A Student Of the Dirt, Sam Parks' Education Paid Off At the 1935 U.S. Open

The native Pennsylvanian won his lone major title at Oakmont Country Club, one of the nation's toughest courses, by intimately getting to know the layout.

Ben Hogan once said the secret to golf “is in the dirt,” referring to hitting golf balls daily for hours from the dirt of the practice tee. Sam Parks, the winner of the 1935 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh, also believed the secret to good golf lay in the dirt, but in a much different way: study the dirt that comprised the course.

Parks was born in 1909 near Pittsburgh and had a father, after whom he was named, who was very interested in golf. Father Sam was a single-digit handicap, at one time as low as 4, a director of the Western Pennsylvania Golf Association and an acknowledged expert on the Rules of Golf. He also belonged to Highland Country Club in Pittsburgh, where Gene Sarazen was the head professional.

In the spring of 1922 at the age of 12, young Sam took lessons from Sarazen, but in July of that year Sarazen won the U.S. Open and was given the rest of the golf season off by the club so he could cash in on his Open win by playing in exhibitions. Still, Sam got the basics of his swing from Sarazen, who would later say (with tongue in cheek) that Sam was his favorite student and had made him into the player who would win the U.S. Open.

Parks had a slow backswing, a big turn of the shoulders and hips, then a sweeping downswing with a lot of hand action, and a long, flowing follow-through. He started with hickory-shafted clubs but made the transition to steel, while retaining the wristy hand action of hickory play.

Sam continued playing as a young man, but didn’t do anything spectacular as a junior golfer. When he went to the University of Pittsburgh, though, he convinced the school to start a golf team and became the captain. He established himself as a fine golfer in the community.

Without Training, Parks Becomes a Pro

Sam graduated from Pitt in 1931 and jobs were hard to come by. The depression had set in and hit hard across the board. Sam thought that he’d have opportunities through contacts his father had in the business world, only to realize that they had no openings for him and, in fact, many of the contacts were themselves out of a job.

Then a position for a golf professional opened up at a small resort, the Summit Hotel and Golf Club, near Uniontown about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh. It was a job and Sam loved playing golf, so in 1932, with no real prior training for the position, Sam turned pro and took the job.

A year or so later, a job opened at a nice club on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, South Hills Country Club, and with some help through his father’s golf connections, Sam got the position.

During the winter, Sam played the unofficial Western tour, which started in California and worked its way to Texas. Sam played well enough to get an invitation to play in the inaugural Augusta National Invitation Tournament (now known as the Masters), where he finished a respectful T47, and then headed home to South Hills for the golf season to give lessons and tend to the club membership.

While Sam didn’t win any of the tournaments on his swing through the west, he finished high in a lot of events and was well known to his fellow competitors and to people who followed golf closely, including Bob Jones who would become a good friend.

Sam came from a different background than most of his fellow tour players. Almost all of them had started in the caddie ranks and worked as assistants in golf shops, repairing clubs and learning the game. Sam came from a country club background, had taken lessons from Gene Sarazen and had a degree in business from the University of Pittsburgh. Sam was good company and got along with the others in spite of their different backgrounds and was accepted as one of the guys.

As for big-time golf, Sam had qualified for the U.S. Open in 1931 and 1932, but missed the cut both times. He qualified again in 1933, but had to withdraw due to an injury sustained in an automobile accident. Sam qualified for the Open in 1934 at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Sam made the cut and finished T37 with a score of 309. However, the 1934 Open only paid the top 17 players, so Sam didn’t make any money, but he felt that he’d done well enough to prove to himself he could do well the following year when the Open was scheduled for Oakmont. He’d played Oakmont on several occasions, including sectional qualifying rounds for the Open.

Getting to Know Oakmont

Oakmont was a course designed and built by Henry Clay Fownes (pronounced “phones”), a Pittsburgh industrialist who loved the game of golf. Fownes played in several U.S. Amateur Championships and made the quarterfinals in 1903. His son William C. Fownes was also a fine golfer, winning the U.S. Amateur in 1910.

Henry Fownes wanted to built a golf course of his own. He had seen the gutta-percha golf ball disappear almost overnight after the introduction of the wound rubber core ball which went farther than the old “gutty,” making many fine courses obsolete for major tournament play. The new Fownes course was not to be overwhelmed; it would measure at a monstrous 6,400 yards when it opened in 1903, with room to lengthen the course if necessary.

Fownes liked the style of British links courses: hard-rolling fairways, few trees, and fast greens with slopes, subtle rolls and false fronts. Oakmont was a challenge. Trees had to be removed en masse and, unlike linksland which was porous and drained quickly, the Oakmont site consisted of hard clay. Fownes had to design drainage trenches at the bottom of slopes to draw the water away from fairways and greens, and the trenches presented new hazards for the player who was off line.

