Fried Egg Stories: Ben Hogan vs. the Monster (The Open Doctor and His Monster, Part 2)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, Just to note that this is part two of a three part documentary series. You can definitely listen to this episode on its own, but you'll get a bit more out of it if you start with part one. This episode of Frida Egg Stories is brought to you by Precision Pro Golf Rangefinders. I don't need to tell you that Father's Day is coming up June nineteenth, but I do need to tell you that Precision Pro is having a Father's Day sale. Go to precisionprogolf dot com and save up to forty dollars off their award winning rangefinders. Swing with confidence, hit more greens with Precision Pro Golf.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: Frida Egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Here's the take.

00:00:53
Speaker 4: Playing out of a buried line of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night clean line of green side bunker.

00:01:00
Speaker 5: You need to be aggressive on any show, weather it's sitting cleanly or it's Friday Egg.

00:01:05
Speaker 6: Well, we've all faced it.

00:01:07
Speaker 1: The dreaded Frida Egg not to be feared, though it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.

00:01:22
Speaker 6: You like it?

00:01:24
Speaker 3: Very nice, and it might better than our first cup.

00:01:28
Speaker 1: The movie stars and Baxter and Glenn Ford are on a sound stage in Hollywood pretending to drive a Cadillac through the windows. A simulation of fog is visible, but just in case he didn't notice it, the dialogue refers to it repeatedly.

00:01:42
Speaker 7: You got a peg guy for driving in soup like this on this road.

00:01:47
Speaker 1: In a bit of foreshadowing, there's a cut to a semi truck being closely followed by a bus.

00:01:53
Speaker 3: How's a fog?

00:01:54
Speaker 8: It's getting worse.

00:01:56
Speaker 9: I'm glad there aren't many foods on the road like the hogans and got.

00:02:00
Speaker 3: Poles and smart, very smart? Is that a new home to go to?

00:02:19
Speaker 1: The movie is called Follow the Sun, and this part of it the crash, is fairly accurate. On February second, nineteen forty nine, a Greyhound bus headed from Dallas to El Paso, Texas, tried to pass a freight hauler in a heavy fog, and it pulverized a black Cadillac Sedan belonging to Ben Hogan, the reigning US Open and PGA champion. Ben's wife Valerie, was in the passenger seat, and as the headlights of the bus bore down, he leapt protectively across her lap.

00:02:50
Speaker 10: The Greyhound bus slammed into Hogan's car. It was such force that it drove the steering wheel back into the back seat.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: That's Ed Griver.

00:02:58
Speaker 10: I'm the author Ofringing the Monster to his Knees. The story of Ben Hogan and the nineteen fifty one US open.

00:03:05
Speaker 3: Now.

00:03:05
Speaker 10: If Hogan hadn't thrown himself across the front seat to protecting Valerie, he likely would have been impaled by his own steering of him and you know, probably would have died. At the scene, his car is driven off the road, tumbles down an embankment. Valeries able to escape the car, but Ben is trapped in there.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: He had a broken collarbone, pelvis, ankle, and rib. The left side of his face, which had struck the dashboard, was a bloody mess. Still, it looked like he would be okay. But two weeks later a pair of blood clots were creeping toward Ben's lungs and threatening his life. A surgeon was flown in from New Orleans to perform a dangerous experimental procedure, and once again Ben survived. But that was really the only good.

00:03:50
Speaker 10: News, because the doctor said, you know, forget about playing championship golf again. You know, you may not even walk again.

00:04:01
Speaker 1: Of course, there's a reason a movie was made about all of this. Hogan did come back, and he didn't just play, he didn't just win. He dominated. It was such a powerful story that it not only turned Hogan into a living legend, but also, in a kind of roundabout way, changed the direction of golf architecture history. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is Frida Egg Stories. Today we continue our series The Open Doctor and His Monster. In the first installment, we described Robert Trent Jones's modernization of the South Course at Oakland Hills. This episode focuses on Ben Hogan's encounter with that new form of golf architecture at the nineteen fifty one US Open. We look at how this battle between man and monster immediately became a kind of myth, and how that myth has shaped what we imagine a championship golf course to be. Now, to understand why Hogan's performance at the fifty one Open had such an impact, you have to know something about his life story. The first part of that story, his childhood turned out to be ripe for mythologizing, but when it was happening, it was just sort of sad and difficult. His father was Chester Hogan, a blacksmith from West Texas who likely had what we now call bipolar disorder. In nineteen twenty one, Chester, his wife, and their three kids, including Ben, moved to the city of Fort Worth, partly to find suitable mental health care. But a year later, during an argument with his wife, Chester shot himself in the torso with a thirty eight revolver. Ben was nine years old.

