TITANTIC THOMPSON: GOLF HUSTLER PAR EXCELLENCE
FROM THE GOLF.COM WEBSITE
The first of two excerpts from a very readable golf history book -
"Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything" by Kevin Cook.
Never heard of Titanic Thompson? Well, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and later Lee Trevino and Raymond Floyd knew him well. He was a notorious con man, card shark and killer. He also happed to be one hell of a golfer - "the best shot-maker I ever saw," said Hogan.
Why Thompson never played on the US Tour, or in any pro tournaments for that matter, was a straight forward case of simple economics - his own elaborately-concocted money matches were far more lucrative for him and less time-consuming.
Tall and thin with a bland mask of a face, he had close-set eyes that looked a little dead, at least until he offered you a bet. Then those dark eyes sparked and he smiled like he had good news.
"Are you a gambling man?" he'd ask. "Because I am."
Alvin was his name, but nobody called him that. They called him "Titanic."
In the years between the World Wars, Titanic motored from town to town in America in a two-ton Pierce-Arrow, living by his wits and reflexes. He carried his tools in the trunk: left- and right-handed golf clubs, a bowling ball, horseshoes, a shotgun, and a suitcase full of cash. He conned Al Capone out of $500. And he double-crossed Arnold Rothstein, the crime boss who fixed the 1919 World (Baseball) Series.
Titanic Thompson was America's original proposition gambler, always on the move, one step ahead of his prey and the law — and he did some of his best work from tee to green. He hustled country-club golfers for $20,000 a hole while elite pros like Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson were earning $10,000 a year. He once drove a ball more than 500 yards. "The best shotmaker I ever saw," Hogan said. "Right- or left-handed, you can't beat him."
In the 1930s and 40s, even the most upstanding golf professionals played money matches on the side. In 1934 several members of Ridgelea Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, put up $2,000 to back rising star Byron Nelson against Titanic. "I told them I wasn't a gambler," Nelson recalled. "They said, 'We'll do the gambling. You just play.' "
The 22-year-old Nelson, who would go on to win five majors, shot 69 to Ti's 71. He thought he had won. "I was pleased with my play," Nelson said. Later he discovered that Titanic had dickered with Nelson's backers before the match and convinced them to spot him three shots (i.e. give him three shots of a start).
Nelson admired Titanic's talents, as did two other golf greats: Hogan and Sam Snead. Hogan would recall Ti's knack for working the ball — slicing or hooking a shot around a tree, or punching the ball between bunkers to a rock-hard green.
Snead, no mean hustler himself, called Ti "golf's greatest hustler," a title that might have required as much skill as being the game's best tournament player.
Nelson, shortly before his death in 2006, said there was "no question" that Titanic could have excelled on the US Tour, "but he didn't have to. He was at a higher level, playing for $25,000 while we played for $150."
Twenty years older than the Hall of Fame threesome, Ti was a golfer from another time who still called his 9-iron a niblick and referred to backspin as "English," as if the green were a pool table. He wasn't inclined to report to a course at seven in the morning three or four days in a row in hopes of winning $1,000, even if he could add another thousand in side bets as Snead and Hogan often did.
For reasons of temperament and timing — his prime came just before the US Tour's purses began to grow — Titanic was the last great player to ignore tournament golf.
He seldom trusted skill alone. The great poker player Johnny Moss, who hustled golf on the side, once bet a man $5,000 that he could shoot 45 or better for nine holes using only a 4-iron. Titanic appeared out of nowhere and bet $3,000 against Moss.
"They didn't know it, but I'd practised for days with that 4-iron," Moss remembered. "I'd even given the greenkeeper a hundred to keep the cups where I liked them."
On the first hole Moss missed a three-foot putt. The same thing happened on the next hole — his ball was heading for the cup when it veered off. Moss realised that someone had tampered with the cups. (It was easy, Ti admitted later: "You just reach a pocket knife under the rim of the steel cup-liner and lift it a little.")
So Moss sent a friend to the third green to step on the hole and push the liner back down. "Ti's conniver is on the fourth green raising 'em up and my man's on the third stomping 'em back down," Moss said. "It went on like that for a hole or two, till Titanic stepped out of the crowd.
I said, 'So it was you?' Ti just grinned. I told him I'd call off my man if he called off his. I shot 41 and took all the bets."
After that Titanic and Moss teamed up to beat other golfers out of sums ranging up to $100,000. In one legendary match Ti employed a trick that was the conceptual opposite of the one he had used on Moss. He had been thinking about those steel cup-liners, asking around until he found a handyman who helped him rig a car battery and jump cables to magnetise a few of them. They planted magnetic liners in the last three greens of a course Ti was about to play. He had a $25,000 match set up for the following day, and brought a new box of First Flight golf balls.
