Golf Central

On this day in 1949, Ben Hogan was driving to his new home in Texas from the Arizona Open in Phoenix with his wife Valerie when their car was hit head-on by a Greyhound bus in heavy fog on the West Texas Highway (US 90).

Hogan was driving over a two-lane bridge outside Van Horn, Texas - nearly 150 miles east of El Paso, when the bus swerved out of its lane to overtake a truck. Hogan threw himself over his wife to protect her but by all rights should have been killed in the hellacious smash. Valerie ended up with just cuts and bruises, but Hogan had a broken clavicle, fractured ribs, a complex pelvic fracture and smashed bones in his left ankle and nearly died on the way to hospital.

It is also believed that in his heroic move to save his wife's life, Hogan saved his own, as the steering wheel was propelled straight through the driver's seat. The rest, as we know, is history ...

Hogan's survival and recovery is one of the true miracles of modern golf lore. It took 90 minutes for an ambulance to reach the crash site; another several hours over 150 miles of mostly dirt roads to El Paso. During the trip Hogan endured what must have been unspeakable pain: the ambulance team would not give him analgesic medication for fear it would shut down Hogan's blood pressure or respiration.

But survive he did. And a year later, even after being told he might never walk again, Ben Hogan teed it up at Riviera. And 16 months after the accident, he won the US Open at Merion ... and won all three of the majors he played in 1953. Although he was never really the same physically after the accident (he was a much better golfer), the crash certainly shortened Hogan's career: But golf was all the richer for his amazing survival story.

It was also on this day in 1961, at the Palm Springs Golf Classic (now the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic presented by George Lopez or something like that ...), that Don January aced the 15th hole at Indian Wells, winning a bonus prize of $50,000. ... Billy Maxwell went on to win the tournament, taking home a paltry $5,300. That means that January would have had $328,790.27 today's money, compared to only $34,851.77 for Maxwell! Harrumph! ...

And don't forget that in weather lore, today is officially Groundhog Day in Pennsylvania, New York, and parts of Canada. It was on this day in 1887 that Groundhog Day was celebrated for the first time at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. ... The tradition says that if a groundhog emerges from its hole today and sees its own shadow, there will be six more days of wintry weather. If the rodent has no shadow, spring will come early.

And, to be honest, it's an excuse for us to write "Gobbler's Knob" ... Punxsutawney ain't bad, either  ...

And on this day in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war between the United States and Mexico, with the Americans handing over $15 million in exchange for New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California (hurray!) and, unfortunately, Texas ... and, presumably, the cessation of hostilities (although some residents of those border states say the war still hasn't ended) ...

That said, it's breithla shona dhuit!, as they say in Irish Gaelic, to the wispy haired '70s and '80s sex kitten Farrah Fawcett (61), the really hot one from Charlie's Angels; to one-time supermodel Christie Brinkley (54), of whom Billy Joel wrote the tune Uptown Girl before he married her; the sexy Colombian singing sensation Shakira (31), whose records titled Oral Fixation and Hips Don't Lie sold millions for some unknown reason; and to fitba's Barry Ferguson (30), the shifty and tough skipper of both Glasgow Rangers and Scotland.

It also would have been a birthday for the blathering Irish author James Joyce (b. 1882), the author of Ulysses, which hardly any university student ever finishes despite the saucy bits and the f-bombs, had he not gone, in 1941, where all blathering Irishmen eventually end up ... 'Til tomorrow ...