00:05:44
Speaker 10: There was a question whether he was actually in the room when his father committed suicide. But I talked with Ben's niece, Jackie Hogan, and she said that no, it was her father who had been in the room, not Ben. But Ben was in the house when it happened. So here you have a young boy, you know, fatherless, you know, has to grow up the hard way. You know, has to grow up scraping for everything he could get.

00:06:06
Speaker 1: So by the time Ben is in fourth grade, he's hawking newspapers at a local railroad depot to earn extra money for his family. Occasionally those papers mentioned the brilliant amateur golfer from Georgia, Bobby Jones, as well as the flamboyant professional Walter Hagen. Later, Ben starts catting at the nearby Glen Garden Country Club at sixty five cents a loop. That's where he meets Byron Nelson.

00:06:30
Speaker 10: Nelson was favored by the other golf club members at that time. Nelson was considered to be a little more refined, a little more you know, golf club.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: Like, a little more likable, perhaps.

00:06:41
Speaker 10: Was more of a rough, you know, rough hewn character.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Ben's personality has been shaped by hardship. He's solemn and moody, and he's a survivor, self driven and exacting in his standards for himself.

00:06:55
Speaker 10: And so he no matter what he was doing, he would strive not only to be good at it, but to be as perfect or as near perfect as he could be. I think the story that illustrates that is that he told the writer once that he had dreamt that he had hold the first seventeen holes on a course, but then had lipped out on the eighteenth and woke up and it was really angry. And the writer said, you know, so you had seventeen holes in one and were angry at the eighteenth, and Hogan was like, sure, I wanted all eighteen.

00:07:26
Speaker 1: Perfectionists don't always play well with others, and Ben finds that he's most comfortable on his own.

00:07:32
Speaker 10: And I think that's one of the reasons why he got into golf, because it afforded him many many solitary hours on the golf course where he was just, you know, one man in pursuit of perfection. He had no teammates. I remember a quote from Sam Snead who saw Hogan sitting by himself at a luncheon once at a golf club and he said, oh, look, there's Ben Hogan sitting with all his friends.

00:08:00
Speaker 1: Ben turns pro in nineteen thirty, right at the start of the Great Depression. He's just seventeen, hasn't graduated from high school, and like many people in many professions, he struggles to make ends meet for much of the decade. He's got plenty of power in a swing, especially considering he's five eight and not burly, but he battles a persistent hook, the ball diving out of the air into the left. His former colleague Byron Nelson has quicker success on the pro tour, so does Sam Snead. The long ball hitter from West Virginia. Nelson, Snead, and Ben were all born in the same year, nineteen twelve, but Ben just takes a bit longer to come into his own. After World War Two, Nelson retires and Ben is starting to figure out his game. He wins the PGA Championship in nineteen forty six, and in nineteen forty eight torches Riviera Country Club to win his first US Open.

00:08:53
Speaker 10: Yeah, he had really reached the pinnacle of the golf world just prior to his accident.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: What was it like for him to live after the.

00:09:06
Speaker 10: Accident, Well said that he never lived another day without pain, walked with a limp, you know, struggled with staying warm. He was constantly cold because of the poor circulation of the blood in his lower body. So he would wear sweaters out on a golf course in the summer months, you know, just trying to stay warm.

00:09:25
Speaker 4: You know.

00:09:26
Speaker 10: He would lean on his golf clubs, basically turning them into like a cane of sorts while he was on the course. His shoulder ached constantly. That affected his swing. He was near blind in one eye that affected his putting. But one of the things that almost benefited him was that by constant exercise to repair his broken body, he became, you know, a heavier, stronger man than he had been before the accident. Before the accident, he weighed around one hundred and thirty five pounds, which is why they called him bantam Ben. After the accident, he was a solid you know, one hundred and sixty pounds or so, they said. He you look like up close, he looked like a solid middleweight.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: Wow.

00:10:08
Speaker 10: And Sam Sneez said that always in his opinion, that had helped Hogan with his golf game, that he could drive greater distances after the accident than before.

00:10:16
Speaker 1: Incredibly, just fifteen months after a bus turned his Cadillac into an accordion, Ben Hogan wins the nineteen fifty US Open at Marian Golf Club. How did he do it?

