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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.