To produce the fast greens that Fownes wanted, he had them cut to one sixteenth of an inch, and then, for tournament play, had them rolled with a 750-pound roller. The greens were fast, but true. But you had to know the line and hold to it. Sam Snead once commented that the Oakmont greens were so fast that when he went to mark his ball, his ball marker slid off the green. A frustrated Arnold Palmer said, “You can hit 72 greens [in regulation] in the Open at Oakmont and not come close to winning.”

If the greens weren’t a problem always in the back of your mind as an Open competitor, consider the thoughts on Oakmont’s starting holes made by a golf course architect: “How about this for design variety? The first six holes: A long, downhill par 4, a short uphill par 4, a medium uphill par 4, a gettable par 5, a short par 4 and a short par 3. All six holes vary in fairway width, green size, hazard presence, and preferred approach angle. It is simply tough to beat.” In other words, the first six holes tested your entire game.

There were 220 bunkers at Oakmont for the 1935 Open and they were treacherous. The bunkers were filled with heavy sand from the Allegheny River and the sand was raked not to smooth it out, but to make furrows. A special rake weighted with a concrete slab and having 2-inch triangular prongs was used to make furrows two inches deep and two inches apart. The only way out was to blast and hope. Many contestants complained about the bunker style, but the younger Mr. Fownes responded, “A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost.” And that was that.

Bob Jones had no love for the furrowed bunkers. He’d finished as runner-up in the 1919 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont, but stayed silent about his distain for the style of the bunkers. He thought his comments might sound like “sour grapes” from a loser. But after winning the Amateur at Oakmont in 1925, Jones commented on what he saw as an unfairness. Jones could play a chip, a cut shot or a blast from normal bunkers, but Oakmont made everyone play a blast shot due to the deep furrows, removing an advantage for a skilled bunker player.

As an aside, the furrows were removed for the 1953 Open scheduled for Oakmont because several players threatened not to play if they remained. The USGA convinced the Oakmont board to reduce the number of bunkers and do away with the furrows. William Fownes had passed away in 1950, and no one put up a strenuous objection.

In 1935, the course was set out with a par of 72, 37 out and 35 in, with a total of 6,981 yards, including the behemoth 12th hole, a 621-yard par 5 played by the members as a par 6. Fairways also had slope and precision was necessary off the tee to be in the correct position for the second shot, but given the length of the course, a long tee shot was also required. And the cruel bunkers and voracious rough had to be avoided.

The course was a monster, and Sam Parks decided to understand it by playing nine holes daily at Oakmont early each morning for about a month before the tournament, with the approval of young Mr. Fownes. His playing partner was Emil (“Dutch”) Loeffler, the head greens superintendent at Oakmont, and also the club’s head golf professional. Loeffler was no slouch as a tournament golfer. He played in six U.S. Opens, finishing 10th in 1921 and was a quarterfinalist in the 1922 PGA Championship (match play format). Loeffler probably knew more than anyone about Oakmont, strategy for playing the course and the many quirks the course might suddenly throw at the unsuspecting golfer.

Parks and Loeffler didn’t always play nine holes in succession. They frequently skipped around to play different holes, chip from various angles and study the green complexes. Sam said that he learned in college that to remember things it was best to take notes, and that’s what he did in those early morning outings with Loeffler. Sam didn’t measure yardages, but he made notes on what club he played from various points on the course such as a tree, a dip in the fairway or a bunker.

Oakmont Country Club archives

Sam Parks' hand-drawn renderings of Oakmont's 17th (top) and 18th holes / Oakmont Country Club archives

Parks also made charts of the greens, dividing them into quadrants and noting the break and a special box showing the direction of the grain on the greens; some say grain always breaks toward the setting sun, but that is incorrect. Grain isn’t heliotropic and grows in any direction and, in many instances, grows in different directions on the same green. Today, it’s not as much a factor with new strains of grass which grow vertically and not on an angle.

Sam said that many of the good tournament players could play a course and remember these points, but Sam knew he needed to write it down and refer to his notes during play. Some credit the first yardage book to Deane Beman, others to Jack Nicklaus, but it was Sam Parks who made the first such book, although he listed clubs hit from various points instead of yardages. Unfortunately, Sam’s notes have not survived, although he did chart out his shots on a course map for the last two rounds of the 1935 Open which is in the archives of Oakmont Country Club.

On To the U.S. Open

Before the 1935 Open at Oakmont, Parks made his usual Western swing from California through the Southwest, with a stop in Augusta where he’d again received an invitation to play in the Masters. This time around, Parks finished T15, a great improvement from his T46 the prior year.

With his Western swing behind him and a good showing at the Masters, plus his daily practice with Dutch Loeffler in the weeks prior to the Open, Parks felt he was ready to make a good showing in front of a hometown gallery.

The format for the Open was 18 holes each on Thursday and Friday, when the field was cut, and 36 holes on Saturday. In the first round, Sam came in with a 77, six strokes behind the leader, Alvin Krueger, but in the middle of the pack. On Friday, the second day of play, a tremendous gale came up, blowing across the almost treeless course, knocking over scoreboards and almost bringing down the press tent.

