The 12th annual Pepsi Celebrity Shootout tees it up today at Buckingham Golf and Country Club alongside the base of Mount Konocti. Former NFL greats such as Dwight Clark and Fred Dean of the 49ers and Fred Biletnikoff and Daryle Lamonica of the Raiders headline a gathering of 18 Bay Area footballers.
The Shootout is a nice walk down memory lane. True, there is nothing truly memorable about the golf, but the football stories are always worth their weight in gold. Golf too is a bastion of great stories. And speaking of great stories, two books that have recently been published are well worth your reading time.
An outstanding piece of golfing fiction is John Coyne”s The Caddie Who Played with Hickory (St. Martin”s Press, $24.95). Coyne wrote a classic golf novel several years ago entitled The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan. This book piggybacks on a similar theme of country club life, caddies, golfers of fame, and the personal nature of the game.
The setting for Coyne”s tale is Midlothian Country Club, a turn-of-the-century private country club that was designed by Herbert Tweedie in 1898 in the south Chicago suburbs. Early in its history, Midlothian hosted the 1914 United States Open. The top professional of the day, Walter Hagen, edged out Chick Evans, the top amateur linkster of that era, by one stroke to win the ”14 Open.
The post-World War II era is the timeframe as Coyne”s story begins. It is the summer of 1946. The members and staff at Midlothian are all abuzz because later that summer the 54-year-old Hagen is going to return to the site of the first of his 11 major championships to play an exhibition match. The caveat to Hagen”s visit is that he is going to play with his old 1914 hickory-shafted club and then, at the conclusion of the exhibition, he”ll make a formal presentation of his cherished sticks to the members of Midlothian to forever display at the country club.
The book revolves around the No. 1 caddie at Midlothian, Tommy O”Shea. An 18-year-old farm boy, he has just graduated from high school and has to make some decisions regarding his career and impending adulthood. Nonetheless, he intends to hang in there for one more summer so that he can be the looper who caddies for Hagen. Along the way, he meets a new adult caddie, Harrison Cornell, who gives Tommy left-handed insights into life, women, the game of golf and his past connection with Walter Hagen.
An interesting sidebar to The Caddie Who Played with Hickory is the almost caste-like division between the members and the club employees. As an employee, being inside the private country club gates is a journey into a very different and special world, but it is also a place where one slip up with a member will put you on the outside looking in.
I won”t give away the interesting conclusion to Coyne”s tale, but it is a book that I highly recommend, and because it”s such a great story, it turned out to be an easy read that I found hard to put down.
Another fascinating tale of golf lore is Leigh Montville”s The Mysterious Montague (Doubleday, $26). Its subtitle is ?A Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery.” John Montague arrived at the high-profile golf clubs of the Hollywood elite during the Depression. A man of incredible strength and talent, Montague was also a sub-scratch golfer who hit prodigious tee shots and knocked down flagsticks. He became a regular at the upscale Lakeside Golf Club, a Max Behr design that first opened in 1924.
Within the first year of Montague”s arrival at Lakeside, he was not only the club champion, but he was also a friend to the wealthy and famous. He played golf with the likes of W.C. Fields, George Bancroft, George Von Elm, and Bing Crosby. He lived in the Hollywood mansion of another golfing buddy, Oliver Hardy, and used to demonstrate his physical prowess by picking up the 330-pound Hardy with one hand while placing his other hand atop the club”s Grill Room bar.
Lakeside had some early top-notch golf history in that some of the game”s greats, namely Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones, had played the course. Nonetheless, the general consensus of the membership was that Montague was a superior golfer in comparison to those aforementioned giants of the game.
Nonetheless, Montague didn”t enter tournaments against pros or top amateurs and simply played golf with his Hollywood friends. Along the way, he played with Grantland Rice, the leading sports writer of the era. At a time when the country was in the throes of the Depression and sporting giants such as Babe Ruth and Red Grange were starting to age, an unknown golfer who broke course records and hit the ball 50 yards farther than Bobby Jones was newsworthy material. Rice just had to write about this unknown talent.
Following Rice”s story about Montague, other publications picked up the Mysterious Montague phenomenon, always resulting in dead ends as far as the golfer”s background and past were concerned. John Montague was the real golfing deal, but it was almost as if he had appeared out of thin air.
He hadn”t. He was really a charming con man from upstate New York who was on the lam from the law. A glitzy trial with high-powered legal help for the man originally known as Laverne Moore was the 1930s version of the O.J. trial. An acquittal, leading to golf exhibitions with the likes of Babe Ruth and Babe Zaharias as well as cherry picking events such as the Philippine Open, didn”t exactly turn out the way Montague and his handlers had hoped. An extremely well-researched piece of non-fiction, the Montague book is a great and entertaining read.
So, as the summer starts to wind down, it”s as good a time as any to settle into reading two great pieces of classic golf literature. I highly recommend John Coyne”s book about the hickory-playing caddie and Leigh Montville”s book about a mysterious Hollywood con man who blew his cover because he was a great golfer.
