By Jeff Kolpack | May 15, 2025 | www.inforum.com

There are fascinating golf stories and then there are the 160 pages of Jody Vasquez’s book that reveals inside information on one of the greatest players the game has ever seen. There are very few people who knew Ben Hogan; I mean, really knew him.

He was a private soul who preferred a very tight inner circle. Vasquez knows. He was a teenager who wandered into the clubhouse at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, one day, and was hired to shag balls for Hogan.

It turned into a best selling book “Afternoons with Mr. Hogan,” that gives readers a look into a Ben Hogan not a lot of people knew. He was never the life of the big-group room party because he didn’t want to be part of the party.

“He was one of the most enjoyable people that you’ll ever be in the presence of,” said Vasquez, who was a guest on my Saturday golf show on 740 The Fan. “People are like, what? So I ended up writing the book to convey all of the beliefs that he had.”

What does this have to do with anything around here? It started with Vasquez trying to find a way to help Hogan, in his later years, with putting from short range.

He first found a training aid called “The Bickler,” with an initial emphasis to work on the right hand.

“I went over to him and said, Mr. Hogan, I want to show you this,” Vasquez said.

Hogan declined to use it, calling it awkward, but the foundation of the idea was formed. Vasquez went home and thought of ideas on how to make it better. That concept eventually turned into the “Putt Master” manufactured by Jim Hackenberg’s Orange Whip Golf company. Hackenberg is a 1986 graduate of Grand Forks Central who gave professional golf a shot before getting into the science end of the industry.

His original “Orange Whip Trainer” has been on the market for over 15 years, a product that developed into other facets of the game like putting.

Years after trying to help Hogan’s putting, Vasquez and Hackenberg were introduced to each other at the annual PGA Show in Orlando, Fla., Vasquez saw that Orange Whip Golf had the marketing expertise to get his putting aid product distributed to the public.

“It was natural to partner with them,” he said.

The Orange Whip “Putt Master” training aid traces its roots to Ben Hogan.

A partnership that traces its roots to an automobile accident in 1949 when Hogan’s car collided with a bus, which turned out worse than anybody knew. It has been widely published that Hogan suffered several injuries like a broken collarbone, broken ankle, smashed pelvis and major damage to the ribs.

Nobody ever said anything about his eyes. At one point, Vasquez would learn later, the doctors thought they might have to remove his left eye.

“What it ended up being was something that wasn’t quite correctable,” Vasquez said.

The problem visibly surfaced in the 1954 U.S. Open in Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J, when it looked like Hogan, the defending champion, had the yips. He had four bogeys in his first six holes in the third round. A conversation ensued between Hogan and his wife Valerie when they got back to the hotel.

“Valerie said you should tell the media,” Vasquez said. “And he told her, I’ll never apologize for my golf game. He said it is what it is and I can live with that.”

It wasn’t that Hogan was a bad putter, from a distance he was very good and early in his career he was very good from any distance. But those close-in ones became an adventure after the accident because his eye had a hard time focusing on the hole.

“Say 10 feet in, your left eye for a right-handed vision, you’re peeking with the inside of your eye and he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t focus,” Vasquez said. “So he would continually look at the hole with his right eye to make sure he was OK. So there was a lack of confidence as he got older. He never would tell anybody.”

Certainly, if he used a training aid, he wouldn’t tell anybody. If there are seven degrees of separation between humans, in golf, there are two between Ben Hogan and Jim Hackenberg.