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Ben Hogan dead at 84

By RON SIRAK / AP Golf Writer

Ben Hogan, the stone-faced man in the white hat who survived a crippling car crash to become one of the greatest golfers ever, died today. He was 84.

Hogan, who had colon cancer surgery two years ago and Alzheimer's disease, died at his home in Fort Worth, Texas, said his secretary, Pat Martin. She did not know the exact cause of death.

"Ben Hogan personified golf for many of us," said Professional Golfers' Association Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. "Perhaps no other player had the same impact on the way people approached playing the game."

The facts alone argue well for Hogan's greatness - 63 victories, nine major championships, four U.S. Open titles, the career Grand Slam and the only person to win three professional Grand Slam events in a single season.

But mere numbers hardly told the story of the single-minded, at times surly man driven to master the game.

Born to a hard-scrabble life in rural Dublin, Texas, on Aug. 13, 1912, William Ben Hogan was 9 years old and in the room when his blacksmith father, Chester, committed suicide with a .45-caliber pistol.

Shortly after, his mother, Clara, moved the family to Fort Worth and Hogan discovered golf as a caddie at Glen Garden Country Club where, at age 15, he lost the caddie championship in a playoff to another boy his age named Byron Nelson.

Hogan turned pro when he was 17, joined the tour full time at 19 in 1931 and neared bankruptcy several times until he won his first tournament at the Hershey Four-Ball in 1938.

It was the beginning of one of the most dominating careers in golf.

Hogan's total of 63 victories is third all-time to Sam Snead's 81 and Jack Nicklaus' 70. Only Nicklaus, Gene Sarazen and Gary Player also won the Masters, U.S. Open, PGA Championship and British Open in their careers.

Only Nicklaus, Bobby Jones and Willie Anderson matched Hogan's four U.S. Open victories. And only Nicklaus with 18 and Walter Hagen with 11 won more major professional championships than Hogan.

Hogan's mastery of the game took time. After years of fighting a severe right-to-left hook Hogan changed to a controlled left-to-right game, starting winning regularly at age 28 and at 33 emerged as the greatest player in the world.

In a rare interview in 1987 with Golf Digest, Hogan said he never tried to hit a straight shot.

"I can't," he said. "I don't believe anybody else can hit a straight ball. You only hit a straight ball by accident. The ball is going to move right or left every time you hit it, so you had better make it go one way or the other."

From the time of his discharge from the Army in August 1945 - just after his 33rd birthday - until the head-on car crash with a bus on Feb. 2, 1949, that almost killed him, Hogan won an astounding 37 tournaments, including two PGA Championships and a U.S. Open.

That achievement alone would have made him ninth on the all-time list.

Beginning with his breakthrough major at the 1946 PGA Championship and ending with his British Open triumph at Carnoustie in 1953, Hogan played in 16 major championships and won nine. He won six of the first nine majors he played after the accident.

Hogan never played in more than seven tournaments in a single season after the car wreck. His legs simply couldn't take it. Yet he would win 13 more tournaments - including six major championships.

A typical Hogan day would be breakfast, practice, lunch and then more practice.

"What has given him his edge over the field?" sportswriter Grantland Rice once wrote. "I've seen Hogan finish a hard morning round, grab a sandwich, and then go out for an hour's practice before starting the afternoon round."

While Hogan was known for his solitary dedication to the game it was his selfless effort to save his wife, Valerie, when their car collided with the bus that saved both of them. And it was Hogan's recovery from that crash that helped build the Hogan Mystique.

Hogan, then 36, shattered his legs but would have been impaled on the steering wheel and certainly would have died had he not thrown himself across Valerie's lap.

She walked away. Hogan almost died a few weeks later when blood clots formed in his left leg, but he returned to competitive golf less than a year later, losing the 1950 Los Angeles Open in a playoff to Sam Snead. He never played without pain again.

"His heart was simply not big enough to carry his legs any longer," Rice, playing himself, said about the L.A. Open playoff in the Hogan biographical film "Follow the Sun," starring Glenn Ford.

The 5-foot-8 Hogan wore a trademark white hat, chain-smoked and was the first of the very slow players - analyzing every course, dissecting every shot. He was known as "The Hawk" for the way he studied a course.

A slight man who played most of his career at barely over 140 pounds and always wore gray and white, he was also known as "Bantam Ben" and by the Scots as "The Wee Ice Mon."

Hogan almost never spoke on the golf course and was just as sparse with his words off it.

There are so many stories of his silent, single-minded devotion to golf that it is difficult to separate fact from legend. But they all paint the same picture.

Hogan's last victory was the 1959 Colonial. In 1960, Hogan was tied for the lead in the U.S. Open until, gambling for the pin, he hit a ball that spun backward off the green and into the water on the next-to-last hole.

The tournament was won by Arnold Palmer with 20-year-old Nicklaus finishing second. Hogan had passed the title of Greatest in the Game to a new generation.

Hogan's last great round was a 66 - 30 on the back nine - in the third round of the 1967 Masters at age 54. His last tournament was in 1971 at Colonial, when he dropped out on the 11th hole after spraining his knee.

He never played on the Senior tour. It would have been too much of a step down for a man whose only standard for the game was greatness.

In competitive retirement, Hogan ran his golf equipment company and later lent his name to the Hogan Tour for young players, now known as the Nike Tour.

Hogan did not approve of commercialism by contemporary players.

"Wearing these caps and visors with a name on them. I don't know what is going on out there," he said. "The players get paid. The caddies get paid. It is a strange thing, but I suppose the people who pay for it think they get their money's worth if it is shown on television.

"I never wore signs. I never will."

Hogan needed no signs. The stoic stare, the deliberate concentration, cigarette to his lips, the perfect, repeating swing time after time, the silent shuffle from shot to shot were images that will remain forever in the mind of anyone who saw him play the game he tried to perfect.

He is survived by his wife of 62 years.