Sport: Putter Trouble

On the winter golf circuit, ginger-haired Byron Nelson copped eight tournaments with a sensational 18-hole average of 68.4 strokes. Sparse-haired Samuel (“Sambo”) Snead was a dangerous second, with six wins and a 69.2 average. Such figures promised little less than perfection for last week’s two-day battle royal between the two best golfers in the land. Perhaps it was because they played for charity instead of pay, but the match proved nothing more startling than that Snead and Nelson were equally human where strokes count most—on the greens.

In the first day’s medal play at Long Island’s tricky Fresh Meadow Country Club, Nelson (8t05 in the betting) tried every known form of body English to persuade the ball into the cup. Time & again, he dipped at the knees and rolled with the breeze. He slapped the carpet with his hands, suffered awful tortures on the near misses. He three-putted two greens. West Virginia’s Sambo contented himself with a puckered-up Bogart face and an occasional “Woof!” Neither of them sank a man-size putt all day. But Snead felt he couldn’t lose, because it was his 33rd birthday, and he won by a stroke—with a three-over-par 70-73 = 143. He did it by outplaying ironmaster Nelson with the irons.

Nelson, who can play championship golf with an ax handle when he’s hot, came to life next day in the match play battle at New Jersey’s Essex County course. He sank a 35-footer, outdrove hard-slamming Sambo. Snead’s putting meanwhile went from poor to punk, ended in a nose dive on the water-soaked greens. Nelson, six-up at the 13th, closed it out at the 33rd with the score four-and-three. That left the unofficial championship just about where it was in the first place. With a win apiece, Nelson and Snead were still wrapped up in a photo finish.

Despite their misbehaving putters, the two experts gave 8,000 fans their money’s worth from tee to green. Sample shots:

¶ After his drive hooked into a clump of bushes at Fresh Meadow and nestled against a fence, Nelson used the back of his putter with a left-handed swing, chipped the ball 100 ft. through shrubbery onto the fairway.

¶ Snead drew his biggest cheer when he nonchalantly selected a No. 5 iron, blasted out of a trap with a 175-yd. carry dead to the pin.