HOGAN MYTHS: AN OVERVIEW
Reams of newsprint have chronicled Ben Hogan’s story from the 1920s to the 1990s—his childhood in Dublin and Fort Worth, the years of struggle to become a successful touring professional, the near-fatal car accident, his triumphant years as the world’s greatest golfer, and the final years. By the 1950s, a movie about Hogan had been produced, followed by a spate of books about the man.
By mid-career, Hogan had already taken shape as a mythic figure. His reticence during practice and play hastened his status as a legend. His extraordinary success in golf served as a template for others aspiring to greatness in the game. Under the Hogan spell, golfers changed their grip, their stance, their swing, their approach to practice. This is still happening in the twenty-first century.
Inevitably, when public figures such as sports stars and film actors become mythologized, they attract rumors and false narratives. In our desire to know these figures—especially so that we can appropriate qualities we admire—we tend to fill in blanks about their lives with stories, many of which can be distorted or false. These faulty stories are often referred to as myths. This meaning of “myths” is poles apart from what we mean by classical myths, ageless stories that aim to teach us how to live more consciously in the world.
Oft-repeated elements of Hogan myths go like this:
· Hogan grew up in a poor family.
· The family experienced extreme poverty after Ben’s father’s death.
· Hogan’s impoverished and tragic early life propelled him to become the greatest golfer of his time.
· Hogan was a self-made man, who developed his extraordinary prowess by “digging it out of the dirt.”
· Hogan made “secret” changes to his golf game that propelled him to greatness.
Many Hogan biographers have focused their writing on select aspects of Hogan’s early life in an effort to understand him and explain his motives. Among the earliest Hogan books was Jimmy Demaret’s My Partner, Ben Hogan, published in 1954. In the book, Demaret downplays the supposed poverty of Hogan’s early years in Dublin, writing that Ben enjoyed a typical rural childhood until the age of nine, when his father, Chester, died. (Demaret doesn’t identify the death as a suicide.)
In 1978, Fort Worth Star-Telegram sports reporter Gene Gregston published Hogan: The Man Who Played for Glory. In his version of Hogan’s early life, Gregston claims that Chester’s suicide had a devastating financial effect on the family. He gives primacy to the effect that the family’s supposed poverty had on Hogan’s life. He also mentions that Hogan was an above-average student who was forced to drop out of school and go to work in order to help with family finances after his father’s death.
Curt Sampson’s 1996 biography, Hogan, a unofficial and much-debated version of Hogan’s life, gives substantial weight to the effect of Chester’s suicide on young Ben, citing the opinion of psychologist Fran Pirozzolo on the subject. According to Pirozzolo’s hypothesis, Hogan developed a mistrust of males due to anger over his father’s suicide and the adversity that it caused for the family. This dynamic was meant to explain why Hogan kept to himself while playing and practicing and why, in both Pirozzolo’s and Sampson’s opinions, Hogan didn’t enjoy close personal relationships.
Sampson speculates that Hogan’s prodigious ability to practice was due to his “world weariness, his dislike of company, or a Calvinist belief in redemption through work.” But he offers no supporting evidence for his theory.
Many Hogan admirers consider James Dodson’s 2004 authorized biography, Ben Hogan: An American Life, to be authoritative. For Dodson, the suicide of Hogan’s father is “[t]he simple key to understanding William Ben Hogan . . . and the pivot point that explains everything about the man [italics added], from his incomparable practice routines to his Mandarin powers of concentration, his relentless search for technical perfection to his fanatical need for absolute privacy . . . his meticulous manner of dress and unbending standards of public behavior, his obsessive need for rituals, scrupulous business acumen, and powerful but largely hidden tenderness and spirituality—all evolved from the same terrible family tragedy that shaped every aspect of his life after age nine.” Dodson suggests that the Hogan family was not as impoverished as others had claimed, yet he compares Hogan’s early life with the impoverished childhood experienced by Charles Dickens, whose father was confined to debtors’ prison for a time.
The temptation to propose simple solutions for complex problems can be irresistible at times. But I’ve never been convinced that Chester’s suicide explains everything there is to know about Ben Hogan.
It’s plausible that some of Hogan’s personality characteristics and behaviors were influenced by his father’s death, but this cannot account for all of Hogan’s traits and tendencies. In my years as a child psychiatrist, I’ve not encountered a patient whose traits and tendencies are wholly explained by one traumatic childhood event.
In the 1951 Hollywood movie about Hogan’s life, Follow the Sun, the screenwriter glosses over almost all of the adversity in Hogan’s life—especially his father’s suicide—in favor of portraying Ben and Valerie as a charming young couple who, after struggling to get by, finally make it big.
Some of Hogan’s chroniclers have isolated aspects of Hogan’s life or personality as the sum of the man: the kid whose early life “was almost totally void of acceptance, the self-made loner, the enigma who revealed nothing about himself.” From Hogan’s heightened powers of concentration on the golf course or his penchant for privacy off the course, these writers have extrapolated the whole of his personality.
Others who observed Hogan over the years have variously speculated that he had an inferiority complex, an obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, heightened anxiety, or an addictive personality.
And some who knew Hogan have simply settled for an unresolved view of the man. Veteran professional golfer Sam Snead reported to James Dodson that he believed that there were “two Ben Hogans . . . Hogan the golf champ and Ben the man . . . The two [were as] different as night and day.” Snead went on to say that “The public side of Ben Hogan was tough and hard to get close to . . . The Ben most people never saw, on the other hand, was a very decent man, a lot of fun to be around when he wasn’t kicking your pants, with a hell of a good sense of humor.”
Mike Towle, sportswriter and author of I Remember Ben Hogan, appears to echo Snead when he refers to “Hogan Heavy and Hogan Lite.” Towle writes that “The former could reduce confident people to shrinking violets; the latter possessed a feathery touch . . . Hogan Lite had a dry sense of humor, and it was at work more than listeners realized. At times, Hogan was the epitome of someone best understood if you listened to what he said, not how he said it. Even his humor was often couched in gruff tones.”
Byron Nelson, who had known Hogan since both were adolescents, told James Dodson that Hogan was “a lot friendlier and more complex than folks realized, not the Hogan you read about in books so much.” Jimmy Demaret, writing about the adult Hogan, said, “Certainly on the golf course, Hogan is a grim-faced, tight-lipped automaton. But take it from someone who knows him well—he is also a fine, courageous, and warmhearted human being.”
Jerry Austry, president of the Ben Hogan Company during the late 80s, recalls in his book, The Hogan Edge: How the Hogan Company Found and Lost Their Edge, what it was like spending time with Hogan. “The wonderful thing about Mr. Hogan was when you were in his company, being the greatest golfer to ever play the game, he never once flaunted his celebrity nor enjoyed particularly talking about it. A humbler man there was not.”
Even Hogan defended a more nuanced, realistic view of himself, apart from the public versions. While being fêted in New York after winning the 1953 Open Championship at Carnoustie, Hogan tearfully admitted, “I have a tough skin but a soft spot in my heart and things like this [celebration] find that soft spot.” He later declared to Kris Tschetter, “This image of me being a rock with no emotions is untrue.”
Citations have been omitted but will appear in the book.