Ben Hogan: Portrait of a Golf Legend

Not long after daybreak, the SS United States, the fastest liner on the seas at the time, came into view of the breathtaking sights to be seen.

To the left rose the Statue of Liberty, her burning torch raised to the heavens symbolic of so many American virtues. Next was Staten Island. Back off to the right was Brooklyn. To the rear, the Manhattan skyline came into view on this cloudy and foggy July morning. The Empire State Building’s peak broke high into the mist hovering above this cold and impersonal city.

Enterprising reporters covering the scene sped out into New York Harbor on cutters to meet the big ship.

Boarding the vessel through a passageway in the midsection, the press corps tramped through the corridors and took turns riding elevators up to the captain’s bridge.

Their destination was the reason for all the fuss: Ben Hogan, now unchallenged as golf’s best player and a citizen of the world just returning from Scotland, where he had conquered the only unmet-challenge of a rags-to-riches career that had taken him from the sand traps at Glen Garden Country Club he once used as bedding to the ultimate greeting, a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

He stood there with his wife, Valerie, answering questions from the inquiring correspondents who all wanted to shoot questions to the most popular man in the Western world.

“I’m a golfer and have been since I was 12 years old,” said Hogan, just shy of his 41st birthday. “Tournament golf is my life.”

Hogan had won six of golf’s major championships entering the 1953 season. On the shelves of his trophy case were the 1946 and ’48 PGA Championships; the 1948, ’50, and ’51 U.S. Opens; and a Masters trophy from 1951. 

Despite what he had done in all the years previous, there were many who were unwilling to compare Hogan to the game’s greats until he crossed the Atlantic to prove that he could master the winds and the dunes of Britain’s great seaside courses in the Open tournament setting.

Considering the pressure, he was under to prove his place in history, conquering Carnoustie in July 1953, his only British Open appearance, with a 6-under par four-round total, might have been Hogan’s greatest achievement in a life full of them. Hogan’s appearance at Carnoustie generated so much interest and publicity that if he didn’t win it, it would have been, as one writer put it at the time, one of sports history’s “great anticlimaxes.”

As it happened, Hogan left no doubt, firing a course-record 68 in the final round. Winning at Carnoustie was the capstone to the greatest year any golfer ever completed since Bobby Jones in 1930.

The Scots adored him. The “Wee Ice Mon,” he was fondly called by the Scots, who gave him the Elvis treatment. Actually, maybe it was Elvis who got the Hogan treatment. The first hint of Elvis wouldn’t occur until the next month.

Disembarking after a layover in France, Hogan and Mrs. Hogan were welcomed to America’s cultural and economic capital the way it had all the beau ideals who had come before him, all those national and international knights idealized for their courage, achievements, and virtue.

Only the select few had been feted by the New York’s ticker-tape parade. Theodore Roosevelt; Gen. John J. Pershing, following his triumphant return from Europe in 1919; Edward, the Prince of Wales, before his fall from the House of Windsor; David Lloyd George; Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Wiley Post, Will Rogers’ good buddy; Jesse Owens; Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Wainwright, Nimitz, and Harry Truman; and Churchill and MacArthur.

To name only a few.

And now Ben Hogan, son of Fort Worth, was receiving this hero’s reception, the ultimate survivor, in every sense of the word, and the winner of the Masters, U.S. Open, and British Open in 1953 — forever known as the “Hogan Slam.”

All 70 years ago this July.

From the ship, Hogan was led to a long, black convertible. He sat on top of the backseat. Valerie was escorted to a car behind.

With 50 police motorcycles, their sirens howling, the motorcade sped 20 miles around the city. Reporters noted revelers ranged from shirtless factory workers to white-collar office people. Nurses and other medical professionals waved from a hospital. As the cars advanced slowly, men, women, and children yelled, “Hi, Ben,” or “Hi, Champ.” The fire department boats in the East River saluted with tremendous, shooting streams of water and the sounds of their horns.

When they had reached the start of the parade at the Battery, the cars crept up a packed Broadway, 100 mounted police officers and the 100-man fire department band leading the way. Ticker-tape paper fell from the sky like a snowfall in the middle of a North Dakota winter. Tens of thousands stood cheering, applauding, and waving.

Hogan smiled broadly, waved, and nodded.

The destination was a platform at City Hall. There Hogan accepted a scroll presented by Mayor Vincent Impellitteri, an underdog populist who had neither a band nor a platform for his inauguration in 1950 after sending the powerful political bosses a message of being unbought and unbossed. The mayor read a message to the populist golf superstar from President Eisenhower.

