Sport: Mysterious Montague

He drove a golf ball 50 yards farther than Bobby Jones. He could put an approach shot within ten feet of the pin from any distance up to 200 yards. He bet he could knock a ball three-quarters of a mile in five shots and won easily. He said he could beat Bing Crosby at golf using a shovel, a rake and a baseball bat, and did it.

These, last summer, were a few of the wild rumors that were going the rounds about a mysterious denizen of Hollywood who called himself John Montague, refused to let himself be photographed, told no one where he came from or how he made his living, and never entered golf tournaments where he might attract publicity. The rumors were so wild that even when benign Sportswriter Grantland Rice, who is too serious about sport to hoax his public and much too wise to be beguiled by Hollywood hoaxers, wrote a column in which he called Montague one of the world’s greatest golfers, no one took him very seriously. When Westbrook Pegler labeled Montague a combination of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Popeye the Sailor and Ivan Petrovsky Skovar, it gave the story more color than credibility.

Last week Mysterious Montague descended abruptly from fiction to reality. At Los Angeles’ Lakeside Club, freelance Photographer Bob Wallace trailed him onto the golf course, hid in a clump of bushes, snapped him twice with a telephoto lens, as he was putting and as he was marching down the fairway, niblick in hand. After taking the pictures, Photographer Wallace handed the film to his brother, popped a dummy magazine into his camera. Golfer Montague, who had heard the shutter click, ran over to Photographer Wallace, took the camera away, removed the dummy magazine, destroyed it.

With the existence of Golfer Montague proved, there remained last week the glamor of legend about most of his doing: Since he never appears publicly, all accounts of his prowess come from his friends. If available reports about Golfer Montague are accurate, Columnist Pegler was last summer guilty of serious belittlement. Montague lore:

When he bet Actor Bing Crosby the he could beat him with a baseball bat, shovel and a garden rake, the match ende after one hole because Montague started off with a birdie, using the rake as putter. With golf clubs, he almost neve scores above the 60s. His best score : 61, made at Palm Springs, where he lowered the course record every day for four days in a row. Two years ago Golfer Von Elm said he had played golf with Mysterious Montague for a month without seeing him score above 66.

Mysterious Montague’s private life modeled on his golf game. He lives in Beverly Hills with Comedian Oliver Hardy (284 lb.) whom he can pick up with one hand. When not in residence with Hardy he is “somewhere in the desert” where he is supposed to own a silver mine or gold mine. He has two Lincoln Zephyrs and supercharged Ford, specially geared for high speed. He is about 33, 5 ft. 10 in 220 lb. He is built like a wrestler, wit tremendous hands, bulldog shoulders and biceps half again as big as Jack Dempsey’s. His face is handsome, disposition genial. He can consume abnormal quantities of whiskey. He frequently stays up all night and recently did so five nights in a row. He is naturally soft-spoken and dislikes hearing men swear in the presence of ladies.

In Hollywood last week, Crooner Crosby, who also maintains a prizefighter, a girls’ baseball team and a stable of race horses, one of which, Fight On, last week won its maiden race at odds of 80-to-1, announced that he would run a $3,000 invitation golf tournament at Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, on Feb. 6-7. Golfers wondered whether Mysterious Montague would be invited to compete and, if so whether he would oblige his friend and the public by accepting.