Maybe the funniest—and most astute—thing anybody ever said about
Samuel Jackson Snead was that he would probably be considered the greatest player who ever lived—if he’d only had Ben Hogan’s brain.
Indisputably, Slammin’ Sam, the Peckerwood Kid and pride of Hot
Springs, Virginny, a Blue Ridge hamlet no bigger than the hips on a corn
snake, won more tournaments in golf than anybody—he claims 180 in all,
but the PGA Tour places the official total at 81—and was the only player
to win tournaments in six different decades, the first to shoot 59 in competition, the oldest player to win a PGA Tour event (at Greensboro; he was
fifty-two at the time), and the youngest player to shoot his age (a 66 at
Quad Cities in 1979). He played on seven Ryder Cup teams and captained
two more, scored thirty-four aces in competition, and undoubtedly plucked
more “pigeons” in his legendary money matches than any who played the
game.
The combination of his spectacular ability to drive the ball prodigious
lengths off the tee and his engagingly unrefined “hillbilly” personality—
partly real, partly the creation of his brilliant manager and Tour impresario Fred Corcoran—made Sam a true media phenom, the sport’s first major
star to emerge since the retirement of Bobby Jones, attracting thousands of new fans and igniting unprecedented popular interest in golf at a time when
the pro game was seriously languishing. Armed with the most graceful “natural” swing ever seen in golf and clothes that looked as if they’d been tailored for him, it was “Slammin’ Sammy Snead,” (a nickname he actually
disliked, placed on him by the irrepressible Corcoran) who along with
Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan consistently drove Tour scoring into the sixties and went on to capture seven major golf titles—three Masters, three
PGAs, and the 1946 British Open. Decades later, when his colleagues were
long gone from active competition, it was the ageless Sam Snead who was
still chasing Old Man Par and helping to organize the U.S. Senior Tour.
History loves winners, and the fans simply couldn’t get enough of the
golfing exploits and homespun antics of Sam Snead in his prime. Upon
seeing his swing, Bob Jones said he couldn’t understand how Snead ever
shot above 70, while big-city reporters loitered at his elbow, waiting to jot
down the amusingly unrefined things that came out of his mouth—often
as crude as they were insightful. A product of the Great Depression, Sam
spoke of loathing banks and preferring to keep his tour winnings in a
tomato can buried in his backyard. Regaling scribes about how he used to
play golf barefoot back home in hills that were so narrow “a dog had to
wag his tail up and down,” and egged on by the publicity-minded Corcoran, Sam slipped off his shoes and played two of Augusta National’s toughest holes barefoot, earning a couple of birdies, national headlines, and Gene
Sarazen’s indignant wrath. Upon winning his first tournament in Oakland,
California, in January 1937, Snead saw his photograph in a New York paper
and dryly asked his manager, “How’d they get my picture, Fred? I’ve never
even been to New York.” Sam meant it as a joke, but Corcoran passed it
off for years as an example of his client’s backwoods innocence.
Unfortunately, over the long haul of his unparalleled playing career, it’s
what Snead failed to accomplish on the golf course that makes many,
including the man himself, pause and wonder what greater glories might
have been. “I figured out once that if I’d only kept my head and shot 69
in the final round,” he told me one sunny autumn afternoon during a
round at the Greenbrier’s famous Old White Course, where Snead first
went to work as a shabbily dressed assistant pro in the mid-1930s and for
seventy years served as pro emeritus, until his death in 2002; “I’d have won
nine, maybe even ten, National Opens and probably a couple more Mas26 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
ters and PGAs. Frankly, it’s the Opens I let slip away that hurt the most.
Not a day goes by when I don’t think about that, I reckon.”
As USGA historian Bob Sommers has noted, though Snead never
attained the most coveted and difficult prize in golf, no one meant more
to the U.S. Open than Sam Snead—or broke as many hearts attempting
to claim a tournament he probably should have won several times. Beginning with a spectacular finish in his first Open at Oakland Hills during his
rookie year in 1937, Snead all but had his massive country-boy hands
wrapped around the tournament’s hardware when drab Ralph Guldahl
came out of nowhere to take the trophy, the first of a series of major disappointments for the lanky Peckerwood Kid.
