Lee Trevino says he treats golf as a “unending course of,” simply as his idol, Ben Hogan, did.
Getty Photos/Sports activities Illustrated
Within the 67 years since they have been revealed, the teachings in “Ben Hogan’s 5 Classes: The Fashionable Fundamentals of Golf” haven’t modified.
However the writing round them has.
A brand new version of the landmark ebook has simply been launched (writer Avid Reader Press hails it as “the definitive version”), that includes never-before-seen images and memorabilia from the Hogan property archives.
There’s additionally a brand new introduction by Lee Trevino.
As personalities, the garrulous Trevino and the stoic Hogan might hardly be extra totally different. However they shared defining traits as up-from-nothing Texans who received into golf by way of caddying and taught themselves to play by digging solutions from the grime. And that’s not the place the ties between them finish.
One other hyperlink is the debt Trevino says he owes to Hogan for serving to put him on a route to success lengthy earlier than the 2 ever met.
It’s a narrative Trevino recounts in his introduction, kicking off the narrative in December 1957. By then, the 17-year-old Trevino was already displaying promise within the sport, however he was additionally stressed and directionless. “I used to be feeling misplaced and starting to get into hassle,” he writes. In search of construction, he mothballed his sticks and joined the Marines, forsaking his dollar-an-hour job at a driving vary for 13-week bootcamp at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. After that, it was off to Yokohama.
As Trevino boarded a troop ship for what could be a 22-day voyage from San Diego to Japan, “golf,” he writes, “was the furthest factor from my thoughts.” That modified, although, when he wandered into the ship’s library and got here throughout a duplicate the March 11, 1957, problem of Sports activities Illustrated, which contained the primary installment of a five-part educational collection by a sure well-known Texan.
On the time, Trevino knew the title however little else about Hogan. However bootcamp, he writes, had “given me a crash course in construction and self-discipline for the primary time in my life.” A couple of pages into the article, Trevino sensed that he’d discovered a kindred spirit and felt “the golf bug stirring once more.”
The remaining is historical past, with colourful facet notes. Trevino would go on to hitch the Marines golf staff, taking part in in his first tournaments and successful his first particular person titles. A star was born.
After his discharge from the army, Trevino returned to Dallas with renewed fireplace and focus. When he wasn’t on the vary or taking part in cash matches, he’d gentle out for the course alone and play two balls, imagining that one in every of them was Hogan’s. In time, he would cross paths with the person himself.
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Trevino relays the oft-repeated story of going to play a spherical at Shady Oaks Nation Membership, Hogan’s house course, and seeing Hogan on the vary, smashing balls towards a caddie who barely needed to transfer to retrieve the pictures. Watching from a distance, Trevino says he observed how Hogan “managed his pictures together with his decrease physique. And that the extra he led together with his hips and his legs, the extra he’d fade the shot left to proper.” In these days, Trevino performed a draw that always betrayed him underneath strain. Hogan’s methodology for producing a fade grew to become one other foundational lesson. “What I’m saying,” Trevino writes, “is that Hogan is the rationale I developed my sport.” His gratitude was so nice that after successful his first main, the 1968 U.S. Open, he devoted his personal educational ebook to Hogan.
The 2 wound up being members of a mutual admiration membership. Although their primes didn’t overlap, they have been paired collectively within the closing spherical of the 1970 Houston Champions Invitational, when Hogan was 56. They completed facet by facet, in a tie for ninth. Hogan, for his half, made a particular effort to observe Trevino play at any time when the Colonial Invitational rolled round. In accordance with Trevino, at any time when Hogan was on the brink of launch a brand new line of his namesake golf equipment, he’d give one in every of his reps the next directions: “Take this set over to Dallas and let that little Mexican boy hit ‘em. He’ll inform me in the event that they’re stable.”
“And I didn’t have any downside with that,” Trevino says.
In closing, Trevino shares one closing pearl of reality he picked up from Hogan. “Whether or not you’re working towards or taking part in, college your self to suppose when it comes to trigger and never the consequence.” Trevino seized on that. “I known as myself an uneducated engineer who might dissect an issue, discover the why and repair it,” he writes.
However the course of by no means ends. Even in his twilight, Hogan remained a variety rat. Like the person he realized a lot from, Trevino is similar.
As he places it: “I’m nonetheless attempting to determine it out at age eighty-five.”
