A Sweet Inheritance

Barnes and Hogan: Master and Student —Part II

Ben Hogan’s personal golf library, consigned directly by the Hogan family, sold for $5,198 at auction this past weekend. The collection comprised 18 golf books — most of them autographed by the author and inscribed to Hogan himself — spanning the ages from Horace Hutchinson’s Hints for Golf (1886) through to modern titles like Sir Nick Faldo’s Swing for Life.

Barnes’s influence on Hogan stretched beyond his own instructional book Picture Analysis of Golf Strokes, which was among those volumes. It was Jim Barnes who carried the torch from the Great Triumvirate of Vardon, Taylor and Braid through to the American Triumvirate of Hogan, Snead and Nelson — all three remarkably born in the same year.

In 1940 Barnes was still teeing it up, twenty-four years after winning the inaugural PGA (he also won the second). This time the venue was Hershey Country Club, in the shadow of the Chocolate Factory, where Hogan would later serve more than a decade as resident professional. Hershey had already been the stage for Hogan’s first professional win in 1938. Barnes’s own final victory would come the following year at the New Jersey State Open.

In the field at Hershey were the rising American Triumvirate — Hogan, Snead and Nelson. With twelve rounds of golf crammed into seven days, it was little wonder that Barnes was eliminated early. Hogan fell in the quarter-finals, and Nelson went on to beat Snead by one hole in the final.

Between them, the three would go on to win seven PGA Championships in the next eleven years.

From hickory to steel, the torch had passed.