Unplayable Lies: (The Only Golf Book You'll Ever Need)

by Dan Jenkins

  For those who think Nelson may have taken advantage of war-weakened fields, I enjoy pointing out that Sam Snead played in twenty-six tournaments in ’45, winning six of them, and Ben Hogan was released from the Army Air Corps in time to compete in seventeen tournaments, winning five.

  Only eight other players won tournaments in ’45. Their names deserve enshrinement: Henry Picard, Dutch Harrison, Sam Byrd, Ray Mangrum, Jimmy Hines, and three amateurs—Cary Middlecoff, Frank Stranahan, and Freddie Haas Jr., who won at Memphis. Middlecoff would become a big star as a pro, Haas would also achieve success on the Tour as a pro, and Stranahan’s career was perhaps the most remarkable. Frank was not just the finest American amateur of his day—he won two British Amateurs along with seventy other titles—he won four times on the Tour while playing for fun, and twice more after turning pro.

  Ironically, Byron’s last victory of the year—his twentieth—occurred in the Fort Worth Open, back in his old hometown, and on Glen Garden Country Club, the course where he and Ben Hogan had caddied in their teens.

  I was in high school then and spent the week at the tournament being amazed by everything I saw, starting with Byron’s fast play and crisp iron shots that enabled him to run away from a strong field of competitors that included Hogan and Snead.

  I was there the day of a practice round when Jug McSpaden arrived from an exhibition in Shreveport in his single-engine airplane. He landed on the fifth fairway, a par-5, realized he’d chosen the wrong landing strip, took off, circled, and landed on the first fairway, a par-4. He taxied over to the pro shop, unloaded his clubs, and took off again to look for a local airport.

  Apparently this wasn’t unusual for Jug. His trademark on the circuit was playing golf in a pair of aviator glasses.

  Glen Garden in that chilly middle of December looked like a parched prairie decorated with green polka dots. These were the rye greens. It was a strange layout to begin with. Par was 37-34–71, and I have yet to come across a goofier back nine in my travels. It featured back-to-back par-5s once, and back-to-back par-3s twice.

  Byron once said, “When I was growing up, I never heard people talk about how different the layout was. Of course I didn’t have much to compare it with. I do know the back nine was difficult. The 15th was a long, uphill par-3—you had to hit a wood—and the 18th was a three-iron to a small green with out-of-bounds close on the left.”

  When I reminded Byron of the tall electrical tower in the middle of the fairway on number 12, a par-5, he laughed and said, “Oh my, yes.”

  Nelson’s truckload of trophies in ’45 says one thing about his dominance, as does his astounding scoring average of 68.33 in thirty-two tournaments, but as stats go, I’m partial to his margins of victory.

  He won by eight strokes over Sam Byrd in Greensboro, by five over Toney Penna in Durham, by nine over Byrd in Atlanta, by ten over Jug McSpaden in Montreal, by seven over McSpaden in Chicago, by eleven over Lieutenant Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen in the Tam, by ten over Byrd in Knoxville, by seven over McSpaden in Spokane, by thirteen over McSpaden in Seattle, where he shot 259—a world record—and by eight over Jimmy Demaret at Glen Garden.

  Those margins of victory bring to mind an old saying, source unknown, but it probably came from a football coach:

  “It’s not enough to just win, you have to let the loser know he lost.”

  TITANIC AND I

  IF EVEN HALF the stories about Titanic Thompson were true, he couldn’t have lived to be eighty-two years old. Earlier in his life some gentleman in a pin-striped suit looking like Rico Bandello or Michael Corleone would have bumped him off. Big shots don’t like to get robbed.

  I once met Titanic. That’s the big news in this effort.

  I’d heard most of the stories growing up, and every article I’ve ever read about Titanic was written by someone who never knew him personally. But I’m not faulting them for it. A lot of people who never knew Napoleon have written about him.

  Those who have rhapsodized about Titanic in print were understandably intrigued with the legend and all the outlandish gambling stories attached to him, many of them helped along by the man himself, along with the stunts and tricks he performed, or supposedly did, to fleece the unwitting in a more naive era.

