Golfs killer gambler: The legend of Titanic Thompson – Golf Digest

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Damon Runyonno relation to the short-hitting, one-putting Paul Runyanwas an American newspaperman who wrote about colorful Prohibition Era characters with funny nicknames. One of his greatest lines was a warning: Son, no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: Some day, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet him, for as soon as you do, you are going to get an ear full of cider.

The guy who Damon Runyon had in mind was probably Titanic Thompson. Sam Snead called him the greatest hustler ever. Minnesota Fats called him the greatest action man of all time. Its been said that Titanic was the model for Sky Masterson in the musical Guys and Dolls. We know Thompson was a gambler and a golfer in the long-ago days before Las Vegas became Ground Zero for sports wagering. In the 1920s and 30s, playing for money was a traveling roadshow, and Thompson mainly worked the backroads from Texas across the Deep South. Known for walnut throwing (weighted with lead) and guessing the combined weight of a diner waitress staff (he weighed them the night before), Titanic took up golf later in life and won big-money matches ambidextrously.

He died in 1974 at age 80, the stuff of legend, and was always a subject of intrigue for Golf Digest contributing editor Dave Kindred, who spent years researching this profile for the May 1996 issue.

They remembered Titanic Thompsons blue eyes. The hustler has been dead 20 years now, and the time of his fame is half a century past. But people who knew him, who played golf with him and drove down dusty roads with him, now talk about him as if he were still alive; not only alive but plotting a new hustle. You hear a thrill in their voices.

An old U.S. Open champion tells you Titanic Thompson could have been the best golf ever. One of todays great players tells you about Titanics beautiful hands, and another man tells you how those hands made cards fly through a transom and made dice sit up on a bedspread.

You track down one of the hustlers old road partners from the 1930s, and the man says, no, no, NO, he doesnt want to talk about that sumbitch Titanic Thompson. He calls him a thief and tells you he saw Titanic right before he died. And that man tells you he wanted to shoot the sumbitch on the spot.

You find Titanics last wife, a sweet woman, and she says her mans story is more phenomenal than all the legends written about him. She tells you he lived to gamble, that gambling meant more to him than food, sleep or love. You trust people who talk that way, people who were there and saw things happen. And all these people tell you the same story: The man could do things.

So before you write your Titanic Thompson tale, you arrive at a state of mind called the willing suspension of disbelief, which means you might not believe every word of a story, but you are willing to listen. Youve heard enough to think, maybe, some things did happen.

You know he never hit a golf shot into Babe Ruths beer. He never threw Amelia Earhart over the Brooklyn Bridge. He never bottom-dealt to the Queen of Sheba. He never married Gypsy Rose Lee, never shot J. Edgar Hoover, and never caused a one-eyed jack to squirt cider in a suckers ear.

But you get the feeling that if money talked, soft and sweet, Titanic Thompson could have and would have done it all. For when the money talked, however preposterous the proposition, Titanic Thompson always found a way to do it. He was Americas Robin Hood, sort of. He stole from the rich. And kept it.

Born to nothing in the Ozarks of Missouri, he came to wear diamonds before dying with nothing in a Texas nursing homenot that he didnt try to fleece his buddies out of their Social Security checks.

I could outsmart, outcheat, out-connive, and roll higher than em all in my day, he said. And thats no lie.

The son of a wandering gambler he never met, Titanic Thompson took gamblers money any way they wanted it taken.

One story is he threw a lemon onto a high roof to win $500 from Al Capone. Another insisted he sat at a dice table with Howard Hughes and walked away $10,000 ahead. Testimony under oath had him playing poker all night with the thief who fixed the World Series, and when the thief was shot dead, the prosecuting attorney, who smelled a rat, asked Thompson what he did for a living.

There in the witness-box with diamonds on his finger, handsome as daybreak and resplendent in a fine suit with a silk tie, the hustler who had put his hand on a Bible and promised to tell nothing but the truth, testified: I play a little golf for money.

Thompson married five women and killed five men, not because he heard money talking, but because he could do it and because, he said, sunshine in his smile: They needed it.

One day in the Arkansas of 1928, the seven of diamonds sailed through a transom-window space and fluttered to the floor, followed soon after by the deuce of hearts. Each card spun in the air as if controlled by an agency with supernatural powers.

Titanic Thompson was that agency. He sat in an easy chair halfway across the room. Thirty-five years old, a thin man with a delicate face and shining dark hair, he wore a white dress shirt and a silk tie. His last wife thought of him as a fern or a willow, a litheness to him.

He held the deck of cards in his right hand and with his left snapped cards across the room, over the transom and into the hallway.

What are you doing? said a man at the door.

Titanic Thompson said, You cant tell when some suckerll bet you $1,000 you cant sail 51 out of 52 cards through that transom.