Two years later, at Spring Mill in Philadelphia, in only his third full year
on the Tour, all Snead had to do was finish the seventy-second hole with a
relatively easy par five, and the national championship he hungered for
would be his. Instead, misinformed by someone in the gallery and believing he needed to make birdie, he committed his own number-one sin in
competition—“Thinking instead of acting”—lost his celebrated tempo and
focus, topped his tee ball, and then compounded the problem by putting
his second shot in the face of a steep fairway bunker. Six shots later he staggered off the green with a humiliating triple-bogey eight, presenting the
tournament to Byron Nelson. As he walked toward the clubhouse, Sommers recounts, “Women’s eyes watered and men patted him on the back.
Other players turned away to save him embarrassment.” That tournament
would forever be thought of as the Open Sam Snead “threw away.”
But he was far from through blowing National Opens. In 1947, at St.
Louis CC, rattled by the unexpected intrusion of USGA rulesman Ike
Grainger, who was summoned by the Slammer’s playing partner Lew Worsham to measure the length of their final putts—both of which lay about
two and a half feet from the cup—Snead stepped back from his ball.
Moments later, granted the right to proceed but visibly fuming, he missed
the putt and presented the championship to Worsham—an incident Snead
stewed about for decades.
As if to simply add insult to injury, two years later at Medinah, seemingly cruising to the championship at last, Sam lost to Cary Middlecoff by
a stroke. In 1953 he entered the final round of the Open at Oakmont just
one stroke behind Ben Hogan. Perhaps reflecting on his many past frusJus’ a Simple Country Boy • Sam Snead 27
trations, he went on to shoot 76 and lost by six. When reporters asked afterward if he’d been tight, Sam gave them a look of pure countrified disgust
and remarked: “Tight? I was so tight you couldn’t-a drove flaxseed up my
ass with a knot maul.” Vintage Sam Snead, even in the bitterest of defeats.
In all, the pride of Hot Springs played in twenty-six national Opens,
seriously contending in more than half of them, amassing one of the finest
Open records in history. “Would I give half of what I did win just to have
one of those Open titles?” he mused rhetorically the afternoon we played
the Old White in West Virginia. Looking over at a patch of clover just off
the fourteenth tee, he smiled and hopped out of the cart where we were
riding with his beloved golden retriever. He walked over to the clover patch,
stooped, and ran his long fingers over the grass. A few moments later he
came back to the cart delicately holding a perfect four-leaf clover, still grinning beneath his brightly banded straw-hatted hat—another Snead trademark. “Lookee here. Nobody in this game could ever find four-leaf clovers
the way I could,” he said, presenting it to me, the sly old smile fading just
a bit. “But I reckon I’d give up that talent and half of what I won just to
have just one of those damn Opens.”
Snead’s tough luck in national Opens haunted golf’s Grand Old Man
to the grave, and bothers the kind of historian who feels that particular
shortfall is a black mark against his greatness, but it certainly won’t diminish the fact that nobody who ever picked up a golf club swung it any finer
or more naturally than the Peckerwood Kid.
As he related in his engaging memoir Education of a Golfer (1962), written with Al Stump, a must-have for any serious book collector on golf and
still one of the most instructive books of its kind on the game, Snead’s first
golf club wasn’t even a golf club. It was a “swamp maple limb with a knot
on the end with bark left on for a grip” he hacked off a tree and whittled
into the rough approximation of a club like the one his idolized older
brother Homer used to hit golf balls in the family pasture.
The Homestead resort was located a few miles down the road from the
Snead place, and that’s where Snead, the youngest of five athletic dirt-poor
kids, eventually wound up caddying, cleaning clubs, running errands, and
teaching himself to play the game on the side with a cast-off set of cheap
wooden-shafted irons he had picked up from his meager earnings. “Nobody
would give me lessons, so I basically experimented until I got it down
right,” he said, recalling how he eventually graduated to apprentice teach28 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
ing pro and picked up a few bucks showing hotel guests how to swing a
golf club. “After about a year of not many pupils, but with plenty of time
to practice on a real course, I was thin as a razorback hog and had sharpened into a long hitter with a fair amount of ability at chipping and putting, while not having a prospect in sight for getting up in the world.”
