It was February 1949. After participating in a tournament in Phoenix, Arizona, golfer Ben Hogan and his wife, Valerie, were driving home to Texas. Near a town called Van Horn, Texas, a huge bus went into a skid. There was no way to avoid a collision.
Instinctively, Hogan threw himself over his wife to protect her. The move also saved his own life. The collision drive Hogan’s steering wheel back against the seat where he would have been. Valerie Hogan sustained only a few small injuries. Ben took the brunt of the impact.
Hogan had suffered a double fracture of the pelvis, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a fractured ankle, and severe internal injuries. For a brief moment Val Hogan thought her husband was dead. He lay with his head in her lap, pale and still. The doctors who sped to the scene must have thought Hogan was dead because they covered him with a blanket. Then Val Hogan heard a very faint groan. Her husband was still alive!
Hogan was taken to a hospital called Hotel Dieu, Hotel of God. There doctors worked around the clock for two days trying to patch him up. Just when they thought he was out of danger, he developed blood clots in his circulatory system Surgeons operated immediately, tying off some of the veins in his legs. Later the doctors faced a battery of sportswriters and answered the barrage of questions.
Yes, the chances were that Hogan would live. Yes, he might be able to walk again, but perhaps not normally. No, there was no chance that he would ever play golf again.
For 58 days Hogan lay on a hospital bed, then he was sent home. It was then that the fighting spirit of “Bantam Ben” Hogan showed itself one more, as it always had on the golf course. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like a cracked body stop him from coming back to the game he loved.
At first he was content to walk around his bedroom a few times a day. As time passed he walked around more and more. He did some exercises in spite of the pain. Slowly his muscle tone returned. By late summer he had begun to practice swinging a golf club. In December, just 10 months after he had almost been killed, Hogan was playing golf again. But he was still way off his game.
In January 1950 Hogan entered the Los Angeles Open. He shot a 73 in the first round, then fired three straight rounds of 69 to tie his old rival Sammy Snead. Hogan lost the playoff, but he had come back–partially.
Three months later Hogan entered the biggest, most important tournament of all, the Masters at Augusta, Georgia. Again he took a 73 on the first round, and in the second round he had a 68. The third round was almost too much for him but he managed a 71 to stay two strokes behind the leader. But his tired, aching body could not maintain the pace. He carded a 76 on the last round to finish tied for fourth place.
There was no stopping Ben Hogan after that. Two months later he won the U.S. Open. And in 1951 he won the Masters Tournament by two strokes.
Two years and two months earlier Ben Hogan had been presumed dead of injuries. Yet he came all the way back to win the coveted green jacket, the symbol of victory at Augusta.
From The Giant Book of More Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hogan#Career-threatening_accident
The bus didn’t so much go into a skid as move into the opposite traffic lane on a bridge in a thick fog. By the time Hogan saw it, it was too late.
Who the hell names a hospital Hotel Dieu? I’m impressed with this guy’s determination. If I get a paper cut I take to my bed.
Yeah, I thought that it was weird to name a hospital “Hotel”. The God reference is pretty common, but I’ve never in my life heard of a hospital called hotel anything.