. While Hogan was in the hospital in El Paso, his life was endangered by a blood clot problem that led doctors to tie off the vena cava. He left the hospital on the first of April, 59 days after the accident, and returned to Fort Worth by train.^[15][16]

Hogan regained his strength by extensive walking and resumed his golf activities in November 1949. He returned to the PGA Tour to start the 1950 season at the Los Angeles Open, where he tied with Sam Snead over 72 holes, but lost the 18-hole playoff, held over a week later (due to course conditions).^[17][18]

The win at Carnoustie was only a part of Hogan's watershed 1953 season, a year in which he won five of the six tournaments he entered, including three major championships (a feat known as the Triple Crown of Golf).^[19]

It still stands among the greatest single seasons in the history of professional golf. Hogan, 40, was unable to enter—and possibly win—the 1953 PGA Championship (to complete the Grand Slam) because its play (July 1–7) overlapped the play of The Open at Carnoustie (July 6–10), which he won. It was the only time that a golfer had won three major professional championships in a year until Tiger Woods won the final three majors in 2000 (and the first in 2001).

Hogan often declined to play in the PGA Championship; he skipped it more and more often as his career wore on. There were two reasons for this. First, the PGA Championship was, until 1958, a match play event, and Hogan's particular skill was "shooting a number"—meticulously planning and executing a strategy to achieve a score for a round on a particular course (even to the point of leaving out the 7-iron in the U.S. Open at Merion, saying "there are no 7-iron shots at Merion"). Second, the PGA required several days of 36 holes per day competition, and after his 1949 auto accident, Hogan struggled to manage more than 18 holes a day.

After the win at Carnoustie, Hogan and his wife Valerie were passengers on the SS United States westbound to New York City, where he received a ticker tape parade down Broadway on July 21.^[20][21]

Hogan was known to practice more than any of his contemporary golfers and is said to have "invented practice". On this matter, Hogan himself said, "You hear stories about me beating my brains out practicing, but... I was enjoying myself. I couldn't wait to get up in the morning, so I could hit balls. When I'm hitting the ball where I want, hard and crisply, it's a joy that very few people experience."^[22] He was also one of the first players to match particular clubs to yardages, or reference points around the course such as bunkers or trees, to improve his distance control.

Hogan thought that an individual's golf swing was "in the dirt" and that mastering it required plenty of practice and repetition. He is also known to have spent years contemplating the golf swing, trying a range of theories and methods before arriving at the finished method which brought him his greatest period of success.

The young Hogan was badly afflicted by hooking the golf ball. Although slight of build at 5'8½" and 145 pounds^[23] – attributes that earned him the nickname "Bantam", which he thoroughly disliked – he was long off the tee early in his career. Like many professional golfers of his day, he competed in long drive contests as well as matchplay and strokeplay events.

It has been alleged that Hogan used a "strong" grip, with hands more the right of the club grip in tournament play prior to his accident in 1949, despite often practicing with a "weak" grip, with the back of the left wrist facing the target, and that this limited his success, or, at least, his reliability, up to that date.^[24] Jacobs alleges that Byron Nelson told him this information, and furthermore that Hogan developed and used the "strong" grip as a boy to be able to hit the ball as far as bigger, stronger contemporaries. This strong grip is what resulted in Hogan hitting the odd disastrous snap hook.

Hogan's late swing produced the famed "Hogan Fade" ball flight, lower than usual for a great player and from left to right. This ball flight was the result of his using a "draw" type swing in conjunction with a "weak" grip, a combination that all but negated the chance of hitting a hook.

Hogan played and practiced golf with only bare hands, i.e., without gloves. Moe Norman did the same, playing and practicing without gloves. The two were arguably the greatest ball strikers golf has ever known; even Tiger Woods quoted them as the only players ever to have "owned their swings", in that they had total control of it and, as a result, the ball's flight.^[25]

In May 1967, the editor of Cary Middlecoff's 1974 book The Golf Swing watched every shot that 54-year-old Hogan hit in the Colonial National Invitational in Fort Worth, Texas. "Hogan shot 281 for a third-place tie with George Archer. Of the 281 shots, 141 were taken in reaching the greens. Of the 141, 139 were rated from well-executed to superbly executed. The remaining two were a drive that missed the fairway by some 5 yards and a 5-iron to a par-3 hole that missed the green by about the same distance. It was difficult, if not impossible to conceive of anybody hitting the ball better over a four-day span."^[26]

In the spring of 1953, Hogan announced he had discovered a "secret" that made his swing nearly automatic.^[27] There are many theories as to its exact nature. The earliest theory is that the "secret" was a special wrist movement known as "cupping under". This information was revealed in a 1955 Life magazine article. However, many believed Hogan did not reveal all that he knew at the time. It has since been alleged in Golf Digest magazine, and by Jody Vasquez in his book "Afternoons With Mr Hogan", that the second element of Hogan's "secret" was the way in which he used his right knee to initiate the swing and that this right knee movement was critical to the correct operation of the wrist.

