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By John Steinbreder
It is generally acknowledged that the modern game of golf was born centuries ago on the links of St. Andrews, with the likely sires being local shepherds who started banging small stones with their crooks into the rabbit holes as they tended their flocks.
That seems a sensible supposition. So does the likelihood that at some point, one of those Scots declared to a fellow herdsman that he would need only a few strokes of his stick to get a rock into a nearby hole – and that his colleague then inquired: “Care to make it interesting?”
From the very beginning, golf and betting were a perfect pairing, and that connection only grew through the decades. The USGA seemed to approve, once offering that it “does not object to informal wagering” so long as the “amount of money involved is such that the primary purpose is playing the game for enjoyment.” Noted sports hustler Bobby Riggs put it a little less elegantly – but no less honestly – when he averred that “the second worst thing in the world is betting on a golf game and losing. The worst is not betting at all.”
The general golfing public appears to harbor similar sentiments, as evidenced by a 2002 study that indicated only 15 percent of private club players in the United States rarely if ever gambled on their games. The vast majority like having some action, whether they were putting up money for their own match or wagering on someone else. Betting was inexplicitly and indisputably attractive, even to individuals who typically eschewed all other games of chance.
... while the big action always found its way to the golfers involved in the matches, there was lots of side betting among spectators. The caddies, too.
According to historians, the first references to gambling in golf are found in a diary that a medical student at the University of Edinburgh kept in the 1680s. His name was Thomas Kincaid, and he ruminated in his writings about odds and strokes and different types of bets.
By the mid-1800s and before the first Open Championship was staged (in 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club in Scotland), challenge matches between the best golfers in that land had become commonplace, with professionals like Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris of St. Andrews and the Dunn brothers (Tom and Willie Jr.) from the nearby town of Musselburgh facing off. Games often were organized by local benefactors who put up the prize money and touted the competitions in advertisements that ran in area newspapers. Many times, those contests pitted players from different communities and clubs and were as much about civic pride as the pounds and shillings that were won or lost. And while the big action always found its way to the golfers involved in the matches, there was lots of side betting among spectators. The caddies, too.
Invariably, those contests attracted a lot of attention, and that served to boost the popularity of the game in the British Isles through the 1800s. They also helped to bolster the ball- and club-making businesses that the first golf professionals had established for themselves as well as their bona fides as caddies and swing doctors to well-to-do players.
Gambling became just as big a part of golf in the United States when the sport started to take hold in the New World at the turn of the 20th century. British professionals who had immigrated to the States to teach a nascent golf land all about the royal and ancient game frequently played challenge matches in their new home. And as they educated the Yanks about the swing and the strategies of stroke and medal play, those pros also introduced them to the pleasures of having a little something riding on a round.
Americans are nothing if not inventive, and they quickly established a variety of different ways to wager on golf. Perhaps the most famous of those is a Nassau, which was invented in the early 1900s at Nassau Country Club in Glen Cove, New York. Actually, a Nassau is three bets in one – the front nine, the back nine and then the match itself. Presses may be proffered whenever a team goes 2 down on any of those. Individual bets for junk – in the form of “greenies” for being closest to the pin on a par-3 or “sandies,” for recording a par after hitting out of a bunker – also can be made.
Challenge matches continued to be very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the early parts of the 20th century even as the Open Championship grew in stature and tournaments like the U.S. Open and PGA Championship were established in the States. That is largely because in those days, there was much more money to be made in the former as opposed to the latter.
Consider what happened in summer 1928, when American Walter Hagen traveled to Royal St. George’s for that year’s Open Championship. Shortly before the tournament, the Haig played a 72-hole challenge match against Englishman Archie Compston and lost badly to the Brit, 18 and 17. Then came the Open, and while Hagen managed to avenge that thrashing by winning this third Claret Jug as Compston finished third, it was Compston who ended up with the fatter wallet. His winnings for the challenge match were said to be 10 times what the Haig took home for taking the Open.
