We celebrate the birth anniversaries of two West Virginia sports legends this week.
Golf’s Sam Snead was born on May 27th 1912 and The Logo, Jerry West was born May 28th, 1938. Both are gone now, but certainly not forgotten.
Since Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer, let’s focus on Sam Snead this morning. And specifically, the early days in which his legend was just beginning. The days before he was known as “Slammin’ Sammy” — a nickname he was never really fond of, by the way.
Technically, Snead was born in Virginia and may have never crossed the border to Almost Heaven, if it wasn’t for salary dispute. Snead was working at The Homestead resort in Hot Springs, when he asked for a raise.
When Snead’s request for just one dollar more a week was denied, he packed up and headed to White Sulphur Springs, to begin a lifetime of having his name intertwined with The Greenbrier Resort starting in 1935, as an assistant playing and teaching pro for $25 a week. On the surface, that may not sound like much, but to get a stable job at a luxury resort in the height of the Great Depression was actually a massive break for him.
Snead was working hard on his game in those days, and it paid off. His swing is still considered by golf historians to be the most naturally beautiful ever seen. Snead’s swing was smooth, powerful, and remarkably durable. The sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote that Snead’s swing was “as fluid as a snake moving through a bamboo thicket.”
In July of 1936, The Greenbrier hosted the West Virginia Closed Pro tournament on its Championship and Old White courses. It turned out to be Snead’s arrival on the golf map. He dismantled the field, fired a second-round 61 en route to winning the tournament by 16 strokes. It was his first professional win; the first of a record setting 82 pro victories, including seven major titles.
Later that year, Snead was still representing The Greenbrier, when he won a pair of high-profile matches at the Meadow Brook Club in New York, earning a $10,000 prize. That loot, along with money he had been saving from his job at The Greenbrier, bankrolled a shot at the pro tour in 1937 and he was off and running.
Snead won five times in his first year on the circuit and after a victory in the Oakland Open in California he famously saw his photo in the New York Times and genuinely couldn’t understand how they got a picture of him since he “had never been to New York.”
Speaking of Snead’s early days, here’s a Mountain State record he still holds. Snead’s win at the West Virginia Open on his home turf at The Greenbrier in 1936 would not only be his first pro victory, but the first of the seventeen times he would win that event. Snead won the West Virginia Open for the final time in 1973, at the age of 61.
Just imagine, winning that event at least once in five different decades. That’s a record that will likely never been broken.