Sam's slammin' sand shot

Greatest Shots: Number 16/Sam Snead, 1946 British Open: It wouldn't be fair to say that Sam Snead was a reluctant traveller to the British Open at St Andrews in 1946, but he did go with some degree of hesitancy, writes Philip Reid

Many of his peers - Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson among them - were not going, but, still, in the eyes of Slammin' Sam, it was a major and that's the sort of championship he wanted to win.

Snead was in many ways a contradiction to Hogan and Nelson. Hogan worked all hours of the day to find a swing that worked, and Nelson was simply the most efficient score-maker and winner of his day.

Snead, though, was a natural, with a loose, easy action that looked as if it required no rehearsal. As a rival remarked, "Sam just walked up to the ball and poured honey all over it."

Like many players, Snead was initially perplexed by the links that met him at St Andrews. In truth, he never really liked the Old Course - and, heresy or not, he didn't care who knew it. Still, it was here in the British Open that he was to produce one of his most famous shots, which allowed him to hold the Claret Jug to his chest.

Snead had opened the championship with a 71, and repeated that score the following day, to be placed two strokes behind the leader, Henry Cotton. In those days, the final two rounds were played on the one day, and the bad weather arrived in the morning. Snead's third round 74 put him into a tie for the lead with Bobby Locke, Dai Rees and Johnny Bulla.

In the afternoon, a raw wind blew in from the North Sea, making the outgoing nine holes play even longer and harder than they did in the morning. After the first four holes, Snead was three-over, including two three-putts, and he came to the fifth hole, a par five, with his game unravelling.

Driving into a strong wind, he hurried his release slightly and hooked the ball wildly into the cavernous bunker known as Hell.

With over 350 yards left to play, every inch of it into the wind, Snead knew he needed a good recovery shot. Despite the high lip on the bunker, he chose a three-iron and opened the blade and cut it up and out of the sand. But the wind accentuated the left-to-right spin and dashed it back across the fairway into the right rough, where it lodged in the centre of a thick clump of gorse. To make matters worse, the gorse had snared the ball and it was now perched about a foot off the ground. And the wind was blowing the ball back and forth.

After deliberating, Snead took a swipe at the ball with a six-iron. It went farther than he imagined it would, and finished in one of The Eyes, deep bunkers about 140 yards from the green. He was there in three and, suddenly, it looked as if Snead was playing his way out of the tournament. Snead faced a more difficult shot than any he had executed in his life.

"When I bent down to address the ball," he was to recall, "the lip of the bunker was higher than my hat. I had a pretty good lie, but what I had to do was make the ball climb almost straight up. What's more, I had to hit it 150 yards if I wanted to get it to the flag. I remember thinking, 'you don't have a club in your bag that will do the job. You need an eight-iron to reach the pin, but the loft of the eight won't get you over the lip. A wedge will get you out, but not on'. I finally decided to take a nine-iron and try and hit it as high and as hard as I knew how. I remember opening my stance wider than I ever had, laying back the clubface, and swinging the club as if it was a hatchet."

On the way down, he slipped the clubface under the ball with a quick flicking motion. He picked the ball clean yet caught it solid. It shaved the grass on the lip of the bunker and climbed up toward the green, where it stopped about 20 feet from the hole. From there, he took a bogey six which he called the "most welcome six of my life". That final shot, a great shot from sand in the most pressurised of circumstances, steadied the ship - and Snead was to go on to a four-shot victory to take his only British Open title.

• At the end of the series, readers can vote for the Five Greatest Golf Shots Ever - the reader whose selections correspond with the shots selected by our Irish Times panel will enter a draw to win a custom fit Titleist 975J driver.