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He tips his caddies as much as $150 a tournament (plus his old hats, if he wins).
He has a picturesque way of tipping. In a restaurant he will fold a five-dollar bill into a tiny ball of paper and hand it to the headwaiter with the suggestion: "Here, put that in yore holler tooth." Guesses about his fortune vary. One friend estimates it at around $1,000,000.
Snead admits to an annual income of "right close to" $100,000, but claims that if he ever made a million, he has been robbed. He has a mountain boy's distrust of revenuers—in his case, Internal Revenuers, who visit him regularly. Sam gets nervous whenever he sees a story about his wealth: "You know, every time they read a story about me they clip it." The Little Dog's Tail. Last week, as he packed his bags for Baltusrol, Sam Snead seemed at peak form. The warm West Virginia sun and hot sulphur baths had relaxed him. Ten days of practice, drivBEN HOGAN Before sunup, an old bogey.
ing balls into a staked-out, 35-yard circle (Baltusrol's fairways average 35 yards in width) and putting into a three-inch cup (the official U.S.G.A. cups are 4¼ inches in diameter), had honed his game to a wicked keenness. His body showed few signs of age, approximately the same dimensions of 18 years ago: height, 5 ft.
11 in.; weight, 180 lbs.; waist, 33 in., chest 43 in. In his sinewy shoulders he still had the power to smash out 300-yard drives; his huge hands still contained the nuances that make chip shots fall where he chooses. He has acquired an ounce of caution—but only an ounce—that may cut a little drama from his game and save him a few Scoreboard points.
At a time when older players dominate the game (Hogan is 42; most of the other top-seeded players range from their mid-30s to 50). Snead looked as good in 1954 as he had looked in 1937. He recognizes that competitive golf is still a young man's game, and attributes the present dearth of young stars to the Korean war.
Snead expects a new crop of golfers will force him off the tournament courses before long. "Just gimme four more years," he says, "at $100,000 a year, and Snead will have made it." But before he turns in his clubs, Snead still has one deep desire: to win his first Open. He has been acting very much like a man who expected to win. In Augusta (TIME, April 19), he won the Masters, defeating his old bogey Hogan in a brilliant play-off.— And at the Palm Beach tournament in May, he won with a sizzling 338 for five rounds. Recently, he sent in his entry for the British Open in July—obviously a bid for the professional golfer's "Grand Slam" (P.G.A., Masters, U.S.
Open, British Open), which no pro has ever won in a single year.
With the Open approaching, the big boys were fretting about their health. As the late-starting pacemaker for the third annual LIFE-P.G.A. National Golf Day, Ben Hogan carded a sensational 64 (eight under normal par at Baltusrol), but he complained of fatigue and various aches and pains. "My head," he said, "is so sore I have trouble combing my hair." Snead, for his part, grumbled about a "stiff neck that's cramping my swing." The course at Baltusrol seemed tailored for Sam Snead. Its long, sweeping fairways were an invitation to his power drives.