Afternoons with Mr. Hogan: A Boy, A Golfing Legend and the Lessons of a Lifetime

Ben Hogan’s former ball shagger recounts firsthand stories of the golf legend—and reveals, for the first time, Hogan’s Swing Secret, a source of mystery to golfers for more than fifty years.

Ben Hogan’s pro-golf record is legendary. A four-time PGA Player of the Year, he celebrated sixty-three tournament wins and became known as a man of few words and fewer close friends. Most of what we know about Hogan has been based on myth and speculation. Until now.

In the 1960’s, though Hogan’s competitive career was over, he kept the practice habits that had made him famous and remade modern competitive golf. He hired fifteen-year-old Jody Vasquez to help. Each day, after driving to a remote part of the course at the Shady Oaks Country Club, Hogan would spend hours hitting balls, and Vasquez would retrieve them. There, and over the course of their twenty-year friendship, Hogan taught Jody the mechanics of his famous swing and shared his thoughts on playing, practicing, and course management—unknowingly revealing much about his character, values, and beliefs, and the events that shaped them.

In Afternoons with Mr. Hogan, Jody Vasquez shares dozens of stories about Hogan, from the way he practiced, selected his clubs, and interacted with other star players to his little-known humor and generosity. Combining the gentle insight of Tom Kite’s A Fairway to Heaven (which recalls Kite’s golf education under Harvey Penick) with the sage perspective of Penick’s own Little Red Book, Vasquez’s tribute is funny, poignant, and full of advice for golfers of all levels.