Dr. Cary Middlecoff, who abandoned dentistry to play professional golf and won more prize money than Ben Hogan, Sam Snead or anyone else in the storied 1950's era, died Tuesday at the Allen Morgan Health Center in Memphis. He was 77.

Dr. Cary Finn, his personal physician, said the cause of death was congestive heart failure. He said Middlecoff had lived in a nursing home the last six months because of deteriorating health. Middlecoff had not been well since 1993 when, after watching the final round of the Masters tournament on television at home in Memphis, he fell and suffered a severe head injury that hospitalized him for two months.

In his prime, Middlecoff was a glamorous figure -- 6 feet 2 inches, 185 pounds, handsome, articulate and boyishly charming. From 1945 to 1967, he competed on the PGA Tour. He won the 1949 and 1956 United States Opens and the 1955 Masters, and he was so happy with his 1956 victory and its $6,000 purse that he tipped his caddie $500.

In all, he won 40 times on the tour, a number bettered only by Snead (81), Jack Nicklaus (70), Hogan (63), Arnold Palmer (60), Byron Nelson (52) and Billy Casper (51) and equaled by Walter Hagen. When he retired as a full-time tour player after back surgery, he led in career earnings with $295,043.

''Now they make that much in a week,'' he said in 1994. ''I don't know what's going to happen to pro sports. Guys are making too much money and they're too demanding. They're going to ruin sports eventually.''

He was as gifted as his more renowned peers. As 82-year-old Tommy Bolt remembered his former colleague, ''He was ''a long, straight driver and long-iron player, and a great putter.''

Middlecoff would have appreciated that assessment because, he once proclaimed, ''If you don't drive straight, you can't do anything.''

Emmett Cary Middlecoff (he cringed at his first name) was born Jan. 6, 1921, in Halls, Tenn., and raised in Memphis, where his father, Dr. Herman Middlecoff, was a dentist and club golf champion. When the youngster was 7, his father taught him to play golf.

''I used to go out with the other kids my age and shoot six or seven holes once a week,'' Cary Middlecoff said. ''By the time I was 14, I was playing 54 holes a day. But it wasn't until I was 17 that I got serious about the game.''

At 17, he was city champion. After attending the University of Mississippi, he graduated in 1944 from the Tennessee College of Dentistry and, like his father and two uncles, he became a dentist. He was soon commissioned as an Army dentist and in 18 months filled 12,093 teeth. (The Army did keep such statistics.) In 1945, still in the Army, he became the first amateur to win the North and South Open in Pinehurst, N.C.

''When I got out of the Army,'' he said, ''I didn't want to see any more teeth. I just wanted to play some golf.''

But in 1946, after his discharge from the Army, he joined his father's dental practice. A year later, he started playing golf full time. For 10 years, his name remained on the office door, but he never filled another tooth.

In time, Herman Middlecoff reconciled himself to his son's choice of professions. Once, the father asked a longtime friend, the legendary golfer Bobby Jones, to persuade the son to pursue dentistry, not golf. But after Middlecoff won the 1955 Masters, beating the second-place Hogan by seven strokes, Jones said, ''The way he filled those 72 cavities during the last four days makes me think I may have been wrong.''

For all of his success, Middlecoff was, as one observer put it, ''a bale of nerves.''

The columnist Furman Bisher wrote in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution: ''It is true that Cary Middlecoff played golf slowly, fidgeted, fiddled around over club selection to the point that it's the first thing that pops up when the name comes up. How unjust, how cruelly unjust.''

Middlecoff said golf success came at a price.

''I don't deny I'm nervous,'' he said. ''I have always maintained that a man who is not nervous is either an idiot or has never been close enough to winning to get nervous. I believe that the proper mental attitude is easily 50 percent of the game. By that, I mean being able to leave your game on the 18th green, not take it home with you and replay it that night in bed.''

After retiring from the tour, Middlecoff spent 18 years as a golf analyst for television. Otherwise, he was a private person, and in the early 1990's he stopped playing golf.

He said he did not miss the tour life, especially the traveling. ''We did most of it in cars those days,'' he said. ''Fifty thousand miles a year, mostly on Sunday nights and Monday. It was not like a vacation.''

For most of that time, he was accompanied by his wife, the former Edith Buck, whom he married in 1947. She is his only immediate survivor. They had no children.

Middlecoff felt modern pros had a more secure life.

''When I played,'' he said, ''Hogan and everybody had to play most of the tournaments just to make a living. You couldn't win enough. Kids now just have to play well three times a year and they have a great year. I think they play for money more than they play to win now.''

E cary Middlecoff