American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  “Old Scotty,” he was assured, was the finest looper in the Auld Grey Toon, as good as they came at reading the Old Course’s quirks. They played a final practice round and, indeed, Sam’s nerves not only settled a bit but he also began to see what Bob Jones meant by his remark that every time one played the Old Course, one’s admiration of it deepened. Unfortunately, on the eve of the championship, Old Scotty vanished into his favorite pub and got arrested for public drunkenness, requiring Sam to hire a fourth caddie, little more than a teenage bag carrier, just minutes before he teed off.

  Somehow, through all of this, providence smiled on him. Tee to green he was never in better command of his game, playing the most intelligent golf of his career, outdriving a strong field that in addition to Little included the great Henry Cotton, South African Bobby Locke, Welshman Dai Rees, and even his old Carolina traveling pal Johnny Bulla by an average of thirty yards. More important, he admitted later, his respect for the Old Course’s countless subtleties began to appeal to the natural shotmaker in him; the need to improvise and imaginatively create things on the spot was an instinctive talent Sam possessed in much greater depth than either Byron or Ben.

  On the vast double greens, for instance, using a slightly heavier blade putter than his normal one, he devised a strategy of lagging his ball to within a three-foot circumference rather than trying to hole every long putt. After fifty-four holes, with a sharp wind increasing off the Firth, he found himself sharing in a three-way tie for the lead with Rees, Locke, and Bulla. “Sam had the golf in him to win,” as Herbert Warren Wind noted. “The only question was how Sam, who had never won a big championship at medal play after his ordeal at Spring Mill, would bear up to the crucial eighteen holes.”

  He was the last man to go out, thus bearing the additional pressure of knowing what score he’d have to beat in order to win. On the outward leg, indeed, he suffered two costly three-putts and missed yet another maddening two-footer at the ninth for an easy birdie. “Putting in that wind,” he said later, “was a guess.” On making the turn, however, he learned from a marshal armed with a military walkie-talkie that the others were having even more difficulty in the high winds, their scores ballooning. At ten, he drained a slow-rolling downhiller for a birdie, and on twelve rolled home a timely second birdie from thirty feet. On the fourteenth tee, a Scotsman stuck his whiskers in his face and declared, “You can shoot sixes from here on in, laddie, and win.”

  After Spring Mill, Sam was taking nothing for granted. He played cautiously wide of infamous “Hell Bunker” and made birdie on the hole but three-putted on sixteen green for bogey. Coming off the green, facing the notorious “Road Hole,” he spotted Richards Vidmer, the former New York Times columnist who was covering the Open for the Herald Tribune, and asked for an update on scores. Rees and Bulla, he learned, were still close. But the others had fallen back. “A pair of sixes on the last two will get you in with a tie,” Vidmer told him. “But a six-five finish will win it.”

  Sam still wasn’t convinced. Following a conservative drive to the left-hand side of the dangerous, half-hidden fairway, his smooth nine-iron approach shot was batted to the right by a sudden, brisk cross-breeze, settling in a swale off the putting surface. Though one of the finest chippers ever, he cautiously opted to lag putt—having absorbed one of the cardinal lessons of Old Course mastery. Rewarded for his decision to keep his ball on the ground, he watched it climb the slope and curl lazily toward the hole, given an extra roll or two by the wind itself—and then disappear into the cup. The most appreciative golf fans on earth hailed the least popular figure in the field with a robust volley of cheers. Brilliance on the Road Hole forgave a multitude of sins, including intemperate and uninformed remarks.

  Sam finished with an easy par that gave him a four-stroke victory in golf’s oldest championship. He removed his hat and shook hands all around, smiling like a man who’d been promoted from the mail room to the office of the chairman of the board.

  For years to come, he would tell anyone who’d listen that his surprising birdie on seventeen—rightly considered the toughest hole to birdie in all of championship golf—won him the Claret Jug, though in fact he had the championship well in hand by then. Some British writers actually take a much different view of his finish. “His victory at St. Andrews in the first championship after the war was remarkable rather for the failure of Locke and the others, including Cotton and Rees, to stay the course, rather than for Snead’s exceptional play,” reflected an otherwise admiring Pat Ward-Thomas in the Manchester Guardian. “This was not surprising as the British were unaccustomed to the pressure of tournament golf after six years without any, and there may have been something in Cotton’s claim that the lack of good food undermined their stamina.” Even Sam might have concurred with this last point.

