If that hadn’t happened, they might not have faced foggy, and possibly icy, conditions on the high road between Van Horn and Kent, and they wouldn’t have encountered impatient Greyhound bus driver Alvin Logan who decided to try and overtake a lorry on a blind corner and ploughed headlong into their Cadillac. The following week in the Phoenix Open, Hogan once again found himself in an 18-hole play-off with Demaret, one that he narrowly lost.īut the play-off was significant as it delayed the Hogans’ drive home to Fort Worth by 24 hours.
Amazingly, he had won 11 times in 15 starts. At the start of 1949, he won the Bing Crosby Pro-Am and the Long Beach Open in a play-off against Jimmy Demaret. The following year looked set to be another belting season for ‘The Hawk’. Without her support he might have been inclined to throw in the towel.Įxpand US Masters Tee Times 2019 – Sunday Round 4 Groups But he had great support from his girl, and from 1935 wife, Valerie, who always believed in him. He spent his first years in the paid ranks as a poorly remunerated club pro and more than once found himself flat broke. Hogan turned pro in 1930 at the age of 17, a year before Snead and two years before Nelson, but it wasn’t until 1940 that the Texan won his first individual professional event. Born in 1912, just months after Byron Nelson and Sam Snead, the early part of Hogan’s career was tough in comparison to his famous rivals, both of whom had won more than ten tournaments by the time Hogan claimed his first. It's an amazing story and cemented Hogan as a golfing legend.Įn Hogan was something of a late bloomer as a professional golfer. The fact that Ben Hogan even played in the 1950 US Open at Merion is incredible, as 16 months earlier he almost died in a car crash. Here, Fergus Bisset looks back at Hogan's 1950 US Open victory, which came just 16 months after being involved in a car crash
"The pain he had to endure, the things he had to do just to play and just how hard it was for him to walk, and he ended up walking 36 holes (in one day) and winning a US Open."