The Flower Nobody Saw
by Sam Snead
(This is the Forward that Sam wrote to 'Oakhurst', and is reproduced with the permission of the publisher Walker & Co. New York.)
I HAD NEVER HEARD of Oakhurst when I was a boy, even though I lived close by on the same property where I live now, and the Montagues were still living when I was growing up. Golf was still pretty new too, when I got started in it. By the time I was seven years old, in 1919, I was hooked on golf, but still I never knew anything about what had been going on at Oakhurst until much later. I'm glad kids today will be able to hear about Oakhurst. Most young kids don't care about the past. They want to get to the future. I don't blame them, but if you love golf, the Oakhurst story is the key to the lock.
Everything has to start somewhere. I got my start in golf caddying for pennies, when I was only a little boy. Later I helped build the third green at the Homestead. I was pushing a wheelbarrow and working on it when I was about fourteen. I was a club maker too, just like Fraser Coron, who made the Oakhurst clubs. I even met him once. I got so I could tune a set of hickory-shafted irons with a pocketknife so that the flex was similar in each club. That was a kind of art.
But of course, to play, you need at least two thingspractice and talent. Some people have a little better touch than others. I say to some people I've tried to teach, "Can you swing a little slower on your backswing?" and they have no idea what to do. I've seen people who have all the talent in the world, but they don't want to practice. They will stay right where they are. Talent and desire-you need both.
I used to love hitting with hickory clubs. I'm sure that growing up in the hickory-shaft era really helped my tempo and swing. In the wood-shaft days we used hickory and maple, and when you took a swing, you had to wait to feel the clubhead come into impact. I had to put wooden shafts into iron heads. I'd have to trim them down. Some were a little larger than others, some were stronger. You'd have to go through maybe a hundred shafts to get a good one.
But comparing these clubs to today's clubs-now we are talking about comparing the Model T to modern race cars.
The most difficult aspect of hickory clubs was fixing them-that's where a lot of golfers should start, so they can appreciate what the club is supposed to do. I remember before I went on the tour, working at the club repair shop over at the Homestead, and people would come in from someplace who hadn't played golf in a long time, so they were dying to get to the course. And if their clubs were wood, then they would have dried up and the shaft would be rattling in the metal socket. These guys would come in and say to me, "Hey, can you do something with this?" and I knew that if I put the club in a bucket of water for a half an hour or so it would swell up and get tight again. But they wouldn't wait-they were so impatient to tee it up. So, with those people I'd say, "Just a minute," and I'd go in the back, and if nobody was looking, I'd hit the club with a ball-peen hammer and give it back to them, and they'd say, "Boy, that was fast." I wouldn't have wanted to be there when the next guy tried to fix that club-it would never have come out once I got through whacking it.
Of course, once I really started playing, I didn't do those kinds of things anymore. I became the pro at the Greenbrier in 1937, and I guess I had heard of Oakhurst by then. I know I was over there hitting golf balls across the hills in 1938. You couldn't really see the fairways anymore, but I knew there was a golf course there somewhere, though I didn't know Lew Keller yet.
Golf is the hardest sport of all, I think. You have to have so many different shots-uphill, downhill, sidehill. A guy has to have imagination. As kids, we did. We made our own homemade golf course in our backyard. And for clubs, we used any kind of wood we could attach to a steel head. Using wooden clubs makes you slow down a little bit more, think more about what you are doing.
That's where Oakhurst comes in today. Oakhurst is golf as it once was. And it's important for anyone who loves the game to understand where it all came from, how it has changed.
So if you go from a great modern golf course, like Pinehurst, to play Oakhurst, you'll say, "Boy, now I know what those guys were thinking about when they first started playing golf."
To be able to say, "I've played the first course in America"-Just think what that means. It's like getting an autograph from the guy who did play that first course. It's unique.
Oakhurst was the flower nobody saw. Now everybody can see it, just as it was when it was born, and when golf was born in America.
FromOakhurst ISBN0-8027-1371-8 2002 by Paula DiPerna and Vikki Keller