Stat profiles for 1500 golfers
Gambling, Gamblers and golf
First on GolfObserver: October 10, 2004
Bob Rosburg has never been averse to a little wager on a round of golf. He's also seen and played with a few characters who were known to get into some big-money games, like Martin "Fat Man" Stanovich, Smiley Quick, and a young Raymond Floyd.
Now as Dave Marr said for almost three decades, "Back to you Rossie."
- GolfObserver editors
------------------------------------------------------------When I was growing up in San Francisco, there were a lot of good players around who liked to play money games. Of course, I didn't have much money as a teenager and my dad didn't want me to play for a lot. But I would get involved as somebody's partner, and if we won I would get 10 percent or something.
These weren't huge money games--$50 Nassaus or something like that. But it made you want to win. I think it was good. A lot of the kids in San Francisco in those days, Ken Venturi, who's three years younger than me, and George Archer, who came along later, used to play in that kind of game. I really think it made everybody a better player.
Nowadays, kids don't seem to play for any kind of money. They go to college on scholarship and they go first-class in airplanes. They're brought up in a different world.
One of the guys in San Francisco in those days was Martin Stanovich, who was known as the Fat Man. He could really play. I don't think he could play as well then as a younger man as he did later on when he started hustling everybody in Florida, but he was a good player.
I played with the Fat Man a lot in those days. Everybody called him a hustler, and in those early days he probably was. But he became a lot better player as he got older. I remember one winter, after Ed Furgol had won the U.S. Open in 1954, he played Stanovich for about two straight weeks, every day, down in Florida. He was giving Stanovich just one shot a side, and he was the National Open champion! And Stan was no kid then, he must have been close to 50.
Some people complained about Stanovich. But I knew him all of his life and he had a big heart, took care of a lot of people. Sure, he liked to beat you out of your money whether it was betting horses, basketball, football or anything. He probably won a lot of money playing golf, but he probably lost more betting the other things.
Another guy that I played with was Smiley Quick. He lived in Los Angeles, but I got to know him through amateur golf, starting in the 1940 California State Amateur when I was just 14. He was a feisty little guy. He was gruff. He just wanted to beat the hell out of you, whether you were 14 years old or 60, it didn't matter.
Smiley was a great gambler. He didn't have the greatest game in the world, but there's nobody who tried harder and was a better competitor. If you wanted to bet your life on a putt from 10 feet, you might have taken Smiley. He could really bear down, and he'd beat guys that were really a lot better players than he was.
Not that he was a stiff. He won the U.S. Public Links in 1946 and was runner-up in the U.S. Amateur the same year. Until Ryan Moore swept those events this year, Quick came the closest to doing it. He lost in the U.S. Amateur final on the 37th hole when he missed a three-foot putt. If it had been a big money match, I think he probably would have made it.
Smiley later turned pro when he was almost 40 and he played a lot of money games with Doug Ford, Dow Finsterwald, and Jerry Barber. Ford was a great player, a Masters champion, and Smiley held his own. Smiley was co-champion of the Bing Crosby Pro-Am one year, but he was better in a $1,000 Nassau than he was on the Tour. When everybody played for somebody else's money, that wasn't quite Smiley's forte. He liked to beat you out of your money.
The biggest money games I ever got into were with Raymond Floyd in his early years on the Tour. Raymond used to play for a lot of money. We would play around San Francisco, and he and I would be partners. These were games where you could lose $15,000 or $20,000 in a day. Of course, we usually had backers then. At the time, we didn't have that kind of money.
We'd win some and we'd lose some. It was a lot of fun, there was no animosity with the guys we played against. They were good friends of ours. Every time, no matter who won, we would go out and have dinner with them.
I had been on the Tour about 10 years when Raymond came along. We both liked the same things, we both liked to gamble and bet the horses. We liked to go out and have a few drinks, though Raymond was never a big drinker. We both liked baseball and got very close to the Dodgers and Cubs. It was a tremendous amount of fun for me. It kept me a lot younger, I think, than if I hadn't traveled with Raymond.
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