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A few hours after news broke about Tiger Woods’ devastating auto accident last Tuesday morning in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, two calls came my way from Los Angeles.
One was from my daughter, Maggie, an advertising executive who grew up around the world of golf. The other from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Their questions were identical. It’s one a lot of folks across the extended worlds of golf and sport have been asking this week in the aftermath of an accident that threatens to end the playing career of the most gifted player of his generation, perhaps all time. Did I see a parallel between Ben Hogan’s nearly fatal traffic accident in February 1949 and Tiger’s early-morning crash in February 2021?
“Isn’t this like history repeating itself?” asked Maggie, who was in high school during the four years it took me to research and write “Ben Hogan – An American Life,” the Hawk’s authorized biography. The reporter used almost the same words.
My short answer to both was a qualified yes – there are striking similarities in these tragedies as well as eerie echoes of each man’s struggle to reach the summit of the game only to pay a price for becoming the best in the world. In each case, though they were stars from very different eras, both also experienced something of a personal awakening – even redemption – along the way.
But let’s begin with some basic differences.
William Ben Hogan was, by circumstance of birth and temperament, a diminutive Texas loner whose deeply depressed father – a failed blacksmith who happened to be his youngest son’s idol – put a bullet through his own heart on the eve of St. Valentine's Day 1922, probably in the presence of 10-year-old Ben. The impact of this tragedy shaped the mind and personality of Hogan, who grew up dogged by a pathological fear of never measuring up and forever being an outsider.
The game of golf eventually leveled life’s playing field a bit for hard-luck Bennie Hogan, however, initially allowing him to rise from a Fort Worth caddie yard to the nomadic professional tour of the bleak 1930s. Working a stream of demeaning jobs in and out of golf, undersized and lacking the physical gifts of his fellow competitors, Hogan developed a relentless practice routine that made his hands bleed but saved his life – eventually refining a golf swing that would make him a living legend, the greatest shotmaker of his day.
After toiling nearly a decade in anonymity, the success he craved finally came at Pinehurst’s fabled North and South Open, where Hogan finally broke through to claim his first solo victory in spring 1940, a win that even took the tour scribes by surprise. The next morning, the most respected newspaper in the state mistakenly identified “Hagen” as the North and South winner.
Hogan captured the next two tour stops in a row, a stunning debut that meant nobody would mistake his name again.
The severe leg injuries Tiger Woods reportedly suffered ... sound a lot like Ben Hogan’s injuries of half a century ago, proving history may not repeat itself but sometimes rhymes ...
Tiger Woods emerged from a very different America.
His father, Earl, also his son’s idol, was a former Kansas State athlete and decorated Army officer who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, a man who became so enchanted with golf after taking it up at age 42, he set out to help make his son, Tiger, a prodigy, introducing him to the game before age 2.
The elder Woods accomplished his mission and then some.
By age 8 Tiger was breaking 80; by 12 he’d eclipsed 70.
He went on to collect six Junior World Championship age-division titles, three U.S. Junior Amateurs in a row and a trio of consecutive U.S. Amateur victories before dropping out of Stanford University in 1996 to turn professional, signing the most lucrative endorsement contracts in golf history.
Woods’ storied professional career to this point – 15 major titles, a jointly held record (with Sam Snead) of 82 PGA Tour wins, 110 total professional victories, nine Vardon Trophies and far too many tournament records to name – speaks eloquently of his seismic impact on the game since his debut in ’96, a domination that not only attracted untold millions to the game but sparked a revolution of athleticism in golf (and sports marketing) that made Woods arguably the most famous face on the planet. An American Prometheus who captured fire and set the golf world ablaze.
But as the ancient Greeks warned, even immortals have their humanizing trials.
In the aftermath of lengthy tournament droughts and numerous injuries, career-threatening surgeries and a humiliating fall from grace resulting from his marriage breakup in 2009 that ghoulishly played out in print, on TV and in every seamy corner of the internet for more than a year, Woods’ triumphant return at age 43 to claim a fifth Masters title in 2019 – his 15th major, cheered on by rejuvenated Tigermaniacs and former detractors alike – seemed to reaffirm that Americans dig a good resurrection story.
