FORT WORTH — Corporatism has made counting Colonials as challenging as listing off 300 years of Russian czars through the rote method.
When they tee it up for Thursday’s first round it will be the 73rd edition of the PGA tournament in Fort Worth.
It will be, however, the first Charles Schwab Challenge and, no, this is no event paying homage to Charles Schwab. That’s not to say he doesn’t deserve some commendation, though the cult of Bernie Sandersnistas unquestionably disagree. Billionaires are the serpents of their Garden of Eden.
Despite the name and title sponsor change, this is still Hogan’s Alley, and the Royal House of Hogan is still the one due the reverence of all those who celebrate the golf and the history of Colonial Country Club.
Like anything else in this world, you can’t appreciate the one without an appreciation of the other. The past puts the present all in its proper context. Its application tells us how we got here.
Ask Jack Nicklaus, a one-time winner at Colonial, when it was known merely as the Colonial National Invitation.
Since those innocent days of golf puritanism, the golf tournament at Colonial has had flings with Southwestern Bell, MasterCard, Bank of America, Crowne Plaza hotels and Dean & Deluca, as failed a marriage from day one as Dennis Rodman and Miss Carmen Electra. (He who hasn’t been of “unsound mind” shall cast the first stone.)
The only one that has stuck is Hogan. The flesh is gone, but the spirit is everlasting.
“I played quite a bit of golf with Ben,” said Nicklaus, who was a young man breaking in when Hogan was in the sunset of this career. “I was very flattered in 1961, at Augusta … he walked into the locker room and couple of sacks of shoes over his shoulder and said, ‘Hey, fella, how are you doing? You got a game?’ I said, ‘I do now.’”
You only spoke if first spoken to, perhaps?
“I was very flattered by that. I was a 21-year-old kid that Ben sought out to play with. He did the same thing at Oakland Hills (Michigan) two months later. That was a big part of my career. Hogan had seen something in this young kid. That was very neat for me.”
It was likely certainly one reason Nicklaus came back to Colonial after a six-year hiatus in the last part of the 1970s and the first two years of the next decade.
But in 1982 Nicklaus returned to Fort Worth and, in doing so, seemed to rediscover himself.
Since the early 1960s, Nicklaus had yet to get the best of our grande dame, where the game’s best golfers – Hogan, Snead, and Palmer, among them – had all put on the honored-as-holy plaid on Sunday.
Nicklaus’ best finish was a second in 1974, one stroke behind Rod Curl, who rolled in a 30-footer on No. 16 on his way to triumph. Nicklaus’ best finish before then was third in 1963, though he did have five top-10s.
Nicklaus wasn’t the only notable to return that year. Arnold Palmer, 52, played too for the first time since 1975. Palmer was commemorating the 20th anniversary of his victory at Colonial in 1962.
Unlike Palmer, Nicklaus kept his name on the leaderboard despite having a less-than-warm putter. He entered the final round two back of leader Andy North.
The putter made a timely arrival on the backside on Sunday.
As North and Danny Edwards, the leader at the time, staggered around No. 9 like they had stayed around that margarita tent an hour too long, Nicklaus rolled in a 10-footer for birdie at 10 to take a one-shot lead.
Nicklaus closed at the same place Curl had seven years before, on 16.
Hunched over his putt in Nicklaus form, the Golden Bear rolled in a breaking 17-foot tournament-clinching birdie, lifting his putter with his left hand as the ball found the center of the cup.
“Colonial was always a difficult golf course for me,” Nicklaus said earlier this month at the Dallas Athletic Club. “The way the wind swept across the golf course. For a left-to-right player, it was a hard golf course.
“When I won there, I was very pleased with that. I always liked Colonial. I just had a hard time playing it.”
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Nicklaus rediscovered something that May. The next month, he was perhaps only Tom Watson’s miracle chip at No. 17 at Pebble Beach from claiming a fifth U.S. Open. At 46, Nicklaus wrapped himself in a sixth green jacket in 1986.
Hogan was nearby on the weekend of Nicklaus’ third Masters title, in 1966.
Hogan was in Nicklaus’ group on Sunday after entering the final round two strokes back. The putter deserted The Hawk, who shot a final-round score of 77 in his penultimate Masters appearance. His galleries attracted upwards of a reported 50,000, all of them knowing, at 53 and already in semi-retirement, the end was near.
Nicklaus went on to win in a Monday playoff over Tommy Jacobs and Gay Brewer, who returned in 1967 to win and become a one-hit majors wonder.
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Hogan, a five-time champion at Colonial, won the first two national invitations in 1946-47. He didn’t play in 1949 after his traumatic car accident in West Texas in February.
As it turned out, no one played at Colonial in 1949.
The year 2019 marks 70 years since the historic Fort Worth flood, remembered by most not alive at the time by the iconic photo of the Montgomery Ward’s building on West Seventh, where water had climbed well above its first and second floors.
The natural disaster, which claimed 10 lives and left thousands homeless, necessitated the cancellation of the tournament.
A day after raging flood waters from the Trinity’s Clear Fork invaded the city center of that year, the Colonial layout stood under the weight of 10 feet of water that had rushed up the river’s banks that line the course. Of the 18 holes designed by John Bredemus and Perry Maxwell, only the 15th green was visible.
The most serious damage was to the ninth green, where water currents cut gulleys in the putting surface. An equipment shed, which among its items included a motor scooter and tools, was moved 20 feet.
Only trees kept it from being swept into the river.
Six days before the start of the event, club officials called it off. The course was, believe it or not, playable, but it was simply no time for a golf tournament.
“I’m confident that we could get it ready in time,” said Marvin Leonard, founder of the club. “In fact, I feel certain that our members will be playing on Sunday. Unless we get more rain.
“We’re canceling the tournament because the city has been struck by tragedy. Most of our members are engaged in relief work – Red Cross, RFC and other things – and we don’t want to take them away from their jobs. People just don’t have time for golf now that thousands are homeless and the city is battling a second flood.”
So, Clayton Heafner never got a chance to defend his title in 1948. In 1950, Sam Snead won his only Colonial.
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Thousands will walk through Colonial’s front entrance this week and silently bow or make a mental curtsy before the majestic statue of Hogan, as much the epitome of sublime as any such work, if you ask me.
Speaking of genuflections, it has been 60 years ago this week that Hogan hosted King Baudouin, monarch of the Belgiums, for a round at Shady Oaks Country Club on Fort Worth’s west side.
The king called on Hogan as part of his tour of the United States in 1959. Earlier that morning, the king spoke in Dallas. He flew into Carswell and was driven to Shady Oaks, Hogan’s home away from home.
It was during the reign of Baudouin that the Congo earned independence. Baudouin likely was quite pleased by Congo self-determination. You see, Baudouin had bigger things to achieve. When he wasn’t working to make life for his subjects more tolerable, the king was working like his butler on his golf game.
Baudouin, who ascended the throne after his father’s abdication in 1951, was no slouch on a golf track. The king, a 3 handicap, was the No. 2 on Belgium’s international team.
Still, as a royal aide said at the time according to reports, this was no match in the traditional sense. As it concerned golf, there was no question who reigned.
“This is more of a lesson than a match … just like any golfer who would play with Mr. Hogan,” the aide said.
Only two years earlier, Hogan received Baudouin’s father for a round at Colonial.
“Your father was an excellent player,” Hogan said. “I understand you are even better.”
“Oh, no,” the king said. “He sends you his love.”
No one — not the king of Belgium, not Charles Schwab — is bigger than Ben Hogan here in Fort Worth, at least in things of import, like hitting and hunting little white balls.