  Regardless, indisputably, his 290 eclipsed all four of Walter Hagen’s victories, two of Bob Jones’s three winning scores, and also bested Tommy Armour’s when he carted home the Auld Mug. More to the point, Sam had won his first medal-play major championship under extremely adverse conditions by playing the most astute golf of his career, and though the paltry financial benefit prompted him to decide on the spot that he would likely not return to defend his title, which made him few friends in the Home of Golf, he went to his grave spinning tales about that magical week on the Auld Sod and rightly giving himself some credit for helping to revive American interest in the Open.

  One of his favorite moments came as he was leaving the presentation of the Claret Jug, when his errant caddie Scotty reappeared from the crowd and begged to have the winning ball as a keepsake, a memento of their special time together. “I’ll always treasure it,” Scotty growled affectionately, wiping an eye as Sam handed it over.

  “Damned if he didn’t take that ball and sell it within the hour,” Sam loved to say, shaking his head and laughing, then admitting that he might well have done the same thing himself under the circumstances. “He made fifty pounds off that ball—more than I made for winning the Open.”

  12

  THEN THERE WERE TWO

  WITH BYRON NELSON NOW a full-time rancher, Sam Snead approached 1947 believing that only Ben Hogan stood between him and domination of the PGA Tour. Sam had already concluded that Ben was the premier ball striker of their day and perhaps all time. “Nobody was ever better at eliminating mistakes from a golf swing than Hogan, and knowing exactly which shot to hit when it was needed,” he once said. “That’s what set him apart from the rest. He intimidated the pants off most of the other guys out there because he never gave up ground. But he brought out the best in me. My record shows that. Anytime I played head to head with Ben, why, I felt there was something special on it.”

  Ironically, Ben told friends he felt Sam was the premier ball striker of all time, lacking only in the decision-making department. “If I’d caddied for Sam,” he once told friends at Shady Oaks, “no one else would have been in the record book.”

  Coming off a season-ending win at the Miami Open in early December, Sam believed he’d finally worked things out with a balky putting stroke that had cost him half a dozen tournaments that year alone. But his optimism proved premature. At the start of the ’47 season in Los Angeles, a pair of 69s broke the event’s thirty-six-hole scoring mark but an old nemesis suddenly returned, the jerky putting stroke he labeled “the yips,” producing one of the largest scoring free falls in years. “I broke down completely.… The yips took me then and tore me apart,” he recounts in The Education of a Golfer. “The rest of my game was never better but on the carpet I was a zombie. Over the ball, I felt like someone else’s hands held the putter. All control was gone. No such thing as a straight line to any cup existed.” He finished tied twenty-fifth in a tournament he’d won just two years before.

  A week later in the relatively cloistered privacy of the Monterey Peninsula, he desperately experimented with a variety of grips and techniques on putts: cross-handed, reverse grips, stiff-armed, even putting one-handed a
s Joe Turnesa suggested. He saw slight improvement but finished third in the Crosby Clambake and was happy to climb aboard another Constellation for a flight to Africa for a series of exhibition matches against the gnomish and knickered Arthur D’Arcy “Bobby” Locke, who’d tied for second in the Open Sam, won at St. Andrews, and brassily proposed a $10,000 challenge match over a series of courses on his home turf. Fred Corcoran was happy to oblige, and the South African Tourism Board and a diamond company put up the funds.

  After their first nine holes at Locke’s home club near Johannesburg, Sam had his host five down. “I thought I’d run him right out of Africa,” he remembered, “but then he went to work, and after thirty-six holes he had me eight down with seven holes to play.”

