The Upset: Jack Fleck's Incredible Victory over Ben Hogan at the U.S. Open

PROLOGUE

Two Characters in Search of a Championship

JACK FLECK KNELT IN THE SAND on Ocean Beach, at the far west side of San Francisco. Wave spray from the Pacific Ocean lightly coated his thin, jut-jawed face. He was praying for good luck or divine intervention or good karma—he wasn’t quite sure—in the great task he had ahead of him that afternoon. He would be competing against Ben Hogan on the Lake course of the Olympic Country Club in a playoff for the 1955 U.S. Open championship. Ben Hogan! Well, of all things! Fleck wasn’t sure the prayers would help, but they couldn’t hurt. They could reinforce the voice he was sure he heard while shaving the previous morning. It came through the mirror. Someone, or something, delivered the message—twice—that he was a man of destiny and was going to win the U.S. Open.

At the same time, Ben Hogan was in his room at the Saint Francis Hotel, in downtown San Francisco, finishing the burdensome but absolutely essential task of encasing his right leg from mid-thigh to mid-shin in a cottony elastic wrapping, making sure it was not too tight or too loose. This followed sitting in a warm Epsom salt bath for fifteen minutes. He did this before every round of golf, and it had become as routine as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It began after he recovered, more or less, from the highway accident he suffered six years earlier that nearly killed him and, among other things, left his legs forever fragile and vulnerable to stress—such as walking a golf course and especially making his vigorous golf swing.

Hogan’s wife, Valerie, with her long, sad face, watched her husband do the wrapping. It was not a difficult job to run the bath or apply the wrap, and she would have liked to help. She used to offer, but he always said no, no, he could do it himself, and she no longer applied to assist. Her husband needed to be the sole manager of his life. He liked to think he didn’t need anyone else, that all he had accomplished was entirely of his own doing. That was not true, of course, but it was how he wanted to understand himself and the world to understand him.

In strictly golf-accomplishment terms, Fleck had no business being part of the upcoming confrontation. As a professional golfer he was in the qualifier class. By common consensus that is to golf what an opponent is to prizefighting: a pug with no chance of beating anyone of consequence and who serves as fodder to build up the record of contenders, those with real potential. A qualifier is a player who manages to get into the field of a golf championship but only gives it numerical legitimacy.

Fleck had played twenty tournaments on the 1955 pro tournament circuit, starting in January, and earned a mere $2,500 in prize money. He was just about breaking even financially, but only because he didn’t drink or smoke and was otherwise very close with a buck. He got that way as a boy growing up during the Great Depression. His father had been a truck farmer but failed during a misbegotten land rush and from then supported his wife and five children with the sketchy and uncertain living of a salesman. There were three boys and two girls. Jack was the third born, the middle child, the one who gets ignored and ends up doing something special or different.

Fleck’s wife, Lynn, was back home in Davenport, Iowa, with their four-year-old son, Craig. She looked after the two public golf courses at which her husband was the professional/manager. She had encouraged Jack to try the tournament circuit full-time this year. In past years he had gone out from November through March to play the winter tour and then returned home to his day jobs. But now, at thirty-two, it was time to give big-time tournament golf a complete, all-year effort and once and for all determine if he had the goods.

Give it a try, dear, Lynn Fleck had said to her husband, and see if you can do it. Based on his overall performance over the last year and a half, it seemed clear he couldn’t do it. And yet, because he was an accurate driver of the ball, Fleck was not discouraged when he arrived at the Olympic Country Club for his practice rounds. He had a feeling before the tournament began that he might be able to finish in the top ten. That was his goal. It would get him into the next year’s championship without having to qualify.

Ben Hogan had somewhat loftier expectations going in. It was not just a matter of winning this particular edition of the National Open, as it was commonly called. He had already won it four times. But a fifth one would make it truly special. No one had won that many. Hogan ordinarily liked to project himself as unconcerned with such statistics, as if he was just out to excel and earn the first-prize check. But in this championship he made no bones about wanting to set a new record. He felt it would cement his place in golf history, a feeling that reflected the insecurity not uncommon among highly accomplished individuals, athletes in particular, who are forever fearful they are about to lose their unique edge or run out of luck. If he could have stepped back and viewed himself objectively, Hogan would have realized he didn’t need any reassurance of his place in the annals of the game. He was already cast in bronze, properly recognized as one of the greatest golfers the game had ever had.

