American Triumvirate

by James Dodson

  Shortly afterward, believing it was important to perpetuate his legacy to golf, Ben’s great-niece Lisa Scott had the idea of creating a nonprofit organization in his honor and invited Robert Stennett, a longtime Shady Oaks member and aerospace engineer, to serve as the foundation’s director. And in 2007, a hundred influential citizens and friends gathered to launch the Ben Hogan Foundation. “Our principal mission is to promote the values of golf that Mr. Hogan exemplified and to improve children’s lives,” Stennett explained, citing the foundation’s college scholarships to deserving high school students, education assistance to area military families, and financial support of Camp Bronco, a camp designed to improve the lives of asthmatic children. But its most enduring creation, many feel, will be the 5,500-square-foot Ben Hogan Learning Center that opened in December of 2011, a splendid facility of classrooms and practice grounds for the First Tee of Fort Worth, which boasts one of the fastest-growing First Tee organizations in the country, serving an estimated fifteen thousand kids.

  “We think this is a beautifully fitting and lasting tribute to Ben Hogan and what he gave to the game of golf,” says Stennett. “Ben loved kids and he loved golf. We think this is the beginning of something very special.”

  On Hogan’s birthday, August 13, 2011, moreover, down in tiny Dublin, Texas, the Ben Hogan Museum officially opened, the joint creation of the Dublin Historical Society and the Hogan Foundation. According to one museum official, more than three thousand local residents have signed up to serve as volunteer hosts honoring “the greatest golfer who ever lived.”

  Somewhere, Hennie Bogan must be smiling.

  Sam Snead remained a public figure almost until the day he died, setting performance and longevity records that will likely never be broken.

  In the spring of 1965, he won the Greater Greensboro Open for a record eighth time; two months shy of fifty-three, he became the oldest player to win a PGA Tour event. By then, his 1962 memoir, The Education of a Golfer, written with Al Stump, had been a best-seller for more than a year, and he would author at least four more books on everything from how to gamble to the pleasures of golf after forty.

  At the PGA Championship at Firestone in 1966, leading the tournament at the time, Sam suddenly abandoned conventional form and putted croquet-style for the first time. This seemingly larkish move paid quick dividends, as he finished tied for sixth. During the Masters in 1967, however, Bob Jones told him this new style “didn’t look like golf” and most likely violated the rules. It did not. Yet after Jones took it up with Joe Dey, both the USGA and the PGA banned the maneuver. Sam’s partisans howled but weren’t the least bit surprised. In 1968, at the PGA Senior Championship, he used a modified “sidesaddle” style and won by nine strokes. The authorities considered banning this as well, but fearing a backlash from the public wisely chose to take no action. In fact, neither sidesaddle nor croquet-style violated golf rules, and several lesser-known tour players had been doing it for years.

  Over the next fifteen years, Sam played a lot of golf in a great many places, a man in constant motion, traveling as much as anyone except perhaps Gary Player. He played with presidents and heads of states, celebrities and ordinary paying guests at the Greenbrier, where he served as head professional on three different occasions. “The thing about Sam,” says his old friend Lew Keller, “is he would play with anyone, really regardless of their handicap. But there always had to be something riding on the match.” Stories abound about Sam playing with hotel guests and later charging them for the privilege, though Keller and Sam’s other friends say this is largely inflated by his reputation for penny-pinching. His most interesting casual matches occurred against skilled amateurs who sought out Sam knowing he could be lured into a money match, hoping to win a check from him that they could later frame. He rarely lost these encounters, however, and referred to these players as “pigeons,” birds just waiting to be plucked.

  Before winding up his twenty-year relationship with the Boca Raton Club, he paid for a membership at the Pine Tree Golf Club in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he owned property. A common story around the club holds that Sam routinely took five figures off a local millionaire every time they played, and had a regular game with a wealthy coal mine owner from Michigan and three other heavy hitters who loved to play a standard $25 Nassau with automatic presses. “Sam would clip them every time,” remembers former Pine Tree head pro Bob Ross, who went on to teach using techniques he picked up from both Sam and Ben. He also remembers that Sam lent his name to numerous charity events and exhibitions to benefit other pros who were either sick or financially struggling, often waiving his appearance fee. “Sam was frugal to a fault,” says Ross, “but also extremely generous, especially to others in the profession. He considered it a brotherhood.”

