A Champion's Last Hurrah

After his closing 77, Hogan (with George Archer) never came back to the Masters. Photo: Historic Golf Photos

Chirkinian's cameras caught Hogan on No. 18, wearily making his way to the elevated green. "He was really struggling to get up the hill," says Chirkinian. "They were slow and deliberate steps, and it wasn't because he was looking for applause, I'll tell you that." Hogan vowed after three-putting No. 18 to lose the 1946 Masters to Herman Keiser that he never would leave his approach above the hole, but he had, 25 feet away. Still he sank the putt to come home in 30 for a 66, and trail 54-hole tri-leaders Yancey, Julius Boros and Bobby Nichols by two shots.

"Usually, when a long tournament day is over, the galleries plod for the exits tired in eye and limb, but there were no weary steps that evening," Herbert Warren Wind wrote in The New Yorker a couple of weeks later. "Hogan sent us home as exhilarated as schoolboys."

The protagonist wasn't feeling too bad himself. "I saw him upstairs after the round," says Venturi. "He wasn't one to jump around, but you could see the twinkle in his eyes and the satisfaction he had. He said, 'That's not something I dreamed I could do.' "

Addressing reporters, Hogan sounded like the realist he had always been. "As for chances of winning," he said, "a lot of fellows are going to have to fall dead for me to win. But I'll tell you one thing: I'll be playing as hard as I ever have in my life." His wife, Valerie, told The New York Times on Sunday she would "consider it a miracle if Ben won."

Says Jenkins: "I knew 66 would be his last hurrah. I remember Drum and I putting his over-under number on the final round at 75."

Hogan began his final round with a par, but the euphoria of the previous day evaporated quickly with bogeys on the second, third and fourth holes. He was wary of all the tight hole locations and three-putted four times en route to a 77 that dropped him to T-10, 10 strokes behind Gay Brewer Jr., who closed with a 67 to edge Nichols by a stroke.

The gallery masked its disappointment, standing and clapping at every green, appreciation for the body of work and the man. "What a phenomenal day it was," says Joe Black, who was on the rules committee. "In the last round Ben got a standing ovation on every hole. It was almost chilling." Hogan visited the pressroom Quonset hut for the second-straight day for an interview. "You fellows must be gluttons for punishment," he told the reporters, "asking me to come down here and describe my round. Jeepers, creepers, it was awful."

He would not return to the Masters, not even to attend the Champions dinner he helped start in 1952. He continued to make rare tournament appearances until 1971, when his bad knee forced him to make an ignominious withdrawal from an event in Houston.

Everyone had a Hogan story, but he owned the memories.

"You talk about something running up and down your spine," Hogan told Furman Bisher in The Masters in 1976, recalling that special Saturday in '67. "I'd felt those things before. I'd had standing ovations before. But not nine holes in a row. It's hard to control your emotions. I think I played the best golf of my life on those last nine holes. I don't think I came close to missing a shot."

In 1995 Clem Darracott's movie of Hogan was marketed as a video, 23 minutes of a maestro tuning up for his last virtuoso performance. After receiving a copy, Valerie Hogan invited Darracott to Fort Worth. She told him "it was the first time Mr. Hogan had seen himself swing."

Until his death at 69, Harold Henning liked to look at a framed newspaper clipping that had a prominent spot in the den of his Miami Beach home. It hangs there still, the front page of the April 9, 1967, Augusta Chronicle-Herald. The focus of the page is a four-column photo of Henning standing over the man who wouldn't talk to him, helping him check his scorecard, signing off on a day that really wasn't about numbers at all.