When Golf is No Fun
By Jim Apfelbaum

 

In an interview late in life, Ben Hogan drew a characteristic distinction between playing golf with friends and what he called friendly golf. You know, the glad-handing, rollicking game familiar to weekend players just knocking it around. That would certainly fit with our image of the Hawk, or, for that matter, in considering any serious competitive golfer’s approach to the game. Indeed, Chi Chi Rodriguez referred to the golf course as his “office.” An accurate description, it remains now more than ever for his successors who weekly vie for six-figure sums comparable to those clawing their way toward the upper rungs of corporate compensation.

Concerning the legendary Hogan mystique, Houston oracle Jack Burke Jr. adds that it may have a less-than-mysterious explanation. Hogan was a ponderous thinker, he said, as opposed to Sam Snead or Jimmy Demaret who he recalled could “see” a shot more easily and played faster as a result. “You know, Hogan was blamed for not being talkative and all that sort of thing,” said the former Masters and PGA Champion, still sharp at 83-years-old. “He was a fairly slow thinker. It takes a while for some people to analyze.” The observation only lends credence to the word and judgment of another austere immortal. Harry Vardon is credited with having observed that the best golf is played in comparative silence. And how unnerving that silence can be!

Underneath his studious rather than icy exterior, Hogan had some sympathy for the duffer’s plight. Obscured in his writings is an entertaining 1942 Esquire article on a subject that does not get sufficient attention entitled When Golf is No Fun. Given Hogan’s outlook, it’s certainly an intriguing subject for him to tackle. A round with Hogan, we imagine, might be many things: mesmerizing, fascinating, intimidating, instructive, but how much fun could it have been?

Then again, who better to address the game’s severities?
Genuine fun must be fleeting for the touring pros who face uncertainty with every swing. Aside from depositing a check, the “fun” hardly lasts longer than the instant between a putt’s disappearance and the commencement of calculations for the ensuing drive. The most important shot is always next, the last: good, bad, indifferent, magnificent – quickly forgotten. Not that the pros can’t be fun. I’m indebted to the PGA Tour player who once described his putting as having deteriorated such that “he couldn’t find water putting off a boat.” The intervening years, I’m sorry to say, have proved the accuracy of his report. Sarcastic and tormented, the comment pays tribute to the heritage of personal suffering that buttresses golf like a Prestwick railroad tie. Telling? Yes, if not exactly evocative of fun per se.

It was Harold Hilton, the winner of two British Opens and four British Amateurs, who when asked late in life if he hadn’t fought the good fight, agreed: “Sometimes – when I could see the humor of it all.” That is a most enlightened attitude. The exceptional Mickey Wright was asked in 1991 whether she would characterize herself as a competitive person on the golf course. “I must have been,” she considered, “but I never felt competitive.” Perhaps that’s the best tack.

Hogan adopts a light and sympathetic tone in the article, offering advice to an amateur who has written to him about his flagging game.

“The first thing I’d honestly advise a fellow who is disgusted with his golf,” he recommends, “is to change the company he’s playing in. If he changes to playing with fellows who enjoy themselves without worrying themselves and others about bad shots and high scores, he’ll begin to relax at his game. He will get a better score because he won’t be trying so desperately that he tightens up stiffer than a steel rail.”

Often as not, he continues, it’s fixating on non-golf distractions that make the duffer a “nervous basket case,” perhaps, “it was something he ate, the war, priorities, taxes or something else far away from a golf course” that is to blame for his indifferent play. Hogan’s bullish on 15 minutes (to two hours) of putting into a cup on the carpet each night. Given his notorious problems on the greens, it is surprising that no less an expert than Bobby Locke, who many consider among the finest putters ever, picks Hogan as the best.

In the back of his autobiography, Bobby Locke on Golf, the three-time British Open champion goes through the bag choosing the best contemporary player with each club. The book appeared in 1954, on top of Hogan’s masterful year, in which he might conceivably have completed the Grand Slam. He won the three majors he played in, all but the PGA Championship. Locke selects Hogan, singling him out not only for his ball striking, long irons but also for his putting.

It’s always interesting when instructional wisdom appears to conflict. Here are two expert contradictions on the value of practice:
Ben Hogan said, “What I’ve learned is that when a fellow is hitting the golf ball well, he should try to keep in that groove until it becomes a habit.”
Bobby Jones said, “Nothing can be gained by tinkering with your swing after it has been once straightened out.”

Of course, they’re both right. Each statement speaks to the personalities of the respective individuals as to their different approaches to golf. Hogan was an inveterate, some would say obsessive, student; Jones, more educated and intellectually introspective, could set his clubs down for prolonged spells to pursue other interests.

“Golf is a very convenient thing for him to blame as the source of his unhappiness,” Hogan concludes in When Golf is No Fun. “He should be happy he has golf handy for that alibi and relief.” Teammates of another old school figure, Ty Cobb, believed, as has often been thought of Hogan, that he would have been successful in any endeavor. One contemporary said the Georgia Peach could have been: “a great banker, a famous general, a successful industrialist – outstanding in any field he chose. No other man ever had his frenzy for excellence. Cobb’s passion was to finish first in everything.” Sound familiar?

In considering Hogan, sportswriter Al Laney wrote: “He does not give you the feeling of being in the presence of a great artist, as Bob Jones did, but he does give you the feeling of being in the presence of a master craftsman.” Certainly the artist and the craftsman would view many things differently, including practice, which explains the disparity in opinions.

Harvey Penick believed that Hogan played so well because he knew his swing better than everyone else knew theirs. Hogan biographer Curt Sampson agrees that the real Hogan secret lies in the depths of his own understanding. Undoubtedly, this is wise counsel in any endeavor, a variation on Polonius’ advice “to thine own self be true.”

Aside from the psychological traumas that drove men like Hogan or Cobb, how grateful Hogan must’ve been to have golf as an alibi and a relief, as an outlet to express himself. Perhaps that was Hogan’s real secret, to have recognized early in life a quest that so fully fed and appeased his strengths and weaknesses like no other.

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