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Ben Hogan
Ben Hogan's career was nearly ended in February 1949, when a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus left him with a fractured pelvis, collarbone, ankle, and rib, and doctors questioned whether he'd ever walk normally again, let alone golf competitively — he'd already won two majors by that point, but the crash came right as his career was building toward its peak. Hogan returned to competitive golf just 16 months later and won the 1950 US Open in an 18-hole playoff, an achievement so improbable given his injuries that it became known simply as "the Miracle at Merion." He went on to win six of his nine career majors after the accident, playing much of the rest of his career on legs that never fully recovered. His most remarkable single season came in 1953, when he won three of the four professional majors he entered — the Masters, US Open, and The Open Championship — a run still known as the "Hogan Slam." He didn't enter that year's PGA Championship, whose match-play dates overlapped with The Open's, meaning a true calendar Grand Slam wasn't even physically possible for him that year. Hogan was renowned for his ball-striking precision and an intensely private, almost obsessive approach to practice and swing mechanics, an approach that gave rise to persistent talk of a secret technique — "Hogan's secret" — that he was said to have discovered and never fully disclosed, a mystique that's outlived him by decades.
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Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods turned pro in 1996 at 20 and, within a year, won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes at 21, becoming the tournament's youngest-ever champion and its first winner of Black or Asian heritage — a victory margin so large it remains the widest in Masters history. In 2000-2001, Woods held all four major championship titles simultaneously — the US Open, The Open Championship, PGA Championship, and the following year's Masters — a feat known as the "Tiger Slam." It wasn't a calendar-year Grand Slam, but it's the closest anyone has come to holding all four majors at once in the sport's modern history. Woods finished with 15 major championships, second only to Jack Nicklaus's 18, and his 82 PGA Tour wins are tied with Sam Snead for the most all-time. His victory at the 2019 Masters, 11 years after his previous major and following a serious 2009 personal scandal and a series of debilitating back surgeries, is widely regarded as one of the great comeback stories in sports history. Woods's dominance through the 2000s reshaped professional golf's economics almost single-handedly — television ratings, tournament purses, and sponsorship deals all rose dramatically during his prime, a commercial impact that golf historians still credit as much as his playing record when discussing his overall influence on the sport.
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