There was laughter and song in the old locker room of the Augusta National Golf Club — the club that Bobby Jones built down in the rolling hills of his native Georgia. The long and rigorous winter tour was over. The boys were relaxing after the strain of four months of living in a suitcase, hopping from tournament to tournament. It's far from all fun — that long 16,000-mile trek to California and back up through the Carolinas and Georgia.

I was dressing slowly, just enjoying the feeling that we wouldn't have another tournament to play until the latter part of May. One of the gang came up to me and said, "Let's go out and practice a bit, Ben."

I started to demur, when I heard a titter. Suddenly I realized that the boys were ribbing me about the extra hours of practice I put in. It was common knowledge that I practiced whenever I got a chance — in the dusk after tournaments were over and my wife was packing up the car for the next hop, in the early mornings before the dew was off the grass, and even at night on driving ranges along the side of the road. I was just coming up then — this was April, 1939 — and I had yet to win my first tournament. Naturally, it seemed sort of silly. I don't blame them for kidding me.

But, looking back now, I don't think anybody will call it silly, if success is weighed in terms of dollars and cents. In the past three years I have made over $45,000 in prize money. In the first month of this year alone I made $5,000. I have won the Vardon Trophy, symbolic of supremacy in the pro ranks over the year, for two years running. That doesn't include the money from endorsements, from the manufacturer whose clubs I use, from my home club at Hershey, Pa., nor from various other sources. It adds up close to, if not over, six figures. Certainly I have made more money than any other golfer active today.

In addition, I have realized most of my boyhood dreams. I have proved to myself what I have always said — that a good golfer doesn't have to be born that way. He can be made. I was, and practice is what made me — practice and tough, unrelenting labor. Hours upon hours of it. It's gotten my swing "in the groove" — so in the groove that it's become an instinctive, subconscious part of me.

Sam Snead has a natural, superbly grooved swing. In fact, he is the most natural swinger of a golf club I've ever seen. But he doesn't know what makes it tick. "I don't dare take it apart," he said when he first came up. "I'd be afraid I'd never be able to put it together again." That's where he and I differ. His game came so naturally that he hasn't had to work on it enough to know all the component parts. I do. I started from scratch.

The only time my game goes bad now is when I'm physically exhausted. I can always tell when a slump is coming on. For example, I knew my string of fifty-six straight tournaments in the money was going to end a week before anybody else did. The week before the end came — in the Henry Hurst Invitation at Philadelphia last September — we played at Atlantic City. I finished well up in the money there, but coming off the course I knew the jig was about up. I told my wife, Valerie, so that night. I was so tired that it was work to walk, let alone concentrate on golf shots. The long winter and summer campaign had worn me down. Save for the few weeks between the wind-up of the winter tour at Augusta and the opening of the summer campaign at the Goodall in Flushing, Long Island, I had been playing competitive golf for nine straight months.

So it was no surprise to me when I staggered home with a 77 in the last round at Philadelphia, to miss the money by three shots. I was just fagged out. I finished way down the list at Providence the week after the Hurst debacle.

Luckily, the Providence affair wound up the summer campaign. I was able to lay off completely. I didn't touch a golf club for weeks, save for a couple of exhibitions previously scheduled. Then in November I went hunting down in Texas with Byron Nelson and Jimmy Demaret. By the time the merry-go-round started all over again at Miami last December, I was fresh and ready to go. The rest was all that I needed.

I played some of my best golf during the recent winter tour. I finished second at Miami. I won the $3,500 first prize at Los Angeles after a play-off with Jimmy Thomson. I was fourth at Oakland and I won at San Francisco. Incidentally, the greatest hole I ever played was probably the eighteenth in the last round at Los Angeles. That was where Snead took another colossal eight to duplicate his famous finish at the 1939 Open at Philadelphia. I needed a birdie four to tie Thomson. The hole had been playing long all through the tournament. Most of the players had been falling short with woods on their second shots, just as Snead did. But I hit one of the finest drives I ever unloaded. It measured more than 300 yards. So I was able to take an iron and whip the ball thirty-five feet past the flag. It landed nicely on the green, and I had my two easy putts to get down.

That hole is proof positive of my theory of good golf. I have read so much and heard so much about the value of putting that it's gotten to be a pet peeve with me. The general feeling is that it's putting that decides the show. I disagree emphatically. Putting is only one minor part of the game. The big thing is to keep the ball in position for your next shot. A good drive paves the way for a good second shot to the green, and a good second puts you in position for that birdie putt.

If you have your swing in the groove so that you are hitting the ball well from tee to green, then you won't have to worry about your putting. Sports writers have called me a great putter. Let me be the first to deny that. Last winter, for example, I wasn't putting too well. But I led all the money winners. I finished second six times. I won at Asheville, North Carolina, and I won the Four-Ball with Gene Sarazen at Miami.

Don't think I'm beating myself between the shoulder blades. I'm only trying to show that you don't have to be a super-putter to do all right by yourself. As a matter of fact, some of the best putters are not consistent winners.

After the Open last June at Fort Worth, everybody was talking about Craig Wood's twenty-foot putt for a birdie three on the home hole. That was a great effort on the rolling carpet, but Craig himself thinks more of his second shot to the green.

"There was where the pressure was on," he recalls. "Most of the Opens that have been lost in the last nine holes have been lost via a bad shot off the tee or an erratic one to the green. It was Snead's hooked drive that started his explosion at Philadelphia. Jimmy Thomson blew a big lead to Sam Parks at Oakmont in 1935 because he couldn't control the simple little chip shot. Once you're on the green you're pretty safe, especially when you have two strokes to spare, as I did coming to the eighteenth.

