American Original (Sam Snead) by E.M.Swift

This excert is from http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2002/05/23/american_original/

5/2/1994

E.M. Swift

"Twenty-nine years ago, on the eve of the 1965 Greater Greensboro Open, the good folks of Greensboro, N.C., threw a party at the old Plantation Supper Club to honor the winningest golfer in PGA Tour history. Sam Snead -- he of the palmetto hat and the seamless, enduring swing -- had helped put their local tournament on the map by winning it a record seven times. In the inaugural, held in 1938, Snead had taken home (and some say buried) the $1,000 winner's check, and he had repeated as Greensboro's champion in '46, '49, '50, '55, '56 and '60. "All his fishing and hunting buddies put on the Greensboro tournament," recalls Snead's son, Sam Jr., known as Jack.

"He was a little more relaxed there." Slammin' Sam had even made a habit of winning the pretournament fishing contest with his partner, Carson Bain, who was Greensboro's mayor in the late 1960s. "Bass and crappie. They measured it by poundage," says Snead, who turns 82 this month. We used shiners and a jig and filled up a bushel basket with crappies. I went home with a new outboard one year."

The wonder of it all was that at the end of that week in 1965, Greensboro didn't just up and rename the tournament in Snead's honor. Because the man of the hour went out and, at age 52 and 10 months, won the tournament for the eighth time -- a PGA Tour record for a single event -- by a whopping five strokes, silencing some critics who had complained that the old geezer was taking a starting slot from a younger pro. "