American Original

Sam Snead, who learned his golf as a backwoods barefoot boy when he wasn't hunting or fishing, still knows how to reel in a sucker

By E.M. Swift

Issue date: May 2, 1994

Twenty-nine years ago, on the eve of the 1965 Greater Greensboro Open, the good folks of Greensboro, N.C., threw a party at the old Plantation Supper Club to honor the winningest golfer in PGA Tour history. Sam Snead -- he of the palmetto hat and the seamless, enduring swing -- had helped put their local tournament on the map by winning it a record seven times. In the inaugural, held in 1938, Snead had taken home (and some say buried) the $1,000 winner's check, and he had repeated as Greensboro's champion in '46, '49, '50, '55, '56 and '60. "All his fishing and hunting buddies put on the Greensboro tournament," recalls Snead's son, Sam Jr., known as Jack.

"He was a little more relaxed there." Slammin' Sam had even made a habit of winning the pretournament fishing contest with his partner, Carson Bain, who was Greensboro's mayor in the late 1960s. "Bass and crappie. They measured it by poundage," says Snead, who turns 82 this month. We used shiners and a jig and filled up a bushel basket with crappies. I went home with a new outboard one year."

The wonder of it all was that at the end of that week in 1965, Greensboro didn't just up and rename the tournament in Snead's honor. Because the man of the hour went out and, at age 52 and 10 months, won the tournament for the eighth time -- a PGA Tour record for a single event -- by a whopping five strokes, silencing some critics who had complained that the old geezer was taking a starting slot from a younger pro. Snead became, and is still, the oldest player to win a PGA Tour event. That was the last of Snead's 81 official Tour wins -- one for every year of his life -- a record that almost certainly will never be broken. (Jack Nicklaus is second, with 70; Ben Hogan had 63; Arnold Palmer, 60.) And that doesn't even include the 50 or 60 unofficial events that Snead, by his own count, has won.

"They used to hold Greensboro right before the Masters, so the weather was usually bad," Snead recalled last week during the 55th playing of the tournament, which is now held at Forest Oaks. He was home in Hot Springs, Va., where he was supervising the long-overdue cleanup of his barns. "One year in Greensboro I hit my ball on the green and couldn't find it. The darn thing was covered with snow. The Bermuda grass was always dormant. You could hardly find a place to tee the ball up, it was so muddy. There were always terrible lies. And the grain of those greens was so fierce that at times you had to aim below the hole if you wanted to sink a putt. The grain would take it right uphill. But I told myself if I liked the courses, I'd play well there.

They used to alternate every year between Sedgefield and Starmount Forest. So I learned to like them. Greensboro's like my second home."

Snead's real home, of course, is home in a way that few of us will ever know: Chestnut Rail Farm, the hilly, woody, 250-acre spread outside Hot Springs, where both his dad and granddad were born and raised. That the winningest golfer in Tour history should come from these steep Virginia hills, where he grew up dirt-poor, shoeless and wild, is surely one of the miracles of American sport. Born May 27, 1912, the youngest of six children, Samuel Jackson Snead is an original, about as far removed from the modern touring pro as the hound is from the poodle.

As a boy Snead would take off his shoes on the first of May and not have them on again until the first frost -- if then. Snead once caddied nine holes in the snow barefoot, developing a severe case of frostbite. The wooded hills behind his home were his playground. Snead and his friends would play hide- and-seek by heading into the woods with a bunch of magazines, leaving a trail of pages behind for the trackers. "When you ran out of paper, that's where you hid," says Snead.

He trapped fox, wildcat, hawks and skunk, selling the pelts for spending money. "My mother'd smell me coming," he says with a twinkle in his eye, recounting how after more than one encounter with a skunk, he had to bury his clothes. "We used to get 75 cents for a hawk's head." He learned to catch trout with his bare hands, and in his later years on the Tour, when he was plagued by the yips, he would try to grip the putter as lightly as he'd fingered those trout.

The Cascades Golf Course was a mile and a half down the road from the Snead farm. Sam was seven when he caddied there for the first time, walking to and fro with a friend, barefoot, of course. But he hadn't told his mother, Laura, who was 47 when he was born, of his plans. When Snead returned, glowing with pride over the pocketful of pennies and nickels he'd earned, she was unforgiving. "She'd been out all afternoon looking for me," Snead recalls. "She said, 'Come on over and show me what you got there.' Then she got a switch and burnt me a new one."

He went back, though, time and again. Snead and the other caddies would pitch and putt for two cents a hole. "When it got up to a dime, that's what separated them," says Snead, whose thriftiness became so legendary that Bob Hope once said Snead made Jack Benny look generous. Snead used to cut swamp maple branches, which he would whittle into golf clubs, leaving a knot for the club head and a few inches of bark for the grip. Then, using rocks for golf balls, he would try to hit fence posts. He discovered that his mother's quart-sized tomato cans were four inches across -- about the size of a golf cup -- and he buried some in the yard, creating his own layout.