Tellingly, in victory, the second-oldest Masters champion went directly to the waiting arms of his children, Sam and Charlie, and hugged them fiercely, an older and perhaps wiser Tiger who appeared to finally have made peace with his complex, supersized legacy. It was a moment that dampened eyes across the golf universe.
This epiphany was underscored last December when Tiger and son Charlie, 11, teamed together to finish seventh at the PNC Championship, stealing the show with their obvious pleasure – and pride – in each other’s company. Tiger later described it as one of the most rewarding days he’s had in golf.
It is here – the point where rare achievement intersects human frailty – that one finds the most compelling similarities between the fates of Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods. One was approaching the peak of his career when disaster struck, while the other was just beyond his.
Coming off his most rewarding season in golf in 1948, during which he’d won 10 times and captured his first U.S. Open Championship at Riviera Country Club – a course dubbed “Hogan’s Alley” due to the Hawk’s three L.A. Open titles there – Ben Hogan was a man on top of the world.
On Feb. 2, 1949, as he and wife Valerie motored home to Fort Worth, Texas, in their shiny new Cadillac sedan from a successful start of the new season that already included a pair of tournament wins, $4,000 in tour earnings and his angular, movie star mug splashed on the cover of Time magazine, the last thing Hogan saw coming from the ground fog of the future was a barreling 10-ton Greyhound bus that would unexpectedly grant him golf immortality.
Around lunchtime in the east, as the shocking news that golf’s brightest star had been critically injured in a collision east of El Paso, Texas, an early wire-service bulletin reported that “Little Ice Water” – the latest nickname bestowed by Time – had died in the accident. In fact, the patient was being treated by physicians who protectively wrapped his devastated lower body in a pair of large plaster casts until the damage to his injured legs could be further assessed.
Within two days, however, following an interview Valerie gave to a local reporter in which she described how her husband had valiantly shielded her body with his at the moment of impact, letters by the hundreds – soon to be multiple thousands – began flooding Hogan’s hospital room from ordinary Americans who suddenly saw the heretofore chilly and remote national golf champion as nothing less than an everyman hero.
Following a risky surgical procedure that left the circulation in his legs severely diminished but saved his life, as Hogan later confided to friends, this surprising deluge of support from golf fans and people from every walk of life proved to be the inspiration he needed for getting back to the game.
Less than 16 months later, in June 1950, with legs firmly wrapped in bandages from thigh to ankle to provide support and prevent swelling, taking only aspirin with ginger ale to knock the edge of his pain, Hogan dramatically captured the 50th U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club in an 18-hole playoff with Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio, one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.
The next season, he complemented his “Miracle at Merion” with his first victory at the Masters and a successful defense of his Open title at Oakland Hills. His watershed season came in 1953, when – at age 41 – he captured five of the six tournaments he entered, including the Masters, the U.S. Open at Oakmont and the Open Championship at Carnoustie. Though he fiercely protected his privacy for the rest of his days, Hogan’s family members and closest friends privately maintained that the Hawk looked at life through a different lens following his accident and comeback.
“Uncle Ben became a kinder man, much more focused on family and friends and the pleasures of everyday life,” his niece, Valerie Harriman, told this biographer. “He never lost his passion for golf, forever trying to find perfection. But he seemed much more at peace because of what he’d been through, realizing life is never perfect.”
The severe leg injuries Tiger Woods reportedly suffered in his rollover car crash last Tuesday morning south of L.A. sound a lot like Ben Hogan’s injuries of half a century ago, proving history may not repeat itself but sometimes rhymes – leaving the world to wonder if the most gifted golfer of the 21st century has another miraculous comeback or two within him.
Early reports indicate the surgery went well and Tiger remains in good spirits, already talking of recovery. This is good news.
As a once-soaring Hawk discovered, the road back surely will be painful but potentially rewarding.
Only time and Tiger can write the ending to this story.
E-Mail James