Amateur champ Bogart was passionate about golf

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It would be presumptuous to assume golf was Ralph Bogart's whole life -- after all, he ran an insurance business in Bethesda with longtime links partner Bobby Brownell and helped raise a family. But there weren't many things in his life more important than the sport he loved.

Dick Slay, a retired golf writer for the old Washington Star and copy editor for The Washington Times, recalled Brownell's reaction after Bogart married Una Bohrer Bogart in 1945: "She didn't know what she was getting herself into."

You might call Bogart, who died of congestive heart failure Feb.22 at age 84, more than a little bit obsessed. "Ralph liked to play a tournament every week, and he'd go to any length to find one," Brownell once told Slay.

Bogart didn't hide his love affair with the game. When he proposed to Una, he told her the truth: "I have a bad habit."

According to Slay, Una was baffled. "He doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink -- what could it be?" she wondered.

"I play golf."

Said Una a half-century later: "I didn't know anybody could be so addicted to a game."

Many others are, too, but few enjoy as much success as Bogart, who won 10 Maryland State Amateur titles and qualified for 31 U.S. Golf Association Championship tournaments in addition to dozens of other accomplishments at the sport's competitive and executive levels. Small wonder that he is a member of the Maryland Athletic Hall of Fame.

Ralph even got sick on the golf course -- and not because of a lousy shot, either. He was officiating on the second hole of the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., when he felt ill and required a replacement. The next day he suffered cardiac arrest, and a triple bypass followed a year later.