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Perhaps it allowed him to feel a measure of control over the chaos around him. He sought to hit a perfectly controlled ball, and to achieve a repeatable swing that would hold up under pressure. Digging hundreds of balls out of the dirt, day after day, he worked to the point where, legend had it, his hands would bleed. When he wasn’t carrying bags, he spent countless hours on the practice range. Ben sold newspapers at the train station, then became a caddy at a nearby country club. The loss of the family breadwinner meant the Hogan children had to contribute financially. Hogan biographer James Dodson says some reports place Ben in the room of their home in Fort Worth, Texas, at the time. In 1922, when he was 9, his father, a blacksmith named Chester, pointed a gun at his chest and committed suicide. Hogan had been working for as long as he could remember. Two weeks earlier, his face had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, above the quotation that would define him: “If you can’t outplay them, outwork them.”
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For the first time, the diminutive golfer had captured two major tournaments in the same year-the U.S. Ben ate, went back to their room and packed the Cadillac with their luggage and his golf clubs.īen Hogan had reached the pinnacle of his career. He and his wife, Valerie, had driven more than 500 miles east from Phoenix the day before, and while the road made his wife queasy, he craved a quick breakfast, and they still had to go 500 miles east to Forth Worth. On the damp and chilly morning of Wednesday, February 2, 1949, Ben Hogan got up before the sun and hit the El Capitan Motel coffee shop in Van Horn, Texas. Ben Hogan received a tickertape parade down Broadway in New York after winning the 1953 British Open and the "Hogan Slam."ĭick DeMarsico, courtesy the Library of Congress