00:10:30
Speaker 10: Sheer dedication and sheer unwillingness to believe that he couldn't do it. He made it a point to prove people wrong when they said that he couldn't do this or couldn't do that.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: This is when Hogan fully becomes a mythic figure. Americans see their story in him. Like Hogan, America has been through trauma, world War two, the Great Depression, and like Hogan, many Americans believe or want to believe that they're coming back stronger than ever.

00:11:00
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think there's a definite connection there, and I think people did see in Hogan the personification of the ability to come back from devastating circumstances. He was the comeback story of the nineteen fifties. And again, like you said, that was just five years after the end of World War Two and basically just a decade removed from the Great Depression. So this country had been through a lot and Hogan personified a lot of that, and people connected with him about that. Before the accident, before his comeback, a lot of people had difficulty relating to Hogan because of his kind of withdrawn, solitary personality. Post accident, Ben Hogan this great comeback story. You know, a lot of people could connect with that because of what they were going through in our daily lives and because of what this country had come back from.

00:12:06
Speaker 1: Season two of Friday Egg Stories is made possible by Precision Pro Golf. All Right, I told you at the top of the episode about the sale going on right now and through June nineteenth at Precisionpro golf dot com. Lots of great deals there at the moment, but I want to zero in on one in particular, and that's thirty dollars off the NX nine Slope rangefinder. The NX nine Slope happens to be my rangefinder, and it's really fantastic. I especially love the pulse vibration feature. Basically, you get this little buzz when you lock onto the flagstick and it gives you this serene sense of confidence that you're getting the right number. And that's what it's all about, confidence in the club you've chosen and the shot you're playing. Another benefit you get with a Precision Pro rangefinder, like the NX nine Slope is industry leading customer service. You'll talk to an actual person quickly and get any information or help you need. So if you're looking to step up your game or get an awesome gift, check out the Father's Day sale through June nineteenth at precisionprogolf dot com. Swing with Confidence, hit more greens with Precision Pro Golf. A few months after winning at Marion, Hogan is advising on the Hollywood version of his comeback story. Meanwhile, his next opponent is emerging outside of Detroit, Michigan. The South Course at Oakland Hills, host of the next US Open, is undergoing a major renovation. The old Donald Ross design is being rebunkered, narrowed, and toughened by Robert Trent Jones. Jones's theory is that the modern game demands a modern form of architecture, and that traditional US Open venues need to be revised in order to stand up to the likes of Ben Hogan.

00:13:50
Speaker 4: And hey got to demonstrate that philosophy to his heart content at Oakland Hills.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: That's Dick Houting, a member of Oakland Hills and the defacto club historian, and he says that even as Jones and his crew are in the midst of their work in late nineteen fifty, word starts to get around that something big is happening at the South Course.

00:14:11
Speaker 4: The rumor was just going like hot, you know, spreading all over the country fast. And they had literally they had guys who had never seen Oakland Hills, who had never never been there, didn't know what was going on. Hear these rumors, and they were calling the PGA, these pros and saying, this is an outrage, what's going on at Oakland Hills.

00:14:32
Speaker 1: At one point, Joe Dye, the executive director of the USGA, tells Jones to stop what he's doing.

00:14:37
Speaker 4: Stop everything, stop everything, and he and a bunch of his people from the USGA came over to Oakland Hills to examine what the hell is what's going on, because we're hearing this from everybody, you know. And they looked around and it's like, well, nothing's going on. We're just doing the work that we all agreed to.

00:14:57
Speaker 1: So they keep going and finish the renovation. And in the spring of nineteen fifty one, a number of pros play practice rounds at the course, and their reactions are widely reported. Some are complimentary, Byron Nelson, for one, says positive things, but several players make it known that they are not happy. Chief among them Sam Snead.

00:15:18
Speaker 4: Here's what he said. This is by far the toughest course for any Open I played in. If this tournament wasn't the National Open, there wouldn't be many players sticking around this course. This place is a nightmare now, but then we might as well get used to it. We've got to play it, but we don't have.

00:15:37
Speaker 7: To like it.

00:15:38
Speaker 1: Nonetheless, over as four practice rounds Sneed reportedly shoots two to eighty one one over. Now he hasn't won the US Open before, it's the only real gap in his resume. So the big question going into the tournament is whether this is Sneed's year, even if he hates the course. As for Ben Hogan, the defending champion, he's also critical of the new Oakland Hills.

00:16:01
Speaker 4: He played five practice rounds and he said, you know, after two rounds, I usually know exactly how to play a course and how I'm going to approach it. He said, I've played five rounds at Oakland Hills, and I have no more idea now than when I started the first round how to play this course.