“Millions of Americans would like to participate with the New Yorkers today who are extending their traditional welcome upon your return from your magnificent victory,” the President wrote. “We are proud of you not only as a great competitor and a master of your craft, but also as an envoy extraordinary in the business of building friendship for America. With best wishes to you and Mrs. Hogan.”

Said Hogan, anything but the stern, ice-cold competitive killer he was reputed to be: “This is the hardest course I’ve ever played. I’m so grateful that I can’t explain it in words. This sort of thing brings tears to my eyes. I have a tough skin but a soft spot in my heart, and things like this find that soft spot.”

The emotions undoubtedly stemmed also from the memories, all of them likely flashing before him at this moment, the triumph and trauma, all blended together made a complicated man.

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The story of Hogan’s hike to this time and place is one of the most captivating in 20th century American history, up to and including his own personal war on poverty, a cycle broken by an uncommon will.

As the newspaper recounted on that day in 1922, a day before Valentine’s Day.

“Daddy, what are you going to do?” asked Hogan’s brother, 12-year-old Royal Hogan.

Chester Hogan, 37, a struggling blacksmith, answered by rummaging in his handbag. He found what he was looking for. Chester took out his gun and shot himself just over the heart in a room at their home in the 300 block of Hemphill. It was the coda of a tragic life.

Chester Hogan had been noticeably ill since early 1921. According to The Brothers Hogan: A Fort Worth History, written by Royal’s daughter Jacqueline Hogan Towery, her husband Robert Towery, and Peter Barbour, Chester had often thought about death and at times was unable to work. He was drinking more than he ever had, and his moods varied from one extreme to the other.

Hogan’s mother, Clara, recognized the crisis and that no hospital in the family’s hometown of Dublin could diagnose, much less treat, his condition. The family believed, in hindsight, that what likely ailed him was bipolar disorder, a condition further complicated by alcohol consumption. Clara relocated her family to Fort Worth. Chester, according to The Brothers Hogan, began outpatient treatment at a hospital here, but when he couldn’t find work as a mechanic, he returned to Dublin and reopened his blacksmith shop, which struggled to stay open as the trade’s demand had diminished significantly in the area.

Chester had returned to Fort Worth to try to coax his family back to Dublin. Clara merely wanted to wait until the school year had completed before considering it.

Hogan, then 9, his brother, and their older sister Princess, 15, were left without a father. Their mother was left with three children to raise on her own.

Needless to say, the prosperity of the Roaring ’20s never made a stop at the Hogan home. Freedom from want was as foreign to the Hogans as the ruble. “These people were destitute,” was how one described the family to a reporter in the 1970s.

Royal, himself an accomplished amateur golfer, as his Colonial club championships would suggest, quit school in the sixth grade to help his mother support the family. Royal Hogan became a successful businessman as head of Hogan Office Supply.

“One has to consider what might’ve been different if that moment in my family’s past had never happened,” Jacqueline Towery Hogan wrote. “Would my father have become a successful businessman? Would he have quit school when he did? Would he or Uncle Ben have attended college? And, most importantly, would Daddy or Uncle Ben have ever picked up the game of golf? I wonder.”

Hogan discovered golf at Glen Garden Country Club.

Royal had begun selling Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspapers outside its offices on Seventh Street. Ben, then in the fourth grade at Carroll Peak Elementary, would come join him after school. Royal would give him some papers and position him at the T&P Station. Royal would return to Seventh Street.

Hogan was introduced to the idea of caddying by a friend at school who told him he could make more money carrying and cleaning golf clubs than he could selling newspapers. And if you worked hard enough at it, one could carry two sets of clubs for two golfers, meaning double the compensation.

Hogan walked the six miles to the course to ask for a job. He wasn’t embraced. There were more caddies on the course than they needed. So, he had to literally fight his way, hazed and harassed all the way, according to his niece’s book.

“Uncle Ben was a scrapper,” Hogan Towery wrote. “He told me they still made him fight one of the larger boys as a final test to become a caddy, and he got the better of this fellow because he knew how to fight. Sooner or later the boys who wanted it badly enough made the grade to become a caddy, and Ben made it.”

He soon discovered an affection for the game. His first club was one he found, a left-handed iron. Hogan, of course, was a righty, but he would hit balls with it every weekend morning, when the caddies were allowed to use the practice range.

