Winter Troupe

The basic income of the average golf professional is derived from the sale of golf balls. If he is employed by a country club of average wealth and size, the average professional's revenue from teaching, the sale of golf equipment and the concession for shining the members' clubs amounts to about $5,000 a year. In the winter months, when the majority of the 2,000,000 golfers in the U. S. turn their hands to bridge and the radio, the majority of the jobless professionals go south. Some are hired to accompany rich club members to their winter playgrounds. Some find comfortable berths at flourishing hotels. But a goodly portion embark on one of the most extraordinary tours in the realm of sport.

Beside professional golfers, only rodeo contestants are willing to travel some 8,000 miles, pay their own expenses, receive no guarantee of being a dollar richer when they return. Every year some 300 trouping golfers jaunt from town to town, from coast-to-coast, making three-day stands in a carefully planned route known as the "grapefruit circuit" (see map). Starting at sporty Pinehurst with the Mid-South Open in November [No. 1 on the map], they move down the coast one jump ahead of the thermometer, spend the month of December shuttling around Greater Miami and Nassau [tournaments this year: $10,000 Miami-Biltmore Open (No. 2), $3,500 Nassau Open (No. j), $3,000 Miami Open (No. 4), $4,000 Holly-wood Beach Hotel Open (No. 5)], swing over to California for a midwinter stand, then return to Florida [this year via the $5,000 Crescent City Open at New Orleans (No. 12)1, work their way up the coast to climax the season with Bobby Jones at his Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga. [Consecutive map numbers follow tour.~]

To be able to join this caravan is the goal of the average U. S. golf professional. Not only does it give him an opportunity to maintain a competitive edge to his game but here is his chance to observe at close range the better-than-average professionals--topnotchers like Harry Cooper, Horton Smith, Johnny Revolta, Henry Pic-ard--who play in the winter circuit because i) they are on the payroll ($5,000 to $10,000 a year) of U. S. sporting-goods manufacturers to publicize their products, and 2) they usually win from $3,000 to $6,000 in prize money during the tour. But most of all, the average pro knows that in this troupe the lowliest member may suddenly become the leading man at some performance, may win a few hun-dred dollars and get some press notices which will help him find a better job next year.

A larger group than ever started off this year. For fresh in the minds of many was the fabulous feat of Ralph Guldahl, who, debt-laden and jobless, started out on the grapefruit circuit last winter with borrowed clubs and a wheezing jalopy, won $3,500, went on to win the U. S. Open championship last summer and wound up the year with $8,600 in prize money, a lucrative winter job at the Miami-Biltmore and a potential 1938 income of some $25,000 from endorsing golf equipment, exhibition matches, magazine articles and other pickings & perquisites that fall to a U. S. champion.

By last week the winter troupers had reached Los Angeles for the high spot of the season--the $5,000 Los Angeles Open, sponsored by the local Times. Warming up for the opening round, on the sunny municipal links at Griffith Park, the top-notch golfers of the U. S., as well as the obscure hopefuls, experienced more than their usual pre-tournament "yips" (Jitters). For this was the No. i tournament of the West Coast and, although it was almost midway in the winter circuit, it was the beginning of a new year and a new race for money-winning honors. This. too, was the first tournament in which they were officially compelled by the new U. S. Golf Association ruling (TIME, Jan. 11, 1937) to use not more than 14 clubs.* And worst of all--there was Sam Snead.

A little over a year ago the name Sam Snead might have been that of a wrestler or a race horse to the majority of U. S. sport addicts. But to a little rural group round Hot Springs, Va., Sam Snead was the youngest of the five Snead boys, the one who always kept "within hollering distance of his mother," the one who was a golf pro over at the Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur and could drive 35 balls in a row for an average of 285 yards. Some of the drugstore hillbillies even ventured to say he was the best golfer in the world.

In 1937 Ralph Guldahl made the great comeback of the year. But Sam Snead made the great come-up. A million or more U. S. sport addicts now agree with the Virginia hillbillies, and some experts, notably Gene Sarazen, go so far as to say he is the greatest golfer ever developed in the U. S. Making his bigtime debut in the winter circuit last year, 24-year-old Samuel Jackson Snead captured the favor of golf galleries by his tremendous power and precise timing, his natural swing, his titanic stretch finishes. He began to draw galleries reminiscent of the Hagen, Jones and Sarazen eras. By the time the No. i U. S. tournament of the year, the National Open, came around in June, Sam Snead was favored to win--an unheard of predicament for a first-year man. And more unheard of was the fact that a first-year man lived up to his reputation in his first national championship tournament. Although Sam Snead did not win the tournament he came within a stroke of tying the U. S. open championship record with a phenomenal 283, missed the title only because Ralph Guldahl played one of the most heroic last rounds in the annals of golf--to break the record with 281.

On this winter's tour, Sam Snead has proved he is no.flash in the pan. In two weeks of play, ending Christmas Day, the cool, phlegmatic juvenile lead had won the Miami Open, the Nassau Open and placed fourth in the Miami-Biltmore Open. He had won $2,000 in two weeks, had played twelve rounds of grueling competitive golf with an average of less than 69 strokes a round. In the Miami Open he had reached his peak when he zoomed away from the field to finish 13 strokes under par, scoring a 68, 67, 66, 66. Sam Snead became a nationwide sensation.

So, at Griffith Park last week, it was Sam Snead against the field. In the open-ing round, Sam Snead started off in the same threesome with Jimmy Thomson of Shawnee-on-the-Delaware. Snead shot a 73, Thomson a 65. At the end of the second round Jimmy Thomson, who used to be known as the husband of famed Silent Cinemactress Viola Dana but is now known in his own right as the longest-driving golfer in the world, led the field with 131--a new U. S. record for 36 holes. Two days later, when they divided up the prize money (increased to $7,500 on the final day because of unexpectedly large gate receipts), husky Jimmy Thomson, the winner, received $2.100 for a record-breaking 273, four strokes better than second-place John Revolta. Sam Snead was only a bugaboo.

-A 1938 composite bag of clubs--arrived at by polling 17 leading pros--contains a driver, brassie, spoon, irons from No. i through 9, a sand-wedge and putter.

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