  The tales about him were hard to resist. He was indeed an accomplished professional gambler as well as a hustler, and those are two different things. There is solid testimony from people who did know him that he was an excellent golfer, cardplayer, pool shark, and skeet shooter. The rest is up for grabs.

  I was fourteen when I first heard about Titanic. So did every kid in Texas who spent any time around golf courses. The club pros usually told the stories and pretended to know him, and some did know him, and they were prone to embellish the stories if that was needed to hold your interest.

  I believed he could throw an orange or a lemon over a five-story building—I assumed he had an arm like Dizzy Dean. Of course, I later learned the orange or lemon was weighted down with lead. I never believed he could throw a brass key into a door lock from across a hotel room. That defied logic. But I did believe he could throw a roll of quarters into a snuff can from thirty feet away without missing. At a young age I was willing to believe, if not hopeful, that he had dated movie stars like Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, and Myrna Loy.

  There was a lot of romance in the stories about Alvin C. Thomas, which was his real name. Alvin Clarence Thomas of Rogers, Arkansas, by way of his birthplace, a small town in Missouri.

  But I never believed he could knock a bird off a telephone wire by hitting a golf ball at it with a four-wood. I wasn’t that gullible.

  Then I found out how he did it if a wager was involved. Ti would drop a ball on the ground and take out his four-wood, waggle it, and pretend to aim at the bird on the wire. When some sucker would bet him he couldn’t do it, Ti would pull out a gun he carried and shoot the bird off the wire.

  Years later I realized Ti could do some of the things I’d heard about, because I saw others do it. Bob Rosburg, for example, could sail fifty-two cards out of a deck, one by one, into a hat from a good distance away in a locker room.

  And this day and time almost any college golfer can bounce a golf ball on the face of a sand wedge fifty times or more without missing. These days it’s what a college golfer practices in the dorm instead of studying.

  My first long-distance call from Titanic Thompson came in March 1970. He was then living in Grapevine, Texas, which is near Fort Worth and Dallas. I was living in Manhattan and writing for Sports Illustrated. The call came to my office in the Time-Life Building.

  I let Titanic know how delighted I was to be speaking with a legend, after which he told me how rich we were going to be when I wrote his story for a movie and a book. All he wanted was a million dollars up front. Just a million.

  As the saying goes, I may not be smart, but I’m not stupid. I was aware that I couldn’t possibly be the first person Titanic—“Call me Ti”—had ever approached with the project. I must have been far down the list, or he would have sold it by this particular time in history.

  I was also busy. Not only with my magazine assignments on the road, but I was working on a novel, which happened to be Semi-Tough. Still, I didn’t want to blow him off altogether. I told him I would ask around, talk to my agent, try to see if his story could “gain any traction in the marketplace,” to use agent-speak, and we would chat again another day.

  Which we did. A week later. When he called to try to stoke my interest by rolling his credits as a folklore character. I heard how he had set up the poker game at which Arnold Rothstein, a crime boss, was murdered in New York City. How he won a bundle off Howard Hughes at Lakeside Golf Club. How he took on other Hollywood folks on the golf course and “picked ’em like chickens.” How he had skinned that “big fraud” John Montague at Lakeside. How he’d dated all those Myrna Loys in Hollywood in the early thirties.

  That last bit of info probably didn’t need questioning—it evidently wasn�
��t that hard to do.

  This requires a brief interruption, a skip forward by fifteen years. Through a mutual friend, as it happened, my wife and I were invited to have dinner with Myrna Loy—and drinks afterward in her Manhattan apartment. A swell time was had by all.

  Myrna Loy was friendly and charming, and well preserved for a lady in her eighties. I had adored her on the screen as Nora Charles in all the Thin Man movies, and even more as Milly, the wife of Fredric March, in The Best Years of Our Lives. She made over eighty films.

  At some point during the evening I asked her if she had ever known or gone out with a man named Titanic Thompson in her early days. I explained who he was, and that he had been well-known in certain circles.

  She said, “I was making a movie every six weeks in those days. But I did have a free night now and then. What a wonderful name. Was he handsome?”