He was a natural athlete, a star in football and track, the top scorer on his high school basketball team. "The spectators never bothered me when I played golf," says Snead. "In the early years, there was no roping off the gallery. They gave you just enough room to swing. Then you'd hit it, and they'd race ahead to see where it had gone, sometimes knocking the club right out of your hands. They were like a pack of wolves. Some guys on tour would shake like a leaf in front of a crowd. But because of basketball, where the fans were screaming and yelling all the time, I was used to it."

Snead worked at the Cascades from 1934 to '35, cleaning and repairing clubs, making $20 a month. He used the money to buy his first set of steel-shafted clubs, Bobby Jones Spalding irons, which cost $5 each. Snead paid for them one club at a time. When the Cascades decided to hold a golf tournament in 1936, Snead entered and shocked his bosses by finishing third, earning $358.66. His huge drives caught the eye of Freddy Martin, who was manager of golf at The Greenbrier, 40 miles away in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. Martin offered Snead an assistant's position at $45 a month, plus room and board and half the income from lessons he gave. Snead, who is still The Greenbrier's golf pro, now emeritus, hit the road and never looked back.

Snead won his first noteworthy titles in the summer of '36, including the West Virginia Open and the West Virginia PGA, and was befriended by Henry Picard and Craig Wood, two of the better touring pros of the era. They helped get Snead a $500 sponsorship deal with the Dunlop equipment company. He decided to use the money to try to make it on the PGA Tour, and in January 1937 the 24-year-old Snead drove west with another young pro, Johnny Bulla. He had $300 in his pocket and the word of Wood that if Snead ran out of cash, Wood would pay his way home. Wood never had to ante up, and there are those who swear Snead still has that original $300.

Snead finished sixth in his first tournament, the Los Angeles Open, earning $600, then won the Oakland Open ($1,200) and the Bing Crosby Pro-Am ($1,000) before the tour headed east. That summer Snead, for the first of four times, finished second in the U.S. Open, the only major championship he never won. By the end of the year he had signed on with Wilson, which he has represented ever since.

Golf scribes played up the colorful Snead as a West Virginia hillbilly, sometimes referring to him as "Daniel Boone with a driver." Snead didn't mind, telling tales in his mountain drawl about catching wildcats barehanded, while posing barefoot with overalls and a straw hat. Most tournaments in that era included 36 holes on the final day, and Snead liked to tell people that all his running around in the woods as a kid gave him an advantage. "I could go 36 holes and not think anything about it," he says. "I was looking for another round."

Another pigeon was more like it. Snead soon got a reputation, which has followed him throughout his life, as a premier hustler, always on the lookout for a $500 Nassau, which was a pretty good hunk of change in the '30s and '40s. His biggest payday came against an amateur named Tommy Taylor. "He could beat all the professionals on Long Island," Snead remembers. "And he thought he could see the hayseeds growing out of my ears." Both men were paired with rich backers, and in a match for $10,000 at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island in 1938, Snead closed Taylor and his partner out by eagling the 17th hole. Snead then birdied 18 with a tap-in to win a $5 side bet. "Tommy paid me and told me, 'I don't believe I ever want to see you again,'" says Snead, chuckling.

Snead was a professional's professional. He played golf for money. He still does and makes no bones about it. "People today, doctors and lawyers, want to play for twosies or fivesies," he scoffs. "Cheapest I'll play for is a $25 Nassau. Any less than that, I'd rather sit home and watch the squirrels. Must be the economy. I only got 12 games between April and October."

In 1946 Snead went to the British Open at St. Andrews. He won it, then figured out that his winner's check came to $600. The trip had cost him nearly $2,000 in expenses. "Will you be back to defend your title?" a British journalist asked him.

"Are you kidding?" Snead replied with a sneer.

Snead's swing, so rhythmic he could have conducted an orchestra with it, for decades remained unchanged. Long after his touch with the flat stick deserted him and he was reduced to experimenting with croquet-style, then side-saddle putting, Snead's peerless play from tee to green kept him in tournament contention. In 1974, at age 62, he tied for third in the PGA Championship, behind Lee Trevino and Nicklaus. At 67 he became the first golfer to shoot his age in a PGA Tour event when he went 67-66 at the Quad Cities Open. In 1984, at age 73, he shot a round of 60 at the par-72 Cascades course on which he grew up.

Snead, a trim 180 pounds, can still shoot his age, or better, though he has lost 50 yards off the tee since dislocating his left shoulder in an automobile accident two years ago. He claims he can't putt worth a lick. "Every time I miss a green, it's a bogey," Snead moans. Sounds like easy pickings. Why not head on down to The Greenbrier this summer, ask for an old hillbilly in a palmetto with a twinkle in his fading eyes and take advantage? Sam would sure like to meet you, and they say there's a new one born every day.

Issue date: May 2, 1994