00:16:16
Speaker 1: Yet it's hard to tell what Hogan truly thinks of the course because he's so busy using the media to mess with his rival Sneed.

00:16:23
Speaker 4: When Snead blew his mind about the course, one of the things Hogan did was immediately predict that, oh yeah, I think that Sam Snead's going to win this tournament. And it was like just to play with his mind, because Snead knew that Hogan didn't have any good wishes for him in that tournament.

00:16:42
Speaker 1: Sneed tells reporters don't believe a word of it. That's just then trying to get in everybody's heads like a swarm of wasps. But just because Sneed is aware of it doesn't mean it's not annoying to him.

00:16:57
Speaker 10: Everything Hogan was, Sneed wasn't, and vice versa.

00:17:01
Speaker 1: That's ed Gruver again.

00:17:02
Speaker 10: You know, Snead was everybody's pal. You know, he was the guy with all the funny jokes. He had the down home drawl and everybody loved him, and you know, probably had the most natural golf swing of that era. Hogan. Of course, his swing, as he said, was built out of the dirt.

00:17:19
Speaker 1: But what Hogan has is a higher level of mental wherewithal than almost any golfer before since.

00:17:26
Speaker 10: And again I think it goes back to some of that gamesmanship. I think Hogan knew full well prior to the fifty and Open that he was kind of putting the onus on Sam by predicting that he was going to win it, and Sam wouldn't take the bait. He was like, I know what that little man is up to.

00:17:40
Speaker 1: And here Hogan is the defending champion too, and he's like, oh no, that other guy's the favorite, and as all this chaos is happening, no one is enjoying it more than Robert Trent Jones.

00:17:54
Speaker 4: Trent Jones was very good at PR and they were all so owned up by the time they got to Oakland Hills. They had kneup and down and there'd been a ton of PR generated.

00:18:09
Speaker 1: How would you say the course played during the first two rounds, how would you say Oakland Hills played for the field as a whole, Well.

00:18:18
Speaker 6: It played exceptionally difficult.

00:18:21
Speaker 1: That's Jim Hanson, the author of a Difficult par a Robert Trent Jones biography.

00:18:26
Speaker 6: They one the average score was seventy eight point eight. That's, you know, almost nine over par. And the weather wasn't really bad. You know, throughout any part of the tournament.

00:18:36
Speaker 10: The golfers were just beside themselves, you know, with complaints about this. Trent Jones redesign that it was not what they had thought it was going to be. It was much more difficult.

00:18:46
Speaker 6: It's one of those things, you know, I shot seventy eight, I shot seventy six, I shot eighty. I should have done this instead of that.

00:18:53
Speaker 10: So now here we are trying to play it and it's not fair and it's you know, it's making us look bad. And it was said that rather than the golfers playing the course, the course was playing the golfers. It really got into their heads.

00:19:05
Speaker 6: Hogan himself didn't blame the course for the round he shot. He shot seventy six, six over, and he said he made six real mistakes and he ended up six over.

00:19:16
Speaker 10: He would later call it the most stupid round of golf he had ever played.

00:19:20
Speaker 6: So he he blamed it on him playing really stupid and making stupid mistakes. So he accepted the judgment of the course. You know that he didn't deserve to be any better than that.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: Sam Snead, on the other hand, shoots seventy one won over and finishes the day at the top of the leaderboard. But the next day.

00:19:40
Speaker 4: Second round, Sneids skies and shoots a seventy eight.

00:19:43
Speaker 10: Yeah, he struggled. And I think it comes back to some of those old bugaboos that Sam had about the US Open. When his game started to go sideways, as it did in the second round at Oakland Hills. I think some of those you know, problems from pass Opens probably crept into his mind and it was like, here we go again.

00:20:00
Speaker 4: Attitude Nolly did is bitch about things like you know that the bunkers aren't raked. I landed in three bunkers and there's footmarks I landed in because people didn't rate it was like, you know, part of him was the ability to whine when he wanted to.

00:20:17
Speaker 10: And by contrast, Ben Hogan now starts to step up his game. You know, shoots not a great round, but certainly better.

00:20:27
Speaker 4: Hogan brings down is he's seventy.

00:20:29
Speaker 10: Three, and I think he's starting at that point to get a feel for the course, what he can do, what he can't do, you know, how to read it properly.

00:20:38
Speaker 4: But after a seventy six to seventy three, he's putting those together and he's saying, this is crap. You know what am I going to do?