Hogan revealed later in life that the "secret" involved cupping the left wrist at the top of the backswing and using a weaker left-hand grip (thumb more on top of the grip as opposed to on the right side).

Hogan did this to prevent himself from ever hooking the ball off the tee. By positioning his hands in this manner, he ensured that the club face would be slightly open upon impact, creating a fade (left to right ball flight) as opposed to a draw or hook (right to left ball flight).

Many believe that although he played right-handed as an adult, Hogan was actually left-handed.^[28] In his book Five Lessons, in the chapter entitled "The Grip", Hogan said "I was born left-handed -- that was the normal way for me to do things. I was switched over to doing things right-handed when I was a boy but I started golf as a left-hander because the first club I ever came into possession of, an old five-iron, was a left-handed stick." This belief also seemed to be corroborated by Hogan himself in his earlier book Power Golf. However, some mystery still remains about this since Hogan in subsequent interviews said that the belief of his being left-handed was actually a myth (noted in what was probably his last video interview and in his 1987 Golf Magazine interview).

In these interviews Hogan said that he was indeed a right-handed player who early on practiced/played with a left-hand club that had been given to him because it was all that he had and that it was this issue that brought about the myth that he was left-handed. This may be the reason that his early play with right-handed equipment found him using a cross-handed grip (right hand at the end of the club, left hand below it). In "The Search for the Perfect Golf Swing", researchers Cochran and Stobbs held the opinion that a left-handed person playing right-handed would be prone to hook the ball.

Hy Peskin, a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated, took a famous photo of Ben Hogan playing a 1-iron shot to the green at the 72nd hole of the 1950 U.S. Open.^[29] It was ranked by Sports Illustrated as one of the greatest sports photographs of the 20th century.^[30]

Hogan believed that a solid, repeatable golf swing involved only a few essential elements, which, when performed correctly and in sequence, were the essence of the swing. His book Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf (written with Herbert Warren Wind) is perhaps the most widely read golf tutorial ever written, although Harvey Penick's Little Red Book would also have a claim to that title, and the principles therein are often parroted by modern "swing gurus". In the Five Lessons, Hogan breaks down the swing into four parts: The Fundamentals, The Grip, Stance and Posture, and The Swing.

Hogan explains that the average golfer underestimates himself. He believes that beginners place too much emphasis on the long game. If you have a correct, powerful and repeating swing, then you can shoot in the 70s. "The average golfer is entirely capable of building a repeating swing and breaking 80."^[31] Through years of trial and error, Ben has developed techniques that have proved themselves under various types of pressure.

Hogan says, "Good golf begins with a good grip."^[31] Without a good grip, one cannot play to his or her potential. The grip is important because it is the only direct physical contact you have with the ball via your golf club. A bad grip can cause dipping of the hands at the top of the swing and a decrease in club head speed. This can cause a loss of power and accuracy. The following describes the perfect golf grip in the eyes of Mr. Hogan:

"With the back of your left hand facing the target, place the club in the left hand so that, 1) The shaft is pressed up under the muscular pad at the inside heel of the palm, and 2) The shaft also lies directly across the top joint of the forefinger".^[31]

"Crook the forefinger around the shaft and you will discover that you can lift the club and maintain a fairly firm grip on it by supporting it just with the muscles of that finger and the muscles of the pad of the palm."^[31]

"Now just close the left hand-close the fingers before you close the thumb-and the club will be just where it should be."^[31]

"To gain a real acquaintance with this preparatory guide to correct gripping, I would suggest practicing it five or 10 minutes a day for a week until it begins to become second nature."^[31]

"To obtain the proper grip with the right hand, hold it somewhat extended, with the palm facing your target. Now-your left hand is already correctly affixed-place the club in your right hand so that the shaft lies across the top joint of the four fingers and definitely below the palm."^[31]

"The right hand is a finger grip. The two fingers which should apply most of the pressure are the two middle fingers."^[31]

"Now with the club held firmly on the fingers of your right hand, simply fold your right hand over your left thumb."^[31]

The right stance not only allows for proper alignment, but also for a balanced swing, prepared usage of the proper muscles, and the maximum strength and control over your swing. We align our body to the target only after we have aligned the club head to the target.