Sport: Down Hogan’s Alley

At St. Louis last month, with the Professional Golfers’ Association championship in his grasp, Ben Hogan found the grind just about too hard to take. “I want to die an old man, not a young one,” he told reporters. Every golfer in the big time—a businesslike gang that lives a life of tense desperation from hole to hole and tourney to tourney—knew just how he felt. The game had changed from the day of the great Walter Hagen, when a pro played in about 15 tournaments a year. Now it is a year-round business, in which only half a dozen do better than break even financially.

Last week, little (137 Ibs.) Ben Hogan showed up in Los Angeles (along with 170 others) to play in the U.S. Open. He seemed the coolest of the lot. As always, his face was as phlegmatic as an oldtime faro dealer’s.* The long Riviera golf course was to his advantage. Although he insists that “There’s no such thing as a course that fits a man’s playing style,” the boys called Riviera “Hogan’s Alley.” He had won two Los Angeles Opens there in the past two years.

Muscle Memory. The first day Ben fired a 67 (four under par) and was tied for the lead. The tension seemed to sharpen rather than scuttle his game (“Keeps me awake”). Carefully, before each shot, he went over it in his mind, a trick to get “the tempo” of the stroke, in effect making the shot before he hit the ball. He calls it “muscle memory.”

There were little, routine distractions—the exasperating clicks of cameras, the chatter of spectators (Ben draws the largest galleries), the unnerving applause coming from another green. On the second round, a couple of happy-go-lucky dogs yapped about the course after him (the committee quickly enforced the no-dog rule). At the halfway point, Ben had fallen one stroke behind Sam Snead, and South Africa’s dangerous Bobby Locke had moved up to tie Hogan for second.

Chips Down. Next day, with the chips down, cool Ben played Riviera as if he owned it. On “Hogan’s Alley” that morning he posted a 68. He began the afternoon round with a birdie and finished it by sinking a six-footer—then flipped the ball casually to an admiring youngster and strode into the clubhouse. His score of 276 chopped five strokes off the U.S. Open record (Ralph Guldahl’s 281 at Michigan’s Oakland Hills Country Club eleven years ago). The runner-up: fancy-pants Jimmy Demaret, last year’s top money winner.

Not since chunky Gene Sarazen did it 26 years ago had a golfer won the P.G.A. and the Open the same summer. It looked as if big-time golf had again found a man it could call champion.

* Somewhere in the past, Ben Hogan learned to “shuffle” a deck of cards. Occasionally, he shows the boys some of his sleight-of-hand tricks, by way of explaining why he never plays poker with them.