  I said, “According to lore. Tall guy, elegant dresser.”

  “Well,” she said with a sparkle, “I hope he took me to the Brown Derby.”

  I told Titanic I would be in Fort Worth in May for the Colonial tournament and two or three days afterward, to visit with relatives. Maybe we could get together. I wanted to meet the notorious figure in the flesh.

  He was seventy-eight years old then, dividing his time between Tenison Park in Dallas and Meadowbrook in Fort Worth, two public golf courses where gentlemen of sporting blood gathered. He still fancied wagers.

  I let him know I’d be staying at the Green Oaks Inn in Fort Worth. He said he’d call me there and we could arrange to meet.

  The Titanic Thompson I found at Meadowbrook was a thin, white-haired man roughly six feet tall. He was wearing a long-sleeve alpaca sweater over a golf shirt, a pair of tan slacks, and a red ball cap.

  First, I broke the news to him that I couldn’t find any interest in a book or a movie. The book people had never heard of him, which didn’t surprise me. The movie people said Guys and Dolls had covered the subject of gambling, and a golf movie didn’t yell money at them.

  I did tell him that SI would be interested in an article. He could collaborate with a writer on our staff, and the magazine would pay him a fee of some sort.

  He said he would give it some thought.

  The thing I wanted to hear about the most was his side of the legend-filled match he played against a young Byron Nelson in Fort Worth, but I led up to it with questions about other things.

  I said, “You mentioned John Montague on the phone. You said ‘Golf’s Mystery Man’ was a fraud?”

  Ti said, “The biggest mystery to me was how he ever got famous. He could hit a long drive, but he couldn’t break 75. Heck, if you gave me two strokes a hole, I could beat you with a baseball bat and a rake and putt with my shoe. He got all he wanted of me in one day at Lakeside. But the middle 70s was all he needed to shoot to beat those Hollywood people with low handicaps they couldn’t play to. Except for Howard Hughes. Howard was a good golfer. He worked hard at the game. He took lessons. Howard wanted to win the National Amateur more than he wanted to make movies. But he was never that good.”

  I said, “Your reputation came in handy, didn’t it?”

  “It did when my name got around,” he said. “I come to find out there were a lot of people who wanted to lose money to Titanic Thompson. It gave ’em a story to tell their friends. I took advantage of that.”

  “Golf was the game you were best at?”

  “I was good at cards, too. I never cheated at cards. I played straight up. I could read cards and I could read people. I mostly played poker, but I could play any old card game. Fan Tan, Crazy Eights, gin rummy. Gin was starting to catch on back in the thirties, but not everywhere, and not like today.”

  I said, “Gin was too slow, right? For a gambling man?”

  “You could say that.”

  I wanted to hear about his name. I’d read that he adopted “Thompson” when he saw his name misprinted in a newspaper.

  “Titanic Thompson does have a better ring to it than Titanic Thomas,” I said as a comment, not a question.

  He nodded.

  As lore had it, he got the name Titanic as a young man before World War One in a pool hall in Joplin, Missouri. But I said I found it hard to buy that he got it by jumping over a pool table, or diving over a pool table, or whatever else he’d let people believe.

  He said, “I did get the name in a pool game in Joplin, Missouri, before the war. A man named Snow Clark gave it to me. We were in a big game of pocket pool. Snow and me were partners against two other fellers. The stakes got pretty high. Snow saw me miss a couple of shots I should have made, and he knew it takes as much skill to miss a shot intentionally as it does to make it. He thought I’d put him in the can—that I’d bet on the other side. That’s when he said, ‘Boy, you’re sinkin’ me like the Titanic.’ I started laughing. I knew he’d given me a great name.”

  “I’ll take that version,” I said.

  In years past I’d talked to both Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson about Titanic. Each said he possessed a fine golf swing and was a hell of a player. Hogan also said, “Only a fool would play him in a game he suggested.”

  I brought up the match between Titanic Thompson and Byron Nelson. It wasn’t covered by the press, and was never written about, but it became a part of Fort Worth golf history. They played an 18-hole match for $1,000—winner take all—in 1931 at Ridglea Golf Club on the west side of town. Ridglea was a public course then, but since 1954 it has been a country club of prominence.