His big “break” came when he was invited to play in a foursome “over
the mountain” at the famed Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West
Virginia, that included Lawson Little, the former British and U.S. amateur
champion, and two past U.S. Open winners, John Goodman and Billy
Burke. Snead beat them all and was hired as teaching pro at the Greenbrier—a job he nearly promptly lost by driving the 335-yard fifth green
and striking a prominent hotel guest on the rear end while the guest was
bending over to fetch his ball. That guest was powerful Alva Bradley, president of the Cleveland Indians baseball club and director of the Chesapeake
& Ohio Railroad, the company that owned the Greenbrier. Outraged,
Bradley attempted to have the young pro summarily fired and refused to
believe the offender had driven the green from the tee until he saw him
repeat the performance and appointed Sam his personal teacher for the rest
of his days.
It was the stuff of legend—Horatio Alger meets Bobby Jones. Or so Fred
Corcoran later packaged and peddled it.
When twenty-four-year-old Snead ventured west with $300 in his
pocket staked to him by several Greenbrier members who believed the longhitting phenom might be able to hold his own on the winter touring circuit, Snead himself figured “I’d just do it until I could find me a real job
and the money ran out.”
It never did. He made $600 his first week and three weeks after that collected $1,200 first-prize money at the Oakland Open. He went on to win
four more times and finished second in his first Open Championship that
year—one of the most sensational and unlikely debut years in the history
of the professional game.
What’s not widely conveyed in the popular mythology that sprang up
around the laconic wisecracking cracker from the hills of Ole Virginny is
the fact that driving the golf ball—probably the factor behind Snead’s meteoric rise to fame—was initially the aspect of his game that troubled him
most. His favorite and most effective club, in fact, was his pitching wedge,
followed by his putter and his long irons. Driving the ball, he figured, was
Jus’ a Simple Country Boy • Sam Snead 29
what he did about “fifth best . . . and at times I spray-hooked balls all over
the field.”
Slammin’ Sam Snead wasn’t nearly the natural the sportswriters always
have made him out to be, he confided in Education of a Golfer. “My longartillery game needed plenty of fixing in the beginning” and bedeviled him
so woefully during the early days of his pro career that he considered giving up and going home. One day on the practice range at the L.A. Open,
though, tour journeyman Henry Picard watched him duck-hook several
balls and deduced that Sam’s driver was too light and whippy, then offered
to let him try out a heavy stiff-shafted driver made by Philadelphia clubmaker George Izett. A week later, his hook miraculously cured, Sam won
the Oakland tournament with his new Izett driver and went on to capture
the Crosby Invitational days after that. That club—which he paid Picard
$5.50 for—became Sam’s favorite club, the driver he used to win the hearts
of fans and win most of his major championships with, “the single greatest discovery I ever made in golf and [that] put me on the road to happy
time.”
If Slammin’ Sam was a uniquely American phenomenon, as natural as
rabbit tobacco or heat lightning on a southern summer evening, his was an
image and down-home appeal that failed spectacularly to translate across
the ocean to the game’s birthplace. Peering from the window as his train
approached St. Andrews for the 1946 British Open, Snead commented to
a passenger across the aisle, “Say, that looks like an old abandoned golf
course.” It was, of course, the Old Course at St. Andrews and the man,
according to Sam’s account, or at least Corcoran’s, which wound up in several prominent London broadsheets, was a local lord who took severe
umbrage at the Slammer’s remarks.
Never one to spend his folding money unless it was absolutely unavoidable, Sam claims he had no interest whatsoever in contending for the Claret
Jug but showed up only to appease his manager and his sponsors at Wilson Sporting Goods. The British Open paid $600 first-place prize money,
which Sam calculated would scarcely cover his travel expenses. But Wilson
and Corcoran leaned on him to go, so off he went—and seemed to be
jinxed from the very beginning.
Leaving New York for England, his airplane blew an engine and failed
to get off the ground. Arriving in London, still ravaged by the recent world
30 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
war, he couldn’t find a hotel and actually napped on a depot bench before
catching a train to Scotland. He hated the rationed food and later claimed
to be dizzy from just “beans and porridge.” Then came the encounter with
the lord on the train to St. Andrews and his insult to the royal and ancient
game. “Snead,” the Times of London fired back, “a rural American type,
undoubtedly would think the leaning tower of Pisa is a structure about to
totter and crash at his feet.”