Paul Runyan became one of professional golfs great players. That day in 1928 he was a kid invited into a big-money match. Two Little Rock businessmen bet $3,000 that Runyan and another club amateur could beat Titanic Thompson and an Arkansas teenager, Dutch Harrison. With side bets, the kitty came to about $4,000.

I was fortunate that match didnt ruin my career, Runyan said 66 years later. I was on the practice tee and Ty comes by and, in a voice loud enough to be heard by the 30 or 40 people standing right there, he tries to buy me. He says, Kid, if you dont win any holes this afternoon, Ill give you half the money.

No way would I be crooked with Titanic Thompson. But I was scared to death somebody heard him. I made five birdies that day, so nobody could say I was crooked. But I was so scared I played badly, and we broke even.

Runyan is one of the last men alive who teed it up with Thompson. He was crooked and unscrupulous, Runyan said. He also was the most fascinating human being Ive ever met, so skillful at what he didand I saw it with my own eyes.

Alvin Clarence Thomas became Titanic Thompson one night in a Joplin, Mo., poolroom. It was the spring of 1912, shortly after an iceberg interrupted the maiden voyage of the ocean liner Titanic.

Thomas won $500 from a local shark who compounded his mistake by accepting a further proposition: double or nothing, that Thomas could jump across the pool table without touching it.

Tall, lean and strong as a wild razorback hog I could jump farther than a herd of bullfrogs, Thomas took a running start, dived headfirst across the table and landed on the far side, never so much as brushing an edge. As the country boy collected the extra $500 and some side bets, a loser asked, Whats the strangers name?

Dont rightly know, the pool shark said. But it must be Titanic, the way he sinks everybody.

The backwoods-rogue Alvin C. Thomas liked the sound of that. And when a newspaper later jumbled with his name, he went along. The rest of his life, he strutted on a stage of his own in a persona of his making. He became Titanic Thompson.

He made himself such a master of odds that he knew which card was likely to show up at any seat around a poker table. Should he lose at poker, he offered to lose even more by betting he could hit a silver dollar with his .45 pistol eight out of 10 times from 10 feet away. He carried a bowling ball in his car trunk, there with his golf clubs, a rifle, pool cue and a throwing rock with a flat side and edges beveled to fit his fingers. As for dice, years of practice on hotel beds made him sure a six or ace would sit up only once in 10 rolls.

What he called his smooth propositions came to be the surest sign that Thompson had passed through a town and identified its sucker. He perpetrated an especially smooth proposition at age 14, barefoot in the Ozarks, a dog his accomplice.

He said, I used to watch these dudes come to fish in their elegant casting outfits, and I wanted one of those things. I had trained my spaniel to dive to the bottom of the fishing hole and bring back a rock I tossed in. So one day I told a dude my dog could do that and offered to bet the dog against his casting outfit.

The dude said, Mark it so I know its the same rock you throw in. I did, and the spaniel leaped into the water, swam out of sight and came up with the marked rock. What the dude didnt know, of course, was that the bottom of that pond was covered with marked rocks.

The famous road-sign proposition began outside Joplin when Ty saw workmen putting up new signs on the highway. His friend Hickory McCullough owned a fishing camp out that way, 30 miles from town. Tys story:

That night I dug up a sign that said JOPLIN 20 MILES and replanted it five miles closer to Joplin. Next day we were riding along, and I remarked to Hickory as we passed the sign, Those boys are crazy. Its not 20 miles to Joplin.

Hickory and Beanie [Benson] bet me $500 each the sign was right. Of course, I won the bet. Hickory and Beanie used that same sign to win plenty of bets later.

Biographer Jon Bradshaw wrote of Thompson: In the period between 1912 and the end of the First World War, Ty became famous in the netherworld of gamblers and confidence men for the success of his improbable propositions. By changing the common hustle into a pure and elegantly constructed con, Ty earned an envious respect among his fellow gamblers. Tales of his feats were recounted so often they acquired the legitimacy of legend.

Such as the walnut throw:

Thompson sat on the porch of the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Ark., eating walnuts from a bag. A local merchant fell into conversation, and Titanic offered him a walnut, eventually giving him the entire bag and saying, casually enough:

Ive got an interesting proposition for you. What odds will you give that I cant throw one of these Danish walnuts over that hotel across the street?

The hotel was five stories. Ty, the merchant said, you are some thrower, but not even Ty Cobb could throw a walnut over that hotel.

Maybe not, Titanic said, but Im willin to bet I can. Shucks, Im willin to bet a hundred dollars if you could see your way to givin me odds of, uh, three-to-one.

One of these walnuts, Ty?

Yep. You can pick any walnut in this here bag.