"Titanic's putts kept sucking right into the hole," said gambler Rudy Durand, who saw the trick years later. "Those First Flight balls had steel centres."
Titanic played most of his golf at Dallas's rough-and-tumble Tenison Park, where the city maintained a pair of sun-blistered public courses flanked by thousands of pecan trees. Gamblers called it "Hustlers' Park" because the action never stopped. "You could always find a money game at Tenison," said a US PGA Tour pro who knew the place.
During the 1960s, Titanic spent long afternoons on the practice putting green. At 70 he was too creaky and weak off the tee to break par anymore, a condition that irked him. He kept busy by betting he could break 80 left- or right-handed.
Around this time Titanic and a few others invented cross-country golf. Teeing off from one course, he and some Texans known as Moron Tom, Cecil the Parachute, and Magoo played across streets, fences, front yards, parking lots, and the odd highway ramp, holing out after 30 or 40 or 100 swings on a different course two or three miles away. Ti always won. Some said he went part of the way by bus.
He also crossed paths with hustlers he dismissed as gimmick golfers. One was LaVerne Moore, a 300-pound con man who had joined Titanic on the road 30 years earlier. Moore followed Ti to Los Angeles in the Thirties and skinned movie-colony golfers.
Calling himself "The Mysterious Montague," he made his name by hustling 2-handicapper Bing Crosby for $5 a hole. Crosby used his full set of clubs while Moore played with a baseball bat, a shovel, and a rake. On the last hole Moore raked in a birdie putt.
Scammers abounded in the Fifties and Sixties. The next best after Titanic was probably Martin "Fat Man" Stanovich, who looked like a hippo crouching over the ball, but whose steel nerves and miraculous short game made him more than a match for touring pros.
Another trickster, Ray Hudson, beat crooner Dean Martin in a $35,000 round in which each man had to down a bottle of vodka. Martin never bothered to check Hudson's Smirnoff bottle, which was full of water.
PART 2 TOMORROW ... When Titanic Thompson played the up-and-coming Lee Trevino and Ray Floyd in big-money matches.
The first of two excerpts from a very readable golf history book -
"Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything" by Kevin Cook.
Never heard of Titanic Thompson? Well, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and later Lee Trevino and Raymond Floyd knew him well. He was a notorious con man, card shark and killer. He also happed to be one hell of a golfer - "the best shot-maker I ever saw," said Hogan.
Why Thompson never played on the US Tour, or in any pro tournaments for that matter, was a straight forward case of simple economics - his own elaborately-concocted money matches were far more lucrative for him and less time-consuming.
"Are you a gambling man?" he'd ask. "Because I am."
Alvin was his name, but nobody called him that. They called him "Titanic."
Titanic Thompson — a made-up name for a self-made man who won and lost millions of dollars playing cards, dice, pool, golf, horseshoes, and anything else he could think of to bet on. He also married five women, each a teenager on her wedding day, and killed five men, all in self-defence.
While most of Titanic's victims were hardened criminals, one was a teenage caddie who had tried to rob the gambler at gunpoint hours after one of his money matches.In the years between the World Wars, Titanic motored from town to town in America in a two-ton Pierce-Arrow, living by his wits and reflexes. He carried his tools in the trunk: left- and right-handed golf clubs, a bowling ball, horseshoes, a shotgun, and a suitcase full of cash. He conned Al Capone out of $500. And he double-crossed Arnold Rothstein, the crime boss who fixed the 1919 World (Baseball) Series.
Titanic Thompson was America's original proposition gambler, always on the move, one step ahead of his prey and the law — and he did some of his best work from tee to green. He hustled country-club golfers for $20,000 a hole while elite pros like Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson were earning $10,000 a year. He once drove a ball more than 500 yards. "The best shotmaker I ever saw," Hogan said. "Right- or left-handed, you can't beat him."
In the 1930s and 40s, even the most upstanding golf professionals played money matches on the side. In 1934 several members of Ridgelea Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, put up $2,000 to back rising star Byron Nelson against Titanic. "I told them I wasn't a gambler," Nelson recalled. "They said, 'We'll do the gambling. You just play.' "
The 22-year-old Nelson, who would go on to win five majors, shot 69 to Ti's 71. He thought he had won. "I was pleased with my play," Nelson said. Later he discovered that Titanic had dickered with Nelson's backers before the match and convinced them to spot him three shots (i.e. give him three shots of a start).
