The High-Class Hustle

The air had a fabricated chill, the slight odor of chemistry and compressors. In a couple of hours, the bar's night lights would come on, enhancing every wrinkle, mole, pimple with the merciless cruelty of motel-bathroom lighting. "You can't make money sitting in a place like this," said the Archivist irritably. He was talking of the way he makes money--by hustling golf--not the way the barkeep does it. He was a short man, in his mid-to-late 30s, beginning to lean to fat. There was about him the very faint but perceptible flavor of kinetic violence, an attribute for a man who--having to "collect"--always seems on the edge of losing his temper. Even when motionless, he exudes a quality of beefy energy or dramatic command. His skull is large under the wavy, dark hair, his face is theatrical--with heavy bones and eyes that slant downward at the outside corners. A small mouth, expressive brows, a general look of gamy handsomeness that you might cast as the hard-drinking private eye of a low-budget television serial. He is single, a man oriented to good whiskey, good cigars, good women and cutthroat poker for high stakes. He is modest, falsely, about one thing--his golf swing ("a good enough swing for a short, fat little guy")--and embarrassed about another: He makes a legitimate living. Sometimes.

"The old days are gone. You've got to have something legitimate now. People know you're a hustler and they avoid you. Unless you're a big-time pro, a celebrity. Then they think it's a privilege to lose to you." So he sells insurance. To his astonishment, he sells a lot of it. It is easy to see why. He has, when he chooses, the ability (continued on page 132)High-Class Hustle(continued from page 117) to relate totally to someone, to listen to what he has to say with an intensity that makes him feel unique, to give that someone the feeling that he or she is the most perceptive person he's ever encountered. His is an exercise in the pragmatics of instant intimacy. ("I sell a lot of insurance to divorcees and widows," he says dryly. And even that is the least of the premium.) It is, of course, all counterfeit; he is also sly, devious and single-minded. "That's why I hustle golf," he says. "I'm a natural."

Golf, in fact, has always been a game that appealed to the single-minded, the simple-minded and the devious--the hustled as well as the hustler. Take single-mindedness: Ask a golfer about Dick Nixon and he'll say, "Used too much right hand." Or simple-mindedness: Ask a golfer what the essence of the game is and he'll say skill, because he hasn't realized the truth--self-deception. Or deviousness: Ask a golfer what the rules are and he'll say, "Something to break." Perhaps this is the reason that golf is so popular: Men can get a lot of sun and fun while succumbing triumphantly to their lower instincts. For no other obsession this side of the White House offers so superb an opportunity for chicanery, duplicity and all-round villainy as does golf. The reason is not only the existence of rules but their abundance; they range in style, tone and amplitude from the polished-mahogany politenesses of the Royal and Ancient in Scotland to the spontaneous perfidies of Goat Hill in East Wagering. They are, in their opportunity, what appeals to most men: Any individual lacking in power, youth, speed, brawn, clearness of eye, suppleness of muscle, virtue of purpose can become a pretty good golfer. And hustler.

"As long as he has style," says the Archivist. He earned the cognomen because (A) no hustler wants to be known--if he's known at all--by his real name and (B) because it fits: He not only hustles but he memorializes hustling by becoming something of a storehouse for the rich, arcane legends and traditions of the felony. He has studied the techniques of hustling, amateur and otherwise, from his own high-style hustle back to the raffish days of the talented tramp--the days of the Stork, the Fat Man, the Dog Man, the Fire Man, Mysterious Montague, Titanic Thompson, and so on and on. He considers himself and his style an aberration--or an accommodation--of the times. He has never made the "hustlers' rounds"--Edgewater and Tarn O'Shanter and Riverwoods in and around Chicago, Tenison Park in Dallas. Memorial Park in Houston, Bayshore in Miami. "Most of those places are reformed or sold for developments," he says. This is not to say he doesn't make the Miami/Miami Beach rounds. "I spend six--eight weeks down there every winter." Not always consecutively: He'll work the rounds according to his pigeon's vacation cycle, then fly back to Chicago for some midweek insurance selling ("I got to keep the business going--just at that rate, so it doesn't come to possess me") before flying back for a new cycle of vacationers--and victims. He spends the summer the same way, playing very little midweek golf in the Chicago area--"You heard of never dirtying your own nest?"--before flying off for long weekends of golf in the Catskills or in Texas or anyplace where men care not whether they win or lose but how much they play the game for. He likes to consider himself a golfer, not a gambler. ("The hustlers in the past were all gamblers; they got famous as gamblers because they couldn't hack it as golfers.") And he insists that it is not the hustle he's interested in but the psychology of the hustle. "People need to be hustled. They've got to take the grand chance--the big bet that they're going to lose. They put themselves in the way of it: You lose at golf, you feel you've made the big bid, but what have you lost? Your life? Nothing! You lost some money--which you substitute for your life!" He translates this into a readiness to be psyched out--"Even the biggest of the big-time golfers get psyched out and they do it because they need to."

