📍Glen Garden, Fort Worth, TX 76119, USA
1922 – 1930“I was born in Dublin, Texas, in August 1912, the youngest of three children of Chester Hogan, a blacksmith and mechanic, and Clara. When I was nine, my father died, and my mother moved us to Fort Worth to start again. Times were very hard; my mother took in sewing, and we children all worked. I sold newspapers at the railway station, and at eleven, when a friend told me caddies could earn sixty-five cents a round, I walked the seven miles to the Glen Garden Country Club on the south side of town. The older caddies made the new boys fight each other to earn a place, and I was small, but I stuck it out. Caddies could play the course only on certain days, so I practised whenever I could, hitting balls alone until dark and sometimes sleeping in a bunker so I could be first in line the next morning. I was naturally left-handed but switched to right-handed clubs because they were all I had. In December 1927, at fifteen, I tied with another Glen Garden caddie, Byron Nelson, in the club's Christmas caddie tournament, and lost the playoff by a stroke. Byron was given a junior membership; I wasn't. I turned professional at seventeen and struggled for years with a hook before I dug a swing out of the dirt through endless practice. I won nine majors, including three in 1953, after nearly being killed in a car crash in 1949. Glen Garden, where it all began for both Byron and me, is remembered as the cradle of two of golf's greatest champions.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today