'An American Life': Author aces troubled golf icon Ben Hogan
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In golf parlance, this is an "attractive pairing," as noted golf writer James Dodson attempts the ultimate biography of Ben Hogan, the complex perfectionist with the tragic past who became the greatest shot-maker in history. Dodson succeeds, and the result is a book worthy of an Augusta green jacket: "Ben Hogan: An American Life."
Dodson proved that he knows how to tell a golf story in "Final Rounds," about his final golf trip with his dying father, and as co-author of "A Golfer's Life" (Arnold Palmer's autobiography). But Dodson declares that Hogan "surely is the most complex, remarkable and self-determined life anyone ever fashioned for himself in any sport."
Hogan rose from Texas poverty to national icon and millionaire. At one point early in his playing career, he had only change in his pocket and was eating oranges he found growing along fairways. He went on to win 64 tournaments, including nine major titles. Five of the "majors" came after he nearly died in 1949 in a car-bus collision that also almost crippled him.
The high-school dropout also founded one of the top golf-equipment companies in the world and wrote the best-selling golf-instruction book of all time ("Five Lessons") with the help of Herbert Warren Wind.
Hogan was sometimes called the "Garbo of golf" because of his passion for privacy. It was rooted in the unspeakable tragedy of having his mentally unstable father commit suicide, most likely in Ben's presence, when the future golfer was only 9 years old. Dodson contends that Hogan felt "somehow complicit in his father's death and was dogged to the end of his days by a fear of never quite measuring up."
After the tragedy, Dodson said Hogan's childhood "became a Dickensian ordeal of survival." He peddled newspapers and ventured to the caddy yard at the Glen Garden Golf Club in Fort Worth, where his initiation included being rolled down a hill in a barrel and being forced to fight an older boy. (Hogan won.)
The most famous story about his Glen Garden caddy days was the 1927 Christmas tournament where he lost to future PGA legend Byron Nelson by a stroke. Later, Nelson and Hogan would team with Sam Snead to form golf's first great triumvirate.
Hogan married young and admitted to his wife, Valerie, that he lacked concentration under pressure in tournaments. She replied, "Then maybe, Ben, you should just practice until you don't really have to think about how to hit the shots during a tournament."
He promptly became addicted to practice in an era when pros usually avoided the driving range. Valerie, who was too shy and nervous to follow her husband during a tournament round, was his psychological bedrock. While they were a wonderful sports partnership, the marriage had many dark moments, especially after he retired from competition. They separated at least three times and he once considered divorce. In the final years before his death at age 84 in 1997, she became a stern gatekeeper, depriving him of his friends and even his cigarettes.
Hogan became a mythic figure in 1950 when he won the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club in suburban Philadelphia 16 months after almost dying in the bus-car collision. Doctors originally predicted he never would walk, let alone play golf. He won the U.S. Open in 1951 at Oakland Hills Country Club outside Detroit with a final-round 67 that included a back-nine 32, uttering the famous quote, "I'm glad I brought this course, this monster, to its knees."
In 1953, Hogan had one of the greatest years in sports history when he won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open, where Scottish fans dubbed him "The Wee Ice Man." (Hogan was only 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed less than 140 pounds).
"There were two Ben Hogans," Sam Snead told Dodson before his own death in 2002. "There was Hogan the golf star and Ben the man. The two weren't much alike in my estimation." To his credit, Dodson captures them both.
Craig Smith is a Seattle Times sportswriter.
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