One of his earliest memories of golf was the 1947 U.S. Open--"I was ten, eleven years old"--in St. Louis, when Sam Snead met Lew Worsham in a play-off. They were on the 18th green of the play-off, still tied and with the balls almost identical distances from the hole. Snead was about to putt, because he believed he was "away," when Worsham stepped in front of him and asked, "What are you doing?"

"I'm putting out." said Snead.

"Oh, no," said Worsham. "I think I'm away and should have the first putt." He called for a tape measure. In the meantime, Snead had to step back and, in utter fury, wait for the putting distances to be measured. It turned out that Worsham's ball was 30 inches from the cup and Snead's ball was 30 and a half inches away. So Snead did have the right to putt first. But he'd been psyched out. When he got up to the ball, his concentration was broken and he blew the putt by two inches. Worsham, barely controlling the grin, stepped up, hit his putt smack into the cup and won the play-off and the U. S. Open.

"It was the closest Snead ever came to winning an Open and he was beaten on a psych-out trick," says the Archivist. "The thing about Snead is that not winning the Open is his thing. He's more famous for not winning than he is for winning. He was psyched out on that hole, but maybe he had to be psyched out. The way I look at it, there are times when even a Snead has to be a loser."

So he began studying not only the hustling of golf but the psychology of the hustle. He got to caddying at Tam O'Shanter, "a great place for studying. A legitimate golf club--everything on the up-and-up, but a place where people went to find action." He found the psych-out as cordial as a bloodletting among friends. He tends to classify the "friendly" psych-outs in this way:

The admiring cut: You admire your opponent in just the right way for an extravagantly bad shot. "Not bad, not bad at all. There's the ball over there, under the rock next to the tree. Another two or three shots like that and you'll be oil the tee."

The helpful cut: You wait until the opponent is in his backswing and then say helpfully, "Don't worry too much about the water on the right." Or you comment, "Say, do you always hold your right hand over like that?" A more elegant example of the form was--says the Archivist--displayed by comedian Buddy Hackett, a golfer more enthusiastic than skilled. Hackett, he says, goes onto the course with a package of Band-Aids and, when somebody is doing something disgustingly well, he offers one to him.

"Here, you'll need this for your finger," he says.

"What finger? What are you talking about?" says the opponent.

"Just to take care of those blisters in that one spot...from the funny way you hold the club."

"Wha'd'ya mean, the funny way I hold the club?"

"Oh, nothin'. Don't give it a second thought. Just keep the Band-Aids handy. When the blisters pop, you'll be glad you have them."

That, says the Archivist, "should be good for three strokes a round."

The distractive cut: You wait until your opponent is standing over a key shot and then you say, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. Met your doctor in the clubhouse and he wants to talk to you as soon as our round is over about the X rays you had last week. Nothing lo worry about--just something about that dark spot on your lungs."

Or, if your opponent happened to be out of town for a few days and elects to go right from the airport to the first tee--as any thoughtful man would--it's helpful to pick up his wife and drive her over to the golf course for the joyful reunion. The uniform is an unshaven face and clothes that look like you've slept in them. Then, as you leave her and approach the first tee, you turn and wave to her and say warmly, "I'll never forget." When her husband/your opponent hears someone looking like you're looking say "I'll never forget" to his wife, you can be (continued on page 158)High-Class Hustle(continued from page 132) sure he won't forget, either.

The curious cut: You ask an innocent question about his game--the best part of his game--so that he begins to dissect what he's doing well reflexively. "Did you realize that you tap your right foot three times every time you putt?" is a good question. ("It took me five years to get my putting back to form--I was looking at my loot all the time instead of the putt," one victim has said.) Of course, sometimes the ploy doesn't work.

On the eve of the British Amateur at Sandwich in 1948, says the Archivist, a British golf writer sent a note to a fellow diner, Frank Stranahan, asking: "Do you inhale or exhale when putting?" The idea, of course, was to get Stranahan, a most accomplished golfer, to think about his breathing, not his putting.

At the adjoining table, Stranahan looked up, apparently bewildered, "I don't know," he said.

Later that evening, the writer noticed--with satisfaction--Stranahan on the practice green, inhaling on one shot, exhaling on the next. He must have found the answer, because the last laugh was on the Britisher. Inhaling and exhaling all the way, Stranahan won the tournament, beating the local favorite, Charles Stowe of Sandwich, five and four.