There was another incentive for Hogan, one that was more immediate and very real. At the age of forty-two, this could be his last opportunity. Every time he entered a championship he felt, or his body told him, that his capacity to play at the highest level was getting closer and closer to being over. He had played only six tournaments all year leading up to this mid-June date and had said more than a few times during the practice-round days at Olympic that he was working harder to prepare for this Open than any other before and that it was getting to be too much for him.

The general details of the head-on collision of Hogan’s Cadillac with a bus that was wrongly passing traffic on a fogbound two-lane highway in west Texas, in February 1949, were well documented in newspaper and magazine articles and in a feature movie, Follow the Sun, that appeared in 1951. If he hadn’t, at the last second, leaned over to protect Valerie from the oncoming bus, he would have been speared to death by the steering wheel of his car. As it was, he sustained tremendous injuries: a fractured collarbone and ankle, a double fracture of the pelvis, a chipped rib. He also developed blood clots that required a unique surgery that saved his life and allowed him to eventually, heroically, almost incomprehensibly win more major championships than he had won before the accident.

That said, Hogan was never wholly relieved from circulation problems in his legs. Few knew the day-to-day toll he was paying to continue competing. He didn’t volunteer that information. He was an extremely private man when it came to all aspects of his personal life and had an exceptionally intimidating manner that daunted any effort to break in where no one was wanted. So tight was he in this regard that even Valerie did not know until some five years into their marriage that Hogan’s father had committed suicide. And that her husband, a young boy at the time, was in the house and perhaps at the scene when the fatal shot was fired. Even then, Valerie learned of it by accident, overhearing her sister-in-law mention it in a conversation with an aunt.

No guessing was necessary to know Hogan’s legs were a problem. He limped noticeably wherever he played, and on the Lake it seemed even worse. The course is not roly-poly hilly in its overall topography, but there are some substantial rises and a very steep stairway up to the clubhouse from the course. And the grass was almost always wet from the mist and fog that were endemic to the site. Even though the fairways were closely mown, it was a heavy walk. Hogan often rubbed his knees as he climbed the Olympian hills. When he was not shaking hands with a fellow player, chatting with the press, or otherwise in presentation mode, his face in repose had a hauntingly gaunt expression. A teenager who sneaked onto the course to see Hogan play a practice round was amazed to learn that Hogan and his father were the same age: He didn’t look like forty-two at all; more like fifty-two to me, maybe sixty.

Hogan had another issue weighing on him. In the fall of 1953 he went into business as a golf-equipment manufacturer. The Ben Hogan Co. opened its doors in Fort Worth, Texas, where Hogan had lived ever since he was a teenager. Most of the money for the start-up came from two close friends—Pollard Simon, who made his fortune in the construction business, and Marvin Leonard, a Fort Worth department store magnate. The first production run of Ben Hogan irons came out in the summer of 1954, and the clubs were well received. Hogan billed his clubs as being for the better player, and they had both the look and playability that Hogan felt represented the motto. Many better players, including tournament pros, felt the same. But there were serious problems with the second run, which prompted a strong disagreement with Pollard Simon and led to the dissolution of their partnership. A lot of money was involved.

When Jack Fleck arrived in San Francisco six days before the start of play, he drove around the working-class town of Daly City, which was close to the Olympic Club, and found a decent room in the El Camino Motel on Mission Street. It was only a ten-minute drive to the course. Fleck asked if the furniture in his room could be rearranged so he had space for his hatha yoga exercises. He also asked for the bed to be situated so he could sleep with his head toward the north. He had read up on magnetism while at sea as a sailor in World War II and came across a theory that humans sleep most soundly when they are parallel to the magnetic lines of force that encircle the earth from north to south. The concept is also iterated in Hindu scripture, suggesting, among other things, that people who sleep in an east-west position have more dreams than north-south sleepers. That didn’t come up in his study of Hindu-based hatha yoga, but in any case, Jack Fleck wasn’t much interested in having dreams that week. For golfers they are usually troublesome, bordering on nightmares. The proprietor of the El Camino Motel was accommodating. The bed was reset on a north-south line.

