WE HAD FACES THEN :

OBIT : Sam Snead (Daily Telegraph, 25/05/2002)

Commentators vied with each other to do justice to Snead's action. It was "like a Faulkner sentence," wrote one, "long, laced with the perfect pause and blessed with a powerful ending."

"Anyone who would pass up an opportunity to see Sam Snead swing a golf club at a golf ball," enthused another, "would pull down the shades when driving past the Taj Mahal."

Snead himself, a countryman who did not go in for flowery prose, took a practical view: "Ah jes' takes tha club back nice and lazy and then ah try to whop it down on the barrelhead." It did not look like that.

Yet his rhythmical acceleration into the ball made him the first player regularly to drive 270 yards, and earned him the nickname "Slammin' Sammy".

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2002 9:54 AM