Sport: Come On, Little Ball!

Not long ago, the nation’s most prominent amateur golfer and one of the game’s leading professionals played a friendly round at Washington’s Burning Tree Club. Professional Sam Snead was awed into unaccustomed silence by all the folderol that accompanied the game (“All them cops, and you know what they got in their golf bags? Tommy guns!”). Although he noted some bad kinks in his partner’s performance, he offered no advice. Coming up to the 18th tee, though, Snead could no longer keep silent. “Mind if I tell you one thing?” he asked. His partner said no, not at all. “Stick your fanny out, Mr. President,” said Snead. The President of the U.S. obeyed, and cracked out a drive 230 yards down the middle of the fairway.

Another President of the U.S., Ulysses S. Grant, once observed that the game of golf looked like good exercise, but he asked, “What’s the little white ball for?” Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Snead and about 4,000,000 other American golfers could have told him. To the casual eye, golf can seem deceptively undramatic. Golfers do not run or jump or kick or pounce or pound or shoot off firearms. Their play seems unhurried, gentlemanly, almost oldfashioned. Yet, in the pursuit of the little white ball, men find an extraordinary challenge to muscle and mind, the test of skill, and the thrill of chance-taking. They also find camaraderie and relaxation. To some, golf may merely mean the smell of freshly mown grass and the sight of the sudden, wind-blown hill. To some, it may just be a pleasing setting to sell insurance.

To some, it is a soothing therapy for the peptic ulcer; to others, especially those who make their living at it, it is a good way to acquire one.

This year Americans will pursue 33 million rounds of golf. For the privilege, they will spend something like a third of a billion dollars on everything from wood en tees to gin & tonics on the 18th Hole.

After a marked drop of popularity in the ’30s, golf today is more than ever a na tional American sport.

What brought the ancient sport back to popularity? Among the reasons: 1) the increase in leisure time and the five-day week; 2) a growing trend away from private country-club golf toward public golf (construction of military and company courses has been a major factor); 3) improvement in equipment and in courses; 4) diligent promotional gilding of the golfing lily and, more than anything else, 5) the appearance of an exciting generation of durable (and now middleaged) champion golfers. Of the great stars, no one has done as much to bring about the revival of the game as Samuel Jackson Snead, a brawny, balding Virginian of 42, with the drawl of a mountaineer and perhaps the most graceful, powerful swing ever seen on a course.

Why He Is Great. By the book, Snead is by no means the greatest golfer around.

The Professional Golfers Association lists him fourth among the top professionals of the half-century, after Ben Hogan, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen. Sam Snead’s golf glory lies in the fact that, more than any other player, he has made the game seem dramatic and human.

He literally addresses the ball. “Come on, little ball,” he will mutter. “Now git up there on the green like ah say.” Snead lacks Hogan’s machine-tool precision, but he is as durable as Sarazen, as handy with the irons as Byron Nelson, and he outdrives Bobby Jones in his prime by a full 20 yards. Like Babe Ruth (to whom his fans often compare him) and the little girl with the curl, Snead is sensationally good when he is good—and when he is bad he is horrid. He is never dull. He plays a gamboling, gambling game that hypnotizes the spectators. He rarely plays it safe. Unlike the cautious Hogan, Snead likes to take chances. He usually aims at the pin. Says he: “You play ’em for the money, or you play ’em safe. That’s why you win and why you lose.” This week Snead faced perhaps the biggest test of his career in the U.S. Open.

It is Sam Snead’s long-standing private war. He has started in the Open 13 times; each time he has failed. Some shrewd golfers—Bobby Jones for one—have flatly predicted that Snead will never make it.

A lot of Snead fans are betting that this time he will. Most agree with Gene Sarazen, who says: “If he doesn’t make it this time, he never will.” The Battleground. For days before the big battle began, at New Jersey’s Baltusrol Golf Club, the contestants toiled along the fairways and the fast, king-size greens, trying to learn the secrets of the layout.

Baltusrol’s lower course had been redesigned by famed Golf-Course Architect Robert Trent Jones (see box). Its slim fairways were stretched out to 7,027 yards and its bunkers and greens were scientifically remodeled—at a cost of $50,000—to test the skill of the most accurate golfer.

For a year Chief Greenskeeper Edward Casey and his staff worked over the course, improving the turf, coddling the greens. This week 30 maintenance men swarmed over Baltusrol, shaving the greens to a regulation three-sixteenths-inch height while power mowers droned along the edges of the fairways, barbering the marginal rough to a 2½inch crew cut (in the deep rough—”tiger country” to the pros—the grass is five inches high and very thick). Workers unreeled nearly ten miles of rope, fixing it into place along the entire course with 2,100 stakes (for the first time in Open history the spectators are to be kept on the sidelines).

