When he turned up in California in the 1930s, John Montague quickly became friends with some of the biggest names in Hollywood; he lived with Oliver Hardy, whom he could lift with one hand onto the country club bar, and played golf with the likes of Howard Hughes, W.C. Fields and one of his closest friends, Bing Crosby. When he bested Crosby in a one-hole showdown playing with only a rake, a shovel and a bat, his legend grew ever bigger, as it did when he knocked a bird off a wire from 170 yards away.
 
Amazing, simply amazing.

Montague shot such low scores that many wondered why he wouldn’t enter tournaments. Once he quit on the 18th hole rather than set a new course record, which was puzzling, as was his reluctance to be photographed. Still, the great sportswriter Grantland Rice played with him enough to suggest John Montague might just be the greatest living golfer, and the writer Westbrook Pegler, piling on, declared that Montague seemed “to combine the fabulous prowess of Paul Bunyan, John Henry and Popeye the Sailor … ”

The legend, let loose, was running wild. That explains the national reaction when Time magazine finally published a photo of the mysterious golf giant, who police in upstate New York recognized as being LaVerne Moore, a onetime bootlegger and fugitive wanted for an armed robbery years earlier. “Montague, Golfer, Held as Bandit,” one headline declared, while another writer noted that for a man who would have been better off with a low profile, Montague/Moore “played golf too well for his own good.” What it earned him was a trip back to New York for a trial that would be followed from coast to coast – Bing Crosby was there to meet him at the train station – and force him to spend the rest of his life trying to put back the pieces of his no longer mysterious life. 
 
Montville’s treatment of Montague and his celebrity – think a cross between O.J. Simpson and Paris Hilton, which was more than enough for an era when mass media was limited to newspapers and magazines – makes for an engaging read about a long-gone era. Montville has previously written best-selling books about Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, and while his subject here cannot hold a candle to those men and their accomplishments, his star somehow shone just as bright across this land in the glamour of the 1930s. Never did he lose his luster in the years after his true identity was exposed; a match between Montague (Moore legally changed his name after the trial) and Babe Ruth drew so many star-struck spectators that fairways became too clogged for play and the golf had to be called off.
 
Once rid of his dark secret, the player one writer called “the only man brought to trial for being too good a golfer” was free to play before crowds, even to be photographed. But by then Montague’s Hollywood lifestyle had taken its own toll, and the man who had been carried from a courtroom on the shoulders of his fans never was carried off a golf course by his gallery. There’s no mystery there, but maybe some poetic justice.