By Bill Fields
Photo By Leonard Kamsler
March 30, 2007
As was his custom, Ben Hogan arrived early for the 1967 Masters, more than a week before he would suffuse the emerald stage with uncommon drama. It had been years since Hogan was a favorite -- Jack Nicklaus would be shooting for his third straight green jacket -- but he was still Hogan, not quite a man in full but full of intrigue. He came with his flat linen caps and his cigarettes, his shoes with their extra spike, a suitcase full of gray and a golf bag clanking with the extra-stiff-shafted clubs he still commanded like a drill sergeant barking to a hapless private.
"It's hard to remember specifics of playing with Hogan because he always hit it perfectly," says Deane Beman, who was paired with him in the first round at Augusta National GC that week. "He hit almost every fairway, put it right where he wanted to. He played to the middle of the greens and always left himself uphill putts. He seldom hit a shot that short-sided himself. There wasn't anything remarkable about the way he played, except he played remarkably."
Hogan was a bit thicker through the middle than the Hawk of peak flight, the gritty bantam who ruled the sport in the late 1940s and early '50s, his slightly relaxed waistline befitting a 54-year-old man who spent as much time behind a desk as on a golf course. Having subsisted on oranges when he was a poor young golfer hooking his way to nowhere, the graying icon liked to lunch on fruit plates to try and drop a few pounds in preparation for Augusta's sharp hills, slopes that could wear out a younger man, much less someone north of 50 with suspect wheels.
He tuned up for the Masters, as he had forever, at Seminole GC in North Palm Beach, but this spring training wasn't as vigorous owing to a bothersome left shoulder, one of the residuals from the horrific 1949 car crash that nearly killed him. "An indication of the Hogan sharpness for the 1967 Masters is given by his suntan," reporter Jim Martin observed in a pre-tournament story for The Augusta Chronicle. "It isn't as deep as last year."
In fact Hogan's shoulder, plagued with bursitis, scar tissue and calcium deposits, had nearly kept him away from the major championship he had won in 1951 and 1953. "I developed some trouble last year, and it [hurt] all year," Hogan told reporters in Augusta. "So I decided it needed some work. But I got two shots of cortisone two consecutive mornings and have had 15 shots since then that helped it."
The injections?more of them than a doctor likely would allow today?lessened the inflammation and quieted the pain. Hogan knew another surgery would be necessary, but the scalpel could wait. He had competed in every Masters but two ('49 because of the crash and '63 after a shoulder operation) since his first appearance in 1938. Bobby Jones wanted him in Augusta, and Hogan wanted to be there. The Masters was golf, and Hogan was a golfer.
Hogan was the antithesis of tournament-tough when he got to Georgia, his last competition being the 1966 U.S. Open at Olympic Club where, playing on a special exemption from the USGA, he finished 12th. But inactivity didn't equal rust for Hogan. "He hits the irons so good, he's cheating," one of his protégés, Gardner Dickinson, told the Chronicle after a Sunday practice round. "He hits it three feet from the hole at No. 6 and the pin was right on top of Old Smokey [the right knoll]."
The distinctive sound of Hogan's crisp shotmaking had become part of golf lore, but Bruce Devlin judged him with another of his senses. "He had the best control of the elevation of the ball of anybody that I ever played with," says Devlin, who as a young pro in the 1960s traveled with fellow pro George Knudson to Fort Worth to watch Hogan hit balls and was Hogan's frequent practice-round partner in his last tour appearances. Standing behind the legend as he hit drivers, Devlin would hold up his fingers, like a Hollywood director envisioning a scene, and see ball after ball soar through the same frame. "He had fantastic control. They all looked the same when they went off the club?no real low ones, no real high ones."
A cadre of pros usually took advantage of a rare Hogan sighting on tour to watch him practice?the range was far from "Misery Hill," as World War II-era pros called it, to Hogan?but average golfers craved a look, too. On Tuesday morning at Augusta in '67, Clem Darracott, a 41-year-old freight-line salesman from Atlanta who had attended the Masters for several years, approached Hogan as he exited the clubhouse heading for the practice tee and asked if he could film his swing with an eight-millimeter home-movie camera.
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