  It was the height of irony, perhaps, that the particular genius of Old Baggy Pants—as Sam liked to call him—was Locke’s brilliant and wildly unconventional putting stroke, which required him to grip his putter high and lightly and take the putter head back sharply on the inside path, then hood the face at impact, producing a distinctive “hooking” spin on the putt, a technique he claimed he’d picked up from a dipsomaniacal Englishman while serving in the South African Air Force in Egypt during the war. In doing so, Locke violated every commonly accepted principle of putting. He had a closed stance, “swayed like a Bloomer Girl” instead of staying still, and claimed to be able to hook or, conversely, fade any putt into the hole by manipulating the putter head with his hands, meant to neutralize the effect of the grainy Bermuda greens of the warm-weather courses where he grew up playing. Moreover, he could read a green superbly, and went on to capture four Open Championships of his own. And he certainly made a true believer out of Sam, whom he blitzed in twelve of their sixteen matches over three weeks. At the Bulawayo Club in Rhodesia, a large gray monkey sauntered onto the green and leaned against the flagstick as Sam struck a short approach shot. “Here, buster,” the Slammer quipped, trying to hand him his putter, “you can do better than me.”

  Before they parted company, the genial Locke asked his victim if he thought he might make some money on the American tour. “With that putter of yours,” Sam said with his usual candor, “you could get rich.” In his estimation, the only putter equal to him was Ben Hogan and his sidekick Demaret.

  Sam’s frank appraisal led to unexpected grief back home when, within weeks, Locke was winning tournaments right and left on American soil, pocketing more than $27,000 with his unconventional putting stroke during his first five months in America. Despite his late start in 1947, he finished in second place on the PGA money list behind Demaret, and in the fifty-nine events he played over the next two and a half years, he won eleven times and finished in the top three in more than half of the other events, leaving his American competitors increasingly resentful. In 1949, ostensibly because of his alleged failure to fulfill several playing commitments, the tour took the unusual step of banning Locke from the American circuit. Claude Harmon, the Winged Foot pro and ’48 Masters champion, came closest to identifying the real motivation when he candidly told an Augusta reporter, “Locke was simply too good. They had to ban him.” Not until 1951 did the tour yield to complaints of unfairness in the American press and rescind the decision. But by this point the colorful Locke, who favored long-sleeve shirts and four-in-hand ties, had collected two Open titles en route to seventy-two international career wins that established him as the world’s first truly international golf star, and certainly the patriarch of a distinguished line of South Africans from Gary Player to Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, among others.

  Sam’s African adventure only deepened his gloom and marked the beginning of a classic “dark night of the soul” in which he actually stopped competing for several months. He went hunting and fishing, dug up boulders in the new pasture, and worked in the barn at the handsome new home, Old Snead Links, that he and Audrey built in a lovely vale just south of the village of Hot Springs. “I was a walking nervous breakdown,” he said. “Hanging up my clubs, I swore I’d never play like a dog in public again.… Six years of good putting during which I’d won forty tournaments followed by three years of yips made no sense. Off by myself on the Old White Course at the Greenbrier, I started experimenting all over again.”

  Over the next three months, he ventured out to play in just one event, the Masters, where Byron Nelson, to nobody’s particular surprise, came out of retirement to finish in a tie for second with his former pupil, Frank Stranahan. Demaret claimed the title with a sensational seven-under total, and Sam finished with a wretched tie for twenty-second place. A week before the U.S. Open, however, he registered modest improvement at the National Capital Open in Washington, a tie for fourth, using a heavier blade putter with no offset, making several key adjustments that included a “comfortable wider stance” over the ball, more arm motion to improve his smoothness and a takeaway that emphasized keeping the putter low and encouraged the left hand to “lead” through the putt—a technique more reminiscent of Ben Hogan’s than Bobby Locke’s.

  As the national championship commenced at the relatively short and benign St. Louis Country Club in Clayton, Missouri, he was rolling the ball noticeably better, opening with a workmanlike one-over 72 and trailing a group of largely unknown players except for Locke at 68 and Hogan at 70. The book on Sam was that in this event he started like a thoroughbred but finished like a nag, as symbolized by his infamous Spring Mill disaster and a final-round collapse in 1940 when he led going into the final round at Canterbury and could have won with a mere 72. Instead he produced the worst concluding round of his Open career, a horrific 81 that seemed to validate his Open jinx in many minds, worst of all his own.

