Vardaman, who has argued numerous cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during his career, was ready to fight for his golf partner in pro-bono fashion. And Vardaman wasn’t just some attorney trying to right an injustice for his client. Vardaman was the former general counsel of the United States Golf Association, an accomplished amateur golfer in his own right who had won his fair share of tournaments and is a member of four golf clubs.
Vardaman, like his client, felt the TOUR had erred, with the Greenbrier Invitational/Sam Snead Festival omissions his main point of contention.
“My view is that if it was viewed as official at the time by the ruling body of golf, the subsequent ruling body shouldn’t go back and declare it unofficial,” Vardaman explained. “It’s a little bit presumptuous of the TOUR to say, ‘We’re going to go back and determine what was official and what wasn’t official, what was important and what wasn’t important, when somebody else ran the whole Tour.
“It’s like if somebody went back and said some of Babe Ruth’s home runs were in a different field and the field wasn’t up to Major League specs so we should take those away,” Vardaman added.
Ironically, despite the frustration Snead felt about his loss of wins, the 1987 statistical analysis led to this:
The TOUR determined that in three different, meaningful statistical categories that took into consideration 1) the Ryder Cup points system used in the 1980s, 2) tournament performance based on the percent of a tournament’s total purse, and 3) a lifetime points-based system constructed to reflect career top-25 finishes, Snead came out on top in all three metrics.
Translation: He was the TOUR’s best player.
That gave Snead some ammo, and he did revel to the late Dave Anderson of the New York Times after the release of the data, noting that he finished ahead of No. 2 on the TOUR’s list, Jack Nicklaus, who won his 73rd and final TOUR event at the 1986 Masters. “Jack’s where he should be. Second. I like that,” Snead said to Anderson.
Maybe that bit of notoriety was something of a soothing balm to Snead, however it didn’t take away the sting of losing those tournament titles.
As Vardman reiterated, the PGA of America never recognized those Greenbrier Invitational/Sam Snead Festivals because they either didn’t offer the minimum-accepted-purse amount, were played opposite officially sanctioned events -- or both. His contention, naturally, was that it should have.
For instance, The Greenbrier, an elegant, small-town hotel and resort in White Sulphur Springs, held the 1959 Sam Snead Festival at its course opposite the PGA’s Arlington Hotel Open, hosted by an elegant, small-town hotel and resort in Hot Springs, Arkansas. While Snead won his eponymous 1959 Festival by 11 strokes over Mike Souchak in a field that also included E.J. “Dutch” Harrison, Bruce Crampton, Doug Sanders, Jim Turnesa and Gary Player, it was Gene Littler who was beating Jim Ferree in Arkansas by a stroke, with Doug Ford, Tommy Bolt, Cary Middlecoff and Tony Lema among the 99 players entered.
Two years later, Snead defeated Canadian Stan Leonard by a stroke at the Festival while holding off Player, Arnold Palmer and Peter Thomson. Approximately 860 miles away, the PGA was conducting the newly named Hot Springs Open, and Sanders was beating the likes of Middlecoff, Boros, Al Geiberger and Tommy Aaron. Such was the nature of professional golf back then, two tournaments of equal stature played simultaneously, the organizers hustling to attract the best players to their events. Only one tournament, though, part of the official schedule.
“The designation of something as official, like Arkansas, as opposed to the other, Greenbrier, which had more stars, well it makes no sense. Which is more historically significant, the one that had the best players or the one that was considered ‘official?’ That seems to me to be exactly what the panel was saying they were not going to do,” Vardaman reasoned.
He was just getting started.
“Sam won a lot of tournaments. Tiger has won a lot of tournaments. But due to the lack of accepted criteria given the change between the PGA of America and the PGA TOUR, the different ruling bodies of golf, it just seems wrong to me to start taking things away from somebody.”
Beman, who spearheaded the effort to clean up the TOUR’s record books and classify tournaments before retiring in 1994, said, “Some judgments had to be made, and I think they were the right judgments.”
Finchem, who received the 1996 letter from Vardaman, had his staff again examine the record and chose not to make any of the changes Vardaman requested. “It’s always difficult to compare different generations, whether it’s tournaments or players,” Finchem said. “With the data we had, we did what we thought was fair and reasoned, understanding how different professional golf has been over the years.”
To Finchem’s point, Snead played when match play and four-ball team events were common, where tournaments didn’t necessarily start on Thursday and end on Sunday and 36-hole finishes on the final day and 18-hole playoffs were not unusual.
Simple feuds also factored in, and that brings up the question of the 1949 North and South Open, a significant event that began the same year the PGA of America opened up shop – 1916 -- and ran through 1951 (World War II interrupted the 1943 event), with all the tournaments played at Pinehurst’s famed No. 2 Course.
However, in 1947, 1948 and 1949, the PGA didn’t recognize the North and South as official. Back then, the Tufts family, the owners of Pinehurst, as the story goes, had a dispute with the PGA of America about money. While the North and South went on during those three years as usual, the PGA didn’t acknowledge its existence on the official schedule. That’s important because in Snead’s PGA TOUR official record, his 1949 North and South victory doesn’t count. His 1941 and 1950 North and South wins do.
“Again, one of the criteria we used in determining if an event was official was whether or not it appeared on the official schedule that year. Those three years of the North and South weren’t on the schedule, so we accepted that and didn’t count them,” Finchem explained. “That decision by us didn’t just affect Sam’s victory record but Jim Turnesa’s (1947) and Toney Penna’s (1948), as well.”
During his PGA TOUR Champions years, starting in the late 1970s, Snead became close friends with former Golf Digest editor Don Wade after Wade wrote a magazine story on The Slammer. For each subsequent Snead piece Golf Digest ran, Wade was the writer, and the two men knew each other well.
“Sam never said much publicly about his loss of tournament wins,” said Wade, who died in 2014. “But I do know his feeling was that he beat the best players who were out there, and he felt it was an arbitrary decision by the TOUR on getting to the final number (of wins).
“Sam, like all of the guys back then, had tremendous pride in what he accomplished. He was proud of his wins, and that decision to reduce the number was hard for him to take.”