Non-golfers are likely to be clueless as to why the 1960 U.S. Open holds a sacred place in the hearts of the duffer faithful.
HBO explains it all in “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open,” which airs tonight at 8 on the eve of the 108th U.S. Open.
Even those who prefer the 19th hole to the previous 18 will find this an hour pleasantly spent. The 1960 championship, after all, featured golf’s holy trinity — Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus — and memories of the event continue to electrify those who love the game. It was played at the Cherry Hills Country Club in Cherry Hills Village.
Other than being great golfers, the three titans had little in common.
Only Nicklaus was from a country club background. His father ran a string of drug stores in Columbus, Ohio, and young Jack was something of a prodigy, shooting a 51 his first time around nine holes (at age 10) and winning the Ohio Open at 16.
He was also a highly talented beer drinker, as he reveals in an interview. “I tried to drink all the beer they made in Columbus, Ohio,” he says, an exertion that saddled him with an ample gut.
Palmer had a gentrified connection of a different sort. His father was groundskeeper at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania. Arnie was “taught as a young boy that I was not a member of the club,” which meant that instead of swimming at the pool he cooled off in a nearby creek, sharing those rustic facilities “with the snakes.”
Hogan, meantime, rose from “the dirt,” as he called his hardscrabble origins in Dublin, Texas. His story is by far the most tragic of the three.
His father committed suicide when Hogan was 6; according to a newspaper account, he shot himself as young Ben looked on. Hogan got into golf on the ground floor, caddying for 65 cents per 18 holes and sometimes, the film says, sleeping in sand traps when he didn’t want to make the long walk home.
He also showed an affinity for the game and a tenacity that saw him through hard times, including a 1949 collision with a bus that nearly killed him. His comeback was the stuff of legend and a Hollywood film: “Follow the Sun” (1951) starred Glenn Ford as the heroic Hogan.
Hogan, who died in 1997, was definitely the prickliest of the three.
The show builds slowly to the championship. Hogan was the sentimental favorite, but an initial spree of poor putting made some wonder if he’d even make the cut.
Indeed, there was ferocious hacking all around, with Nicklaus and Palmer making a number of bogeys. Yet Palmer staged one of the most amazing comebacks in golf history, with six birdies on seven holes.
Hogan hit the wall on the 17th hole of the final round, where his ball landed in a water hazard. We watch the aging great take off one shoe and sock and blast the wet ball onto the green, where he missed his putt.
He gruffly recalled in a later interview that hardly a month went by when memories of the 17th hole at Cherry Hills didn’t “cut my guts out.”
