For Sam The Price Is Always Right

"Hey," he said to the others, "I'll play your best ball from here in."

Jim Raymond said, "Well, I dunno, I'm not...."

"C'mon, Pidge, you're gonna get hot. You know you can play better."

"You're crazy if you do it," Chuck Kelly said. "I'll go along, but you're crazy if you do it."

"Hell, you boys are shooting par, and look at me? I ain't done nothing."

The mumbling continued until the bet was made. "Don't you like the way he did that?" Jim Raymond said. " 'You three big bad guys against poor little me.' So why am I smiling?"

"What does he mean 'Pidge?' "

"Short for pigeon. He knows I hate it."

Snead plugged along, only moderately sensational, unable to stem the tide of his opponents' best-ball birdies and handicaps. But his putting began to come around on the back nine, and he gained ground; the irony was inescapable. On the tee his swing is the prettiest in golf; on the green his stroke is a curiosity. Sam faced the hole, crouching beside the ball as if he were about to slalom with a single ski. His right hand held the club down the shaft and his left, at the top, acted as a fulcrum. The pendulum action all but eliminated wrist movement, the root of most putting failures. Snead has called this invention the "sidesaddle."

He said he had started putting that way—except then he hit the ball between his legs, croquet style—"about nine years ago in the middle of the PGA when I got the yips so bad it was that or quit." When crossing the putting line was outlawed in 1968, he simply slid his right leg over to meet the left, enhancing the looks of the stroke, though not enough to satisfy the purists. ("Hogan would never have done it.")