  One thousand was big money in those days. It would be the equivalent of $14,000 today in terms of buying power.

  Ti was in town and all the public courses were gambling haunts back then. He dropped by Ridglea and let it be known that he wanted to play “the best man in town” for a thousand dollars. Word reached a member at Glen Garden Country Club, where Byron was a junior member. This was a year before Byron turned pro. He was the best amateur around the area then.

  The member at Glen Garden liked games of chance, and rounded up two other investors. They backed Nelson in the match.

  Byron’s memory of the event:

  “I never gambled at golf in my life, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I don’t really remember who the backers were. A Mr. Brown was involved, but that’s the only name I recall. Mr. Brown said not to worry about the money. All I had to do was play my best golf—they were taking the risk.

  “Well, of course, I enjoyed competition. I wanted to play my best. About a dozen people followed us. I was nervous and bogeyed two holes and fell behind, but I played well on the back nine. We both shot 70, which was one under par, I believe. The match was a tie. We broke even.”

  I shared Byron’s memory of the match with Titanic at Meadowbrook.

  Ti said, “Byron Nelson said we tied? I know I shot a 70 and he shot 71. Ask Mr. Brown if we broke even.”

  Before our meeting ended, Titanic said, “I can still play a little. I’ll tell you what. You let me tee it up everywhere, even in the bunkers and the rough, and I’ll bet you two hundred I can shoot my age. I’ll shoot a 78.”

  I could only smile.

  “I’ll bet you can too, Ti,” I said.

  THE NEW CLUB PRESIDENT

  Dear Members:

  Allow me to take this opportunity to say thanks to all of you who voted to give me the honor of leading you into an exciting new era in our country club’s history, even those of you who have called me a lying, thieving, backstabbing, lightweight phony jerk. I hear the talk.

  It was a close election, but I saw the momentum swing my way when two members of my slate were released from custody before voting. I’m happy to say the charges may yet be overturned, which would be a good deal for our club as well as their families, not to mention their selves.

  I refer to our two new vice presidents, Larry (Gun Crazy) Sharp and Toby (Gimme Putt) Harris. I also wish to congratulate our newly elected treasurer, S. F. (Six Fingers) Cooper, a holdover from the last regime.

 
There is no question we won on our slate of changes for the club. It was a forward-looking, cost-efficient platform, and overall a victory for the common man. As I argued in my campaign, country clubs need more common people in the membership, particularly those who can’t afford it and have to take out bank loans.

  It goes without saying there will be big changes around here, starting with the golf course.

  Not just the controversial greens but the bunkers, fairways, trees, roughs, and tees. All the things the touring pros have complained about over the years.

  If our annual tournament—the Deutschland Acquisition & Takeover Classic in Association with Nissan’s More Than 1,200 Cargo Van Dealers—is to remain a stop on the PGA Tour, the golf course issues have to be addressed. I’m sure that’s what we all want, except for the two thousand nongolfing social members who don’t get parking passes, and a few sporting ladies who play tennis and mah-jongg.

  First thing my regime will do is get rid of the greens. I’m sure many of you remember my campaign slogan, “Poa annua—po us!”

  For years our greens have led the league in spike marks, crusty edges, and casual water.

  In case you don’t remember the words of Jack Nicklaus a few years back, let me remind you of what he said about our greens.

  He said: “I’ve never been able to make a putt on a bear rug.”

  We’re going back to our roots, is where we’re going. Sand greens.

  Sand greens are cheap and they’re not made of sand, of course. They’re made of shredded cottonseed hulls and oil. Or down on the coast where they’re made of shredded seashells and buttermilk pie. I know this from personal research.

  Gimme Putt Harris says he happens to have a big supply of cottonseed hulls in his backyard and he’s willing to let us have it at a fair price. Meanwhile, Six Fingers Cooper says he can make a deal with a certain supermarket for all the bottles of olive oil we need, and he will take only 40 percent for himself.