00:20:46
Speaker 1: The leader is the South African Bobby Locke, one of the greatest putters in the history of the game, and Hogan somehow has to make up five strokes on him over the next two rounds.

00:20:58
Speaker 4: He went to his hotel that night and he was soaking his legs because he had to soak him in hot water after he played, you know, because of the accident. Sitting in that tub, and he was telling Valerie said, I just don't know what the hell I'm going to do. He said, to win now, I have to put together two rounds of seventy. And he said, nobody can put together two rounds of seventy on that course.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: So back in nineteen fifty one, the US Open didn't finish on Sunday. Instead, the third and fourth rounds were both played on the same day.

00:21:41
Speaker 6: The final day was Saturday. It's thirty six holes. They're playing thirty six holes on Saturday. And that, of course was a ground especially for someone like Hogan, you know, because he is just still coming off his automobile accident and so forth, and so thirty six holes walking, you know, that's tough.

00:22:00
Speaker 10: You know, It's called Oakland Hills for a reason. It's very rolling terrain. And to have to tread that twice in one day, as Hogan did. I believe the walking distance of the course is seven miles, so it's fourteen miles. He's walking that day on shattered legs, with a bad back, bad shoulder, using his cane for support at times because of the fatigue.

00:22:23
Speaker 1: But on Saturday morning, in the third round, Hogan's game is in much better shape than his body. He finishes the front nine and three under.

00:22:30
Speaker 10: And then he, you know, his game goes sideways.

00:22:33
Speaker 1: He Boge's fourteen double, Boge's fifteen, misses a five foot birdie put on sixteen, and Boge's seventeen, so he goes four over on the back and posts to seventy one. He's just two shots behind the leaders, Bobby Locke and Jimmy Demerit.

00:22:46
Speaker 4: But he was real disappointed because he thought, you know, I need those two rounds of seventy and now I think I really am blowing it.

00:22:53
Speaker 10: One of the writers who was at the tournament said that Hogan trudged off the course like a man who is condemned to die.

00:23:01
Speaker 6: He goes to lunch, He has the lunch apparently in complete silence.

00:23:06
Speaker 10: And is basically lost in his own thoughts. People who were there told me that it just seemed that he was in his own zone, in his own little world. There wasn't really speaking to anyone.

00:23:18
Speaker 6: But of course, behind that anger and the silence, his mind was churning. He pictured every t shot that he was going to have to hit in the afternoon round, and he decided, and this makes great drama. He sort of decided, well, I'm not going to play it safe anymore.

00:23:37
Speaker 10: You know, I think I figured out a way to beat this course. I have to attack it.

00:23:42
Speaker 6: And so he went out very decisively to play more aggressively. Instead of trying to stay behind the flanking bunkers, he was going to go through them, or he was going to go over them. Instead of playing for the fat part of the greens, he would go for the pins. And he was going to go down fighting. He was not going to surrender to the schemes of jones redesigned golf course. He was going to take this monster and bring it to its knees.

00:24:10
Speaker 10: He found his fighting spirit again, you know, whatever he had that allowed him to come back from all kinds of obstacles in his life, you know, dating back to his father's suicide, the difficulties of his early golf life, from the accident, everything. He was able to dig deep into that and came out for the fourth and final round and really started to take the course a part.

00:24:35
Speaker 1: Hogan's strategy and ball striking are immaculate, but the putts aren't quite falling yet. He goes out in thirty five even part Next up is the tenth hole, one of the most intimidating part fours in the world. From an elevated tee, it rambles over tilted, undulating ground before rising sharply to the green. Hogan leaves himself a two iron approach, and he makes his best swing of the tournament.

00:25:00
Speaker 4: He said, that second shot into the green, he said. He said, it went every inch of the way exactly as I dreamed it. And boom, he said. Right then, everything clicked. On ten, everything clicked.

00:25:13
Speaker 1: He makes his four foot put on ten and adds another birdy on thirteen while he bogies the long, tough fourteenth hole. He bounces right back on fifteen, stuffing a six iron to three feet.

00:25:24
Speaker 10: One of the caddies I spoke to who was there that day, who was following Hogan, said that he had never seen better shot making. I was just shot after shot, hole after hole. He was just making everything that he was setting out to do.

00:25:37
Speaker 1: On sixteen, after a three hundred yard drive, Hogan hits a nine iron to four feet, but misses the putt. Soon he stands on the eighteenth t two under on the day, eight over on the tournament. And he surveys the massive finishing hole, which Robert Trent Jones converted from a par five to a par four.

