Fort Worth, 1953, and a first batch thrown away.

The Ben Hogan Company was founded in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 1953, after the golfer Ben Hogan’s Triple Crown season, according to a May 2014 announcement by Perry Ellis International and Eidolon Brands; its first irons, the Precision, followed in 1954. English Wikipedia says Hogan announced the company that October and quotes his promise that the clubs would be “as near perfect as modern day tools and instruments can perform.”

He held the company to that. In 1954, English Wikipedia says, Hogan scrapped the first batch of clubs because they did not meet his standards, and then bought out the investor Pollard Simons. The first tournament win with Hogan clubs, it says, came in 1955, when Jack Fleck beat Hogan himself in a playoff for the US Open.

The company then passed through a long line of owners. English Wikipedia lists the conglomerate American Machine and Foundry (AMF) as owner from 1960, the investor Irwin L. Jacobs from 1984 as part of his takeover of AMF, the Japanese company Cosmo World from 1988 and the investor Bill Goodwin from 1992. Goodwin moved production to Richmond, Virginia, and fewer than a quarter of the employees moved with it, English Wikipedia says; in 1997 Spalding bought the company and returned it to Fort Worth. The 2014 announcement likewise says the company was based in Fort Worth until the early 1990s and came back a few years later.

Apex, Callaway and a brand sold apart from its clubs.

The name most closely tied to the company is Apex. English Wikipedia dates Hogan’s forged Apex irons to 1972 and says he also designed an Apex shaft. Golf Business News, writing in 2023, named the Edge and Apex irons as the lines the company first introduced.

Spalding widened the range. English Wikipedia says it released an Apex Tour golf ball under the Hogan name in 2002, and that in January 2003 the company introduced Hogan-branded putters made in partnership with Bettinardi Golf.

Spalding’s golf business later became the Top-Flite Golf Company, and in 2003 it was sold out of bankruptcy. A Callaway Golf release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 4 September 2003 said the bankruptcy court had approved Callaway as buyer of its assets, including the Top-Flite, Strata and Ben Hogan brands and manufacturing plants in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Gloversville, New York, and Fort Worth. English Wikipedia says Callaway moved Hogan production to its own headquarters in Carlsbad, California, and stopped selling Hogan-branded clubs in 2008; Callaway kept certain trademarks, including Apex, and released its own Apex irons in 2014.

On 16 February 2012 Perry Ellis International, the apparel company, acquired the worldwide intellectual property rights of the Ben Hogan family of brands from Callaway, according to its quarterly report to the SEC. Perry Ellis has owned the Ben Hogan brand since 2012, and clubs have since been made by licensees.

Clubs, players and owners.

The seven brands in this group all make golf clubs: Cobra, Ben Hogan, Cleveland, PXG, Tour Edge, XXIO and Sub 70. A golf club brand has to work inside a narrow set of rules. The R&A and the United States Golf Association set what shapes and physical characteristics of clubs are allowed in competition, and the Rules of Golf limit a player to a maximum of 14 clubs in the bag, English Wikipedia notes — so every maker is designing variations on the same few objects: woods and drivers, irons and wedges, hybrids and putters.

Because the objects are so tightly defined, identity tends to live in the details: the shape of a head seen at address, the finish on a forged or cast iron, the name or number stamped on the sole, the colour of a headcover, and the way a brand sells and fits its clubs. Many modern iron heads are investment-cast from steel alloys, while forged irons remain popular with skilled players, English Wikipedia says, and heads, shafts and grips can be combined and fitted to a player in a great many ways.

The brands here differ in age, in ownership and in how they sell their clubs; two of them, Tour Edge in Batavia and Sub 70 in Sycamore, are Illinois companies, according to their own websites. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its clubs are designed, made and assembled, and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Licensees, a closure and a revival.

In May 2014 Perry Ellis and Eidolon Brands, led by Terry Koehler, a former Ben Hogan marketing director, announced that Hogan clubs would return in 2015 after a seven-year absence, timed to the 60th anniversary of the first Hogan irons. English Wikipedia says the new Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company sold irons numbered by their exact loft. The licensee went through Chapter 11 in 2017 and that year turned to selling direct to consumers, Golf Business News reported in August 2022; after filing for Chapter 11 again in March 2022, it shut down on 22 July 2022. Its chief executive, Scott White, said the company had been “simply underfunded,” and Perry Ellis said it was looking for a new licensee and club-making partner.

That partner was Golf Brands Inc. of Las Vegas, led by Simon Millington, which struck a licensing deal to bring the clubs back, Golf Business News reported on 4 December 2023. It planned a premium Ben Hogan range of woods, irons, wedges and putters, custom built and sold through the company’s website and select club builders, and a commercial-grade Hogan range for retailers and distributors. “When we found that Ben Hogan had become available, we knew we had to add it to our portfolio,” Millington said, adding: “First and foremost, we have to get the product right.” The company planned to show the full collection at the PGA Show in Orlando the following January. The brand’s website now describes its products as “Custom Clubs Built In America.”

For a design guide, Ben Hogan Golf shows how a founder’s name can outlast a long run of owners and licensees. Compare Callaway, which owned the brand from 2003 to 2012, and Mizuno, another name built on forged irons. For this guide we use navy, cream and a forged brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ben Hogan Golf’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.