Fort Worth Business Press, May 12, 2014 Vol. 26, No. 18 | Seite 4

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May 12 - 18, 2014 | fwbusinesspress.com

Passion, if you don’t have it you know

P

assion.
It’s not just a subpar Rod Stewart
song. If you’ve got it for
your work, it’s a great thing.
If not? Well, if you’ve ever
had a job that just plain
sucked the life out of your
soul until you became a
zombified dried crumbling
husk of a human being,
then you know what I’m
talking about. No amount
of double-shot Starbucks
espressos can get you motivated.

I once took a nice, well-paying (for
journalism, anyway) job at a former
employer. It was a job that, when I
had worked there previously, had
been great. The magazine was solid
and people in the industry saw us as
an up-and-coming upstart that offered a solid alternative to the triedand-true status quo publication.
When I returned, the magazine
quite simply had lost its mojo.
Though my paycheck had increased
exponentially, work was a chore, like
tying a brick to each foot. Mercifully,
after a year it was over, the plug was

by the numbers

in market
Robert Francis
pulled on the news operations and
I could go on and find something
that could reconstruct what was left
of my undernourished, desiccated
soul. I went out with friends, had a
margarita, raised my glass and said,
“Thank the Lord, I’ve been canned.”
Say ‘Amen’ with me if you know
what I’m talking about.
I run across people with a lot of
passion in my line of business. If
you cover entrepreneurs, in particular, you’ll find a level of enthusiasm
that can sometimes border on
mania.
Sometimes that passion has to
wait for the right place and the right
time.
That’s the case with the Ben Hogan Co., which is now being reconstructed in Ben Hogan’s longtime
city of residence, Fort Worth.
Hogan entered the golf club
business in 1953, the same year
he accomplished a feat dubbed
“the Hogan Slam” – winning
three of golf’s four major championships, the Masters, the U.S.
Open and the British Open.
That was just a few years after an
automobile accident left doctors

>>

The industrial/airport connection
Among the metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) tied to Jones
Lang LaSalle’s select top U.S. cargo airports, the Dallas-Fort
Worth-Arlington MSA ranks second in total square footage
and number of properties owned by U.S. REITs, with 37.6 million
square feet spread across 211 properties. The Dallas-Fort Worth
market is Prologis’ largest market in Texas, representing 3.1 percent
of the company’s net operating income. Other industrial REITs with
Dallas as a top market as of March 31 include EastGroup Properties
Inc., First Industrial and DCT Industrial, with occupancy levels of
95.8 percent, 94 percent and 98.2 percent, respectively.
Source: SNL Real Estate www.snl.com

wondering if he’d walk again.
That passion thing again.
Hogan, a golfer well known for
his perfectionism, destroyed his
new company’s first run of clubs,
worth a reported $100,000, because they didn’t meet his exacting
standards.
That’s some passion and some
trust from his investors.
I felt a little connection with the
company because I ended up with a
few of the clubs in my smorgasbord
of a golf bag and because the company’s location, a former plumbing shop at 2912 West Pafford St.,
was on my bicycle-riding route as a
teenager.
Hogan eventually sold the business and subsequent owners allowed
the Hogan brand to fall from prominence, one of them even moving it
from Texas to Virginia.
Now Terry Koehler, president
and CEO of Victoria-based Eidolon
Brands, in partnership with Perry
Ellis, is bringing the Hogan brand
back to Fort Worth and says he’s
determined to restore it to its former
glory.
Koehler has passion. He is a
lifelong Ben Hogan devotee and
former director of marketing of the
Ben Hogan Co. in years past. He is
also the architect of the SCOR4161
product line, a line of wedges and
set-match short irons that gets
raves from some of the online golf

publications I visited. (There’s that
passion thing again.)
For Koehler, creating the ‘new’ Ben
Hogan Co. represents an opportunity to honor the legacy of two of his
heroes: his father and Hogan.
“My golf life began with an
introduction to Mr. Hogan’s values
and principles from my father,”
Koehler said. “He played with Mr.
Hogan before the war and considered him a true hero, so I did too.
I grew up with Power Golf and Five
Lessons [Hogan’s books on golf]
as my golf textbooks, and always
played Hogan irons from my very
first cut-down 5- and 9-iron.”
Koehler said Five Lessons was first
published as a five-part series in
Sports Illustrated, starting on March
11, 1957 – which happened to be
his fifth birthday. “I always believed
that was planned. Still do,” he said.
Koehler said he called his team
together in Fort Worth last week to
discuss future plans and to “get on
the same page.” That meant talking
about Ben Hogan.
“I don’t have the ability to talk
about Mr. Hogan without getting
choked up. I told them this is our
mission, this is what we were put
here to do and I believe that from
the bottom of my heart,” he said.
I’m pretty sure Koehler doesn’t
have any trouble getting out of bed
to go to work. That passion thing,
you know. n