The 162 qualified Open contestants came from all over the U.S. and ^ as far away as Australia and South Africa, chosen in 32 regional qualifying rounds from 1,938 hopefuls. Among them were such invited past masters as Gene Sarazen (two Open championships), Craig Wood, Lawson Little, Lloyd Mangrum, Lew Worsham and Gary Middlecoff (one each).

The defending champion, Ben Hogan, was still weak from a siege of virus and uneasy about his chances of a fifth victory.— The sentimental favorite, the man most golf fans hoped would win, was unquestionably Sam Snead.

He has won just about everything else in big-time golf. He holds three Professional Golfers’ Association championships, three Masters, one British Open, three Canadian Opens, and nearly 70 other officially sponsored P.G.A. and U.S.G.A.

titles. He has been acclaimed Golfer of the Year twice; he has picked up titles in Panama, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. He has played for bus fare in local Chamber of Commerce matches and for five figures in the big, well-promoted, postwar tournaments (e.g., the Tarn O’Shanter, the Palm Beach Round Robin).

He has won more tournaments of all kinds than any other golfer, living or dead. He has come tantalizingly close to winning the Open, too—and (in 1938) he has also fallen as low as a tie for 38th place.

The Open War. In 1937, on his first start, he blazed over the Oakland Hills Course at Detroit with a record-breaking 283. “Laddie,” said Tommy Armour, “you’ve just won yourself a championship.” But another youngster, Ralph Guldahl, finished with an even more sensational 281. In 1947 Snead tied with Lew Worsham to win the Open, then lost the play-off by the length of a 30 1/2-inch putt.

In 1949 he missed a tie with Winner Gary Middlecoff by a single stroke. Last year, at Oakmont, Pa., he was runner-up to his longtime rival, Ben Hogan.

Snead’s most disastrous performance was undoubtedly the famed 18th hole at Spring Mill near Philadelphia in the Open of 1939. It has become a classic of a kind. His first shot hooked into the rough and left him with a sandy lie. Instead of playing a cautious game, Sam took a custom-made 2½ wood from his bag and aimed a daring shot right at the pin. He flubbed it; the ball landed in a fairway bunker. Trying desperately for the green, he slashed an iron shot that landed on an overhanging lip above a sandtrap, rolled back toward the sand and hung precariously in long grass. On his fourth shot, with one foot in the trap and one out, Snead overshot the green and fell into another bunker. Then someone told him he had to get down in two to tie Byron Nelson. He snapped: “Why didn’t somebody tell me this before?” He was so rattled that his game collapsed. He made the green on his fifth stroke, holed out in three putts that would have appalled a Sunday duffer, and pushed his way through the silent crowd muttering, “Ah threw it away. Ah threw it away.” Why He Goes Wrong. Some experts attribute Snead’s blowups to lack of intelligent planning. “If Walter Hagen could caddy for him [and call his shots for him],” Gene Sarazen once said, “he could win the Open and everything else.” Sam is inclined to agree. But in many a critical match Snead has clubbed his way out of seemingly certain defeat with a shrewd shot. Other 19th-Hole critics attribute his failures to erratic putting, but Snead at his best is as handy a putter as any topflight golfer. Some say that Snead’s temperament (a “smoldering volcano,” according to the New York Times’s Arthur Daley) is not tough enough to withstand the grind of the Open. While it is true that Snead sometimes gives way to the sulks or the “yipes” (jitters), he has played some of his most sensational shots when the tension was greatest.

At the Greenbrier Open in 1951, he had a tremendous moment on the 12th hole, a wicked, 535-yard par five. Sam’s drive faded into the rough, but left him with a fair lie. He asked Curtis Griffith, his regular caddy, what club he recommended.

Griffith cautiously suggested that most players would use a spoon. Snead walked all the way to the green and studied the shot from all angles. Then he pulled his No. 2 iron—a dangerous choice of weapons—from his bag and slammed the ball with everything he had. “It went like a rifle, 230 yards,” says Griffith. “It was on the pin all the way.” The ball stopped 18 inches from the cup, and Snead was down in three for an eagle.

Another time at the Greenbrier, Snead drove into tiger country and found that two trees were directly in his approach line to the green. He had only a three-foot avenue between. He selected a pitching wedge, lined up his shot, and blasted the ball 120 yards, right into the cup.