00:25:55
Speaker 4: It's a dog leg right and in the drive zone it kicks left, falls off to the left, and then you have to go uphill to a raised green that's shallow. It's the second smallest green on the course. Now the whole thing is designed to play us at par five. Well, Trent Jones just added a bunch of bunkers on both sides of the drive zone, all along where your ball's going to kick down into him, and then he did nothing to make that green any larger, and he had them playing at I guess what the limit was that are close to it was four point fifty nine. It was the longest part four on the course.

00:26:35
Speaker 1: The eighteenth hole played so hard in the first three rounds that the USGA decided to ease up on the players and move the te forward. So in the fourth round, Hogan is able to do something that those familiar with the course thought was impossible. He pummels his drive over the fairway bunkers on the right, cutting the corner of the dog leg. He ends up with a downhill fifteen foot birdie putt and just tops it and the ball is gaining speed when it hits the back.

00:27:03
Speaker 6: Of the cup.

00:27:04
Speaker 4: And that was his thirty two on the back, and that was a sixty seven, So he knew he'd done it.

00:27:12
Speaker 10: Now for Hogan to overcome the fatigue and the physical disabilities and to still be able to shoot that round of golf that he did, to shoot a sixty seven suffering physically, you know, it really was a triumph, as they say, of the spirit, triumph of the will.

00:27:30
Speaker 4: And I mean even when they heard the chair go up on eighteen, Bobby lock famously said, turn around.

00:27:38
Speaker 7: He said, what the hell was that?

00:27:40
Speaker 6: One of these guys.

00:27:41
Speaker 4: I don't think walkie talk?

00:27:42
Speaker 7: He said, what reported to him? He said, Well, Hogan just shot a sixty seven, and what is it?

00:27:49
Speaker 4: Bobby Locke said, what did he play?

00:27:52
Speaker 7: All the holes?

00:28:04
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone just wanted to cut in here quickly to tell you about another Father's Day sale. This one is happening in the fried Egg Pro shop. Everything except for photography is fifteen percent off right now through June nineteenth. There's a ton of good stuff, hats, shirts, new headcovers, various accessories. You'll definitely be able to find something for the data in your life or just for yourself. Might as well make this an excuse to get something from the Frida Egg pro Shop all Right, pro Shop dot Thefrida egg dot Com Father's Day Sale. Check it out now. Another quirk of Open Saturday is that the leaders are not repaired for the final round, so when Hogan walks off the eighteenth green, the other contenders still have a ways to go. Bobby Locke and Jimmy DeMeritt were the fifty four hole leaders, but both stumble in the final round. The far less famous Clayton Haefner, on the other hand, gives himself a chance. He ends up recording a sixty nine, the second best round of the week, but he finishes two back. Sometimes I think about how history might have been different if Clayton Hafner, not Ben Hogan, had won the nineteen fifty one US Open. Anyway, the point is there's a big chunk of time between the end of Hogan's round and the end of the tournament, and the way Hogan spends this time turns out to be very significant. What he does basically is begin to shape the story of the fifty one Open, the one we've been telling ever since. And this story is not about Hogan versus Hafner. It's about Hogan versus Oakland Hills, Hogan versus Robert Trent Jones.

00:29:44
Speaker 10: The thing to remember is that when he walked off that golf course, he was still in battle mode. He couldn't flip the switch and like, you know, be combative towards this course one second, and then as he's walking off it just be totally you know, reverse course and reverse his mindset and be like, you know, mister happy, go lucky.

00:30:04
Speaker 9: And he came off the green and he walked toward the clubhouse, and he walked by my mother who was very enthusiastic and highly supportive.

00:30:12
Speaker 1: That's Robert Trent Jones Junior, who was eleven years old in nineteen fifty one and not at Oakland Hills, but his mother, Robert Trent Jones's wife, I own was.

00:30:22
Speaker 9: And they knew each other well from golf circles with a small inn group at that time. And my mother said, Ben, I have just witnessed one of the greatest rounds. Congratulations on your winning, to which he said to her after having said almost nothing for thirty six soles missus Jones. He knew her first name very well, which was my owned, Missus Jones. If your husband had to earn a living on the courses he designs, you'd be in the poorhouse and walked off. So that was that was family talk for about a year.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: Hogan heads to the locker room and there he tells reporters that he's never played a tougher course. A little later, Joe died. Per sens him with a trophy and waits for a speech.

00:31:03
Speaker 10: Hogan hesitates, yeah, then said the most probably the most famous quote in golf history.

00:31:08
Speaker 9: I brought this course, this monster to its knees.

