He Didn’t Win Much Money, He Just Won

The most money he made on the golf course in a year was $55,562, good for 49th on the list. He was 62 at the time.

He made $620,126 in his career. That took him 42 years, and he had to win 81 events on the tour to do so.

Thirteen golfers won that much money on the tour last year. Most of them will never win eight tournaments, never mind 80. One of the 13 was winning his first tournament.

To know Sam Snead is to know golf. He is a walking history book. The word legend is too loosely thrown around these days. But Sam Snead is a legend. There has never been anyone quite like him. When I sit across from Sam Snead, I feel as if I am in the presence of royalty. I feel like taking my hat off. You don’t know whether to shake hands or curtsy. You imagine you would feel this way in the presence of Babe Ruth. Or Jack Dempsey.

Sam Snead was the quintessential golfer. I once said that if you had a letter from God with permission to build yourself the perfect golfer, you would begin with the guy with the palmetto hat on his bald head. He would be 5 feet 11 of the most supple bone and muscle, as loose-jointed as an ocelot, as rhythmic as a tap dancer. He would be a little tight with a buck and he would have an accent that came out of a lifetime of speaking through a mouthful of hominy grits.

Sam Snead never changed. He never asked for any shots from life and he never gave any. He was one of the most natural athletes I’ve ever seen. In an unnatural sport, Sam managed never to make it look mechanical. His golf swing was a thing of beauty like a Tchaikovsky ballet. “The Moonlight Sonata,” even. Sam, with a golf club in his hand, was a work of art. He made everyone else look as if they were fixing plumbing.

Sam didn’t come downstairs one Christmas and find a gleaming new set of irons and woods and a bag with his name on it under the tree. He quite literally learned to play with a twig and a rock, and his first “club” was a wooden brassie attached to a buggy whip he found in a haystack. Sam’s first pair of shoes had cleats in them.

Sam never went to Brigham Young or Wake Forest, he honed his game out of a caddie shack. His “class” was a bunch of barefoot kids like himself. “We would sneak out to a part of the course where no one could see us, seven or eight of us with one club, and we’d play until only one was left.” This shootout was for a dime, not to be confused with the weekly $4,000 Merrill Lynch shootout on tour today.

He had the eyesight of a circling hawk. It’s impossible to estimate what he meant to golf. The game went in the doldrums after Bobby Jones retired, until Snead rolled onto the circuit with his peckerwood drawl and 380-degree swing. He was a home run hitter and the public, which loves sluggers whether in the ring or on a diamond or a tee, loved Snead. He was the John Daly of his time, except that Sam was not a one-tournament phenom. Sam learned as he went along, but he always had this marvelous, fluid, one-piece swing they could have set to music. He never had a lesson. He even learned to play the trumpet by himself. He never had a sick day in his life till his eyes began to fail him after 40 years of squinting into the sun down thousands of fairways a year.

Even his blowups were Homeric. The fact that Sam Snead never won the U.S. Open is a historic injustice. But it was part of the mystique, part of the Ballad of Samuel Jackson Snead.

If Sam asked no quarter, he gave none. When the tour banned appearance money, Sam found a way around it. He was not hard-hearted, just thick-skinned. Sam never wanted to be popular, just rich. If you were a 20-handicapper--Sam was a plus-three--you got no mercy and no shots. “You’ve got two eyes and two arms and two legs, haven’t you?” he would demand. Once, when he played in a Brazil Open, the sponsor gave him appearance money but negated any prize money. Sam shot a 71. The sponsor thought Sam was malingering. So he reinstated the prize money. Sam shot 63-63-69. He beat Roberto de Vicenzo, no less. The sponsor wanted to renege. Finally, he relented. The next year, he didn’t invite Sam. The tournament was a flop.

Sam was not sentimental. “The money was there for the asking, why not get it?” he shrugs. You want 63s, you pay for 63s.

There are more good players today, Sam concedes. “But they have all the best of it. The courses are better, the equipment is better, the balls are better. The courses are such you never have a bad lie. The greens are so perfect you can get down in two from anywhere. When we had a 60-foot putt, the odds against you getting down in two were considerable. Now, you can’t bet they won’t make it in one. We had all the trouble shots because we needed them. These guys don’t need them. Their fairways are better than some of the greens we played on.”

They are honoring Sam Snead as a famous past champion at the 1992 Nissan L.A. Open at Riviera this week. Sam will turn 80 in a few weeks but still moves with the jaunty stride and spring in his step as he did 42 years ago when he beat Hogan in probably the most famous L.A. Open. He won this Open twice and was second in 1974 when he was 61.

It’s possible to look at Sam and roll back the clock to that day in January, 1950, when he rolled in that 12-foot putt to birdie 18 and tie Hogan (and then beat him in the playoff).

Sam Snead won more tournaments than any player. He says the count is 125. But if it weren’t for that dreaded third putt, he would have won 50-100 more. Sam had more three-putts than a goat course in Keokuk.

As usual, he adds a large splash of color to any tournament he’s a part of. He was Palmer before there was a Palmer. I’ve said it before, anyone who would pass up a chance to see a Snead on a golf course would pull the shades driving past the Taj Mahal.

His swing should hang in the Louvre. His putting stroke should happen to Saddam Hussein. But Sam Snead is not greater than the sum of his parts. They all go to make him what he is--one of the most colorful characters in all of sport. Whoever wins the L.A. Open this week will owe a great debt to the guy in the coconut hat who won it 42 years ago.