For decades, professional golfers, instructors, analysts, and fans around the world have tried in vain to decipher the secret of Ben Hogan’s flawless golf swing. Hogan, who created the modern swing and introduced the idea of practice to professional golf, forged his masterpiece during thousands of hours of work and a drive for perfection rarely seen in any field of endeavor. He won nine majors (six of them after being crippled in a head-on collision with a bus in 1949) and 54 other tournaments on the PGA Tour.
Hogan was the Tiger Woods of his era, and the public relentlessly demanded to know the secret of his phenomenal achievements. But Hogan, a modest man who disliked talking about himself, would respond only with cryptic comments like, “I dug it out of the dirt.” He finally offered some of his secrets in a l955 Life magazine article and in his own book, "Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf" in 1957. But he held back key revelations he would share only in strict confidence with less than a handful of devotees.
Hogan, who famously hated to give lessons, took Tour pro John Schlee under his wing during the early 1970s and taught him rare insights and techniques, including the exclusive “missing link” ingredient that completes the recipe for Hogan’s mechanical marvel. Schlee was not allowed to publicly reveal what passed between them during Hogan’s lifetime, so Schlee left to his teaching assistant, Tom Bertrand, the task of recording for posterity his treasury of personal instruction from the master himself. Ben Hogan died in 1997, John Schlee in 2001.
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