Ben Hogan

Ben Hogan was a small, trim, immaculately dressed Texan who became one of the most admired and least understood figures in golf. This biography, written by James Dodson with the cooperation of Hogan's family, sets out to explain the man behind the mystique: his punishing work ethic, his famously steady nerves, and the private forces that drove him.

Hogan won four U.S. Opens, a record-tying total, and took five of the six major championships he entered in a single season. His accuracy and cold composure unsettled the best players of his day, and later stars from Arnold Palmer to Greg Norman to Tiger Woods looked to him as a model. Off the course, though, he guarded his inner life closely, and the so-called Hogan "secret" fed years of public speculation.

In 1949, at the height of his career, a Greyhound bus struck the car carrying Hogan and his wife, Valerie, head-on. Both nearly died, and doctors doubted he would walk again, let alone play. Over the next three years he fought his way back, and in 1953 he won the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open in the same year, a feat no one has matched since.

Dodson portrays a man who was strikingly honest yet held back by self-doubt, spurred on by a need to prove himself, and shadowed by a childhood tragedy that lay at the heart of his secret. The book also follows the devotion, and later the strain, of Hogan's sixty-two-year marriage. It shows a side the public seldom saw: a warm, funny, generous man with a sharp head for business, who built the golf equipment company that still carries his name.