How He Plays. Snead is a thrilling performer to watch. With effortless grace he smacks the ball 300 yards or more, straight down the fairway. Explains Snead: “If you want to hit a nail especially hard with a hammer, you don’t jerk it back and slash at it. Rather, you draw it far back, nice and slow, and, with careful aim, let ‘er rip. Now why not drive a golf ball that way?” With the long irons Snead is just as impressive—a rare thing in a good woodsman. His chip and pitch performance with the short irons is executed with the most delicate finesse. He combines deftness and power with an acute sense of rhythm (Snead is an excellent dancer, has long had an untested theory that he could play better golf if music floated over the fairways). On the green his long, approach putts are skillful and deadly. His short putts—admittedly his weakest point—are erratic, although not nearly so bad as he himself seems to think. He has used more than 250 putters in his tournament career in a search for one he can use with confidence. At tournaments Snead carries the regulation number of 14 clubs, but he substitutes two extra irons for his No. 2 and No. 4 woods.

Snead talks to himself quietly during a tournament (“That’ll be a little short . . . This one will stick”). He has never got over stage fright. Says he, pounding his chest: “Man, that thing has a heart in it, and the heart goes ‘thump, thump, thump.’ ” Gamesmanship is practiced in golf more freely than in any other sport, and Snead has frequently been the victim of other players’ psychological warfare.

In a tournament at Hot Springs in 1935, Snead loped through the first four rounds at the head of the pack until a critical pro asked: “What’s wrong with your stance, Sam? You look ridiculous.” Sam became acutely conscious of his stance, his game went to pieces, and he lost the match in the final round. An opponent taking off his glove or breathing heavily in the concentrated hush of a putting green will throw Snead off his game. A clicking camera infuriates him. “They try to get your nanny,” he says.

But Snead has developed a deadly ploy of his own. When an opponent disconcerts him, Snead waits until the bedeviler is concentrating on a putt. Then he walks off the green. The sound of Sam’s faithful fans following him is enough to crack the nerve of the most stoic Gamesman.

Snead himself is rarely stoic in defeat.

As a youngster, he learned golf under the stern eye of his brother Homer, who showed him how to drive a ball toward a hole in a cow pasture, and gave him a kick in the pants every time he muffed a shot.

Today, muffing hurts almost as much.

Up from Caddy. Sam Snead was born and raised in Ashwood, a hamlet near the mountain resort of Hot Springs, Va. and its famed golf hotel, the Homestead. The five Snead brothers begged broken-shafted clubs from the Homestead caddy master, and replaced their splintered wooden shafts with whittled hickory sticks or old buggy-whip handles. Sometimes they carved an entire driver from a hickory sapling with a knotty root.

With his primitive clubs—and the pedagogy of brother Homer’s foot—Sam developed his graceful and somewhat unorthodox swing. He never took a lesson, never hampered his free & easy game with the kinks and strains that often plague the rule-book golfer. At twelve, Sam took up caddying at the Homestead, studied the pros, and played the employees’ course—nine tortuous holes on a mountainside called the “goat -course.” The Sneads were poor (father Snead was a maintenance man in the Homestead’s boiler room). In addition to caddying, Sam also worked as a soda jerk.

In school he was something of a dude, and a natural standout in every sport he tried. In baseball he was an outstanding pitcher and outfielder, played against local coal miners’ teams. In football he was a fast backfield star (a “scat back” according to Snead). He was on the track team and he boxed. He found little time for books.

Often while his mother was cooking a meal, Sam sat beside the old Home Comfort stove and discussed his future with her. For a while he thought of going to college on a football scholarship. In the end, he chose golf.

The Discovery. Snead got out of high school in the depression year of 1932.

There were precious few jobs for untested young golfers. After a year’s drudgery in a restaurant, Sam got his break: a job as shop boy at the Homestead golf shop. For $20 a month he repaired clubs, shellacked and finished woods, did odd jobs, and breathed the atmosphere of golf. One morning an elderly lady guest came into the shop and asked for a lesson. Both pros were busy, so Sam agreed to teach her.

Next day Sam had a job as teaching professional at the Cascades, an 18-hole golf course about three miles from the hotel.

Sam did not even own a full set of clubs. He had a couple of battered woods, no irons, and a bag with a hole in it. He took his $10 salary (for two weeks’ work) and made a down payment on a cheap set of irons. At the Cascades he had few customers, plenty of time to practice. Within two weeks Snead could beat both Homestead professionals. In 1935 Freddy Martin, golf manager at the rival Greenbrier. spotted Snead. For $45 a month, room & board, he lured Sam across the mountains to the Greenbrier. (With the exception of one year at Shawnee-on-Delaware and the 2½ wartime years he spent in the Navy, Sam has been headquartered at the Green-brier.) Says Martin, who has a native Scot’s canny eye for a top golfer; “That swing of Sam’s caused me to predict in 1936 that he would break 60 on a regulation 18-hole golf course.” Breaking 60 in regulation golf is the rough equivalent of running the four-minute mile in regulation track, and Snead had never quite fulfilled Martin’s great expectations, though he carded a 57 and a 58 on non-regulation courses.

