Starred review from April 19, 2004
Ben Hogan is widely credited with ushering in the modern era of golf. His legendary practice sessions, intense perfectionism and iron determination helped turn a lazy gentleman's game into a high-stakes, competitive sport. Yet Hogan's unprecedented achievements on the golf course were often overshadowed by his fierce demeanor and public reticence, which fueled wild speculations about every aspect of his guarded life and gave birth to countless myths and misrepresentations. Dodson (Final Rounds
) resurrects the flesh-and-blood man from the ashes of apocrypha, providing the most intimate and richly textured portrait of the famous golfer to date. Although reverential, Dodson doesn't shy away from the darker aspects of the Hogan story, exposing a vulnerable and pathologically obsessive man whose dogged resolve and incomparable success were matched only by his hidden shame and self-doubt. Reared in Depression-era Texas, nine-year-old Hogan witnessed his father's suicide, a formative event that Dodson believes spurred Hogan's prodigious ambition and drive, as well as his compulsive tendencies and extreme need for privacy. All the mesmerizing stories—including Hogan's near-miraculous comeback and triumph at the 1950 U.S. Open after a debilitating car crash, and his record-setting 1953 season in which he won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open—are related in lush and loving detail, without overlooking anecdotes about the era's other great players and colorful personalities, such as Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret. As much about the game as about Hogan himself, Dodson's nuanced and engrossing biography adds new depth to a figure who has been excessively scrutinized but rarely understood. Agent, Virginia Barber.
Starred review from June 1, 2004
In contrast to the reverence now accorded him, the real Ben Hogan's brusqueness fostered antipathy from the sportswriters of the 1940s. Then came the most shocking nongolf event in the history of golf, the 1949 car-bus smashup that almost killed Hogan and his wife. Hogan's return from death's door to dominate golf is an integral inspirational element in the several extant biographies (most recently, Curt Sampson's " Hogan" in 1996). With authorized access to Hogan's papers, Dodson, author of the well-received " Final Rounds " (2002), brings new information and a new interpretation to the question of Hogan's personality, both before and after the accident. While noting the golfer's modest mellowing following the collision, Dodson considers the key to Hogan's taciturn attitude to be a secret he guarded his entire life: the witnessing at age nine of his father's suicide. Although no proof of Hogan's presence at the scene of his father's death exists, Dodson makes a good circumstantial case. In addition to probing his subject's personality, Dodson ably dramatizes the best remembered of Hogan's on-course heroics, although he avoids the kind of numbing, shot-by-shot detail that rarely holds the interest of even fanatical fans. This is the first Hogan biography to do justice to an enigmatic and complex sports hero, and as such, it becomes the instant standard. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)