Things didn’t go much better in the tournament itself. He went through
three or four caddies in four days, the first of whom whistled through his
teeth every time the Slammer started to line up putts, the second of whom
could not tell distances “worth a lick.” His third caddie, guaranteed to be
St. Andrews’s best, went to jail for public drunkenness the night before the
Open started and barely got out in time for Sam’s starting time.
For all of that, using a heavy-bladed putter, deprived of sleep, and disgruntled by the chilly weather, Snead somehow mastered the Old Course’s
huge double greens and claimed he was almost dumbfounded to find himself tied for the lead by the end of the third round. In the final round a St.
Andrews gale “made every putt a guess,” but Sam lagged his way brilliantly
around the course to capture the venerable Claret Jug and meager prize
money. He gave the winning ball to his caddie, who broke down and,
according to Sam, wept gratefully, saying he would cherish it forever—then
promptly went and sold the ball for fifty quid.
The Slammer didn’t exactly endear himself to his Scottish hosts by later
commenting that he had no intention of trying to defend his British crown
because “my traveling expenses alone were $1,000, and nobody but me
picked up the tab. On top of that, all my hitting muscles ‘froze’ in the icy
wind at St. Andrews. For days I ached in every joint.” Soundly criticized
by both American and British sportswriters for passing up golf’s oldest tournament, the unflappable Sam Snead rejoined that anytime you left the
U.S.A., “you’re basically just camping out.” It was yet another example
where, if he’d only had “Wee Ice Mon” Ben Hogan’s brain, he might have
left well enough alone and simply said nothing—and done his reputation
a world of good in the process.
Pigeons, hawks, and vultures—those were Slammin’ Sam’s nicknames
for the various golf hustlers and player wannabes that drifted their way
across his long and colorfully illustrious career. Most came with “juicy fat
Jus’ a Simple Country Boy • Sam Snead 31
bankrolls,” looking to gun down the longest driver in the game of golf, a
feat only a few ever accomplished.
That’s because early in his life, weaned on the fine art of wagering, with
a week’s groceries often hanging in the balance, Snead developed firm rules
about whom to play for money—and whom to avoid at all costs. Pigeons
were usually well-to-do gentlemen golfers who didn’t mind the prospect of
losing a bundle for a little fun with the greatest name in golf, whereas
Hawks were smooth talkers who shot well above their average abilities until
the game was set, at which point “they cleaned out your pockets.” Vultures
were professional gamblers, golf “hustlers,” and cheaters who preyed on the
vanity of pros and amateurs alike. Knowing one from the other, Snead
maintained, and recognizing the various dodges and wrinkles that came
with their propositions, was the key to successful betting in golf. “Early in
life I developed one basic rule, and I lived by it,” he told me the afternoon
we breezed around the Old White Course together: “Never play for money
with a stranger and don’t believe what a man says his handicap is until
you’ve seen him play at least a dozen times. That’s the rule I lived by most,
and I’m happy to say it’s why I rarely lost my money.”
He said this as we approached the White Course last hole, a wee par
three over a small pond. Both of us were playing pretty well that afternoon,
but especially Sam, who was beating his age by a country mile. Jokingly at
the first tee, I’d suggested we play a quarter Nassau, and—ever the tightwad with the tomato can buried in his backyard—he’d steadfastly refused.
Now, as we arrived at the tee, a couple of elderly men were waiting for us
in a cart—Snead cronies, looking for a little action.
“What are you boys doin’ out here in the sun?” the Slammer drawled
affectionately, scratching his dog’s head. “Y’all ought to be home havin’
your naps.”
“We thought you might want to put a little something on the last hole,”
one of his buddies replied, winking at his partner in crime.
Sam smiled lazily, looked at me, then took the bait.
“All right, tell you what. We’ll all shoot at the green. One shot for ten
bucks. Closest to the pin takes the dough.”
The two old birds in the cart grinned and hopped out, ready to play.
I asked Snead—one of my childhood heroes—if he minded if I played,
too. He fixed me with a stern expression.