"I knew that second shot would tell the story. A hook into the water to the left of the green would ruin everything. So I played it carefully to the right, where I had plenty of room — and made it. It wouldn't have made any difference whether it was ten, twenty, or forty feet from the hole. The pressure was off, once I was on the green."

That, I think, shows what I'm getting at. Once you're on the green, your trouble is practically over. It is humanly possible to get your drive and your iron shots so controlled that they'll never miss. That's just a matter of work and timing. But a putt is different. There are too many factors operating against you on the green. In the first place, it's impossible to gauge the speed with which you must hit the ball or to read the line of the putt correctly every time, whereas you are always hitting the ball from the same spot on the tee. And your lies in the fairway don't differ one tenth as much as they do on the green. So, you see, the percentages favor the fellow whose game is working well from tee to green.

I started out on this theory years ago, when I first took up golf down in Texas, and I've operated on it ever since. I was ten years old, selling papers on a street corner in Fort Worth, when I learned that you could make more money caddying one round of golf than you could selling a hundred papers. It was a couple of years later that I arrived home one night for dinner half an hour late. "Ben Hogan," my mother said, "why don't you get yourself a real job and go to work? You'll never get anywhere fooling around with a silly golf ball."

"Mother," I replied, "I'm going to work harder than any boy you ever knew. But I'm going to work with a golf club, and I'm going to be the greatest golfer that ever lived."

I've still a long way to go to fulfill the last part of that promise, but I've kept to the part about work. It's been sheer drudgery at times. But I'm not sorry I stuck to it.

Work was the only thing that could have done it for me. I never have weighed much more than 140 and I've had to make up in speed and timing for my lack of heft. A physics professor could explain that to you. For force is speed plus weight. If you have too much of one and too little of the other, you won't get anywhere. You've seen countless big men who can't hit a ball a hundred yards and have any idea whether it will land on the fairway or in the next county. On the other hand, take a frail guy like Paul Runyan. He couldn't overpower a pane of glass, yet time and again he has made the big boys eat his divots.

Mine was much the same type of problem as Paul's in the beginning. Work was the only answer. Since I was eleven I haven't missed many hours without a golf club in my hand. When they used to send me to the grocery — about a half mile away — I'd take along a club and ball and hit it all the way there and back.

I think this may explain why fellows like Byron Nelson and Ralph Guldahl, who started out down in Texas with me, came along so much faster than I did. They didn't have so far to go. Then, too, I made the mistake of trying to take to the tournament trail too early. I started on the winter tour of the 1931-32 season, but I didn't get far. Neither my game nor my financial stake had a firm enough foundation. Here's one point that I can't stress too highly to kids who hope to become successful professional golfers. Wait until you're sure your game is ready and you're sure you've got enough money to carry you until your break comes. Many a promising career has been ruined by impatience to mingle with the big shots.

Even after five years of clerking in a bank and building up a stake to start again, I wasn't sure that I was ready. After all, the putts you make in the middle of the night standing on a billiard table in the cellar are hardly the same as those with $3,500 riding on the last spin of the ball. That was where I'd done the little putting practice I'd had in the intervening years. But I knew I was hitting the ball well, that my timing was more precise and my swing more compact. So Valerie and I — we were married in 1935 — talked it over and decided to take a chance. In the summer of 1937, with $1,400 in the kick, we started out again. "It may be very tough going for a while," I warned her as we pulled out of Fort Worth.

It was all of that. But Valerie kept smiling. She has since said that the toughest part of being a golfer's wife is trying to keep a smile on your face when your husband comes in after a day when the putts wouldn't drop and the drives couldn't find the fairway. She's been a grand sport. I doubt if I could have made it without her. That first summer and autumn were as lean as a couple of hungry wolves. Finally, though, we got to Oakland, with only eighty-six dollars between us and an empty pocketbook.

I asked Val if she wanted to take what we had and go home and get a job. "No," she said. "We'll play this out until we're completely flat." So I started at Oakland — and won $385 for taking fifth place. It's been all uphill from there in.

But there still was a long lapse before I could win. I'd knock off a second here and a third there, but still I couldn't win. I'd miss by one shot or three or five, but always miss. I was seething inside. I was at the boiling point when we got to Pinehurst in the spring of 1940. I was practicing putting — my weak point at the time — on the practice green when Freddy Corcoran, the P. G. A. tournament manager, happened along.

"Ben," he said, "do you mind if I make a suggestion?"

I said go ahead.

"I've noticed," he continued, "that you're not keeping the heel of your putter parallel to the ground. And as a result you're hitting the ball too much off to the right."

I saw at once what he meant. And the next day I launched a scoring spree that enabled me to go thirty-four shots under par in winning three tournaments in a row — Pinehurst, Greensboro, and Asheville. I've been a different golfer ever since. I've lost that inferiority complex.

There's still a long road to travel. I have yet to win a national championship. I want first to win the Masters, then the P. G. A. I hope I can do both this summer. The National Open, of course, will have to wait until Hitler and his chums have been attended to.

Meanwhile, golf has its job to do. I am proud to be in a sport that last summer contributed more to war relief than did any other. More than $50,000 was raised via exhibition matches last summer, and we hope to triple that this summer. I am ready to drop my clubs and take up a gun any time. But the P. G. A. feels that we can do more for the war effort at home than abroad. I think we can, too — by keeping "in the groove."

Publication Date: June 27, 1942