The Archivist spent his caddying years studying not only the psychology of hustling but some of its tactics and personalities. "All the hustlers then had a 'freak-shot bet.' If they lost to you in a game of golf, they'd come right back at you with their freak bet that you figured you couldn't lose. The Stork would bet you he could win--on a handicap--by standing on one foot for every shot; he'd tuck one leg up behind him. Mysterious Montague would bet you he could beat you on the putting green with a rake, a hoe or a shovel." Charley the Blade would bet he could beat you playing only with a three iron. Floren Di-Paglia, who went from fixing basketball games to hustling golf--a natural progression--used to bet high-handicap golfers that he could beat them even though he played all his tee shots with a Dixie Cup over the ball. George Low, once a pro-tour golfer, would bet you he could win putting by kicking the ball into the hole ("He's supposed to have aced five of nine holes that way on one bet") and--if it meant a great hustling opportunity--he'd bet you he could win on the greens using a rake, a broom handle or a pool cue. Lee Trevino, who hustled bets on a par-three course in Dallas before going on the pro tour, would bet he could beat you using a taped-up Dr Pepper bottle ("He wasn't so dumb; it had a smooth side instead of the bulging ribs that Coke bottles have"). And Snead has been known to hack a club out of a branch from a swamp-maple tree and bet a "mullet" (as he called his victims) he could beat him using the stick for tee and fairway shots and a wedge for chipping and putting. The mullet took the bet eagerly--and paid off when Snead shot a 76.

In the old days, "says the Archivist, the most florid and renowned hustler was a tall, lean itinerant named Titanic Thompson. "He was a gambler as much as a golfer," says the Archivist, "so he wasn't always working the hustle in expected ways." Once he made a bet with some pigeon that he could drive a ball 500 yards off the tee of his choice. Since the world record recognized by the Professional Golfers Association is 392 yards and the longest known drive was that of a 483-yard hole in Devon, England, with a gale to help, Titanic's bet seemed like a good one to the pigeon. Only the tee Titanic chose, outside Chicago, had a steep drop-off far down the fairway and--while the fairway dog-legged right--the course ran straight out to Lake Michigan. As it happened, Titanic chose winter to carry out the bet, so not only was the fair-way ice-hard but so was the water of the lake. The ball had only to take a couple of big bounces before it was heading out over the ice in the general direction of Michigan. It went not only 500 yards but perhaps that many miles.

If he lost a bet, somehow Titanic had a way to get even: He'd pull out a gun and bet double or nothing he could split a silver dollar thrown into the air--he was, among other things, an expert shot. Or he'd bet he could throw a quarter into a skinned potato at 15 feet--for some reason, he was expert at that, too. If it had been a really bad day, he'd have some back-to-the-clubhouse bets. One example: On the course, he'd usually be tossing pecans into the air and catching them in his mouth. When he got back to the clubhouse, he'd bet everybody double or nothing that he could loss one of the nuts over the clubhouse roof to the other side. Whereupon, he'd palm the selected pecan, replace it with a lead-filled pecan and throw it over the clubhouse. It anybody objected, he'd say, "I threw a pecan like we bet. Nobody said what it had to be filled with." But this gimmick became fairly well known and when its allure wore off, he'd bet he could throw a pumpkin over the roof. The pumpkin happened to be one he'd reserved for the purpose--it was the size of a baseball--and he'd win the bet easily.

Some bets demanded more in the way of resourcefulness. One day Titanic was on the putting green at Tenison Park, practicing with a long-handled shovel--on the chance someone might want to bet that he could beat Titanic putting with a shovel--when a wealthy used-car dealer approached with a deal he couldn't refuse.

"See that kid over there?" he asked. Titanic saw--a long-haired kid putting with a wedge and picking the ball out of the hole with his toes. "I'll back him against you for a grand," said the used-car dealer.

There is nothing that arouses a hustler so much as a chance to match mind and morals with a used-car dealer--particularly one exploiting a kid who can't even afford to buy shoes. It never even dawned on Titanic that the kid--like himself--may not have been altogether what he seemed.

He was, in fact, one of the best junior players in the state. He could outhit Titanic--who was in his upper years--off the tee with no trouble. It was only slightly more trouble to demolish him entirely over the 18 holes.

While the kid went back to the first tee to take on the next pigeon, Titanic went off to brood for a while. He moped around the clubhouse, pitching coins at a crack in the floor--another hobby of his--until he could catch the used-car dealer with a deal he couldn't refuse. "I'll play him double or nothing and I'll beat him," he said. "And to show you how confident I am, I'll let him take three drives off each tee and then let him play his best one." The patron leaped at the chance; some used-car dealers have absolutely no morals about how and how much they exploit a pigeon.

