On a foggy morning, February 2, 1949, golf champion Ben Hogan and his wife Valerie were driving home to Fort Worth on a two-lane Texas highway when a Greyhound bus trying to pass a truck came straight at them in their lane. At the last second Hogan threw himself across his wife. The steering wheel was driven through the seat where he had been sitting, and he was convinced he would have been crushed. He ended up with a double fracture of his pelvis, a broken collarbone, a broken ankle, and a chipped rib, and blood clots nearly killed him. Sixteen months later he was at Merion for the 1950 U.S. Open, wilted in the heat on the final day but still forced a playoff, and won it.