  This time, however, Sam played like a champion to the seventy-second hole and beyond. With Hogan and Locke having blown their chances by ballooning to 75 and 74 respectively in the second round, he cobbled together three solid rounds of 70 and faced a fifteen-foot birdie putt on the final hole to tie relatively unheralded Lew Worsham. The supposed “hillbilly choke artist” calmly holed the putt to force an eighteen-hole playoff. “The crowd roared. Sam smiled, and Worsham walked over and shook his hand,” recounts U.S. Open historian Bob Sommers. “It was as courageous a putt as any man ever holed.” Perhaps his greatest demon had finally been vanquished.

  Indeed, over the first fifteen holes the next day, Sam displayed the same power and control that won the Open at St. Andrews while Worsham, a wry and likable twenty-nine-year-old fellow Virginian, was in and out of the rough, scrambling to make pars and keep up. “With three holes to play Lew was two down and it looked like Sam finally had his Open. I think the gallery was really with him at that point, wanting to see him get this jinx thing behind him,” remembers Bill Campbell, the recent Princeton graduate Sam had befriended back when they played together in a pro-am at the Greenbrier in 1936. Just fifteen when they met, Campbell would go on to play in thirty-nine U.S. Amateur Championships—winning in 1964—and anchor eight Walker Cup teams, serve two terms as president of the USGA, and become captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The unlikely rapport between Sam and this worldly, Ivy League paragon of amateur golf ripened over time into one of the game’s most enduring friendships.

  On the sixteenth hole, Worsham rolled in a clutch twenty-foot birdie putt to halve Sam’s lead. Owing to nerves, both men hit poor second shots to the par-four seventeenth green. Worsham hooked his to the adjoining eighteenth fairway and Sam’s cut shot left fell short in deep rough. Worsham got his third onto the green but Sam punched his ball over the green into the rough, then chipped to within six feet of the cup. He missed his putt and Worsham holed his and the pair headed to the home hole all square.

  For a change in an Open playoff, the estimated five thousand spectators closely trailing both players were treated to one of the most dramatic finishes in history. Sam struck a gorgeous approach shot to the semiblind eighteenth green that left him twenty feet to negotiate for birdie. Worsham’s ball skipped across the putting surface and ran of
f the back edge, stopping just shy of the thick collar. Wasting little time, however, he chipped a low runner that caught an edge of the cup and stopped two and a half feet past the hole.

  With the title in his grasp, Sam calmly stepped up to his ball and rolled it gently down the slope, his only miscalculation being the speed of the putt. His ball stopped short about the same distance away as Worsham’s, only on the upper slope.

  “I knew Sam’s body English and personality well enough to know he was zeroed in on that final putt,” recalls Bill Campbell, who was planted on the back portion of the green, as close to the action as he could get. “That’s why he went straight up to it and prepared to putt. Sam had one of the best eyes for distances ever—a hunter’s eye, you could say. He knew he was away. That’s why what happened next rattled him so deeply.”

  As he took his stance, Worsham suddenly called out, “Wait a minute, Sam. Are you sure you’re away?”

  Sam glanced up, scowled slightly, backed off a few paces and shook his head, convinced he was being gamed—himself being a walking encyclopedia on little things that could unnerve an opponent at a critical moment. He was certain he had the honor, and his mind began to bubble with anger.

  Ike Grainger, the wiry chairman of the USGA rules committee, was summoned to determine who was entitled to putt first. “Somehow the story got started that there was a long delay and a lot of confusion over the issue,” he recalled to a reporter in the mid-1990s. “But that wasn’t the case at all. Sam was visibly upset and told me he was obviously away and wanted to putt. I made him wait. He walked off a few yards to wait for a tape measuring device brought by our assistant on the scene.”

  One can clearly read Sam’s feelings in a remarkable photograph taken as Worsham and the two USGA officials bend over to measure the two putts. His feet are crossed, his right hand planted on a hip as he leans gently on his putter with his left, radiating an expression of incomprehensible disgust.