  The citizens of Bath County were also recipients of Sam Snead’s anonymous charity. As his good friend Bill Campbell pointed out, there wasn’t a church in rugged Bath County that didn’t wind up with a new activity bus, roof, or fellowship hall thanks to an anonymous donation from Sam Snead. “Someone asked him once why he never wanted a soul to know about the things he did for people back home, and he explained that it wasn’t charity if people knew who gave the money,” says Campbell. “He had a point. That was Sam’s philosophy to a T.”

  When a local school’s band uniforms were looking a bit tattered, new ones mysteriously showed up. When a local high school won the state football championship, Sam paid for the rings. A teenager working two jobs at the Homestead to save for college had to scale back and take care of his sick mother; money soon appeared to cover his tuition. Another kid, working as a weekend doorman, once playfully asked Sam what he planned on giving him for high school graduation. “What would you like?” Sam asked. “That watch,” the kid said, pointing to his Rolex. A few days before the ceremonies, he received one just like it. Several other deserving local kids had their educations covered by Sam as well. He also quietly took care of medical bills for ailing family members, old friends, and anyone who’d done him small favors in the past. Such stories are still commonplace around Hot Springs today.

  Sam was a wealthy man, to be sure, worth probably far more than the society popinjays he’d resented as a caddie and shop apprentice, though because most of his transactions were made in cash and he never had a financial advisor, exact estimates remain hard to come by. “Everybody knew Sam was well off, but he was so private about money you never heard him say anything on the subject,” says one of his oldest friends. “That’s why he could afford, I think, to be so generous in a very quiet sort of way—maybe a little too quiet.”

  When a proposal was initially made to rename the primary road through Bath County Sam Snead Highway, the motion narrowly lost. Memories are long in the hills, and some people, clearly, never cared much for any of the Sneads, particularly Sam. “Every day I play with men who could buy or sell me,” he wrote in his engaging book The Education of a Golfer. “But I own about 100 sports jackets, 75 pairs of shoes, 25 sets of clubs, 400 shirts, several houses, a Virginia ranch and five automobiles.” It wasn’t a boast, per se, because in the very next paragraph he talks about buying a fancy toupee from a Greensboro wig maker to cover his expanding bald spot when he played trumpet with a band at popular nightspots in Hot Springs and over the mountain near the Greenbrier. This was vintage Sam Snead—simply mentioning to anyone who was interested how far he’d come up in the world, with a note of sweet self-deprecation that said you could take the boy out of the hills—but not the other way around.

  Over this same period, he won the West Virginia Open seven times, the PGA Senior Championship six times, and the World Seniors five times, and in 1971—the same year Ben Hogan’s game broke down at Houston and he ceased playing in public—he claimed the PGA Club Professionals Championship. When the senior tour began in 1980, he agreed to serve as chairman, attending every sponsor dinner and cocktail party for half a dozen years. “Without Sam Snead,” Arnold Palmer says flatly, “the PGA Senior To
ur would never have gotten off the ground.”

  The last cut he made at the Masters, finishing in a tie for twentieth, came in 1974. Yet he continued to play until 1983, when he withdrew after the first round. Around then, he went in for an annual check-up and had a full body scan. At sixty-two, he still stood five-foot-eleven and weighed 185 pounds, more or less what he did in his prime. The doctors told him that he was in better shape than most men half his age.

  He soon joined Byron Nelson and Gene Sarazen as an official starter of the Masters, striking the tournament’s opening drives for the next eighteen years.

  Meanwhile, the restaurant he and his son Jackie opened in the old-town bank building back in Hot Springs was going great guns. Sam Snead’s Tavern opened for business in 1980, its walls covered with memorabilia Jackie replicated from his father’s well-endowed archives, and there was an art gallery upstairs. A leading restaurant group soon convinced them to expand into markets where golf flourished, and a second Sam Snead’s Tavern opened in Orlando a short time later. Fifteen more followed over the next fifteen years.