00:31:11
Speaker 6: That he brought this monster to its knees.

00:31:13
Speaker 10: You know, I'm glad I brooked his course, this monster to its knees.

00:31:20
Speaker 1: I had always assumed that when Hogan said this, he was being somewhat tongue in cheek and basically complimenting Oakland Hills. But in the context of his fu attitude during and after this us open, I hear something different.

00:31:35
Speaker 7: Now.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: I hear defiance, and I also hear a bit of self mythologizing. This course was a monster, and only I was great enough to bring it to its knees. Hogan is elevating himself, but simultaneously, maybe unintentionally, he's elevating Oakland Hills and Robert Trent Jones.

00:31:55
Speaker 10: I think he legitimized what Trent Jones had done.

00:31:59
Speaker 1: Do you think he intended to do that?

00:32:01
Speaker 10: I think by legitimizing it in that way, I think it makes his round even greater. If he had downplayed it and said, well, you know, I just showed that this course wasn't that tough, I think it would have delegitimized Trent Jones' work a little bit. But by emphasizing yet that, yes, this course, I'm saying now to everybody here that this course is a monster. It makes the course look good, and it makes him look good in comparison. Guess what, I just beat it. I just brought it down.

00:32:29
Speaker 1: So at this moment, the myth of Ben Hogan and the myth of Robert Trent Jones become mutually reinforcing, and both men make the most of it.

00:32:39
Speaker 6: It makes I mean, it makes Hogan even more Hogan in terms of his legend, but it makes Jones Jones. It makes Jones, although the moniker, the open doctor does not really become coined until the early sixties. There's no question that Jones is really at the top of the pyramid when it comes to designating championship golf courses after Oakland Hills.

00:33:07
Speaker 1: So I'd argue that the legend of the nineteen fifty one US Open has gone far beyond what actually happened that week. Consider, for instance, that in the previous year's US Open, Hogan made the playoff at Marion Golf Club with a seventy two hole score of two eighty seven, the same as his winning score at Oakland Hills, and yet no one calls Marion the Monster. Considered also, when you hear that Hogan shot seven over in nineteen fifty one, that one of the main changes Jones in the USGA made to the course was to reduce its par from seventy two to seventy. The eighth and eighteenth holes, both par fives, were shortened, though not by much, and relabeled as par fours. It is not changing the par to seven from seventy two to seventy just kind of tom foolery. I mean, you know, I sometimes say this was done very commonly at US up and courses in the post World War two era, and I'm like, you know, nothing has really changed about the difficulty of the course, just the public image of it has changed in the sense that all of a sudden, the scores to par are coming out higher, and so you can put that out to the public and say, hey, look what a difficult course this is. But it's really not any more difficult. You've just changed the number.

00:34:25
Speaker 6: If it was par seventy two to eighty eight, he would have been one under. Yep. I mean, if how does the public react to somebody winning at seven over compared to winning at one under. Yeah, it is tom foolery, but it's it's tom foolery that certainly works in favor of the USGA and the architect in the sense that you mean, they've created this monstrous score where you, no, you can't the winner can't even shoot par, and that becomes the storyline. It still is the storyline, you know. So if you don't change it to par seventy from seventy two, the storyline's not quite it's not quite as fierce.

00:35:04
Speaker 1: Look, no doubt the renovated South Course at Oakland Hills was an extremely difficult golf course, and no doubt Hogan's victory was a remarkable achievement, but the fact that the nineteen fifty one US Open lives on in the popular imagination has a lot to do with myth making, or to use the modern term, marketing, on the part of Ben Hogan and especially Robert Trent Jones. For Jones, the tournament is a public relations master stroke, not much as clear as early as the trophy ceremony.

00:35:38
Speaker 10: Robert Trent Jones' son, Trent Jones Jr. Told me that his dad received a standing ovation.

00:35:45
Speaker 8: Normally, the president of USHA, thanks the club, thanks the green superintendent, thanks the volunteers, gives the trophy to the winner and diameter and that was pro form of ceremonial conduct.

00:35:57
Speaker 9: And this is these are all golf people loses, not television. Television wasn't involved, they spontaneously said. And the architect and the.

00:36:05
Speaker 10: Architect, they appreciated what they had just witnessed. People enjoyed watching these golfers really have to use every facet of their game to cope with this course that Trent Jones had created.

00:36:20
Speaker 9: My dad was watching this and they spontaneously gave must any and he walked forward, somewhat embarrassed and acknowledged it and thanked them and with the handwave and turned to the gallery.

