HAVEN, Wis. — As he approached his teenage years, Jordan Spieth decided to give up baseball and get serious about golf. Around that time, he entered a junior event in his native Texas that was named after Ben Hogan.
When the entrants were not reading putts, they studied the life and career of the man the tournament honored. That is how Spieth came to know that Hogan was the first player to win the Masters, the United States Open and the British Open in the same season.
Over the next several years, Spieth deepened his knowledge of Hogan through independent reading and oral histories from people who knew Hogan, considered the consummate strategist, shotmaker and competitor.