  In the mid-1980s, Sam and Jackie purchased four hundred acres off I-95 in South Florida and considered building a daily-fee course in partnership with Robert Trent Jones, but nothing came of the idea. “Dad liked to say he was a golfer, not a designer. He loved classic courses and had very firm ideas about them. But at the end of the day, building a course never really interested him all that much. It meant he wouldn’t get to play as often.”

  For a time, an ambitious plan to create a “Sam Snead Golf Trail” circulated in the golf world, and the Virginia legislature considered funding it, thinking his name might give tourism in southern Virginia a major boost. After years of delays and failed deals and a changing economy, this plan also fell apart.

  By all accounts, Sam was never the most attentive of fathers to son Jack early on, but he made up for a lot during his declining years. “We grew to be good friends and very close,” says Jackie. “And Dad never wavered in how he took care of my brother, Terry, who has had the best of care his whole life, first at various top schools and now living with a really wonderful couple here in the county.”

  In January of 1990, Audrey passed away. “It was the first time I ever saw my father cry,” Jackie says. She was buried on a beautiful grassy meadow overlooking the sweeping hills that border the Old Snead Links.

  A short time later, the Greenbrier offered him $20,000 a year to return as head professional emeritus, a largely ceremonial post that only required him to interact with resort guests and serve as host and play in a few events. He gave the occasional private lesson for $500. The resort also mounted an impressive display of his personal memorabilia, including replicas of his major championship trophies, medals, and scorecards. Guests were often treated to the sight of Sam and his beloved golden retriever, Meister, riding around the Old White Course together, greeting old friends and regaling guests with stories. At quieter moments, he could be seen fishing in the stream that bisects the famous course, and was said to have a pet bass in his own farm pond at home, a huge granddaddy that would come when Sam beckoned and allow him to stroke its belly.

  Forever in love with the road, while driving his Cadillac from Florida to the 1992 Masters, Sam ran a stop sign and collided with the car of a young father of four, who wound up a paraplegic. “For a while,” says Lew Keller, “I think Sam thought he might lose everything. He never denied culpability and faced up to the tragedy in a completely honorable fashion.” Eventually, Jack Vardaman, Sam’s longtime friend and a top Washington lawyer and Seminole member, negotiated a settlement with the victim and his family, the terms of which remain undisclosed. “Sam felt as badly about that as anything that ever happened to him,” says Bill Campbell. “I’m convinced that shortened his own life.”

  Sam suffered a fractured shoulder and damaged knee in the accident but his refusal to go for treatment suggests an almost Old Testament sensibility. As his biographer Al Barkow suggests, this marked the beginning of the end for his vaunted golf skills, occasioning a rapid decline. Still, in 1995, Sam agreed to play a seventy-two-hole Legends of Golf event partnered with his friend Bob Goalby, the former Masters winner, and they placed second. “Pretty darn remarkable for a guy who was an eighty-three-year-old man,” says Goalby. “Sam showed everybody that he still had that amazing golf swing and could play with the best of guys who were half his age.”

  It was Sam’s final appearance in a professional competition.

  Two years later, on a warm afternoon in July, he was playing golf with friends at the Lower Cascades Course when Jackie brought him word that Ben Hogan had passed away. Reporters were already calling, seeking his comments. “He looked at me with a glassy look in his eyes, a really faraway look, thumped his driver a couple times on the ground and mumbled, ‘That’s too bad, too bad.’ You could see how deeply it affected him. He only seemed to brighten when I told him Valerie Hogan had called to ask him to be a pallbearer.”

  In spring of 1999, Golf Digest’s Guy Yocom accompanied Sam and Jackie Snead from Fort Pierce to the Masters, an extraordinary nine-hour journey in which Sam unreeled one great yarn after another, covering everything from the pleasures of driving in the moonlight on the back roads of the early tour to how to properly skin a deer. But near Jacksonville, he grew violently ill and threw up. When they reached Augusta in the early afternoon, he was sent straight to a local hospital, forcing him to miss his first Champions Dinner ever. The attending players all signed a menu and sent it to him. “It just wasn’t the same without old Sam doing his routines,” remembers Arnold Palmer. A battery of tests indicated that he’d had suffered a TIA, a temporary stroke that deprives the brain of oxygen, not uncommon among active seniors. According to Jackie, the tests also showed that his arteries were clean as a whistle. When Yocom managed to talk his way into his hospital room the next morning, he found Sam in his usual good form, eating heartily and raring to get back to the Masters to perform his honorary starter duties with Sarazen and Nelson. As Yocom poignantly recounted in Golf Digest, his warm-up swings were all rather sad, lacking the familiar grace and power of golf’s finest natural swing.

