How has Ben Hogan’s mystique endured? It’s simple, and complicated

Ben Hogan will turn 113 in August. Amazing. Right?

True, Hogan died in 1997, but if you watched or attended the Colonial tournament last week — the Charles Schwab Challenge — you saw what everybody saw: Ben Hogan, his own self, making the rounds.

The players, every last one of them, walked by the bronze Hogan statue, brimming with life, which turns the wee man into the giant he was. It was a parade: Texans, like Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth; Californians, like Maverick McNealy and Corey Pavin; Englishmen, like Tommy Fleetwood and Harry Hall. Some of the players checked out the Hogan Room in the clubhouse.

Hogan was in the air and on the airwaves. Jim Nantz, during the CBS broadcast, reminded viewers that Rickie Fowler won the Ben Hogan Award as a student, and a golfer, at Oklahoma State. (There are several national annual awards named for Hogan.) During commercial breaks, Nantz regaled his broadcast booth partner, Trevor Immelman, with Hogan stories, many involving one of Immelman’s analyst forebears, Ken Venturi. In the 1950s and ’60s, Venturi was one of the few players Hogan was willing to help with swing advice.

Nantz, to Trevor:

Hogan’s playing in the tournament here, paired with Kenny. First hole, Thursday, Hogan makes 7. They’re walking to two. Kenny says, “Sorry about that start, Ben.” Hogan: “That’s why these tournaments are 72 holes.” Hogan wins by five.

Is every fact of these old Hogan war stories — often told in the here-and-now present tense — fact-checked and vetted? Of course not. But they carry an enduring message.

David Ford, a former star golfer at North Carolina, played his first tournament as a pro at the Charles Schwab Challenge last week. Last fall, he won the Ben Hogan Collegiate Invitational at Colonial. He once said, “I love golf more than my friends.” Is that not pure Hogan? Except Hogan would have thought it, not said it. Hogan was once at his friend Claude Harmon’s house for dinner. Harmon asked Hogan how he wanted his steak. “I’ll cook it myself,” Hogan said.

The shelf-life is forever.

The 2025 Schwab winner, Ben Griffin, played golf at North Carolina, too. He turned pro, struggled, went home, regrouped. Hogan, in the 1930s and under truly dire circumstances, did about the same. “Ben has kind of carved his own path, and his own swing, kind of like Hogan did,” the winner’s friend Ryan Gerard said Sunday night. Hogan won at Colonial five times.

Tiger Woods has made a study of Hogan, via YouTube clips and other means. Woods received the Ben Hogan Award in 2019 from the Golf Writers Association of America, five days before winning his fifth Masters. This Hogan award is given to a person who overcomes great physical obstacles in pursuit of golf, as Hogan did after a near-fatal 1949 car crash.

Woods knows, as all golf nerds know, how Hogan saved his own life when, in the seconds before a bus smashed into Hogan’s Cadillac: Hogan, driving, threw himself on his wife’s lap to protect her, a sort of human seat belt. Had he not done that the car’s steering column would have impaled him. Hogan didn’t tweet out what happened that night. There were layers and layers of reserve to the man, even if his did permit Glenn Ford to play him in the movie Follow the Sun. Later, there was a tour named for him, the Hogan Tour, precursor to Korn Ferry.

Sunday night, in a phone interview after the tournament and while waiting for a flight home, Nantz talked about Hogan’s grip on the game’s imagination. He credits the Colonial tournament, and the Colonial Country Club’s mesmerizing Hogan statue, with doing a great deal to keep Hogan alive. Nantz has seen players marvel at the lifelike qualities of the statue. “You can see his every muscle, and he holds that finish in perfect balance, just like all these golf instructors tell their students to do,” Nantz said. “Hogan’s pursuit of perfection, the players pick up on that.” In addition to Hogan’s pursuit of perfection, Nantz spoke of intriguing aspects of Hogan’s complex personality. His childhood poverty, for instance. The deep insights in so many of Hogan’s short comments. (The secret’s in the dirt, most famously.) The mystery that surrounded the man. No one could ever say that Hogan was overexposed.