Sure enough, a walnut flew from Titanics hand over that five-story hotel. And the muttering merchant reached for his wallet. He was neither the first nor the last who would fail to discover that Thompson, preparing to throw, had replaced the chosen walnut with the one he carried everywherethe one filled with lead. It was easily thrown over a hotel, tree or barn that begged for a proposition.

GOLF AS EASY AS BREATHING

And propositions werent even his best game. Thompson was almost 30 years old before he discovered golf. After all-night poker games at the Kingston Club in San Francisco in 1921, he sneaked out to the clubs practice range. In a few weeks, the master of hand-eye coordination could play. He played left-handed, with one exception. If he heard money whispering, he often started out right-handed, and when he heard the money talking, he would say, I tell you what. Ill play you double or nothingand Ill play left-handed.

He told Bradshaw, It was the easiest thing you ever saw. I played golf almost as well as I breathed.

Not that Titanic said as much to his poker buddies, one being the local pro Buddy Brent. To Brent, he denigrated golf. A childs game, he said. Probably pick it up in a morning. Shucks, he said, he could probably go out and now beat Brent.

The pro beat Thompson every hole in a nine-hole wager, $90 in damages. On the way home, Titanic moaned that his luck had been bad, the clubs were borrowed, his back ached from the all-night poker, hed have done better if he felt better.

At the next nights poker, Titanic fumed. When Brent dropped in again, he asked for a rematch, this time $1,000 a hole, but he had to get three shots a hole. The pro gave one shot. With side bets, $60,000 was at stake. As Titanic told it, gamblers by the first tee greeted him with sympathetic applauseuntil his tee shot went 275 yards down the middle. Brent blanched. A shot or two the winner, Titanic picked up $56,000.

I never shot more than a stroke or two bettern the opposition, he said. If a man shoots 89, I shoot 88. If a man shoots 68, I shoot 67. I never liked to add insult to injury.

Titanic Thompsons salad days were the Prohibition years of 1920-33. Declaring liquor illegal served best to add a sense of illicit adventure to finding a drink. That pleasure of guilt spilled over to gambling as well, with clandestine games of chance available to players in roadhouses and in secret back rooms of fancy hotels.

Gambling and sports were intertwined so casually that in the 20s the New York baseball manager, John J. McGraw, owned a pool hall with Arnold Rothstein, the gambler whose money bought the Chicago White Soxs cooperation in the 1919 World Series.

In the early part of the century, Jon Bradshaw wrote, the professional gambler was still a romantic figurea fallen man, perhaps, and evil, if the melodramas of the period are to be believed. He was a freebooter, a man who took the long chance at a time when the country still believed in dark horses. Titanic Thompson was at the heart of that belief.

WITH JUST A SCHEME IN HIS HEART

Alvin C. Thomas was born in Monett, Mo., on Nov. 30, 1892, and grew up in the Ozark Mountain woods near Rogers, Ark. His stepfather and a grandfather taught him to hunt, fish and play cards.

He left home at 16 and caught the train to Monett. There he worked as a shill and sharpshooter for a traveling medicine show operated by a Buffalo Bill look-alike who introduced the young schemer to a world filled with suckers.

For the next 25 years, Titanic Thompsons life was a blur of gambling frenzy that took him from his Arkansas roots to Chicago to San Francisco, from New York to New Mexico, from horse-racing tracks to ringside at the Jack Dempsey-Jess Willard fight. Resourceful and energetic, he once said, Ive been broke, but never for more than six hours at a time.

He was flush on Sept. 7, 1928, for a poker game on New Yorks West Side, attended by a rogues gallery of gamblers, bookmakers, horseplayers and organized-crime muscle. The game included Arnold Rothstein, who would lose $475,000$30,000 to Thompson.

But Rothstein didnt pay; he handed out IOUs. Six weeks later, he turned up murdered by a gunman. The New York newspapers had a time with it.

Of the poker players arrested as material witnesses, it was Titanic, then and later, who caught the publics fancy, the columnist John Lardner wrote in 1951. Maybe because he was said to be a Westerner, a lone wolf, a romantic and single-duke gambler of the old school.

Prosecutors believed Thompson and Rothstein had conspired to cheat George McManus out of $51,000, and that a vengeful McManus murdered Rothstein. At the trial, a prosecutor asked Thompson what he did for a living.

I run a cafe, Titanic said.

You have other means of income, do you not?

Titanic smiled. I play a little golf for money.

The prosecutor continued, Isnt it right that you are, in fact, a man who makes rather large sums of money by gambling at golf and that you bet on the horses and sell jewelry at racetracks and that you have played in a number of high-stake poker games ?

