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Sam did not even own a full set of clubs. He had a couple of battered woods, no irons, and a bag with a hole in it. He took his $10 salary (for two weeks' work) and made a down payment on a cheap set of irons. At the Cascades he had few customers, plenty of time to practice. Within two weeks Snead could beat both Homestead professionals. In 1935 Freddy Martin, golf manager at the rival Greenbrier. spotted Snead. For $45 a month, room & board, he lured Sam across the mountains to the Greenbrier. (With the exception of one year at Shawnee-on-Delaware and the 2½ wartime years he spent in the Navy, Sam has been headquartered at the Green-brier.) Says Martin, who has a native Scot's canny eye for a top golfer; "That swing of Sam's caused me to predict in 1936 that he would break 60 on a regulation 18-hole golf course." Breaking 60 in regulation golf is the rough equivalent of running the four-minute mile in regulation track, and Snead had never quite fulfilled Martin's great expectations, though he carded a 57 and a 58 on non-regulation courses.
Last year he missed a score of 59 on the Greenbrier's championship Old White course when he flubbed a two-foot putt.
The Hero. In the summer of 1936, with Martin's blessing and $50 in his pocket, Snead took the day coach to Pennsylvania for the Hershey Open and his nervous tee-off in big-time tournament golf. His first two drives landed in a stream, but Sam pulled himself together and finished in sixth place. That autumn he went to Florida. At the Miami Open he won $108 and signed a contract to endorse Dunlop golfing equipment for $500 and his clubs and balls. "Ah had $300 and ah was $800 rich," he recalls, rolling his eyes.
Sam and Johnny Bulla, another young hopeful, headed for the West Coast in Bulk's Ford jalopy. Snead, who had grave misgivings about his own skill, suggested to Bulla that they split their winnings.
"I said nothing doing, you're not good enough," Bulla recalls. "I think by the end of the year I had won about $500 and Sam had knocked down $10,000." Snead became the overnight sensation of golf. He took sixth place in the Los Angeles Open, then won the Oakland Open and the Bing Crosby tournament over the full field of America's top professionals. Sportswriters dubbed him "Slamming Sammy." In Los Angeles one day, on a practice tee, Snead tried out a decrepit driver belonging to Henry Picard.
He liked the feel of it and Picard, who was planning to throw the club away, sold it to him for $5.50. The driver cured Snead's troublesome hook, and he has carried it in his golf bag ever since, broken and repaired a dozen times. (Snead estimates that he has won more than $5,000 with it in driving contests alone.) Snead and Fred Corcoran, then tournament manager for the P.G.A., became the Gold Dust twins. Together they pulled golf out of the doldrums. Corcoran, an entrepreneur with a leprechaun nose for pots of gold, succeeded in getting the annual tournament antes raised from $100,000 in 1936 to nearly $600,000 in 1947. The young Snead provided the public with a golfing hero like no one since the golden days of Jones and Hagen.