Fleck took most of his meals during the week at the small, narrow Beacon Diner, directly across the street from the motel. There were eight revolving stools before a Formica counter and three small tables along the wall. He could get the kind of food he ate, at a good price. He did not eat meat or anything white—white flour, sugar. He ate a lot of fruit. He referred to himself as a fruitaholic.

After his exercises he ate breakfast at the Beacon—a bowl of dry cereal, orange juice, a banana, a slice of whole-wheat toast, and a cup of tea—ingesting the food in a kind of meditative state. As he chewed and swallowed he stared past the buxom waitress and through the wide front window out onto the street. After paying the check and leaving a half-dollar tip, a little higher than usual, but, win or lose, he was in for a good-sized check—more than he had won that year to date—he drove to Ocean Beach. There, along the shoreline, he walked a bit, then knelt to pray. That done, he got into his one-year-old four-door Buick and drove off to the Olympic Country Club, only five minutes away, to make his date with Ben Hogan and play for the National Open championship. Tee off time was 2:00 PM.

As Fleck was slowly eating his breakfast, Ben Hogan, his right knee now bound for the day, had a room-service breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, a cup of coffee, and a glass of ginger ale. He ate slowly but with a conscious purpose. He had once watched Walter Hagen, the great champion a generation before him, reach for a glass of water in something close to slow motion. Hogan’s friend and swing mentor, Henry Picard, said Hagen’s manner was a way of slowing his metabolism against a tendency to do things too quickly with his hands. Such quickness was detrimental to the golf swing, in which speed kills … except at the moment of impact.

This was one of a number of means by which Hogan sought to slow his internal tempo and subsequently that of his quick-paced swing. He would play as many practice rounds as possible with players such as George Fazio, who wielded his clubs like a maestro conducting La Mer. Another of Hogan’s tactics for slowing himself down was to drive under the speed limit to the golf course. He wasn’t driving this week—the Olympic Club was providing complimentary car service to the players. But every day Hogan asked the fellow driving the car to keep under the thirty-five mile-per-hour speed limit. As for the ginger ale, he was told once that ginger had blood-thinning properties, and while there was little more than a trace of the spice in a glassful of Canada Dry, he felt it slimmed his hands a bit and gave him a more sensitive feel for the clubhead.

Valerie Hogan stayed back to pack their bags, attend church, and have some private time before heading out to the course. She was hoping it would be the last time she would have to go through the whole experience, this National Open business. But she knew, with an internal sigh, that it wouldn’t be.

STAGE SET

OF ALL THE DISTINCTIONS GOLF HAS in the world of sports, none is more telling and potentially compelling than the diversity of its venues. All football fields are the same length and width, as are tennis courts and basketball courts, not to mention the height of the net and dimensions of the baskets. A baseball field can be tweaked a bit to affect play—the distance from the plate to the outfield fences, the depth of the infield grass—but the pitcher pitches from sixty feet, six inches, and it’s ninety feet between the bases everywhere in the world.

No such rigid standardizing of its field of play exists in golf, which is one of the game’s enduring charms—and selling points. As those who claim golf is the toughest game say in the vernacular, There ain’t any sand traps between first and second base and no creek ten yards from the end zone. Except for the standardized diameter of the hole where the ball ends up, each and every golf course has its own dimensions, arrangement of hazards, undulations of terrain, peculiarities of turf, and configuration of holes. No two holes on a golf course are ever exactly alike in their form. All the more fascinating is that the challenges—the width and angle of the fairways, the incorporation of water hazards, the positioning of and contouring of the greens … in short, the difficulties of a golf course—are man-made. Even on the Scottish links, where the game was born, the golfers would route the holes so that the sand-filled mounds—the bunkers—formed by sheep digging in for shelter against the incessant winds became obstacles to the golfers.

In the United States, with terrain far more varied than in Scotland, more ingenuity was needed to produce golf courses deemed sufficiently demanding of players. Courses built on perfectly flat ground in Florida or the Midwest, where there are no natural obstacles already in place, are invariably turned into layouts featuring deep man-made pits Americans have come to call traps, cunningly placed ponds, oddly banked greens, and very often roller-coaster fairways. If no stands of trees are extant, thousands are planted to hem in fairways. If native trees are on the property, fairways are placed to bring them into play. It is generally accepted that a dead-flat course with no bunkers or water or trees will not attract golfers, because the game is too easy, or seems to be. In fact, the harder a course is to play, the more praise it receives, or at least the more of a reputation it engenders.

