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"...Of all the attributes my husband had, the one that I admired most
was his integrity. When the Ben Hogan Company's first batch of
irons came out in 1954, he took one look at those golf clubs and
said, "Throw 'em away." To him, the irons weren't right. He had
that analytical mind in everything that he did. If someone
happened to put an ashtray where it didn't belong in our home, it
annoyed him. "Why don't they put it back where it was?" he would say.
When that first batch of irons came out wrong, Ben knew he
couldn't put them on the market. Not with his name on them.
But one of his partners, Pollard Simon, a Dallas businessman
and close friend, reminded Ben that they would be throwing
away $100,000 worth of irons.
"We can fix them up," Pollard said.
"We cannot fix them up," Ben said.
When Pollard kept objecting, Ben bought him out right there and
then. When Ben came home that night, he told me, "I lost a partner, but I kept my integrity. I would
never put those clubs on sale. I can't do that to people and I'm not going to do it."
But that was the best $100,000 he ever threw away. It made the Ben Hogan
Company all the better because people knew they could trust
Ben to put out a golf club that was up to his standards, which
everyone knew were very high..."
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