In the first nine holes, the kid began piling up a good lead. It wasn't always easy: This was the third round the kid was playing on this day and--what with the extra strokes off each tee--it was the equivalent of two or three extra rounds in one. By the 11th hole, the kid's arms began showing some of the wear of trying to make three long drives off each tee. He began hooking the ball viciously in strenuous efforts to maintain his distance, and then when he shifted his hands in the grip to compensate for it, he began fading it. Soon he couldn't get any of his three drives onto the fairway and by the 15th or 16th hole, when he overreacted in an effort to stay accurate, he wound up shooting short. Titanic finished the round by humiliating the kid and maintaining the honor of the hustler over the used-car dealer.

Titanic is in his 80s now. He kept hustling when he could no longer play well with yet another ploy. He tutored a group of kid golfers in how to make certain shots, then he'd send them out to play the game after he used his head to arrange the hustle. ("Maybe I can't beat you, but my caddie can.") In a sense, says the Archivist, the passing of Titanic signaled the passing of old-time hustling. "Not much action in the old sense around nowadays. It's all penny-ante (continued on page 212)High-Class Hustle(continued from page 158) stuff." He feels the old-time hustlers brought it on themselves: "You got to want to be a freak, a carny, to wander around the country looking for suckers who bet they can beat you when you're standing on one foot with a heel on your ass." People got to know you because you were a freak and you had to move on--one day here, the next day 500 miles down the road, the day after that 500 miles farther down the road. "That's the penny-ante life." He much prefers the high-class hustle among "high-class people who are a success in life and are out on the golf course looking to be losers." Not only at golf: "Hell, they have their bookmakers following them around the course for the afternoon's action at Hialeah, they stop at every phone to call their brokers to see how they're doing in the market." The difference for him is not only in the suckers but in a style of life. "I've got my roots down and I've got a business. The insurance gives me a parlay on the golf--I get a little business on the course, I get a little golf in through the business." Most of all, it gives him an acceptable identity--i.e., anything but as a hustler. "In the old days, all the hustlers didn't mind being known as hustlers. They just didn't want to be known as themselves." Even Titanic kept his real name--Alvin C. Thomas--a secret. Not anymore. "People know you're a hustler and they stay away from you." So the hustler today wants an identity not as a hustler or even a golfer. "Diz Dean has an identity--he hustles all the time and people don't mind losing to him, because they think of him as a baseball player." He mentions another baseball player, now a coach, who labors hard at not being known as a golfer. "Hell, he was about to break the course record one day and--so word wouldn't get around about how good a golfer he was--he double-bogeyed the last two holes." The Archivist keeps a very low profile campaigning as a businessman, as an exceptionally winning insurance agent. In doing so, he adheres to a fundamental proposition: He doesn't cheat his victims--he just places them in the way of cheating themselves. "I mean, hell, they're dying to do it."

He identifies three areas in which the system works in the high-class hustle:

Always know how to lose a little on the exotic bets so you can win a lot in the end.

Always give the guy who's gross in trying to cheat himself a reasonable opportunity to do it.

Always know so much about your game and his that you can make honest and reasonable bets that it's very unlikely you'll lose.

As an example of the first principle, he cites the bet known as bingle-bangle-bungle, a not uncommon bet in hustling, or in the friendly little bloodletting of weekends in the open air. It's basically a three-way bet on a particular hole--usually a par four.

Bingle is a bet on who'll hit the first ball to land on the green. Its payoff is a minimum figure--say $50.

Bangle is a bet on who has the ball that's closest to the cup after all the balls are on the green. Its payoff is for a middling figure--say $100.

Bungle--or bunko to some--is a bet on who gets the ball into the cup first. It's for the third and highest payoff--say $150.

Each bettor in a foursome puts up $75 on the bet; each member of a threesome has to put up $100.

"The thing about this bet is that any golfer--even a high-handicap golfer--can win it," says the Archivist. "But he's so anxious to win it all that he cheats himself out of the big-money end of it."

How?

"By not having the good sense to lose the front end of the bet purposefully." The front end is designed to lure the pigeon: "It's the classic play in golf--who gets onto the green first is really another way of saying who makes it in the least number of strokes. Who can get up there and power the ball the farthest? So it's a familiar bet--the pigeon reacts reflexively to it. But the guy who gets onto the green first has practically no chance of winning the second and third legs of the bet. He's going to be too far away to win the second leg or the third leg." And there's one more point: He's going to be swinging so hard to get his drive out there that he may wind up in the rough or the woods or the water or a sand trap. "So he's going to try to win the low end of the bet--hell, $50 won't give him his investment back--and he stands a good chance to lose it all."