Titanic Thompson was a states witness, cooperating in exchange for reduced bail. Once under oath, though, his memory failed, and he told the prosecutor:

You see, I just dont remember things. If I bet on a horse today and won 10 grand, I probably would not be able to recall the horses name tomorrow.

To no ones shock, Titanics memory improved under cross-examination. He declared that George McManus, the accused, was really a swell guy, even a swell loser, never upset by anything at all, certainly not upset by losing only $51,000 to Rothstein, whose IOU, as all of New York knew, was as good as gold.

The next day, McManus was acquitted of Rothsteins murder.

BONNIE AND CLYDE TIME

After the trial, famous if not infamous, Titanic went back on the road and often found himself in the company of professional golfers. The tour in the 1930s was little more than an excuse to go gambling, if not on the course then in a hotel room rolling dice and dealing poker.

It was all gambling, said Jack Burke Jr., the 1956 Masters champion who learned the game during the Depression from his father, a prominent Texas pro. They had bookmakers at every tournament. Theyd make more gambling with each other than there was in the purse. Ben Hogan would play you $50 nassaus. Thompson wasnt alone gambling on golf. There were a lot of Titanic Thompsons loose out there. It was Bonnie and Clyde time.

The early years of the Depression left 30 million people with no income at all. They were desperate people whose tolerance of crime was the highest in American history. By robbing banks and shooting his way out, John Dillinger became a folk hero. People who had never seen a pistol, a historian wrote, spoke casually of the rod, the roscoe, the equalizer, or the heat.

Titanic Thompson carried a .45 with adhesive tape on the butt to make the grip surer.

He had killed his first man on a riverboat by hitting him in the head with a hammer and allowing him to fall overboard. The next four he did with the .45, each time dropping to one knee and firing up at the poor fellows who thought to rob him.

Sam Snead had heard the stories, not only of the sharpshooting but of Titanics golf game. He knew Thompson played left-handed with a baseball grip and was a good short-iron player who made every putt he needed. When Snead met him in 34, one hustler apprizing another, Sam asked, Just how good are you?

Play me and find out, Titanic said. Ill take four strokes a side.

Oh, no, Snead said. Not until I see your honest swing.

They should live so long. One of his traveling partners, Herman Keiser, who later beat Hogan to win the 1946 Masters, said Titanic seldom gave a sucker an even break.

Tyd get a Hungarian lock on em before they hit the first tee ball. Oh my, hed be moaning about his bad back and his stiff hands and how he hadnt played for so long. They didnt have a chance.

Hed even talk em into letting Tall Boythat was mehave two putts on every green. Well, hell. I didnt need but one most of the time.

Runyan calls Thompson the best left-handed player in the world until Bob Charles came along. He could really play. He was deft, is the word, at hitting any shot in the bag.

Tommy Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion: He couldve been the greatest. He had great everything, a good, solid, compact swing. Not one of those long swings like Hogans where you had to practice every day to keep it; Ty had a gamblers swing. No telling how great that guy couldve beenexcept back then he made more money hustling oilmen in east Texas than he could have made on the tour.

Byron Nelson had heard the name but until 1934 had never seen Thompson. Members at Nelsons club in Dallas arranged a money match between the two best players they knew of in Texas: Titanic Thompson and Byron Nelson.

The way Thompson told it, he shot a 29 on the back nine at Ridglea to win $3,000.

Now, wait a minute. Thompson wants us to believe he was good enough to beat Byron Nelson?

So you go to Nelson under the big oak trees at Augusta National the day the 1994 Masters starts. You ask one of historys greatest players if he ever played Titanic Thompson.

I saw him once, Nelson says. Hed been out in the east Texas oil fields. Those fellas had so much money, it was easy for Titanic to make money out there.

Id turned pro a couple years before when I was 20, 21. The members said they wanted me to play Ty, and I told them I wasnt a gambler. They said, Well take care of that. Ty was backing himself. I had to give him three shots. He shot 71 and I shot 69. The money? I dont have any idea.

What Nelson also remembered were Thompsons eyes. He was a nice-looking man, pleasant and polite, with very sharp eyes. Those eyes could look a hole through you.

The eyes also come up in conversation with Keiser. You find the old man at his driving range in Ohio, 80 years old. You ask if you can talk to him about Titanic Thompson, to which Keiser bellows, Noooo.

I have got nothing good to say about him. He never gave me a dime.

He was a thief. Playing poker, hed mark the cards, and he could see his mark. He had wonderful eyes.

You mumble something about how everyone remembers the eyes. Then Herman Keiser starts talking.

I was with him for one trip across the country. We played 10, 12 places. Good short-iron player, pretty good player all around.

He had fun every minute every day. But all the money he made, I never got a dime. I never wanted it, never took as much as a $10 bill.

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Golfs killer gambler: The legend of Titanic Thompson - Golf Digest