00:36:34
Speaker 6: If you had to say what was the golden moment in Robert Trent Jones's life, You'd have to say, it's the summer fifty long.

00:36:48
Speaker 5: What's very interesting in the history of golf course architecture is the relationship between architects and the media.

00:36:54
Speaker 1: That's Bradley Klein, a historian of golf architecture, and he argues that what really Robert Trent Jones's status as the Open Doctor was an article published six weeks after the fifty one open. The article was called Lynxland and Meadowland, and the author was Herbert Warren Wind.

00:37:12
Speaker 5: Herbert Warren Wind, he struggled to establish himself as a writer, and he tried very hard through many iterations in freelance, and then he finally broke through in I think it was nineteen forty eight with his monumental The Story of American Golf. But it wasn't until his profile of Robert Trent Jones in the August nineteen fifty one issue of The New Yorker that Herbwind broke through as the voice of American golf course architecture.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: The piece is essentially an extended, very extended profile of Jones. It covers his childhood, his education, and his early career. It gives a glimpse of his family life in Montclair, New Jersey. It offers an overview of the history and practice golf architecture, and it places Jones at the very apex of the profession.

00:38:05
Speaker 5: And what's very important about that article is it simultaneously made the reputation of Robert Trent Jones Senior as the definitive architect of the post World War two era. It established the monumentality of Oakland Hills as the tough monster that chewed up and spit out these golf pros. And it established her wins reputation as the definitive critic of golf architecture. So simultaneously, three things are achieved in that one article and immediately led to a Trent Jones getting work subsequently at Baltus for All Olympic Club Southern Hills Inverness, oak Hill. He becomes the Open Doctor as a result of that article.

00:38:49
Speaker 1: And soon the Open Doctor was the best known, best paid golf architect in America for decades. His position was dominant and his output overwhelming. Of course, Herbert Warren Wind's article obviously wasn't the singular cause of all of this, but it played its role. About a decade later, Wind was a member at Sand's Point Country Club, a lovely old course on Long Island, designed by aw Tillinghast.

00:39:15
Speaker 5: It's in the north shore of Nassau County, very close to the Gatsby area of Manhasset, and Herb used to go out there all the time with his golf bag and just sort of hit a few shots, and it was a very fussy player. It was a good golfer too. But in nineteen sixty there was a discussion at the club to bring in the Open Doctor, the most famous golf course architect, to modernize the golf course and make it tougher, deepen the bunkers, change the character, and take the old original Tillinghast designed from I think nineteen twenty seven and turned it into a trend Jones course. And Herb Win hit the roof and he stood up in a meeting and he denounced the plan, and he thought it was a terrible idea, and he was very upset. They voted to go ahead with the plan. They changed the golf course, and the irony is that herb Win was fulminating against a strategy of course renovation that he himself had championed in that article a decade earlier.

00:40:18
Speaker 1: Why do you think Wind objected to that plan, given that he had expressed himself to be a fan of Robert tren Jones.

00:40:26
Speaker 5: It's a great question. I wish I had asked him. It hadn't occurred to me. He passed away. I think it was in two thousand and five or six. Herb Win was a little naive, I think about a lot of things. He just wanted to be a writer. He didn't really like being famous and embarrassed him. I don't think he ever understood how influential he was. I have to say this. In all of the writing, and I've read almost everything that herb Win has written on golf, I've never seen a critical word about anything. He was too much of a gentleman. When I went around with him at Inverness in nineteen seventy nine, golf course had just been through a major overhauled by George and Tom Fasio, with four new holes that everybody thought were terrible, and privately, herb Wind said something to me about, yeah, it's really too bad. But not a word of that in that long article that he wrote about Hale Orwin's Wind, not a single word. And I always felt like that was a in retrospect, that was a limitation of his work.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: But by nineteen seventy nine, by that us open that Herb Wind did not write critically about, the tides were shifting in the world of golf course design. Some people had started to take a more skeptical stance toward the Open Doctor era, and a few were determined to move past it by looking at what had come before it. That's next on Frida egg Stories. Frida egg Stories is produced by me Garrett Morrison, with transcript and editing hell from Meg Atkins. The guests in this episode were Ed Gruver, Dick Houting, Jim Hanson, Robert Trent Jones Junior, and Bradley Klein. Ed's book is called Bringing the Monster to Its Knees, and you can find Bradley's essay on Herbert Warren Wind in issue thirteen of The Golfer's Journal. We'll be back on Friday with the third and final installment of The Open Doctor and His Monster, So see you then and thanks for listening