What the hustler does is lose the first bet. Deliberately. "I play what looks like hacker's golf--worse than the worst," he says. "I look for the best lie off the tee--I don't care how short it is. I want to find my way up there so on my final approach shot I can pitch right up to the cup." It doesn't bother him if it takes him three, four or five strokes to get to the green, as long as he's closest to the cup when he gets there. "This second bet pays off on distance, not on least strokes--this is what the pigeons don't understand. Once I give up the least-strokes idea--once I give up the $50 bet--I get in a position to win the $100. With $150 to come on bungle, because I am closest to the hole, I got the best putt of them all."

The third phase of the bet relies, for the hustler, on his verbal skill as much as his golfing skill. For if he's been swift and foresighted on the tee, he'll have arranged that all putting will be done in strict rotation, instead of in the normal course of the "most away" man getting the first putt, the "next most away" getting the second putt, and so on. "If we use the regular rules, I'll always putt last," says the Archivist. "That means anybody else can get lucky and sink a long putt and beat me. But it we putt by rotation, I may be the guy who comes up first in the rotation. Or second. Or third. Any way, I come off better. No way can I come off worse."

Even if he happens to putt third or fourth, he figures to have an advantage. "The other guys--who were so fast after that first fifty bucks--will see what I've done and they'll be so mad at having been foxed that they can't concentrate on their putts. I'll even tell them about it, if they're so dumb they've missed the point." He'll needle, he'll brag, he'll infuriate--he'll get them to the point where he figures that they'll be so mad they'll blow their putts. His point is that then he's got them two ways: on distance and on concentration. "I haven't done anything but play the first shot the way the worst possible golfer would play it--short and safe. And then I tell them about it."

To illustrate the second principle--"You see a guy who's a sneak and you let him think he's sneaking an advantage"--the Archivist cites the art of the Fat Man. His name was Martin Stanovich, an awkward, bulbous man who straddled the ball like a hacker--and then executed some of the most wondrous shots known to man. The Fat Man didn't mind playing an opponent who could outdrive him. In fact, he'd frequently fall short off the tee of an opponent who couldn't outdrive him. The reason was that he'd then have first shot on the fairway. Both he and his opponent would stop first at his ball and that gave the opponent a deceptive advantage: He could see what club the Fat Man would select from that spot on the fairway and--figuring that he himself was perhaps five or ten yards closer to the pin--choose his own club accordingly.

There was just one small thing: Stanovich covered the clubs with the wrong covers.

He'd turn to his caddie and say, "Give me the five iron." The caddie would reach for the iron covered with a 5, strip the cover and hand it to the Fat Man. It was really a seven iron and the Fat Man would pop the ball gently onto the green, three feet from the cup.

His opponent would walk up, measure the distance, turn to the caddie and say, "Give me the five iron." Only he'd really get the five iron. He'd swing and club the ball 30 yards over the green and spend three strokes trying to find his way back out of the woods.

The Fat Man would smile enigmatically. He'd done nothing wrong. He simply allowed his opponent the chance to cheat himself.

The reverse twist on this--"there's always a reverse twist"--is to let the opponent cheat himself on the fact that you can outdrive him. "This is the Dick Martin bit." Dick Martin, a frail, skittish little man who makes a living playing golf down in East Dallas, once played five guys with high handicaps in a best-ball round. That meant that he'd play his round and they could pick the best of their five lies on each shot to match against his. Thus, they could use the best of their live skills against his encapsulated skill. But he could outdrive all of them--a fact that he knew and they knew. And so, grudgingly, terribly reluctantly, he yielded one extra point: They could start play with their second shot--from where his tee shot landed. That figured to give them the best of all possible worlds: They'd have him drive for them and they could use the best man for each shot thereafter--the best man with the long iron, the best with the short iron, the best with the wedge, the best putter.

There was just one thing: On that day, Dick Martin suddenly developed a long and wicked hook. It was so bad and so devious that somehow the ball always landed in the worst of all possible spots--deep in the woods, in the shallows of a creek, on rock-strewn paths, in the next fairway. Martin had to play his way back horn these disastrous shots, but he was always able to do it. His opponents also had to play their way back from these shots, but they weren't able to do it. The match was supposed to go nine holes. Martin won the first five and--since the pigeons could not possibly win--it was all over.

The third principle is simply to think about golf and the golf course in a way that lets the Archivist measure his game against his opponent's--with the golf course giving him the edge.

"The great golf courses, the great holes are really triumphs of psychology--they look like they're going to give you something while they take something away," he says. "It's a setup that's ideal for hustling."

Thus, he looks carefully at the course and its psychological play. He can glance at the layout, for example, and tell what kind of golfer its over-all design might favor.