Nantz lives in Nashville, where he sees the musician T Bone Burnett, a transplanted Nashvillian himself, now and again. Burnett grew up in Fort Worth in the early 1960s; he was a good junior golfer at Shady Oaks Country Club. Hogan ate lunch and hit balls at Shady almost every day. T Bone’s mother knew Hogan’s wife, Valerie. Burnett retains an undying attachment to Fort Worth, to Hogan, to anybody who knew Hogan, including the late Dan Jenkins and T Bone’s friend, Lindy Miller, a golf pro in Fort Worth. Some years ago, by email, T Bone shared this recollection with me:

“Hogan would sit in the clubhouse at a table in the window above the range. It was always a possibility that he would be watching the cats out there trying to dig a swing out of the dirt. You got used to that.

“But some days, you would be hitting balls on the range and suddenly feel a presence behind you. You would look back and Mr. Hogan would be standing there looking at you. You would turn back around and try to forget he was there and keep hitting balls. After a few shots, maybe a particularly solid one, you would look again, and he would have vanished.”

OMG.

On Amazon’s list of bestselling golf books, a new edition of Hogan’s seminal 1957 instruction book, Five Lessons, has a stranglehold on first place. This new version was edited by Jofie Ferrari-Adler of Avid Reader Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint. (I should note that Jofie is my book editor and Avid Reader Press is my publisher.) I was telling Nantz about this new version of the book. It changes nothing from the original text, ghostwritten by Herbert Warren Wind. All the original and amazing illustrations by Anthony Ravielli are right there. But this new edition has a foreword by Lee Trevino and 95 pages or so of added material in the back, repurposed Hogan-alia. I mentioned to Nantz that there was a transcript of Venturi’s criminally underappreciated 1983 CBS interview with Hogan in the book.

“I don’t know if I have ever seen that interview,” Nantz said.

I cited what I consider its most remarkable part, in which Hogan says, “I feel sorry for rich kids now. I really do, because they’re never going to have the opportunity I had. Because I know tough things, and I had a tough day all my life, and I can handle tough things. They can’t. And every day that I progressed was a joy for me, and I recognized that.” I didn’t have the whole thing down for Nantz, but a chunk of it.

“Amazing,” Nantz said.

Jofie says Hogan’s connection to the word secret is the single-most powerful marketing campaign in golf history. Of course, what makes it so effective is that it is not a one-word marketing campaign at all. Hogan’s life-and-times, his enduring power, is all about his commitment to unlocking golf’s secrets, or secret.

The other day, by Federal Express, a friend, whose name cannot be revealed here, sent me a copy of a document that has been quietly going around for years, a 13-page, handwritten letter to the head pro at Pasatiempo Golf Club from 1948, with stick-figure diagrams, filled with stunning insights into the golf swing and bearing a signature that reads Ben Hogan.

“Is this real?” my friend asked. “I’m not sure.” Many have wondered the same.

The signature is a loopier and more ornamental than the Hogan signature that is now so iconic and familiar, by way of Hogan golf clubs among other things. But by my amateurish assessment of the letter, considering carefully its content and language, the document strikes me as authentic. Indubitably so. Consider this:

“The center of gravity of the body must stay in place throughout the swing. That is if a line is drawn through the nose or head to the ground the head must stay in that position throughout the swing.”

That sounds like pure Hogan, from both his cult-classic 1948 book Power Golf and, later, Five Lessons. Immediately after this discussion, the letter notes how Babe Ruth’s head “remained in one place throughout his murderous assault of the baseball and golf ball.”

Hogan-o-philes know that Hogan and Ruth’s former teammate, Sam Byrd, later a tournament golfer, liked to compare notes on the golf swing. When Byrd, a righthanded hitter, took batting practice, he would sometimes put a towel between his upper left arm and his rib cage, to promote the feeling of arm-body connection through the swing. Last year, on a driving range at a public course in Miami, a fellow next to me, a stranger named Luis, told me how that this connection idea went from Byrd to Hogan to the teacher Jimmy Ballard, and from Ballard to Luis and to the many people to whom Luis talked, I now among them. (Ballard studied golf under Byrd.) In the swing-studies trade, this connection idea is known as “half-a-left-arm” or a “short left arm,” implying that upper left arm (for a righthanded golfer) doesn’t do much in the swing. More precisely, by doing nothing it does everything it needs to do.

The other day, my wife walked by Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, on Broadway near Wall Street. She’s walked by there often over the years, but on this day, and for the first time, she noticed a plaque on sidewalk near the church bearing Hogan’s name. She asked if it was new. It’s been there for decades, commemorating Hogan’s ticker-tape parade in 1953, the year he won the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open, in his only appearance in it. So why did Christine notice it this year for the first time? Because Hogan is in the air. He is among us, looking not a day over a hundred.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

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