“It wasn’t long before Ben knew that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life,” his niece said. “Golf was the perfect game for Uncle Ben’s fondness for solitude and his ability to concentrate. He was able to work alone, without teammates, and to accept all the credit or blame for the results. Golf provided competition, and if nothing else, Uncle Ben was very competitive, either by nature or through the concentrated determination he learned from his mother.

“Golf was the perfect game for Uncle Ben’s fondness for solitude and his ability to concentrate. He was able to work alone, without teammates, and to accept all the credit or blame for the results."  - Jacquelin Hogan Towery

Glen Garden also set the stage for another of Hogan’s seminal moments. Also working at Glen Garden was Byron Nelson, another who would become one of the game’s greats. The two were the same age, Nelson about six months older.

The 1927 Caddy Tournament became more than a footnote in history.

Hogan and Nelson finished tied. Hogan won what he thought was a nine-hole playoff. Hogan, according to golf writer and friend Dan Jenkins, remembers two members racing up to say the playoff was actually 18 holes.

Nelson, who went on to win by sinking a 30-foot putt on 18, always thought it was 18 holes.

“What angered Ben the most was that Byron was given a junior membership in the club, and Ben was told he could not use the practice range,” said Jenkins, who died in 2019, in an interview with the writer. “I don’t think he ever got over it.”

Hogan, with a rougher edge, was never embraced by the members like Nelson was.

Slighted, Hogan left in a huff as a 15-year-old, not to return for decades, taking his game and his drive to Katy Lake, the course a few miles away that became a shopping mall on Seminary Drive that today is the La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth.

What part, if any, the experience shaped him as a competitor or person, no one really knows.

“He liked to say his mother told him not to forget that he was as good as anybody, and he set about proving it,” Jenkins said. “Golf was his way of reaching a higher social level.”

His mother, however, also challenged her 16-year-old about the wisdom of her son’s fascination with the game. Wouldn’t it be wiser to go get a real job like his brother?

“I intend to become the greatest golfer in the world,” he replied.

Perhaps no one was as important to what Hogan made of himself than his mother.

Clara Hogan was an accomplished seamstress. Soon after Chester’s suicide, she found steady work at Monnig’s Department Store downtown on Fifth Street between Houston and Throckmorton. It sat across the street from where The Tower is today.

Her granddaughter, Hogan Towery, recalled her as a “real taskmaster” and “perfectionist.”

“Mama Hogan taught me to sew when I was 12 years old, and I learned in a hurry not to cross her. She would say, ‘Do it right or don’t do it at all.’ She expected sewing to be done perfectly, which meant her way. When I was young, she could be as sweet as pie, but she didn’t show that very often. And when she was determined, look out. It made a difference to her about sewing the absolute best it could be done.

“This disciplined attitude was a quality she bestowed on her children and a philosophy she applied to everything. When she was teaching me, if a seam on a sleeve had the tiniest flaw, I mean the smallest pucker, I would have to take it all apart and start over until I got it right.”

It was his mother’s fingerprints that made the son. Hogan quit playing the very day he realized he could no longer win. That day was May 13, 1971. Hogan withdrew from the Houston Champions International Golf Tournament because of severe leg pain, which he suffered continuously since the accident in Van Horn in 1949.

Wrote Gene Gregston, a reporter who covered Hogan: “Ben didn’t want to play his best that day. He wanted to be the best every day.”

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It was written: A faithful friend is medicine for life.

Hogan had that. Without Marvin Leonard, Hogan’s day in New York City probably never happens.

Leonard was Fort Worth’s leading citizen in his day and, according to one description, its “voice of reason, compassion, and optimism.”

And, of course, the city’s leading promoter and benefactor of the sport of golf, which he revolutionized in Texas with the introduction of the bent grass greens everyone told him he couldn’t grow in North Texas because of the heat. He put them on the championship-caliber course he built near TCU which hosted the 1941 U.S. Open and an annual PGA Tour stop beginning in 1946. The other club he built, Shady Oaks, had them, too.

Much has been written on the topic of friendship, since before and including the Greeks’ great thinkers to singers and songwriters to script writers at NBC and elsewhere. 

It’s the relationships that matter, friends being the essential ingredient to making good in this world — no matter how that is defined — and for Hogan, Leonard was that friend, who stood by him and helped him get his career and perhaps even his life off the ground.