"Most of the courses built from around the turn of the century to about, the mid-Sixties favored a right-handed golfer with a hook." he says. The reason is that most of them were built in or close to urban areas with busy roads around them. "The goiter in those days had played just enough to get rid of his slice and develop a hook. So they began building golf courses in a general counterclockwise fashion for the right-handed golfer with a hook." Why counterclockwise? "Because if they built them clockwise, the right-handed hook would always be going oil the golf course--physically off the golf course and onto the streets where there were people walking or driving. By building them counterclockwise, the right-handed hook still goes far off the fairway--maybe a couple of fairways over--but it still stays on the course: You don't endanger the people outside." (Needless to say, the golf course that favors the right-handed hook also favors the left-handed fade or slice.) "Not every course is built this way," he cautions. Firestone in Akron is built in a series of parallel holes and many of the most recent courses are so far away from highly trafficked streets that they can be built clockwise as readily as counterclockwise ("LaCosta out in California is an example").

Beyond that, the Archivist looks to the individual personality of the particular course he's playing--or hustling--on. "You take Colonial in Fort Worth. It's got Bermuda grass, which means the ball doesn't get much of a roll. You got a duller who hits the ground shot and he won't get 120 yards there if he is used to getting 1 10-150 yards somewhere else. Also, it's a driver's course. If you've got a guy who can't hit hard and accurately off the tee, you know he's going to be in trouble on every hole." Also, it tends to favor the carefully controlled fade--"seven of the nine most difficult driving holes bend to the right." Its over-all demand: "low, hard-punched shots--line drives, really--that don't get high enough to be caught by the wind. Normally, you get a lot of roll on that kind of shot after the ball hits the ground, and roll can get you into trouble, because once the ball hits the ground, it might hit anything on the ground and go anywhere. But with Bermuda, you're not going to get that roll. So you get the yardage without the danger." And, of course, the tee and fairway shots should be susceptible to a controlled fade. "If I've got a guy on a course like this who hits a high, lofty drive that hooks a little, I've got an edge on the bet that he hasn't even thought about."

Augusta National is just the opposite. "You need the high shot that you can drop down for a short roll pretty much where you want it. And a draw is a help here"--the most difficult holes bend to the left. "That's what Trevino meant when he said he didn't have the shots for the Masters. He's got a low punched drive that just can't do him as much good here as somewhere else. Give me Trevino against any golfer of equal skills who has a high, lofty shot with a short roll and I gotta take the other guy." That, he adds, is the reason Arnold Palmer changed his style of driving. "He hit the low, hard-punched shot--great for driving on those English and Scottish courses in the British Open--but he picked up the high, lofty shot with the short roll so that he would do better in the Masters."

The Archivist takes the same psychology down to a lower level: the individual hole. "There's a gate to the green--an opening--on every golf hole in the world." he says. "Most of them are quite obvious. You just go up the middle and find the gate to the green sitting fat out front--no sweat, no trouble." But the better golf courses will put the opening to the green off in a corner or at an oblique angle that will take the golfer out of his way if he wants to avoid hazards. "You can still get to the green if you want to go over water or over a sand trap," says the Archivist. "But if you want to get up there without encountering trouble, you're going to have to pay a price." The price, he says, is usually an extra stroke. "The easiest way in is the longest way around. You can take the easy way with more strokes or the hard way with fewer strokes. That's the test of golf--you give a little, you take a little." But that one extra stroke on every hole in a round--by a guy who's looking for the easy opening to the green--turns a 72-par into a 90. "Hell, I'm hustling for a stroke against a guy who doesn't know how the course is costing him 18 strokes."

And that's only the start, says the Archivist. "You analyze the good holes on the golf courses, and each one has a 'psychology'--they're trying to make you do something that's going to add to your score. How many guys you meet who know that? They're playin' the hole and they don't even know its psychology." He uses as an example the sixth hole at Seminole Golf Club near Palm Beach. ("Once, maybe twice a year I'm lucky enough to play it. That's the only time they let outsiders on the course--two members-guests tournaments a winter." That's also why he's a "businessman," not a hustler.) The sixth is a 383-yard par-four hole--not a long one but a hole liberally sprinkled with trouble. "Constant sand. Like the Sahara. They got at least 11 sand traps in those 383 yards. You can't even see the fairway." The opening to the green is through a narrow channel of 150 yards down to the left of the fairway: on the right side of that channel are four huge sand traps. "But they give you that psychology right off the tee. You can see the opening to the left, but they block it out off the tee so that you feel you have to go to the right." The way it's done is by building bunkers a fewscore yards off the tee, invading from the left toward the right, as well as a few palm trees that force the curve of the fairway to the right. "Every psychological demand is made on the golfer to shoot to the right," says the Archivist. But this, of course, takes him away from the opening to the green. "So when the tee shot gets out there on the fairway, the golfer has two choices: One is to keep going down the right side and come across the big bunkers that guard the green on the right; the other is to sacrifice a shot on the fairway and try to cross over early to the left to get into the channel that leads to the green." The first way, the psychology of the hole leads the golfer into danger that might cost him several strokes. The second way, it leads him into the sacrifice of at least a stroke in the effort to "buy safety." "If he's strong psychologically, he'll take the risk--and lose bets. If not, he'll buy safety--and lose bets." What does the Archivist do? "I go over the bunkers off the tee and try to thread the opening between the palm trees on the left and the big bunker on the right. I'm closer to the hole and I've got no worse lie than if I was off to the right."