  After the elder statesmen were introduced by Masters chairman Jack Stephens and Byron and Gene produced serviceable drives, the first champion to don a Masters green jacket stepped to the tee. And what happened next speaks volumes about the legacy of Samuel Jackson Snead. As Guy Yocom wrote:

  The applause for Sam is prolonged, and trebled in volume. Sam tips his hat, walks forward and tees his ball. He sidles alongside the ball, waggles beautifully—he always had the most beautiful waggle in the game—and cocks an eye down the fairway. Then it is as if an angel enters Sam’s body, for he wheels away from the ball like the Slammer of old, his right shoulder stretching behind him, his left arm jutting into the sky. He pauses distinctly at the top and brings the club down like the arm of a locomotive.

  Pow! The ball explodes off the clubface like a bullet, arcing high and far toward the distant fairway bunker on the right. At the last moment it turns over and returns to earth, coming to rest in the exact middle of the center mowing stripe, 230 yards away.

  There is a moment of paralyzed silence, and then thunderous, sustained cheers shatter the morning. People jump, scream, back-pound and high-five each other. The fellow standing next to me shakes his head and his voice breaks as he mutters, “Unbelievable … unbelievable.” He looks at me with tears in his eye, and he isn’t ashamed.

  As for Sam, there always was a lot of ham in him, and with a broad grin he plucks the tee from the ground, doffs his hat, skips a few steps and kicks his right foot in the air. The crowd roars. Sam leaves the tee as if levitating, fans straining across the ropes to touch him.

  A kindlier angel would have let things end right there. But Sam went on for two more years, powerless to resist the stage of his favorite tournament. During this time, Jackie regularly drove him to speaking gigs at the Greenbrier and down to Greensboro to have supper
with old friends. He attended a wedding in nearby Lewisburg, West Virginia, where he knew the words to every hymn sung. “Dad’s short-term memory was completely gone by that point,” says Jackie. “But he could recall the glory years of the tour—and even old hymns—like nobody’s business.”

  Fittingly, the last ball he ever hit came at the Masters, on April 11, 2002, but it was a feeble drive that struck a spectator in the huge gallery, shattering his eyeglasses. Apologies were made, and Sam, who was disoriented at the time, was escorted away by Jackie and his wife, Ann, a short while later, his last trip down Magnolia Lane.

  Within days, back at the Old Snead Links, he lost the ability to speak, though he still had his appetite and came to supper several nights wearing a jacket and tie. Ann made him chocolate milkshakes and cream chipped beef. Weeks later, his appetite also failed him.

  Over the final seven days of his life, a bed was made for him by the fireplace. Sam wore a U.S. Marines T-shirt and drifted in and out of consciousness, monitored by a full-time nurse, his pulse ebbing. On May 23, four days before his ninetieth birthday, the nurse called Jackie on his cell phone and said he and Ann should come quickly.

  “We arrived expecting him to be gone,” Jackie recalls. “He’d been in a coma for days. But he suddenly opened his eyes, looked at me, pointed up and smiled as if he saw something. Then he shut his eyes and was gone. It still gives me chills to talk about it.”

  Three days later, Sam’s funeral at the tiny Episcopal church in Hot Springs, on a beautiful spring Sunday in the hills, was an all-star gathering, with his childhood friends and cronies crowding in along with Curtis Strange, Tom Watson, Bob Goalby, Doug Sanders, Tim Finchem, and many others. Bill Campbell gave an eloquent eulogy: “He had a deep pride of place. He loved his family. He enjoyed his friends, and he exuded vitality until nearly ninety. Altogether, a great life, for which we will rejoice. Now he belongs to the ages, and his like will never be seen again.”