Last year he missed a score of 59 on the Greenbrier’s championship Old White course when he flubbed a two-foot putt.

The Hero. In the summer of 1936, with Martin’s blessing and $50 in his pocket, Snead took the day coach to Pennsylvania for the Hershey Open and his nervous tee-off in big-time tournament golf. His first two drives landed in a stream, but Sam pulled himself together and finished in sixth place. That autumn he went to Florida. At the Miami Open he won $108 and signed a contract to endorse Dunlop golfing equipment for $500 and his clubs and balls. “Ah had $300 and ah was $800 rich,” he recalls, rolling his eyes.

Sam and Johnny Bulla, another young hopeful, headed for the West Coast in Bulk’s Ford jalopy. Snead, who had grave misgivings about his own skill, suggested to Bulla that they split their winnings.

“I said nothing doing, you’re not good enough,” Bulla recalls. “I think by the end of the year I had won about $500 and Sam had knocked down $10,000.” Snead became the overnight sensation of golf. He took sixth place in the Los Angeles Open, then won the Oakland Open and the Bing Crosby tournament over the full field of America’s top professionals. Sportswriters dubbed him “Slamming Sammy.” In Los Angeles one day, on a practice tee, Snead tried out a decrepit driver belonging to Henry Picard.

He liked the feel of it and Picard, who was planning to throw the club away, sold it to him for $5.50. The driver cured Snead’s troublesome hook, and he has carried it in his golf bag ever since, broken and repaired a dozen times. (Snead estimates that he has won more than $5,000 with it in driving contests alone.) Snead and Fred Corcoran, then tournament manager for the P.G.A., became the Gold Dust twins. Together they pulled golf out of the doldrums. Corcoran, an entrepreneur with a leprechaun nose for pots of gold, succeeded in getting the annual tournament antes raised from $100,000 in 1936 to nearly $600,000 in 1947. The young Snead provided the public with a golfing hero like no one since the golden days of Jones and Hagen.

With his blazing game Snead helped to drive the nation’s golf scores down from the low 705 to the low 60s. (Improved equipment—notably the steel shaft and the larger ball, and such gadgets as the power mower and the fairway sprinkler systems—helped.) Sam Snead, with his own particular style and corn-pone personality, was something new in combat golf. For years the game had been dominated by English styles. With the great American hitters—including Snead—golf had got out of its Oxford bags.

The Goldwyn of Golf. Snead is a model of 4-H Club health and vigor; he never smokes, drinks only a rare beer, and spends more time sleeping than most athletes. He is the best-dressed golfer in the game: his snap-brim palmetto hats and neatly pressed slacks are Snead trademarks (in a recent inventory, Mrs. Snead counted 280 sport shirts and 36 straw hats).

He is the Goldwyn of golf, whose hillbilly homilies are legends. Once Snead sat in the Boston Red Sox dugout during a baseball game and listened solemnly while his good friend Ted Williams held forth on the difficulties of baseball as compared with golf. Baseball, with a round bat and a fast-moving target, Williams explained, calls for much more skill than the quiet game of golf. “Maybe so,” said Sam doubtfully. “But when we hit a foul ball, we’ve gotta get out there and play it.” Another time, when Snead heard that Bing Crosby had just won the Academy Award, he said, “Gee, that’s swell. How’d he do it—match or medal play?” After his first big splash in California, Snead saw his picture, a Wirephoto, in the New York Times. He was amazed. “Now how’d they ever get my picture?” he asked. “Ah never been in New York.” The Big Money. To Snead, golf is strictly business. For relaxation he prefers hunting and fishing (he caught the world record bonefish, a 15-pounder, off Bimini in 1953).

In 1940 Snead and his childhood sweetheart, Audrey Karnes, were married (as teenagers, they had held hands in the school bus) and settled down in Hot Springs. But the lure of golfing gold was too great, and Snead reckons that his travels have kept him away from home for twelve of the past 14 years. The Sneads have two sons, Jackie, 9, and Terry, 2. “My little one don’t even know me,” says Sam.

