Now, I’m not going to diminish Tiger’s achievement in winning the Tour Championship tournament. He returned from potentially career-ending back issues, after four surgeries; after developing cringe-worthy glitches in his short game; and after a general downturn in his game as a whole, to cap a 19-event season with a win in the final tournament of the year, against a field which consisted of the 30 survivors from the Top 125 of the 2016-2017 season.
Tiger started this season in December 2017, in his own event, the Hero Challenge (for which he didn’t qualify on the numbers, but, you know—he knew a guy…); he played a total of 18 official tournaments, made 14 cuts (the WGC-Bridgestone, and the Tour Championship were no-cut events, and he missed the cut in the Genesis Open and the U. S. Open), with a win, a second, seven top 10 and 12 top 25 finishes. Not bad for a guy whom many people had written off just a few months before.
But… does this constitute the “greatest comeback in golf history” as many folks, fans and media alike, are calling it? Does it really compare to Hogan’s recovery from life-threatening injuries sustained in a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus? Many of those who put Tiger’s return on a par with, or above, Hogan’s comeback are adding into the account his personal (marital) problems as well, with the resultant bad publicity, and his relegation to counseling for a “sex addiction” (AKA the inability to not be a horndog like his imminently unlikable father.)
Me, I don’t think it counts if you threw yourself in front of the metaphorical bus that hit you…
Ben Hogan’s crash occurred on the morning of February 2nd, 1949, on Highway 80 just outside of Van Horn, Texas. The poor visibility due to foggy conditions had Hogan moving along cautiously at no more than 30 miles per hour. Despite the conditions, a Greyhound bus with an inexperienced 27-year-old driver at the wheel was passing a truck on a narrow bridge. Hemmed in by the concrete bridge abutments, Hogan had nowhere to go. At the last moment, he flung himself to the right to shield his wife—and in the process, saved his own life, as the steering column speared the space where he had just been.
Let’s look at what Hogan endured in the wake of that horrific collision: a broken pelvis (in two places), a fractured collar bone, a broken left ankle, extensive damage to his left leg, and a broken rib.
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| This is what the Cadillac that Ben Hogan and his wife,Valerie, were driving looked like after a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. |
He was in the hospital for 59 days. Doctors detected potentially fatal blood clots in his legs, and in the absence of the modern anti-clotting medicines that we now have, an eminent thoracic surgeon was flown in from New Orleans to perform a radical procedure—tying off Hogan’s vena cava (the major vein which returns blood to the heart from the legs.) The resultant poor circulation would plague Hogan for the rest of his life, requiring him to wrap his legs in elastic bandages from calf to thigh every day that he played golf.
In a recent weekly round table on the subject of Tiger’s return to form, golf writer Josh Sens, of Golf.com, wrote, “Hogan got badly injured and then recovered to dominate on much, much less competitive terrain. Tiger fell much farther and rose much higher in return.”
This is an interesting take, given that there are those who credit Tiger’s dominating years to competing in an era of weak players (for the record—I don’t agree with that assessment.); it also gives short shrift to Hogan and the level of skill of the players on the Tour at the time. Regardless, it is a futile exercise to make absolute comparisons of performance across eras. The competition was what it was, and each player’s record must be evaluated within the appropriate context.
As far as falling farther, whether you take that in the context of physical injury or level of dominance in the game pre-injury, it just doesn’t wash.
Tiger’s dominating years were put in the rearview mirror in 2009 when his marriage hit the rocks and his Escalade hit a fire hydrant. He had racked up 31 wins in the five seasons preceding those events, including six majors.
Hogan’s solo-win total for a similar time period preceding his accident was 41, including 11 wins in 1944, with three majors.
And what about rising “much higher in return.”?
Post-hydrant, Tiger had two winless seasons in 2010 and 2011, then a mini-comeback with three and five wins, respectively, in 2012 and 2013, before another round of back injuries and personal complications brought on the longest winless stretch of his career, from 2014 to 2017. In his much lauded return to the U.S. Ryder Cup squad, in the week following his Tour Championship victory, he went winless in four matches, bumping his overall losing record of 13-17-3 to 13-21-3.
By contrast, Hogan, returning from a level of physical injury that far surpassed Tiger’s, and contending with continuing physical problems that limited his participation to a select list of events that included the majors and the Colonial Invitation (in his home town of Fort Worth, Texas), won the U.S. Open in the year following his car crash. He had 11 wins in the six years following his accident, of which six were majors—three U.S. Opens (two of them back to back), two Masters, and a British Open. Oh, and three of those majors, his “Triple Crown”, came in 1953, when he won the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open, the first such string of major victories since Bobby Jones won the U.S. and British Amateurs and Opens in 1930. Hogan was named non-playing captain of the 1949 U.S. Ryder Cup squad, which defeated the British team 7 and 5; two years later he played on the again-victorious U.S. squad, winning both of his matches in the 9-1/2 – 2-1/2 victory over the British team.
So, Tiger comes back from essentially self-inflicted back injuries (a result of the violent action of his swing), a bad marriage, and the yips to win again—and OK, against a pretty stiff field—once, at the end of a 19-event season. Hogan came back from life-threatening injuries, and after doctors predicted that he would never walk again, let alone play golf, let alone play championship golf—went on to win 11 times in the next five years, including six majors.
So, you tell me—who made the better comeback?
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