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4-16-09
BOOKS
Gambling and golf have been yoked since the game’s earliest days, according to Bohn’s entertaining history of betting on golf, not that that is big news. In 2002 72 percent of golfers polled by Golf magazine bet on their games, and in a 2006 Golf Digest online poll 93 percent of those responding bet at least occasionally on the course.
So Bohn is preaching to the wagering choir, which in his stories includes Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Sam Snead and just about any player you could name. Woods, Bohn writes, once took $5 while playing with famous rich man Warren Buffet – while playing on his knees. It’s just part of the game’s tradition. Some of the earliest Scots to take up the game played for animal pelts, which some think is where we got the skins game. Fred Couples, say thank you.
Bohn tells of wagers large and small by the likes of Titanic Thompson, perhaps the greatest gambler the game has seen, who would choose a “stranger” in the crowd to be his teammate in money matches. It wasn’t his fault the duped opponents didn’t know the stranger was Lee Elder, in his pre-Tour days.
Al Capone would play for $500 a hole, Bohn writes, and Walter Hagen once bet he’d make a hole-in-one – and then did. Howard Hughes liked an edge when he played for cash. Bohn describes how Hughes had a home on the eighth hole of one course and “just as his opponents prepared to putt, Hughes motioned toward the house and out came a nude woman.” The distraction usually pushed the putt off line.
But for every big money story – Michael Jordan playing for, and losing, $1.25 million, for example – there is another about the wager we all know better. When Herb Kohler met George H.W. Bush on the first tee at Pebble Beach in 1995, Bohn writes, Kohler declared his normal game was a $10 Nassau, $2 skins and Honest John (predicting your score) for $1.
“Mr. Kohler,” Bush said, “if you play with me, it’s a $1 Nassau.”
“Mr. President,” Kohler replied, “I accept.”
It’s a good read. I’ll, er, bet you would like it. –Dennis McCann
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