“The best way I can describe [the relationship] is the inscription Hogan wrote to my father in his first instruction book,” says Marty Leonard, daughter of Leonard. “‘To Marvin Leonard, the best friend I will ever have. If my father had lived, I would have wanted him to be just like you.’”

“That tells you as much as anything. That was certainly the way Hogan felt, and I know my father felt the same way as well.”

True friends are a sure refuge, Aristotle said from his lectern at the Lyceum, it is presumed, in poverty and other misfortunes in life.

The name Leonard and the department store he and brother Obie owned and operated for the better part of 70 years cannot be separated from the history of Fort Worth. 

One reason is because Leonard was incited to noble deeds.

One example was retold in a Leonard biography, Texas Merchant, authored by Walter L. Buenger and Victoria L. Buenger. 

A program to feed hungry school children during the Depression, financed by the state and county budgets, had run out of money. Leonard told the schools superintendent to keep the program going and send him the bill. He quietly paid the $35,000 bill to do so. He wasn’t the kind of guy to go on Facebook — had there been a Facebook — and tell the world what he had done. 

He didn’t operate that way. Leonard was a “quiet giver,” his daughter once said, adding in one testimonial that he was always “helping people in some way, whether it happened to be with paying bills, or with food programs at local schools, providing college funds, or helping out in a personal crisis. Everybody loved him, and that was because Daddy loved people.”

This was a guy who didn’t finish high school because, as his brother Obie said, as retold in Texas Merchant, he didn’t want to burden his parents with the expense of buying him a graduation suit.

Leonard’s Department Store was also the first in Fort Worth to remove the last ugly vestiges of Jim Crow, according to Texas Merchant. The store had always welcomed Black shoppers, but it had separate water fountains and bathrooms. Blacks were also not allowed in the buffet line of the store’s restaurant.

It was an example that is credited for making way for the one of the most peaceful transitions of desegregation in the South. 

Of his quiet philanthropic pursuits, Leonard would say later in his life, “Whatever I might have contributed to the field of golf and to the welfare of my city, I received deep personal satisfaction — more than I know how to express.”

As it concerns golf, Leonard initially put the game away as quickly as he had picked it up. He tried to play in his early 20s but found the game took too long to play. He reasoned that even as a bachelor, he was too busy with an upstart business in downtown Fort Worth to mess with chasing a white ball around a golf course. 

A doctor convinced him to change his mind some years later when Leonard was in his early 30s.

“I woke up one morning feeling so low that I went to my family doctor, and he said to start playing golf or start preparing for a crack up,” Leonard said, according to Texas Merchant. 

He returned to Glen Garden and began playing at least nine holes in the morning before breakfast. His hobby turned to obsession, as we all know the story of his proving that bent grass greens could not only survive but thrive in Texas. He had discovered them in California. 

It was at Glen Garden that Leonard met the hardscrabble Hogan, then a teen. 

Leonard befriended him, and it’s not a stretch to suggest that the older man — 17 years older than his new protégé — was the only true friend of Hogan, at the time, at least.

Hogan quit school at age 17, leaving Fort Worth Central High School to pursue a career in golf.

In those early days on tour in 1931, Leonard seeded Hogan’s first year. By Christmas, he was out of cash and stuck on the West Coast with no way to get home. He called Leonard for another advance. Leonard wired him money, with enough to buy his fiancé a Christmas gift. 

Marty Leonard said she doesn’t know how much money her father gave to Hogan, other than the crude, simple one-page document kept in the Hogan Room at Colonial. It’s a matter of a few hundred dollars (roughly $5,000 today).

“I’m sure there were other instances,” she said. “That’s the one we have record of.”

Hogan’s first 10 years as a professional were difficult. His first victory didn’t come until 1940 at the North and South Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina. The war had shut down golf for the better part of four years. But from 1945-49, Hogan won 37 tournaments, including the PGA and U.S. Open twice. 

The accident in Van Horn almost ended it all. Hogan cheated death twice from the collision with the bus. He suffered a broken left ankle, a fractured collarbone, multiple fractures in the pelvis, and a damaged rib when his car, which also carried his wife, Valerie, as a passenger. In the aftermath of surgery to repair his injuries, he also developed what was described as a serious blood clot condition that compromised his life.

The issue was the casts that covered his body. His brother-in-law, Howard Ditto, Princess’ husband, a medical doctor, flew to El Paso to visit Hogan.

He was “appalled by the casts,” Hogan’s niece wrote.

