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Says beefy, 36-year-old Riviera Caddy Clyde Starr, who has often "packed" Hogan: "It takes him three hours to go nine holes in practice. He'll say, 'Here, drop 15 balls in this sand trap here.' Then he'll blast every one of them out. If he's not satisfied, he'll blast another 15. He'll even memorize the grain of the grass. He'll putt till hell won't have it."
Last week he laced his shots toward selected spots—to the right of the caddy, then to the left, then beyond. It was the same grim ritual on the putting green, the part of golf that the swinger in Hogan still dislikes. Says he: "Putting is foreign to the rest of the game. One of them should be called golf and the other something else." He put in long practice "tapping" the ball (for short putts) and "rolling" it (for long ones). Then he took a practice spin around Riviera's 18-hole championship course.
He kept no score, exchanged few words with his caddy. He was trying to tune himself to a competitive pitch. "Relax?" he says, incredulously. "How can anybody relax and play golf? You have to grip the club, don't you?"
Hogan & Hagen. The 128 men who would be on the firing line against him this week (including his close rivals, Texans Lloyd Mangrum and Jimmy Demaret) knew what he meant. Hogan is one of the reasons why they can't relax. None of them clamors to be in his threesome. Says one frank Chicago pro: "It's no fun to play with Hogan. He's so good and so mechanically perfect that he seems inhuman. You get kind of uneasy and start to flub your shots." Others had other reasons, among them the big, distracting gallery that always follows Ben.
The legend of the Hogan spell cropped up at the Montebello (Calif.) Open last month. "Look at that Mangrum," said another pro. "Steady as a rock out there. He even grins once in a while. But if Hogan were in this tournament, you'd see Lloyd shake when he lit a cigarette. I'm telling you, the guy's got ulcers, and Ben Hogan gave them to him."
In its own way, Hogan's spell is as remarkable as the one the great Walter ("The Haig") Hagen used to cast over the opposition in the relatively relaxed 1920s, when many a champion took his golf with three fingers of whiskey.
Dapper Walter Hagen used to stride out to the first tee, often late for his match, run a comb through his Brilliantined hair and drawl: "Well, who's going to be second?" "The Haig's" psychological warfare continued through the match. He made the hard shots look easy, the easy ones look stupendous. Early in a match he would concede putts to his opponent, later rattle him by insisting that even the short ones be played out. No matter how poorly Walter seemed to be shooting, nobody relaxed until he was in. But where Hagen deliberately played his opponent, Hogan coolly and distractingly plays the course as though there were nobody around. Those who have studied both in action suspect that Scientist Hogan would have been a match for Showman Hagen.