Ben Hogan's Five Lessons

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One of the great fascinations of golf is the instinctive feeling a player gets soon after he has taken the game up that there is an explanation for everything that takes place, that the seeming mystery of how to hit the ball well and hit it well regularly is not mysterious at all, that it is possible to arrive at answers that will be as clear-cut and irrefutable as the solution the master detective unfolds in the last chapter of a mystery novel. All of us, quite like detectives, set off on our own separate paths. We develop a clue here, put it to the test to see if it holds up, develop another lead there, test this lead in turn to see if it will hold up, and so on and on. It is not an easy job. Today’s brilliant deduction all too often folds under deeper examination and becomes tomorrow’s dead end. And more than that, with no trouble at all you can get off on the wrong track, increase your error by studiously taking the wrong turn at another crucial fork in the road, and before you know it you are lost in a labyrinth of your own making. Perhaps the only true mystery to golf is the essential magnetism the game possesses which makes so many of us, regardless of discouragement, never quite turn in our trench coats and magnifying glasses and stop our search for the answers.

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