To accomplish all this--to respond to the psychology of the particular hole and golf course--the Archivist worked on perfecting all his golf shots. "The point of the high-class hustle is to be a good golfer, not just a good gambler," he says. So he can hit the fade as well as the draw, the low punched line drive as well as the soaring lofty fly ball that drops, bounces once or twice, and then stops with virtually no roll. He worked on getting out of all kinds of sand traps so hard that shooting out of a bunker poses no more psychological hazard to him than shooting out of a difficult fairway lie. The result is that he'd rather play a golf course with a lot of sand than one with a lot of water. "Water is impartial. It treats every golfer the same way. Once you get into it, you pay the same penalty for getting out as the worst duffer. But sand"--and his eyes light up with joy--"is a hustler's paradise. It treats me better than it treats most golfers simply because I've worked hard to learn how to get out of it. It might cost me a stroke where it'll cost most other golfers two or three. That's where I get my insurance."

It is by measuring the course against the competition that he decides how to handle his bet. "On a well-bunkered course, I figure I'm going to have an edge on the other golfer that he won't even know about," he says. The basic bet is on the round, based on each golfer's handicap: The Nassau, for example, is a three-way bet--on who has fewest strokes on the first nine holes, who has fewest strokes on the second nine holes and who has fewest for the 18-hole total, with the handicap of each golfer figured into each score. "I won't lie about my golf game," he says about negotiating with his colleagues and victims. "I may test the truth a little, just to see how sharp they are, what their giving point is. But I'm not keeping any secrets from them. One round, two rounds, and you can't fool 'em anymore." What he can do is introduce a certain flexibility into the betting so that their handicaps may fit his skills in such a way as to give him an edge. "I may give a guy a half a stroke a hole except for the par threes," he says. That amounts to a seven-stroke giveaway, since there are usually four par threes on an 18-hole layout. "Or maybe I'll give him two strokes on the par fives and one stroke on the par fours, or maybe if he's a poor driver. I'll give him a stroke on every hole over 400 yards." That may not be as much of a concession as it seems, for he may know that the long holes demand a certain kind of driving ability--other than sheer distance--which the usual duffer does not have. "So that he's not only short but likely to be in trouble all the way," says the Archivist. If the trouble involves sand traps, not water, the Archivist figures he's got an edge of several strokes, simply because he knows he can "let out" and take the chance of the "sand-trap kind of trouble" on a long drive, "whereas the other guy is going to be short and have trouble anyway." If he's playing old friends--"guys I've been playing and betting with a long time"--he may let them have par for a partner on everything but, say, the par-five holes. That means the "friend" will always get the lower of two scores--either his score or par--on 14 holes. ("If he birdies it, he gets the birdie. If he bogeys it, he gets par.") But on the par five, he gets only the score he shoots "That puts a lot more pressure on him--most golfers are psyched out by par-five holes, anyway. They're scared of them because the par fives are so long. This play just puts a little more pressure on them on the par five. Because when they see they're on some 'monster' hole and now they can't fall back on par, they're going to clutch--they're going to blow that hole skyhigh." And when they see how smoothly he plays the par fives--"If it's well bunkered, it's all to my advantage"--the pressure on them will rise even higher. "That's the psychology of the hustle: You give 'em a little one place, you take it away from 'em another place. They psych themselves out by having it so easy on the par threes and par fours."