“He took Royal out into the hallway and told him they had to get the casts off immediately, or Ben would continue to clot and have circulation issues. He felt Ben’s condition would require the services of a surgical specialist to operate, or Ben would not survive much longer.”

Ditto suggested contacting Alton Ochsner, a professor at Tulane University Medical School and considered by many to be the best vascular surgeon in the country.

“I remember being awakened by the telephone in the middle of the night,” Marty Leonard says. “Mr. Hogan, Royal that is, had called my dad to seek his advice on how to get a doctor from New Orleans to El Paso. My dad was very, very upset about Ben’s condition.”

Leonard counseled Royal to seek out the assistance of Hogan’s former Tarrant Field commander during the war. David Hutchinson, by then a brigadier general, had also been Hogan’s golf partner in exhibitions. The general agreed to issue a command to send a B-29 bomber from Carswell Air Force Base to New Orleans to pick up Ochsner.

Eight hours later, a B-29 landed at Biggs Army Airfield in El Paso. Ochsner was transported to Hotel Dieu Hospital to see Hogan. The doctor ultimately made an incision in Hogan’s abdomen and tied off the vein from where the clots had appeared.

It was similar, the doctor said, to “turning off a water faucet.”

“We removed the danger of any more clots,” he told reporters then, “and another one could have been fatal.”

He predicted that Hogan would be “up and around in a few months,” though he would be lucky if he could ever walk properly again, much less play golf.

History tells us how this remarkable story ended. In June of 1950, 18 months after the accident, Hogan, then in his mid-30s, won the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club, and he went on to win six more majors. 

He endured incredible pain in his legs through all of them. The traumatic injuries and the aftermath would limit his schedule for the rest of his career.

Hollywood grabbed onto the story, too. “Follow the Sun,” starring Glenn Ford, debuted in May 1951, a mere month after Hogan’s first Masters championship. Perhaps the only reason he didn’t win all four majors in 1953 is because the PGA Championship schedule conflicted with the British Open.

The friendship between Leonard and Hogan remained steadfast until the end of each other’s lives, said Marty Leonard, who noted also that her father was an investor in the Hogan Co., a manufacturer of golf clubs. 

“He threw out the first set of them because he didn’t like them,” she said. “I think he lost some of his investors when he did that, but not my father.”

Colonial members held a roast of Leonard in 1969, which turned out to be the final year of his life. 

Hogan was the star attraction. 

“For the edification of you out-of-towners, we here in Fort Worth like to honor people who have never made a success of anything,” Hogan said dryly. “We pick out people who have never contributed one thing to this city’s success. We only honor complete parasites.” 

After pausing, he added: “Our honoree tonight goes beyond that.” 

Hogan joked that Leonard’s career had been a series of “mistakes,” which his brother Obie had to bail him out of, including coming to the rescue of Leonard’s Department Store after discovering Marvin was “giving away” the merchandise. “While Marvin was home sleeping, Obie was down at the store changing prices.”

Hogan then grew serious and said: “Marvin Leonard has done more for golf with his time and his knowledge and his money than anyone I know. I don’t know that anyone else would have the nerve and foresight to do the things he did. I doubt if Colonial would exist. I doubt if Shady Oaks would exist. I doubt if the U.S. Open would have come here. Marvin, I salute you.”

There also might not have been the Ben Hogan we know.

In the years that followed Hogan’s success, the golfer offered to pay back the money Leonard had given him, Marty Leonard said.

“Ben,” Marvin Leonard said, “you don’t owe me anything.” 

Hogan won at Leonard’s Colonial Country Club a record five times, the last time in 1959.

That was Hogan’s last victory on the tour.

Fort Worth, too, got its chance to welcome home its favorite son in 1953.

The City Council proclaimed July 27 “Ben Hogan Day.”

A parade was part of the festivities. A police-escorted motorcade took Hogan and Valerie from Western Hills Hotel to City Hall where they were received by Mayor Edgar Deen and other city officials.

Councilman Mansfield McKnight said Hogan’s greatest accomplishment was not his mastery of the links but in overcoming. From there, the motorcade traveled south on Houston to Ninth and east to Commerce and Eighth. A reception awaited at the Hotel Texas.

Rev. Granville Walker, pastor of University Christian Church, where the Hogans were members, took the podium to discuss “Hogan as a Man.”

Walker closed his remarks: “If there is anything more remarkable than Hogan’s record, it is Ben Hogan.”

(Editor's Note: This story is the first in a series highlighting the career of Ben Hogan)

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