100 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 100 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s excerpt is from Hogan by Curt Sampson, a very good biography of golfing legend Ben Hogan. This part of the book is just after Hogan has missed a short putt on the final hole that would have put him in a playoff for the 1946 U.S. Open. The latest in a long line of disappointments at major golf tournaments.

Hogan’s reaction to bitter defeat was his most admirable quality. Some players who later would miss from short range on the final greens of major championships – Doug Sanders at the 1970 British Open, Ed Sneed in 1979 at Augusta, and Scott Hock in 1989 at the Masters, for example – were devastated by the experience. Hogan was not, just as he had not been defeated by the staggering loss of his father or his repeated failures as a golf pro. In fact, he would endure three more eleventh-hour disasters in the U.S. Open – although the last one, in 1960, would just about do him in.

His resilience was awe inspiring. Or was it really a lack of resilience, a refusal to adapt to defeat? He won three of the next four tournaments after his screwup at Augusta; and the week following that mortifying finish at Cantebury, he and [Jimmy] Demaret won the Inverness Four-Ball. For so many years success had eluded him, the way a key or a coin under a couch gets pushed away by a grasping hand. Now winning was part of his ritual and the logical conclusion to all that practice. The downside, of course, was that no one could win all the time. Happy endings on Sundays refused to remain happy; another tournament started on Thursday. But if winning golf tournament allayed his anxiety for only an hour or a day, surely 1946 was the best of times for Ben Hogan. He entered thirty-two tournaments, won thirteen of them, was second six times, and finished third three times. In five other events, he was seventh or better. In other words, he won or almost won nearly every week. He won the most prize money ($42,556). His 1946 was, arguably, the equal to [Byron] Nelson’s spectacular 1945, simply because the competition was better with the war over.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.