Underneath his Li’l Abner façade, he is a shrewd businessman. His official tournament earnings over the years amount to $250,000. Local matches and exhibitions (at a flat fee of $1,250 per exhibition) have probably doubled his take.

There are lucrative off-course sources, too. For 17 years Snead has been a member of the advisory staff of the Wilson Sporting Goods Co.. receiving a fat retainer and royalties on the sales of his signature clubs. He has invested in a California golf course and Florida real estate. He and Ted Williams are co-owners of a fishing-tackle company. Endorsements bring in a good stipend and three gleaming Nashes each year. He has made a golfing record, several films, draws royalties from four ghost-written books and a ghosted golfing column. And, like all the top pros, he makes money gambling on the game.

Snead is careful with his money, but he doesn’t keep it in tomato cans buried in his garden, as Jimmy Demaret alleges.

He tips his caddies as much as $150 a tournament (plus his old hats, if he wins).

He has a picturesque way of tipping. In a restaurant he will fold a five-dollar bill into a tiny ball of paper and hand it to the headwaiter with the suggestion: “Here, put that in yore holler tooth.” Guesses about his fortune vary. One friend estimates it at around $1,000,000.

Snead admits to an annual income of “right close to” $100,000, but claims that if he ever made a million, he has been robbed. He has a mountain boy’s distrust of revenuers—in his case, Internal Revenuers, who visit him regularly. Sam gets nervous whenever he sees a story about his wealth: “You know, every time they read a story about me they clip it.” The Little Dog’s Tail. Last week, as he packed his bags for Baltusrol, Sam Snead seemed at peak form. The warm West Virginia sun and hot sulphur baths had relaxed him. Ten days of practice, drivBEN HOGAN Before sunup, an old bogey.

ing balls into a staked-out, 35-yard circle (Baltusrol’s fairways average 35 yards in width) and putting into a three-inch cup (the official U.S.G.A. cups are 4¼ inches in diameter), had honed his game to a wicked keenness. His body showed few signs of age, approximately the same dimensions of 18 years ago: height, 5 ft.

11 in.; weight, 180 lbs.; waist, 33 in., chest 43 in. In his sinewy shoulders he still had the power to smash out 300-yard drives; his huge hands still contained the nuances that make chip shots fall where he chooses. He has acquired an ounce of caution—but only an ounce—that may cut a little drama from his game and save him a few Scoreboard points.

At a time when older players dominate the game (Hogan is 42; most of the other top-seeded players range from their mid-30s to 50). Snead looked as good in 1954 as he had looked in 1937. He recognizes that competitive golf is still a young man’s game, and attributes the present dearth of young stars to the Korean war.

Snead expects a new crop of golfers will force him off the tournament courses before long. “Just gimme four more years,” he says, “at $100,000 a year, and Snead will have made it.” But before he turns in his clubs, Snead still has one deep desire: to win his first Open. He has been acting very much like a man who expected to win. In Augusta (TIME, April 19), he won the Masters, defeating his old bogey Hogan in a brilliant play-off.— And at the Palm Beach tournament in May, he won with a sizzling 338 for five rounds. Recently, he sent in his entry for the British Open in July—obviously a bid for the professional golfer’s “Grand Slam” (P.G.A., Masters, U.S.

Open, British Open), which no pro has ever won in a single year.

With the Open approaching, the big boys were fretting about their health. As the late-starting pacemaker for the third annual LIFE-P.G.A. National Golf Day, Ben Hogan carded a sensational 64 (eight under normal par at Baltusrol), but he complained of fatigue and various aches and pains. “My head,” he said, “is so sore I have trouble combing my hair.” Snead, for his part, grumbled about a “stiff neck that’s cramping my swing.” The course at Baltusrol seemed tailored for Sam Snead. Its long, sweeping fairways were an invitation to his power drives.

Its oversized greens were an advantage, too: a man who counted on hot putting would never win the 1954 Open. To Hogan, Snead and Baltusrol looked like a winning combination: “Man, he should be the hottest favorite since Jones. This course is just made for his type of game.” After a practice round at Baltusrol this week, though, Snead himself was cautiously pessimistic. “This baby is real tough,” he gloomed. But at Augusta last March, after beating Hogan, he sang a different tune: “The sun don’t always shine on the same little dog’s tail.” For Golfer Snead’s tail, it had been a long wait for sunup.

*Hogan shares the record of four Opens with Bobby Jones and the late Willie Anderson. *Playing man-to-man and not against the ano nymity of the field or a scorecard, Snead has never lost to Hogan. They have golfed together in just three tournament playoffs, and Snead won every time. They will not be paired at the Open tee-off.