BEN HOGAN & NO. 2

By Lorne Rubenstein

The combination that ignited a golf legend.

Ben Hogan. Pinehurst No. 2. The North and South Open. The golfer, the course, and the tournament came together in 1940 in a felicitous meeting that ignited one of golf’s most extraordinary professional careers.

This argument can be made for one simple, overarching fact. Hogan, who of course would go on to become, well, Hogan, had not yet won a professional tournament — not, that is, until he won the 1940 North and South Open. He had been on the pro tour for seven years, and was already 27 years old. His contemporary and fellow Texan Byron Nelson had won the 1937 Masters and the 1939 U.S. Open. Hogan had finished second six times to six different players during the previous 14 months, but he had not won.

He needed a breakthrough. As Lee Pace writes in Pinehurst Stories: A Celebration of Great Golf and Good Times, Hogan “was about to kiss his dream [of winning] goodbye for the security of a club pro.” Hogan himself said, “I had finished second and third so many times I was beginning to think I was an also-ran.” But Hogan did not want to give up tournament golf. He wanted to play tournaments and he wanted to win them. Why else would Hogan have worn out the grass on practice grounds on the tour while trying to refine his swing so that he would know where the ball was going? Hogan craved that security rather than the security of a job as a club professional.

And so Hogan knew that — to appropriate the title of a story written by Delmore Schwartz — “in dreams begin responsibilities.” His dream was to win on the tour. The responsibility he felt was to himself as a professional golfer.

Hogan did what he had to do. When he needed money to finance his explorations on the pro tour, he worked summers at the Century Country Club in White Plains, New York. Come the fall, he and his wife, Valerie, saved money by staying with his mother in Fort Worth, Texas. Meanwhile, Hogan and Valerie often nourished themselves with the free oranges tournaments provided; they didn’t have the money for restaurant meals.

By the 1940 North and South Open, Hogan needed a win. He had hit a low point the previous season when he beat just two men at the U.S. Open. At least he knew he could contend — those six second-place finishes showed that. He was also in fine form coming into Pinehurst, having averaged 71.63 for 33 rounds prior to the 1940 North and South Open. But low stroke averages and high finishes are not winning. He had to be patient; he couldn’t control what another player might do. For instance, he appeared to have won the Texas Open during his series of runner-up finishes. But Nelson birdied the last two holes to catch Hogan and then defeated him in their playoff.

So it was that Hogan came to Pinehurst No. 2 in the third week of March 1940 — a “nearly” man, as the English like to say about golfers who have a propensity for finishing second. But this time Hogan had a little something extra going for him. Nelson had shown him a kindness two days prior to the opening round of the tournament by presenting him with a driver. Hogan liked his clubs as stiff as an oak tree and as heavy as a hammer, the better to feel the clubhead and to know where it was at all times, and the better to be sure it wouldn’t waver out of his control during his swing. At the same time Hogan demanded a perfectly balanced club. The driver Nelson gave Hogan weighed 14 ounces, and was referred to in the local Pinehurst newspaper as a “bludgeon.” Hogan used the driver as if he had owned it for years. He hit the narrow fairways at the Donald Ross-designed masterpiece and then struck crisp, accurate iron shots, and made the birdie putts. Hogan shot 66 to take a three-shot lead, and credited his new driver. “Driving has always been my trouble,” Hogan said after his impeccably played round, “because there were times when the battle got so hot that a tail-end hook would lead me into misery.”

But that problem didn’t surface during his first round at Pinehurst No. 2. Hogan said the round was his best ever, and added, “There’s something about that driver that fits me like a glove. Its weight is so nicely concealed it doesn’t seem as heavy as it really is. I tell you, I never drove better.” Hogan had more than his driver working. Playing the 420-yard 11th hole, Hogan hit his second shot into a greenside bunker — an unforced error from the fairway. But in one of those dramatic events that sometimes alter careers, Hogan holed the sand shot; he had birdied the hole when a bogey was looking more likely, and went on to shoot his 66. Hogan then shot 67 to take a seven-shot lead over Sam Snead and Johnny Revolta moving into the 36-hole final day.

This was the sort of lead that Hogan had anticipated as the prelude to his first professional win. Not long before, he had told his wife that he would win when he got out to such a big lead that nobody could catch him. He shot 74 the third round when he felt jittery, but was still six shots ahead of Snead, who was joined in that position by 1935 Masters winner Gene Sarazen. Sarazen had already taken at least one of the four major championships — the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. He had also scoffed at Hogan’s chances at Pinehurst. “He’s never won before, he won’t win this time,” Sarazen had said when Hogan assumed his seven-shot lead after two rounds. “He’s been out front before. Someone will catch him.”

But Sarazen was wrong. This time the center held for Hogan. He shot 70 the final round and won by three shots over Snead, who came on with a 67. Sarazen shot 75. Valerie was beside herself with happiness. “Don’t pinch me,” she said after her husband had finally broken through with his first professional win. “I’m afraid I’ll wake up.”

Hogan was no longer a “nearly” man, and he went on from Pinehurst to conquer the golfing world by defeating the same golfers who had nipped him so frequently in the past. He won the next tournament in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the one after that in Asheville, North Carolina. Hogan set scoring records in both tournaments. He played the 216 holes of the tournaments in Pinehurst, Greensboro, and Asheville in a cumulative 34-under-par. Hogan broke par in 11 of 12 rounds and broke 70 in 10 of those rounds. He went on to become the leading money-winner on tour in 1940 and to post the low scoring average for the year.

Hogan would return to Pinehurst many times following his historic 1940 victory. He won the North and South Open again in 1942, when he shot 67-68-67-69 to win by five shots and set a tournament record with his 17-under-par 271. One writer noted that Hogan had “touched a new high in artistic performance.” He also won the 1946 North and South Open and played on the U.S. Ryder Cup team that defeated Great Britain at Pinehurst No. 2 in 1951. In that match-play competition, Hogan was two-down after six holes of the morning round in his scheduled 36-hole singles match against the fine British player Charles Ward. But Hogan came on to win three and two.

Years later, in 1974, Hogan would become one of 13 original members of the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst. Such affection did Hogan feel for Pinehurst that he attended the ceremony. What would have happened to Hogan had he been unable to hold on to the seven-stroke lead he so clinically created after two rounds of the 1940 North and South Open? We only know that his time did come at that tournament, and that Hogan went on to win two Masters, three U.S. Opens, the one British Open in which he competed, and two PGA Championships.

“Golf to [Hogan] was an intensely serious business which he practiced with a remarkable single-mindedness of purpose,” the eminent British writer and golf course architect Donald Steel writes. “It was quite simply his profession and he wanted to play it better than anyone has ever played it. That he succeeded came as no surprise to those who knew him.”

In fact it didn’t surprise even Hogan. He knew what he was doing when he was working on his game. Following his turnaround win in 1940 at Pinehurst, he said, “I won one just in time. I needed that win. They’ve kidded me about practicing so much. I’d go out there before a round and practice and when I was through I’d practice some more. Well, they can kid me all they want because it finally paid off. I know it’s what finally got me in the groove to win.”

To win, and to win again and again. And it all began at Pinehurst No. 2, in 1940, at a memorable North and South Open, where Ben Hogan showed the world, and himself, that he was not a “nearly” man. He was a winner. He was Hogan.

Free-lance writer Lorne Rubenstein is working with golf instructor David Leadbetter on The Fundamentals of Hogan, an instruction book that will be released in June by Sleeping Bear Press.