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6 golf books: Swing into spring with these new titles

Here are a handful of new books that golfers may reach for between rounds.

5. "Ben Hogan: The Myths Everyone Knows, the Man No One Knew," by Tim Scott

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

Although Ben Hogan was one of the greatest players in golf history, winning nine major championships during the 1940s and 1950s, he was aloof and private, and thus little known away from the course. Author Tim Scott, however, provides a fuller picture of Hogan based on Scott’s employment with the AMF Ben Hogan Company from 1969 to 1982, when, as vice president of marketing and sales, Scott had a chance to see Hogan in another light and to know him as something quite different from the public perception of him as a cold and unfriendly man.

Here’s an excerpt from “Ben Hogan”:

“As he attempted to play professional golf he struggled financially, going broke numerous times. While Byron Nelson had the offer of others to financially back his attempt to make it on the tour, Hogan did not. Playing on a financial shoestring as he started his professional golf career, a dreadful hook kept him from success. He gradually overcame that problem by countless hours of grinding practice sessions, but several times in the process Hogan used up his entire savings trying to make it on the pro tour without success, and on a couple of occasions he even had to sell his golf clubs to pay his way back home.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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