Millie
and I were halfway through our early walkies one day last week and nearing a
familiar spot beneath the expansive front window of the Rusacks Hotel dining
room. Familiar, because it is there that Millie customarily deposits the
steaming excreta of her evening meal, just as the surveillant hotel guests are
tucking into their breakfast sausages. Before she could commence her enchanting
ritual on this day, however, a gray sedan careened left off Golf Place and
headed toward us with alarming speed.
Fortunately
it slowed down or Millie would not have been the only one making a contribution
to the Ziploc bag. In fact, it stopped smack in front of us and out jumped
Professor David Malcolm, known to everyone in town as “Doc.”
“I’ve
just spent two days in the library at Edinburgh University,” he said excitedly, “and in
the old newspapers I uncovered the most marvelous information.” Doc Malcolm is a
man of 65 years with a great shock of white hair and a unique mid-Atlantic burr
that betrays an education from both Cambridge and
California. By
trade he is a research scientist and lecturer with a specialty in genetics. But
like most people in this town, his true passion is golf, and Doc’s extends to
writing about the game as well as playing it. For the better part of two decades
he’s been researching the definitive biography of Old Tom Morris, which he plans
to publish later this year.
“It
seems that as early as 1850 people were gambling rampantly on golf,” he
continued. “All those exhibition matches involving the Morrises, the Parks and
others—they had hundreds of pounds riding on them!” According to Doc, this is
the first proof of organized betting in the featherie era. Makes sense, though.
In the U.K., they’ll bet on just about
anything, and have for centuries.
Case
in point: When he won the Grand Slam in 1930, Bobby Jones didn’t earn a penny,
but Bobby Cruickshank cleaned up. A canny Scot if ever there was one,
Cruickshank had played with Jones in a spring tournament that year and seen him
thump the field by 13 strokes. Immediately, Cruickshank wired a few quid to his
bookmaker, with long odds on Jones winning all four titles. When the final putt
fell at Merion, Cruickshank potted $60,000, a sum that many a frugal Scotsman
could have stretched over a long lifetime.
In
the U.K., where by all appearances there
are more bookies than dentists, gambling is as legal as dog-walking. At the Open
Championship, where the betting parlors are across the street from the course,
even the players get into the act, routinely backing themselves and others.
Five-time champion Tom Watson admits he’s augmented his winnings over the years,
and several competitors’ fortunes were made in 1991 when Ian Baker-Finch came
through against 50-1 odds.
I
remember well flying back from the 1983 Open on the Concorde (probably because
it was my one and only supersonic travel experience) and sitting in front of
Peter Jacobsen and Andy Bean. Andy had placed a few bets that week, including
some kind of win-place-show on himself, and he’d finished tied for second with
Hale Irwin, just a stroke behind Watson. I’m not sure whether he had trouble
computing the odds, was flummoxed by the pounds-to-dollars conversion or just
couldn’t deal with numbers of such size, but he seemed to take fully half of
that three-hour flight calculating his take, which was substantial. Last year,
if Ben Curtis had put a thousand pounds on his own head at the start of the
championship, he would have more than doubled his week’s pay. Curtis’ odds were
750-1, and first prize was 700,000 pounds.
I
must say, the bookies here make it fun. You can, of course, make a basic bet on
any individual player in the field. For this year’s Open at Troon, Tiger was
installed as the early favorite at 4-1 to win. Ernie was listed at 10-1, Vijay
at 12-1 and the defender Curtis could be had at the price of 150-1. But the odds
tend to vary a bit from parlor to parlor, so it pays to shop around. You also
have the option of picking the winner with Tiger in the field or out; if you bet
a player “Without Woods” and that player finishes second (behind Tiger), you
win.
