Ben Hogan
Colonial Country Club, 3735 Country Club Cir, Fort Worth, TX
Last updated
Koko Score: not enough votes yet
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.
Own this business? Log in to claim this listing.
Appears on
- Top 6 Golfers of All Time
Currently #3 · score 0
Reviews
Log in to leave a review.
Barks
Log in to bark.
Similar places
- Tiger WoodsBattleCompare
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.
- Jack NicklausBattleCompare
Jack Nicklaus turned pro in 1961 and, across a career that stretched into the 1980s, won a record 18 professional major championships, a total that's stood as the sport's benchmark for more than three decades and that Tiger Woods, despite a genuine run at it, ultimately fell three short of. Nicklaus's major total is matched by an equally telling secondary record: 19 runner-up finishes at majors, meaning he was a serious contender at professional golf's biggest events an almost absurd 37 times across his career, a level of sustained relevance few golfers in any era have approached. His most famous win came in 1986, when he captured the Masters at 46 years old, still the oldest champion in tournament history, closing with a back-nine 30 that's remembered as one of the most dramatic final rounds golf has ever produced, two decades after his first major title. Nicklaus's nickname, "The Golden Bear," became attached to a business empire well beyond competitive golf — a globally prominent golf course design business that he built during and after his playing career, extending his influence on the sport into architecture and course design long after his own major-championship run had ended.
- Arnold PalmerBattleCompare
Arnold Palmer won seven major championships between 1958 and 1964, a relatively short window compared to Nicklaus's or Hogan's careers, but his impact on golf's popularity during that stretch is arguably unmatched by any player before or since — he brought a hard-charging, visibly emotional playing style to a sport that television was just beginning to broadcast nationally. Palmer's massive, working-class fan following became known as "Arnie's Army," a nickname that stuck through the rest of his career and captured just how differently fans related to him compared to the more reserved stars who preceded him. His rivalry with Jack Nicklaus through the 1960s, as the younger Nicklaus began overtaking him on the course, is still remembered as one of golf's defining storylines. Palmer's business partnership with sports agent Mark McCormack, beginning in 1960, is widely credited with essentially inventing modern sports agency and athlete endorsement deals — a commercial template other athletes and agents across every major sport eventually followed, extending Palmer's influence well past his own playing statistics. He never won the PGA Championship, the one major that eluded him, but his combination of on-course charisma and off-course business influence is why golf historians still credit him, more than any other single figure, with turning the sport into appointment television during the 1960s.
- Sam SneadBattleCompare
Sam Snead's PGA Tour career stretched across four decades, from his first win in 1936 to his last in 1965, and by the time he was done he'd won 82 official PGA Tour events, a total that stood alone as the all-time record for more than five decades until Tiger Woods finally tied it in 2019. Snead won seven major championships — three Masters, three PGA Championships, and one Open Championship — but never won the US Open despite finishing runner-up four times, a gap in his résumé that's often cited as the biggest "what if" of his career given how dominant he was almost everywhere else. His swing was widely regarded, even by his contemporaries, as the most naturally fluid and mechanically efficient in the sport's history, a reputation that outlasted his playing career and that instructors still reference when describing an ideal golf swing tempo. Snead's longevity was as remarkable as his win total — he shot his age or better numerous times well into his 60s and finished third at the 1974 PGA Championship at age 62, a level of sustained competitiveness deep into what should have been retirement age for most professional athletes.
- Byron NelsonBattleCompare
Byron Nelson's 1945 season remains one of the most statistically dominant stretches any professional golfer has ever produced: 18 tournament wins in a single year, including 11 consecutive victories from March to August, both records that have stood for eight decades without a serious challenge. That win streak is widely considered one of the most unbreakable records in professional sports — the next closest streak, by any golfer in any era, isn't within half of Nelson's total, and modern tour scheduling and depth of competition make a genuine challenge to the record increasingly unlikely. Nelson won five major championships across his career, including two Masters titles, but retired from full-time competition remarkably early, in 1946 at age 34, to run a cattle ranch in Texas — a deliberate choice to step away from the game at the height of his powers rather than a decline forcing him out. His 1945 season is sometimes discounted by critics who note that many of the era's other top players were serving in World War II at the time, thinning the fields he was beating — a caveat Nelson himself acknowledged, though the sheer scale of the winning streak, regardless of field strength, has still never been approached by any golfer since.
