'Hogan, 1-iron'

SIXTY-THREE years later, it remains the most enduring image in golf. And there's not even a close second.

When asked at this April's Masters what he knew about Merion before he first played its East Course, 2010 U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell simply responded, " Hogan, 1-iron."

For many, that's enough. They will be linked for as long as they are still playing this goofy game.

A lot of folks who wouldn't know a driver from a lob wedge have probably seen Hy Peskin's timeless photo of Hogan hitting that club from the 18th fairway to the final green of regulation a little more than 200 yards away. He needed to make par to get into an 18-hole playoff the following day. Sixteen months earlier he had nearly been killed when the car that he and his wife Valerie were riding in collided with a Greyhound bus in western Texas. Now he was trying to win the 1950 U.S. Open.

It was one of those moments that define legacies.

Perhaps, all things considered, the moment. Maybe not only in this sport, but any.

"It's amazing, when you think about it," said 1977 PGA champion Lanny Wadkins, now a Golf Channel analyst who became friendly with Hogan in Hogan's later years. "That's the picture most of us have of him.

"He's just holding , almost like he was posing . . . That just captures it."

Hogan, who trailed by two strokes after three rounds, had bogeyed two of the three previous holes. His heavily bandaged legs were getting weary. His local caddie, Nick Ciocca, actually had to give him a pep talk after the 13th hole, when he was about to quit. In those days the last 36 holes were played on the same day. Somehow, Hogan persevered. After closing with a two-putt par from 40 feet - the second was a 4-footer - for a 74-287, he shot a 1-under 69 (which matched his second-round score) to beat Lloyd Mangrum by four and Norristown's George Fazio by a half-dozen.

David Barrett's award-winning 2010 book that chronicled the inspirational story was fittingly titled "Miracle at Merion."

Yet Wadkins doesn't think Hogan would have seen it that way. Or at least not the iconic 1-iron shot, even if a commemorative plaque marks the spot.

"He kind of pooh-poohed it," Wadkins said. "He was embarrassed by the adulation . He just said it was a good shot. It didn't win the tournament. It probably kept him from losing. It was a great shot, at the right moment. But he still had to two-putt, and still had to win the playoff the next day. His point was, 'Don't make it bigger than it was. All it did was get me in a playoff.' That's how he was."

Hogan's comeback transformed him into an American hero. In 1948, he won the PGA Championship and U.S. Open in back-to-back weeks, for his second and third majors in 3 years. Then came the accident, which kept him in the hospital for 2 months with multiple, severe injuries. Doctors feared he might never walk again. But he was back for the opening tournament of the 1950 season, the Los Angeles Open at Riviera, where he had won the Open. Remarkably, he made it to a weather-delayed playoff before losing to Sam Snead. As legendary sports writer Grantland Rice said, "His legs weren't strong enough to carry his heart around."

Pat Robinson, of the International News Service, wrote that "nobody with the possible exception of the dying Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig has so stirred the nation's heart."

Hogan competed in four more official events that year before the Open. He finished fourth at the Masters, five behind Jimmy Demaret, and third at the Colonial, just before he headed to Ardmore.

Snead, who already had won seven times that year, including his last two starts, came in as the overwhelming favorite. But this was the one major he was destined to never win. He would tie for 12th, never breaking 72. Hogan opened with a 72, which left him eight in back of Lee Mackey, an unemployed pro from Birmingham, Ala. His 64 was an Open record that would stand until Johnny Miller's legendary, closing 63 at Oakmont in 1973. Yet as is often the case, Mackey followed that up with an 81 and eventually tied for 25th.

A 69 left Hogan at 141 after 2 days, alone in fifth place, two behind Dutch Harrison. But nobody, including Hogan, knew how his body was going to be able to handle two rounds in 1 day because he hadn't done that since suffering those extensive injuries.

The world was about to find out.

Another 72 put him at 213, tied with defending champ Cary Middlecoff and John Palmer, one behind Harrison and two shy of Mangrum, the 1946 Open winner. In 1949, Mangrum had been second in the Masters and third in the PGA.

Hogan and Middlecoff were paired the last two rounds.

Hogan was leading by two with four holes left. But he missed a short par putt at 15, then failed to get up and down on the long par-3 17th after missing the green. So he needed a 4 on 18 to keep playing. He drove into the left-center of the short grass, then brought out his 1-iron, supposedly for the only time all week. The rest is history.

Hogan didn't need the 1-iron in the playoff. Which was a good thing, because he didn't have it. Somebody had made off with it between rounds, along with his shoes. The club wouldn't resurface for another 30-some years, when it turned up in a North Carolina pawn shop and landed in the hands of former Wake Forest basketball coach Jackie Murdock, who knew Wadkins. And that's how it finally got back to Hogan. Now it's rightfully in the USGA Museum, where it's treated like the Stanley Cup any time it travels around on display.

All part of the lore.

"As soon I showed it to him he said, 'I haven't seen this in a long, long time,' " Wadkins said. "But he was a very private person, very unique. He didn't talk too much about a lot of things. When you tried to talk to him about , he'd be almost shy about it. You really had to try and pry it out of him. It was kind of like he was telling you, 'What's the point?'

"He did love talking about Riviera. He did have so much success there. So he'd go on about that. But Merion never really came up much. I don't know why. It just didn't . . .

"I used to hang out with David Graham , at Preston Trail . They had the framed picture hanging on the wall. And you couldn't get him to stop talking about it."

In the playoff, Hogan and Mangrum were tied when they made the turn, one ahead of Fazio, who would bogey four of the last five holes before going on to gain greater notoriety as a course designer, a career path followed by his even more-renowned nephew Tom. Through 15, Hogan held a one-shot advantage over Mangrum, who had just made a birdie to halve the deficit. Mangrum appeared to have saved par at 15 when he made a 15-footer, but it turned into a 6 after he was penalized two strokes for lifting his ball to blow a bug off it. Not until a decade later did the rules allow players to do that.

Hogan birdied the 17th by rolling in a 50-footer from the front level of the putting surface, his longest make of the week. This time at 18 he left himself a 5-iron approach, which he bounced over the back. But he chipped to 7 feet and finished things off.

Fazio's 38 on the back nine was six more than he had carded in the morning on Saturday, and five higher than his afternoon total.

Valerie Hogan, who spent all 4 days sipping iced tea on the clubhouse veranda, cried when she was told her husband had won.

Hogan didn't win again in 1950. He didn't have to. He already owned the one victory that nobody would ever forget. The next year he won his first Masters before successfully defending his Open title at Detroit's Oakland Hills, where he came up with the immortal words: "I'm glad I brought this monster to its knees." That made him the first since Bobby Jones, two decades earlier, to win back-to-back Opens. It would take almost another four decades until Curtis Strange became the next to do so.

In 1953, of course, Hogan would become the first to capture three legs of the modern Grand Slam, including the only British Open he ever entered. He didn't play in the PGA because the dates conflicted with the British. And back then the PGA still used a match-play format, which meant multiple 36-hole days.

Hogan received a ticker-tape parade in New York when he returned from Scotland. But he'd already given us the highlight. It's frozen forever, thanks to a camera lens and the will of the man who struck the pose.

THE DAILY NEWS COVERS THE OPEN: Check out PhillyDailyNews.com's U.S. Open page for our guide to the tournament at Merion.