Florida Times Union, March 18, 1998
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ÿGolf legend Sam Snead can still swing and talk with the best of them as he demonstrates at a clinic yesterday for the Legends of Golf tournament at Amelia Island.
- Don Burk/staff
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Gary Smits
Times-Union sports writer
AMELIA ISLAND - Sam Snead is doing the two things he does best: hit golf balls and talk golf.
The swing is still elegant, 70 days before his 86th birthday. The talk is opinionated, sometimes caustic and always straightforward.
Whap!
''We're at Oak Hill in 1968 and Lee Trevino was complaining to me that he couldn't get the ball up in the air and make them stop on those greens.''
Whap!
''So I told him, 'Lee, just stay behind the ball longer.' He won the U.S. Open.''
Whap!
''It's 1950. I win 11 tournaments and Ben Hogan wins one. But it's his comeback [from a near-fatal car accident].''
Whap!
''My scoring average is 69.2. He gets player of the year. Didn't know it was a popularity contest.''
Whap!
Snead is hitting and talking at the same time, and not missing a beat either way. You hear thestory about coffee cans with money buried in his backyard, and the trained bass and all the while, this old man in a hat nearly as familiar as Bear Bryant's houndstooth, with a gravely Virginia accent, is performing on a grassy stage, proving, as usual, that he's the golf equivalent to Astaire, Caruso or Van Gogh.
And the crowd at the Golf Club of Amelia practice range is hanging on every word and marveling at every effortless swing as this amazing octogenarian, winner of 135 official championships (he claims 165), including 81 on the PGA Tour and seven majors, sends balls rocketing dead straight, 200, 220 yards, sometimes longer.
In no other sport could a man in his ninth decade still compete. Snead will do that this week in the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf at the GC of Amelia, pairing with former two-time U.S. Amateur champion Harvie Ward in the tournament's Demaret Division, for players 70 years and older.
Snead will play in his 19th Legends of Golf tournament. He hasn't won one since 1982 but that doesn't seem to matter to fans and even other professionals, as long as they can simply watch him hit a ball.
Last year at the Engergizer Senior Tour Championship in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Bob Duval glanced at his watch during a pre-tournament news conference and said to the media: ''Is that it? I've got to go watch Sam [appear at a clinic].''
Tom Watson has said frequently that he watches Snead hit balls just to look at the rhythm and tempo, as if the poetry in motion that is the Snead Swing could be soaked into muscle memory.
Jim Colbert said what he finds amazing about Snead is that his simple, flowing swing can do so many things with just a subtle change in ball position, grip and stance.
''The PGA Tour right now is mostly a bunch of one-shot players,'' Colbert said. ''They can only do one thing. Sam hits draws and fades, low balls and high balls, knockdown shots, flops, everything. And that swing always looks the same.''
Snead, a good athlete who played six sports in high school (including every position in baseball except first base), said his golf swing was more than natural ability.
''I never had a teacher,'' he said. ''But there was lots of hard, hard work behind everything I did.''
Every now and then, Snead will half-joke, half-gripe about the difference in money professional golfers make from one era to the next, pointing out that his career earnings of $620,126 on the PGA Tour are less than what David Duval made for winning the Tour Championship in 1997.
But he's clearly glad to still be swinging.
''I'm glad to still be around, much less playing golf,'' Snead said. ''The Senior Tour is the greatest thing that ever happened to me and a lot of these other guys.''
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