Sam missed the worst of the storm and posted a 73, tying the low score of the second day and putting him just four strokes behind the leader, Jimmy Thomson, known as the “siege gun” because his long drives off the tee.

At the time, the USGA did not pair contestants by score with the leaders going off last; that’s an invention of television. Leaders were mixed through the field which gave galleries more of an opportunity to see the best players up close, and with the same pairings for the last 36 holes, no one knew what was going happen. Saturday wasn’t “moving day” to position yourself for the next day, it was the day.

Parks was paired Macdonald Smith who’d started the tournament with rounds of 74 and 82. Parks and Smith had starting times of 8:50 a.m. and 12:50 p.m., just four hours apart which would include 18 holes of golf and barely time for a quick lunch before heading out for the final 18.

The weather on Saturday continued with rain and wind. After 54 holes, Parks fired another round of 73, was tied with Jimmy Thomson for the 54-hole lead, and began to feel he might have a chance if he could just hold himself together for the last 18 holes. But in addition to Parks, there were at least 10 other players with a good chance to win, including such big names as Walter Hagen, Denny Shute, Gene Sarazen, Henry Picard, Dick Metz and Al Espinosa.

At the start of the last round, Parks put together a solid 38 for the first nine holes, 1 over par, but it was the streak he had playing 1 under par from the fifth to the 14th hole that put Parks in position to win. Parks stumbled as he headed home with bogeys at the 15th, 16th and 18th holes for a 76 and a total of 299.

Jimmy Thomson fell apart and finished with a 78 for 301 to take second place.

But it was Walter Hagen who almost stole the show. He birdied the 9th and had to play the last nine holes in even par to win or 1 over to tie. On Friday, Hagen had played the second nine in 34, 1 under par. A crowd estimated at 10,000 rushed out to see what the “Haig” could do. But Hagen just didn’t have his old magic and ended up at 302 in sole third.

“All I know is this,” said Parks of his win. “I played all the golf I had in me. I was scared to death down the stretch, but I tried to hang in with all I had.” It’s sometimes said that no one wins the Open, it’s just that others fall away. Thomson faltered and finished second, Hagen faltered and finished third and Sarazen, Parks’ mentor, and winner of the Masters just a few months earlier, faltered and finished T6. But Parks didn’t falter.

Fans surround the 18th hole in the final round of the 1935 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club / Oakmont Country Club archives

The press, always looking for a “hook” or and angle for a story, could have made Sam a Horatio Alger golfing hero who rose to the top by hard work. Instead, the press, led by Bill Richardson of The New York Times and Grantland Rice, who wrote a daily column, The Sportlight, which appeared in 100 newspapers, decided that Parks was a dark horse who had come out of nowhere to win the Open. Some of the reporting seemed to be pulling for Hagen to end his long career with an Open victory at Oakmont, but Hagen couldn’t pull it off.

The dark horse characterization was probably unfair. Players on the winter tour knew Sam’s abilities as a golfer, and the best odds you could get from bookies for Parks to win the 1935 Open were 20-1. He was no long shot.

Did all Parks’ study of Oakmont bring victory? One indication is that Parks only three-putted twice over 72 holes on Oakmont’s treacherous greens, while the greens were giving others fits.

Parks won $1,000 for his Open win and $1,509 for the year. It is also the most money he won on tour in any one year. After his victory, Sam played a series of exhibitions with runner up Jimmy Thomson, netting him $17,000, and also got a contract with Bristol Golf for $100 a month to endorse their clubs.

Postscript

The following year, as defending Open champion, he missed the cut, but played respectfully afterwards in the Open through 1941. In the 1935 Ryder Cup, Parks played 1935 British Open champion Alf Perry in a singles match. Parks and Perry halved their match when Parks holed a 30-foot putt at the 36th hole.

In 1937, Parks quit playing the winter tour, but kept his club job. He did continue playing in the Open as a former champion and the Masters. In 1942, Sam decided to leave professional golf and take a sales position with U.S. Steel, where a top salesman might make $20,000 or more a year. Sam rose through the ranks at U.S. Steel and joined Oakmont as a member in 1947. He kept playing good golf and, at age 50, tied the Oakmont course record of 65. Parks retired from U.S. Steel in 1972 and moved to Florida where he became a sales associate for condominiums at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel and its two golf courses, which were owned by U.S. Steel.

Parks continued to play in the Masters as a past Open champion until 1963, when only past Open champions from the last 10 years were invited to play. Sam then attended the Masters as a non-competing invitee mingling with his golfing friends from the past. He passed away in 1997 at age 87.

Parks didn’t have a Hall of Fame record, but he demonstrated that hard work and studying a course to understand its nuances can pay off. A tip of the hat to Sam, a good guy who did well.