By Jim Kelly
Back in 1990, I got the chance to do something most golf broadcasters only dream about: I sat down face to face with Ben Hogan.
By then, Hogan had become something of a legend you didn’t actually see anymore. He’d stepped back from the public eye, and there was this reputation that had built up around him — that he was distant, hard to reach, maybe even a little cold. The cameras hadn’t picked him up in years. So when the crew and I finally got the room set, the chairs arranged, and the tape rolling, I honestly didn’t know exactly what I was going to get.
What I got was a man who lit up the second we started talking about golf.
Why the Ben Hogan Tour Mattered to Him
We were there to talk about the launch of the Ben Hogan Tour — the developmental circuit Deane Beman had brought to him — and I wanted to know what it meant to a man who’d made his own way with no safety net at all.
He didn’t hesitate. He called it “the finest thing I ever heard of,” and he meant it. He talked about how the young players coming up needed exactly this kind of stepping stone — a way to learn how to compete, read a golf course, and sharpen their swing before they ever got to the big leagues. Then he told me something that stuck with me: he wished he’d had something like it himself.
That led us back to where it all started for him — turning pro in 1931, when the total prize money on offer was $5,000. Not per tournament. Total.
Broke Twice, Never Broken
This is the part of the conversation that really got me. I asked him what he remembered about those early years on the road, good and bad, and he told me flat out — he’d gone broke. Twice. And had to start over both times.
But he said it without an ounce of self-pity. He said he enjoyed every minute of it, the grinding and the work that came with it. He described a routine that sounded almost obsessive: up five or six hours before his tee time to practice every single shot in the bag, then coming back to his hotel room at night and doing it all over again — pitching balls into the furniture, putting on the carpet. He told me a hotel manager once called him personally because the guest next door couldn’t sleep from the constant pop, pop, pop of golf balls hitting a chair.
He had to stop that one.
When I asked him who instilled that work ethic in him, who lit that fire before he was even 19 years old, his answer was simple and a little haunting: “I had to eat, and some days I didn’t eat. That’ll make you go to work.”
He’d sold newspapers before he ever caddied. Caddied starting around age 12. That’s where a legend actually starts — not on a leaderboard, but broke and hungry and figuring out how to swing a club because he had to.
The Man Behind Marvin Leonard’s Trophy Room
One of the stories he told me that day is one I don’t think gets told enough. There was a man named Marvin Leonard — Hogan had caddied for him once — who staked him $85 for his very first run at the tour, the trip out to the Pasadena Open. When that ran out, Hogan wrote him a letter, broke, asking for help. Leonard sent it. It happened again. Leonard helped him again.
Years later, once Hogan could finally afford to pay him back, he pulled Leonard aside privately at a hotel in New Orleans and tried to settle the debt. Leonard wouldn’t take a dime. He told Hogan to keep it — that helping him had been its own reward.
That’s the reason, Hogan told me, that there’s a trophy room at Colonial they were naming after Marvin Leonard. Every trophy in that room, in Hogan’s mind, belonged to Leonard as much as to him. “Outside of him,” he said, “I couldn’t have done it.”
Uncompromising, On and Off the Course
We talked about golf course management too — something he was arguably prouder of than his ball-striking, even though the ball-striking is what most people remember. He told me a golf course with no wind is difficult enough, but knowing how to play the wind when it does blow is a “terrific advantage” for the player who understands it.
And we talked about his equipment company, and what “Ben Hogan” stamped on a golf club was supposed to mean. He walked me through it — the balance, the shaft flex, where the weight sits and why, the grip size and how it’s turned onto the club. Custom orders for players who were tall, short, long, or built differently than the standard. “We don’t put out anything else except a perfect golf club,” he told me. Not because a marketing department told him to say that. Because he meant it.
I asked him where that uncompromising streak came from, whether anyone kept him on the straight and narrow. His answer made me laugh, but he wasn’t joking: “I couldn’t veer off because I had nothing, and I had to eat. And I didn’t want to go to jail. They don’t feed you very well in jail.”
A Man People Didn’t Get to See Anymore
By the time we got toward the end of the interview, I told him something I believed then and still believe now — that the camera doesn’t lie, and what it was picking up that day was a young, energetic, engaged man. Not the recluse people assumed he’d become.
He told me the truth of it: his wife’s sister was gravely ill, his brother had just been operated on, and he simply couldn’t leave home to travel to tour stops, even though nearly every one of them had invited him. It wasn’t aloofness. It was a man taking care of his family.
But when I asked him what it felt like to still pick up a five iron and go hit balls at lunch, his face changed. “It feels just as good as it ever did,” he said. “They don’t go as good as they used to, but I enjoy it. That’s my life, and I thoroughly enjoy it.”
How Ben Hogan Wanted to Be Remembered
I closed the interview by asking him the big one — how he wanted to be remembered. He deflected it at first, the way he deflected most compliments that day. But when I pressed him on the idea that he was always trying to improve, never satisfied, that improving was his marquee, he agreed completely.
“I got enjoyment out of improving,” he told me. “If you improve, you get a great satisfaction within you of accomplishment. If you don’t improve, you’re nothing divided by nothing.”
I gave him one last shot — to look into the camera and speak directly to every fan who’d ever applauded him. What he said still gives me chills all these years later. He thanked them from the bottom of his heart. He thanked God for golf courses, for the chance to train not just his own mind but the minds of the people who played the game, for the friendships it gave him. He said associated with golf was life’s love of his, and he wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
Then he said something I’ve never forgotten: that golf, and the people he’d met through it, was “touching God’s feet every day.”
That was Ben Hogan in 1990 — not the myth, not the recluse, but a man who’d gone broke twice and never once lost the hunger, who never stopped believing improvement was the whole point of a life. I feel lucky I got to sit across from him and hear it in his own words.