Which is to say, given the problems inherent to hitting just one solid golf shot, let alone two in a row, those who crow about building the hardest golf course in the world are at heart sadists. Sado-masochists, really, because if they play the courses they demand be built, then they are inflicting pain on themselves as well as their fellow man. And when an important contest such as the U.S. Open is to be held on one of these hard courses, it is further manipulated, as critics of the United States Golf Association would have it, to make it even more difficult.

The USGA sets the gold standard in making courses as trying as possible, and especially when it comes to the U.S. Open. The association demurs at the many harsh and sometimes profane adjectives it hears regarding the preparation of courses it uses for the championship. Its most memorable rationalization for fairways through which a foursome must walk single file, play out of rough as high as an elephant’s eye, and putt on greens as slippery as mercury is, Our objective is not to humiliate the best players in the world, it’s to identify them.

Be that as it may, when average golfers happen onto a U.S. Open course in the days before the grandstands, scoreboards, and gallery are in place, they will immediately sense that something special is afoot. The definition of the fairways is the most distinguishing characteristic, their unusual narrowness sharply defined by the deep and darker grass that borders them. The courses exude a tone of magnitude, significance, and consequence. Except for its overall length, which can’t be seen at a glance, the Lake course of the Olympic Club had that air about it even before the USGA and the members of the club got their hands on it. But, of course, that was not enough.

The Olympic Club was founded in 1860. It was the first of its kind in the nation, its central purposes to provide a facility for its members to get into or stay in good physical condition through exercise and athletics of one sort or another and to have a place to hang out. It was also meant to develop high-level competitive amateur athletic talent. The Olympic Club formed teams to vie in national and international competitions in many sports—basketball, football, rugby, swimming, boxing. One club member was James J. Gentleman Jim Corbett, the heavyweight champion who defeated the legendary John L. Sullivan for the title. Corbett taught boxing at the Olympic Club for many years. In 1909 an Olympic Club member, Ralph Rose, set the world record for the shot put. In 1915 the club’s basketball team won a national amateur championship, and in 1941 the fabled basketball player Hank Luisetti, an Olympic Club member, introduced the one-hand jump shot to the game and led the club’s basketball team to the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) championship. In 1918 golf was added to the mix.

Golf was steadily gaining attention in the United States after Francis Ouimet’s remarkable playoff victory over Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in the 1913 U.S. Open. The game was officially only in its second decade in the United States when Ouimet took the title at the Country Club, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was a twenty-year-old amateur golfer who had done nothing of competitive note nationally and not much locally. But he managed to defeat the #1 and #2 players in the world head-on. That Vardon and Ray were Englishmen made Ouimet’s achievement all the more satisfying to an American audience. It generated a wave of new New World golfers.

Following the trend, in 1918, when the one-year-old Lakeside Golf Club ran into financial problems, the Olympic Club bought it. (In a neat turn, a notable member of the Olympic Club in 1955 was Ed Lowery, who caddied for Ouimet in that historic 1913 playoff.) It didn’t take long for golf to catch on in a big way among the Olympic members, and the club eventually outgrew Lakeside. In 1924 it purchased considerable land adjacent to the Lakeside course, eliminated that course, and built two new ones. Both were the work of Willie Watson, a noted Scots-born course designer, and Sam Whiting, who was in charge of constructing the layouts. Whiting also contributed to the design of the course, especially when he was appointed the club’s maintenance supervisor or greenkeeper.

One course was named Ocean, as it was more open to the nearby Pacific Ocean. The other was named the Lake, or Lakeside, for its proximity to inland Lake Merced. At the outset the Ocean course was the more highly regarded of the two, largely due to a few visually dramatic holes in the dunes-like area about a quarter-mile west of the Skyline Highway entrance to the club’s grounds. When a powerful storm caused landslides that buried those holes, Whiting was assigned to restore them. Given considerable leverage, Whiting put all eighteen holes of the Ocean course east of the Skyline Highway. And he made some significant additions to