Nelson admired Titanic's talents, as did two other golf greats: Hogan and Sam Snead. Hogan would recall Ti's knack for working the ball — slicing or hooking a shot around a tree, or punching the ball between bunkers to a rock-hard green.
Snead, no mean hustler himself, called Ti "golf's greatest hustler," a title that might have required as much skill as being the game's best tournament player.
Nelson, shortly before his death in 2006, said there was "no question" that Titanic could have excelled on the US Tour, "but he didn't have to. He was at a higher level, playing for $25,000 while we played for $150."
Twenty years older than the Hall of Fame threesome, Ti was a golfer from another time who still called his 9-iron a niblick and referred to backspin as "English," as if the green were a pool table. He wasn't inclined to report to a course at seven in the morning three or four days in a row in hopes of winning $1,000, even if he could add another thousand in side bets as Snead and Hogan often did.
For reasons of temperament and timing — his prime came just before the US Tour's purses began to grow — Titanic was the last great player to ignore tournament golf.
He seldom trusted skill alone. The great poker player Johnny Moss, who hustled golf on the side, once bet a man $5,000 that he could shoot 45 or better for nine holes using only a 4-iron. Titanic appeared out of nowhere and bet $3,000 against Moss.
"They didn't know it, but I'd practised for days with that 4-iron," Moss remembered. "I'd even given the greenkeeper a hundred to keep the cups where I liked them."
On the first hole Moss missed a three-foot putt. The same thing happened on the next hole — his ball was heading for the cup when it veered off. Moss realised that someone had tampered with the cups. (It was easy, Ti admitted later: "You just reach a pocket knife under the rim of the steel cup-liner and lift it a little.")
So Moss sent a friend to the third green to step on the hole and push the liner back down. "Ti's conniver is on the fourth green raising 'em up and my man's on the third stomping 'em back down," Moss said. "It went on like that for a hole or two, till Titanic stepped out of the crowd.
I said, 'So it was you?' Ti just grinned. I told him I'd call off my man if he called off his. I shot 41 and took all the bets."
After that Titanic and Moss teamed up to beat other golfers out of sums ranging up to $100,000. In one legendary match Ti employed a trick that was the conceptual opposite of the one he had used on Moss. He had been thinking about those steel cup-liners, asking around until he found a handyman who helped him rig a car battery and jump cables to magnetise a few of them. They planted magnetic liners in the last three greens of a course Ti was about to play. He had a $25,000 match set up for the following day, and brought a new box of First Flight golf balls.
"Titanic's putts kept sucking right into the hole," said gambler Rudy Durand, who saw the trick years later. "Those First Flight balls had steel centres."
Titanic played most of his golf at Dallas's rough-and-tumble Tenison Park, where the city maintained a pair of sun-blistered public courses flanked by thousands of pecan trees. Gamblers called it "Hustlers' Park" because the action never stopped. "You could always find a money game at Tenison," said a US PGA Tour pro who knew the place.
During the 1960s, Titanic spent long afternoons on the practice putting green. At 70 he was too creaky and weak off the tee to break par anymore, a condition that irked him. He kept busy by betting he could break 80 left- or right-handed.
Around this time Titanic and a few others invented cross-country golf. Teeing off from one course, he and some Texans known as Moron Tom, Cecil the Parachute, and Magoo played across streets, fences, front yards, parking lots, and the odd highway ramp, holing out after 30 or 40 or 100 swings on a different course two or three miles away. Ti always won. Some said he went part of the way by bus.
He also crossed paths with hustlers he dismissed as gimmick golfers. One was LaVerne Moore, a 300-pound con man who had joined Titanic on the road 30 years earlier. Moore followed Ti to Los Angeles in the Thirties and skinned movie-colony golfers.
Calling himself "The Mysterious Montague," he made his name by hustling 2-handicapper Bing Crosby for $5 a hole. Crosby used his full set of clubs while Moore played with a baseball bat, a shovel, and a rake. On the last hole Moore raked in a birdie putt.
Scammers abounded in the Fifties and Sixties. The next best after Titanic was probably Martin "Fat Man" Stanovich, who looked like a hippo crouching over the ball, but whose steel nerves and miraculous short game made him more than a match for touring pros.
Another trickster, Ray Hudson, beat crooner Dean Martin in a $35,000 round in which each man had to down a bottle of vodka. Martin never bothered to check Hudson's Smirnoff bottle, which was full of water.
PART 2 TOMORROW ... When Titanic Thompson played the up-and-coming Lee Trevino and Ray Floyd in big-money matches.
Labels: THE WAY THEY WERE
posted by Colin |
See story on its own page | Wednesday, December 15, 2010
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