Another popular form of betting was the Calcutta pool, which took its name from the Royal Calcutta Turf Club in England and the horse race sweepstakes it sponsored. This format has tournament participants auctioned off to the highest bidders, with the winners taking home the largest share of the pool. It was customary at many places for the person or persons who had been “bought” to acquire half their team from the winning bidder.
Calcuttas became a staple of country club member-guest tournaments through the mid-1900s. But they fell sharply out of favor with the USGA when a couple of golf sharks playing with illegitimate handicaps – and in the case of one with an assumed name – won more than $16,000 at a 1955 tournament at tony Deepdale Club on Long Island in New York.
Hard as it may be to believe today, Augusta National Golf Club ran a Calcutta for the Masters from 1934 to 1952. Initially held at the Bon Air Hotel in town, the auction eventually was moved to the club, with Augusta National members and tournament contestants bidding against each other. Not surprisingly, Bobby Jones often commanded the highest price in the early years of the tournament. The famously devout Byron Nelson, who neither smoked, drank nor swore, once allowed that the only time he gambled was when Hogan’s name came up for auction in the early part of the Hawk’s career, and no one raised their hand. “God forgive me,” Nelson is reported to have said after deciding to “buy” his good friend to spare his fellow Texan the embarrassment of not being backed.
Even though he occasionally participated in the affair, longtime Augusta National chairman Clifford Roberts decided to shut down his club’s Calcutta in 1952, largely due to concerns the USGA expressed on the activity, even before the Deepdale scandal. But an independent auction continued to be staged at the Bon Air for several years after that, often drawing a pool that exceeded the actual prize money meted out for tournament competitors. In fact, newspaper reports show that the handle for the 1956 Calcutta at the Bon Air came to $50,000, while the total purse at the Masters was $41,450. Sam Snead brought the highest price in that auction, at $2,300, followed by Cary Middlecoff for $2,100 and Hogan at $1,800.
Roberts went to great lengths to disassociate the club from that Calcutta, issuing a statement in spring 1956 saying that “the club has nothing to do whatsoever with the public pool held at the Bon Air Hotel where the players in the Masters are auctioned off,” and adding that Augusta National “had made a careful check with each of our members and do not believe a single one has participated in any way with that pool.”
Like their brethren in golf’s ancestral home, American caddies are largely incapable of resisting a little action on the golf course, as a story involving Roberts and former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and some loopers at Augusta National demonstrates.
Ike and Roberts were engaged in a four-ball match at the club when the former five-star general addressed a testy 4-footer on one of the closing holes. Eisenhower, a notoriously poor putter, surely was relieved when Roberts suddenly announced: “That’s good, Mr. President.” But one of the caddies in the group was having none of that, saying: “Not by me, it ain’t.”
Stories also abound of great golf hustlers who have found numerous ways to fleece their marks. Perhaps the most notorious was Alvin Clarence “Titanic” Thompson. In addition to being a world-class poker player and an unparalleled marksman, the Arkansian was also a very skilled golfer. Ambidextrous and self-taught, Thompson scored as well from either side of the ball. And a favorite approach of his was to beat a man playing right-handed and then bet him double or nothing that he could also prevail in a subsequent match as a lefty.
Thompson also liked to engage promising young players to help hustle country club golfers, and among those who joined him on such endeavors was a young Ben Hogan and in later years an even younger Lee Elder. Titanic also was the one who sponsored Raymond Floyd in a famous big-money match in Texas in the mid-1960s against a young assistant club professional named Lee Trevino. The two played three 18-hole matches in three days, the backers of both players betting thousands of dollars as Trevino prevailed in the first two contests before losing to Floyd by a stroke in the third.
Thinking of those competitions and the big-money games that tour professionals will play in practice round matches today, it is apparent that very little has changed in the decades since Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris were teaming up on the links of St. Andrews. The same holds true for recreational golfers who more than a century later continue to engage in weekend games with their good mates.
Golf endures, and so does the betting that for most people only enhances the pleasure.
Top: St. Andrews notables with Old Tom Morris, Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn in the 1850s
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