Watching That Sweet Swing Never Gets Old

Every time I see Sam Snead play golf, I’m 25 years old again. The years roll back.

It was a better time. There were no ropes at tournaments in those days. You could walk down the fairway with your hero. You strained with every shot, groaned with every miss. It was as if you had the club in your hands. Interactive golf.

Sam was perfect for this kind of audience participation. Sam was glorious to watch. Nobody had his joyous, rhythmic sweep at the ball. He was as loose-jointed as an ocelot, as uninhibited as a cub bear. The golf club was a wand. Watching Snead play golf was like watching Kelly dance, Ruth bat, Tracy act, Koufax pitch or Dempsey punch. A work of art.

You should have been there.

When Sam didn’t win an Open, a whole generation felt cheated. It was a historic injustice. Churchill losing an election. You felt as if they shot Lincoln again. Snead didn’t simply lose it. He blew up all over the place. A 7.5 on the Richter scale. If he had won one Open, he might have won seven. He won none. But he was second in the Open four times, to give you an idea.

Hogan was the best striker of the ball, Nicklaus played a stratospheric game no one had ever seen, but for sheer beauty and grace Snead’s swing belonged in an art gallery. Or theBolshoi. Nureyev with a nine-iron.

There was the jaunty walk down the fairway. There was the palmetto hat tilted rakishly over one eye. There was that magical swipe at the ball. It was almost poetic. Everyone who ever played the game had a flaw in his swing. Except Snead. He was born with the ability to swing a club in perfect trajectory. They tell you to keep your left arm straight. But no one can. Snead could. His left arm went so straight up past his chin to the top of his backswing, it looked like a flagpole. It hurt to look at it.

If we took our bifocals off at the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf at PGA West down here this week, there were still vestiges of the glory days. The ravages of 60 years and 25,000 rounds of competitive golf fade from view. It’s 1950 again and Sam is prowling the course like an uncaged leopard.

Oh, he walks more slowly. Limps a little. But he still doesn’t wear glasses. His eyes still sweep the fairway probing for weaknesses, a fighter sizing up an opponent before the bell.

The ball goes sideways occasionally. But, then, it often did for Sam. It was part of his charm. It was nothing for him to be over in the fallen trees, the beer cans, pine cones and broken glass. But the ball would come flying out in a shower of debris and, the next thing you knew it was sitting up there on the green three feet from the hole and the other guy was away. Hogan might never have left the fairway. Snead might never have left the rough. But the match would be even.

The backswing might creak a little now. He uses a driver where once a four-wood might do, a two-iron where a five might have sufficed. The ball might not back up on a green the way it used to. Snead almost invented backspin.

Sam never had any trouble with the 300-yard tee shot. Or the 150-yard approach. The only shot in golf that bothered Sam was the seven-foot putt. Sam could negotiate the first 530 yards of a par five in two. But the last seven feet might take him three. He lost one U.S. Open (in a playoff to Lew Worsham in 1947) because he missed a 13-inch putt. He remembers the great sportswriter Grantland Rice consoling him. “If cryin’ would help, I’d bawl like a baby.”

Sam never cried. He just shrugged and went on to the next tournament.

Sam won more tournaments than anyone who ever lived, 125 around the world, 81, at least, on the regular tour. I say “at least” because the historians used to keep going back and subtracting tournaments from Sam because the prize money was so meager. You can prove anything 40 years after the event. Just ask Oliver Stone. “Prize money!?” Sam explodes. “I got $600 for winning the British Open in 1946. You get more than that today just showing up!”

Sam never won the U.S. Open, but he won the British Open, the Brazil Open, the Cuban Open. He can’t tell you what town they were in--even what continent perplexes him--but he can tell you every break on every green.

Sam learned to play golf with a hickory switch for a club and an acorn for a ball. They had better things to spend their money on down in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia than implements of golf. Rifles to shoot squirrels for dinner, for instance.

Sam couldn’t believe his good luck the first time he got a real wood and a regulation-size ball to hit. One day, he was standing on a tee at a 350-yard hole at the Greenbrier in West Virginia as a new young clubhouse assistant. He wound up and let fly in that fluid effortless flow. The ball went out in the air and stayed there. On the green ahead was the gruff railroad magnate (and owner of the Cleveland Indians) Alva Bradley. The ball came down on the green as he was putting.

“I thought that ball was never coming down,” Snead recalled as he sat in the golfers’ lounge at the Stadium Course of PGA West the other day. It was the only time in his life he wished he had sliced.

Bradley was outraged. He stormed the pro shop. “I want that insolent young man fired out of here!” he roared. “He hit his approach shot into us!” The club pro cleared his throat. “Er, Mr. Bradley,” he began gently. “That wasn’t his approach shot--that was his tee shot.”

Sam corrected an earlier version of the story that it was he who had told Bradley. “I was too scared,” he grins.

You can’t see DiMaggio bat anymore, or Willie Mays field, or Ali shuffle. But you can still see Sam hit a golf ball.

Sam is playing in the Demaret division of the Legends of Golf this week. He played a special skins’ game with Sandra Palmer against Tommy Bolt and Susie McAllister on Monday and the gallery was bigger than the one Bob Tway had on his way to winning at Harbour Town last week.

They used to say if he had Ben Hogan caddying for him, Sam would never have lost a tournament. But the public loved Sam Snead the way he was, blowups and missed putts and shots flying out of the squirrels and all. Sam was golf.

You had to have been there.