The Greater Greensboro Open: Sam Snead's Cathedral

The golf tournament played at Sedgefield Country Club is one of the oldest events on the PGA Tour, founded in nineteen thirty-eight as the Greater Greensboro Open. It is the seventh-oldest Tour event still played today, and no player is more indelibly woven into its history than Sam Snead.

Snead won the first Greater Greensboro Open in nineteen thirty-eight. He won it again and again across the following three decades. When he captured the title for the eighth time in nineteen sixty-five, at the age of fifty-two years and ten months, he became the oldest winner in PGA Tour history, a record that has never been broken. Eight victories in a single tournament remain an all-time record on Tour.

Sedgefield itself was designed by Donald Ross, the Scottish-born architect who shaped more American golf courses than anyone before or since. Ross built Sedgefield in nineteen twenty-six with the gentle Piedmont terrain in mind: subtle elevation changes, greens that fall away at the edges, fairways that reward placement over raw distance. The course is considered one of his finest designs in the South.

The tournament bounced between venues across the decades, spending thirty-one years at Forest Oaks Country Club before returning to Sedgefield in two thousand eight. Its current name reflects a corporate sponsorship, but locals still call it what it has always been.

Every year, at the close of the PGA Tour's regular season, the last players chasing spots in the postseason FedEx Cup Playoffs come to Greensboro. The tournament functions as a last chance, a pressure cooker in the August heat. Sam Snead would have liked that. He always played his best when something was on the line.