Roger Maltbie Makes the Cut

By Pete Dexter Playboy August 1986 There is an old man sitting on a folding chair behind the green on the 12th hole at Perdido Bay. His name is Archie. He is wearing a plaid shirt, buttoned at the neck and wrists, and is absently holding a cigar against the cuff of...

What Might Have Been

By Ron Rapoport From The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf 2005   Sometime after Augusta National, the home of the Masters, became one of the most famous golf courses in the world, it was suggested that a statue of its founder, Bobby Jones,...

At Large with Bill Murray

By Harold Conrad Smart July/August 1989 “In the end, everything is a gag.” —Charlie Chaplin It is 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday in January. Bill Murray has just driven his Jeep from Malibu to Palm Springs. I am waiting in his suite at Maxim’s de Paris, an ultrafancy spot in...

The Masters Its Ownself

By Dan Jenkins Golf Digest April 1985 Something mythical happens to every writer who goes to The Maters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas. The...

Fore Play

By Richard Ben Cramer Esquire June 1987 I play golf, I recommend golf, I celebrate golf—for the exercise. For this I am roundly derided by friends. God knows what my enemies say. But they don’t understand. This exercise has nothing to do with getting winded, making...

Titanic Thompson

By John Lardner True 1951 One day not long ago, a St. Louis hotel detective tipped off a cop friend of his that there was a fellow in a room on the eighth floor who packed a gun. They decided to do a little further research. They went into the room without knocking,...