These bets, like the Nassaus, are negotiated on the first tee. The Archivist has no set amount for his betting: "You have to take what comes along. You can't get on the first tee and figure you're going to get $1000 a side in Nassau. You're just going to scare the hell out of people and you won't have either a bet or a golf game." So if they don't start out with big bets, he doesn't. He takes the action as it develops: "Maybe $20 a side in Nassaus, maybe 100 bucks a side." But his low-keyed, low-profile posture is deceptive. He looks for a lot of action beyond the first tee. "Before we're through, I'll be betting 'em on every hole and every shot. I'll bet whether they'll get a birdie, a par, whether they'll sink the putt, who'll be farthest off the tee, first on the green, closest to the cup, everything you can think of." This, too, is part of the psychology of hustling: "A guy who figures 'What the hell, the worst I can do is lose twenty bucks Nassau' winds up standing over a putt and suddenly realizes that I've been 'pyramiding' him and he may have a $1500 putt looking up at him. And that's the putt he's going to blow." In these on-the-course bets, the Archivist again takes advantage of his knowledge of course and hole design as well as what his opponent can do. "If the hole bends right and my pigeon can't hit a controlled fade, I know he's not going to be able to tuck the ball in there close to the hole. Hell, even if the fairway is straight and long but the cup is up there behind the bunkers on the right-hand side of the green, I know he's not going to be able to get up there close to the cup--he's going to be shooting for the left-hand side of the green and start putting across." That means more putts or big trouble: "He hits the first putt so hard it goes off the green and into the bunkers." The Archivist's point is that he can spot so many bets to make that he doesn't have to cheat; he doesn't even have to battle for the big edge on the handicap on the first tee. "I can look like I'm giving something away there and know that I'm going to get it back on the golf course." Or he can make a low-yield Nassau: "It's a prime thing in hustling to make it look like money doesn't mean anything to you. 'OK, if you want to make it easy, let's play ten dollars a side.' Then they don't feel they're being hustled."

He'll do this with all members of his foursome. He'll do it with other players who may gather at crowded tees late in a round--"if I know them." Thus, what starts out as a foursome might involve six or eight bettors or even more late in a game. "Down there where Trevino plays out of"--Horizon City Country Club in El Paso--"they'll go out in foursomes or sixsomes and wind up with twelvesomes on some of those holes. Hell, when they come off those tees in their golf carts, it looks like a Roman chariot race."

So what starts out as a modest piece of action can build to something pretty wild. "Presses, double presses"--double or nothing, quadruple or nothing--"and parlays, anything you can think of, with half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen guys in the action; you can be going for a couple of thousand bucks by the end of a round." He remembers he built the action from a "little Nassau" to more than $5000 in one round in Miami. "You can afford to give a little--let a guy think he's taking you for $20 early in the game--when you know what's going to come later on." Of course, he's not the only guy doing the betting. He's encouraging everybody to cross-bet, in order to step up the action and yet not look like the guy who's "making" the game. "The big thing is to have a good memory. That's where I come in handy. I can remember all the bets, not only my own but what the other guys have laid. So I come in pretty handy for them--I can handle the traffic. And when the payoffs are made, it's not all one-way traffic, money coming into my hand and nobody else's. The money's getting passed around. Only I'm not passing it out as much as the other guys."

He maintains the same low profile when he spots a guy cheating. "I guess I've seen all the tricks," he says. Not just the gross: washing a ball with a vigorous rackety-rax--in a wooden ball washer near the tee--when an opponent is in his backswing, jingling coins in a pocket as he stands over a critical putt. "The real sneak is the guy who's pulling something out where he figures he can't be seen." In the fairway, for example, a golfer is allowed to clear away any impediment--a twig, a stray leaf, perhaps a branch or even a food wrapper--from behind the lie of the ball. But not in the sandy rough: He cannot clear pebbles or wet-hardened clumps of sand or anything else from behind the ball. Indeed, you are not even allowed to touch the sand with anything but the soles of your shoes.

"But I've seen guys bend over and look as if they're clearing out a twig or a leaf--like they don't know the rule against it--and they'll stick out a finger or two and brush the sand behind the ball. Dig out a little trench behind the ball with that finger, so that the impact side of the ball sits up free and clear on the sand." Or he'll see other golfers go into a grassy rough and violate another rule--that of not pressing the grass down behind the ball so that, in effect, the rough is cleared from behind it. "But I'll see guys choose a wood for what is clearly an iron shot, go in and address the ball, and then 'change their mind' and call for an iron instead," says the Archivist. "They think I don't know what they're doing: They're taking that wood and leaning down on it while they're 'addressing' the ball, and pressing the grass flat behind it." He rarely calls them on it, unless it's a key shot that'll cost him a lot of money. "Usually, I pick out the feistiest, most uptight guy in the foursome and I point out to him what's going on. And I let him go up to the kink and call him out. I don't need enemies--I just let them fight it out among themselves. When it's to my benefit."

So the high-class hustle demands identity but not celebrity. No prominence, no eminence, no salience. The wanderers of the past can make a big point of hustling only if they're willing to settle into a penny-ante life. So says the Archivist. "I'm a professional," he says. "I made a study of the field, I gathered what the scholars said about it and I found something cerebral in it"--i.e., the psychology of the hustle as well as the hustle itself. "I found a new form of the art and a way to make it fill my own life. I can go on doing it all my life--I can be a gentleman golfer for the next 40 years." He finished the last of his Scotch and water and the night lights came on. "Nobody is going to give me a Nobel Prize for it." he said. "But I don't have to sit here and drink all night." So he got up and left.