More in Sports
- Robert Killian
Robert Killian, a former U.S. Army Green Beret with more than 12 years of active service, won the Spartan Race World Championship in 2015 despite having just four races of OCR experience at the time, then won it again in 2019 for two career Spartan World titles. His path to obstacle racing ran through elite military and endurance competition rather than combat sports: he was a high school track star and collegiate runner who won the military division of the Ironman World Championship in Kona in 2009, was named Army Athlete of the Year in 2010, and won the grueling 68-hour Best Ranger Competition in 2016. At World's Toughest Mudder, Killian won the event three times and placed second overall (and first American) at the 2017 edition, completing 105 miles in 24 hours, one of the highest single-event distance totals recorded in the format's history. His combination of two Spartan World Championships and his background as a Best Ranger Competition champion and military Ironman world champion has made Killian one of the most distinctively credentialed competitors in obstacle course racing's history.
- Lindsay Webster
Lindsay Webster won her first Spartan Race World Championship in 2017, then added titles in 2018, 2021, and 2022 — the 2022 win making her the first-ever four-time Spartan World Champion, male or female, at the time she achieved it. Along the way she set the sport's record for most consecutive Spartan wins with 17 in a row, and her 2021 title came alongside partner Ryan Atkins, who won the men's championship the same year in Abu Dhabi. Her combination of strong trail running speed and reliable execution on OCR's more technically demanding upper-body obstacles gave her a genuinely complete competitive profile that sustained her dominance across changing eras of the sport's growth. Her combination of a record four Spartan World Championships and her 17-race consecutive win streak has made Webster, by most accounts, the most decorated woman in obstacle course racing history.
- Hunter McIntyre
Hunter McIntyre is a six-time obstacle course racing world champion by his own team's count, having first entered the sport almost by accident — he and a group of friends had loosely talked about doing a Spartan Race together, and he ended up the only one who actually finished it. He went on to become a three-time Hyrox World Champion as well, extending his competitive dominance into that separate hybrid fitness-racing discipline and becoming one of the few athletes to hold major titles in both OCR and Hyrox simultaneously. His path to elite athletic performance ran through bodybuilding and strength training before OCR, giving him a physical profile built for heavy carrying and climbing obstacles that distinguished him from more purely running-focused competitors, and his outspoken public persona helped introduce the sport to broader fitness audiences. His combination of six OCR world championships and his separate three-time Hyrox World Championship has made McIntyre one of the most recognizable and commercially significant figures across obstacle and hybrid fitness racing.
- Amelia Boone
Amelia Boone, nicknamed "the Queen of Pain," won World's Toughest Mudder three times — in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — with her 2014 title coming just eight weeks after major knee surgery, a comeback timeline that became one of the defining stories of her career. She competed at an elite level while working full-time as a practicing corporate attorney, a combination that gave obstacle course racing a distinctive public profile well beyond its core competitive community during her prime. After shifting focus toward ultrarunning in 2016, Boone suffered a femoral stress fracture that put her on crutches for three months, then a cascading series of additional injuries — a sacral stress fracture, a fully displaced second metatarsal, and three separate heel stress fractures — totaling six bone stress injuries across three years. Her combination of three World's Toughest Mudder titles, including one won eight weeks post-surgery, and her later public account of recovering from six separate bone stress injuries has made Boone one of the most significant and candidly documented figures in obstacle racing's history.
- Ryan Atkins
Ryan Atkins won the 2016 OCR World Championship in the 3km distance and later took the 2023 OCR World Championship Male 15K title, a span of major championships nearly a decade apart that reflects an unusually long competitive prime for the sport. He won the 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside partner Lindsay Webster, giving the Guelph, Ontario-based couple simultaneous titles in the same event and making them one of OCR's most publicly recognized competitive pairings before Webster went on to become the sport's most decorated woman. His background as a competitive adventure racer before focusing on obstacle course racing gave him a multi-discipline endurance foundation, and the OCR World Championships specifically returned to his home region of Collingwood, Ontario during his competitive prime, reflecting the sport's continued growth in the areas where its top athletes trained. His combination of OCR World Championships seven years apart and his 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside Lindsay Webster has made Atkins one of the most historically significant men's competitors in the sport.