'Everybody cheats. I needed a few dollars': Almost 50 years later, a key figure speaks out on the Deepdale scandal

Golf Digest, March, 2001 by Dave Anderson

He is golf's lost soul. When you ask people around Springfield, Mass., the whereabouts of Bill Roberts, the answer invariably is, "Ever since that scandal, he just sort of disappeared."

Only the old-timers remember that scandal, the handicap hoax at the 1955 Deepdale Calcutta in a leafy Long Island suburb of New York City, but for Bill Roberts, golf has never been the same. Neither has he. If Phillip Nolan is the fictional "Man Without a Country," for nearly half a century Bill Roberts has virtually dis-appeared as the Man Without Golf.

In my search, none of the listings for William Roberts in the Springfield-area telephone directories matched. His father, Raymond, before he died at 95, professed not to know his son's address, but he rattled off his son's unlisted phone number.

When the phone rings, only the answering machine responds. A message mentioning the Deepdale scandal goes unanswered, but the address is un-earthed--a yellow condo in Chicopee, Mass., near the Westover Air Force Base. On a quiet afternoon, I knock on the front door. Bill Roberts opens it. "I thought it might be you," he says. "I was away over the weekend. I was going to call you."

I believe him; he has written my phone number on a slip of paper that is on the table in the kitchen where we sit and talk for two hours. Tall and slim, he has on a tan windbreaker over a plaid shirt with brown slacks, brown moccasins. He speaks quickly and nervously but willingly, as if relieved to be finally discussing the hoax.

"I don't absolve myself of guilt, but I was 26," he says. "I did wrong, morally and golf-wise, but I knew that around here, everybody cheats. It was a private club, and I needed a few dollars."

Roberts, who turned 71 last May, once was among New England's better amateurs. But that was before his 1955 involvement in a $16,016.90 jackpot from a $45,000 auction at the elegant Deepdale Golf Club, then in Great Neck, N.Y. (When construction of the Long Island Expressway cut through the course the following year, the club moved to a site in nearby Manhasset.)

Then a 3-handicapper and a three-time club champion at The Orchards in South Hadley, Mass., Roberts was listed as a 17 on the Deepdale pairing sheet. His partner, Charles (Bud) Helmar, a 3 at the Franconia municipal course and the Springfield public-links champion, was listed as an 18 and played under the name of Richard Vitali, another member of The Orchards.

Roberts and Helmar, alias "Vitali," shot a net 58-57 for 115, winning by five strokes. Richard L. Armstrong, a New York bank executive, headed the syndicate that held the $16,016.90 ticket.

The scam is exposed Six weeks later, the scam was exposed by Lawrence Robinson, the golf writer for the now-defunct New York World Telegram & Sun, after Helmar, a carpet-factory worker in West Springfield, had confessed in a "conscience-stricken" letter to the Deepdale president, the late L. Dorland Doyle.

"During and after the tournament," Helmar wrote, "I have received no money."

Roberts deposited three checks totaling $3,713.99 (his share of the winning ticket minus expenses) in the Park National Bank of Holyoke, Mass. But when his name and photo started appearing in the New York and Springfield newspapers, he was no longer to be found at his home in Amherst, Mass., or at the laundromat where he worked.

"I don't know where he is," his mailman said at the time. "I haven't seen his new green Volkswagen convertible for a few days."

Roberts' disappearance had begun. So had golf's public embarrassment. In that era, long before handicaps could be checked by computer, the higher the bet, the higher some amateurs' traveling handicaps were. But the handicaps for Roberts and Helmar had been grossly inflated, by 14 and 15 strokes.

To add to the embarrassment, all this had occurred at elite Deepdale, where President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a member. And the $45,000 pot was important money then, even at Deepdale; today it would be the equivalent of more than $225,000.

Then as now, a golf calcutta involves an auction of players or better-ball teams, often escalating into high-stakes bidding and paydays for the participants. In the Masters' early years, a calcutta was held on the tournament field, involving players and officials alike, at a nearby Augusta hotel. The fashionable Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, Fla., reportedly once had a pot of $193,000 in its calcutta--a name that evolved from England's Calcutta Turf Club, which sponsored horse-racing sweepstakes.

Siren for sandbaggers But 46 years ago, Roberts and Helmar, of all people, blew the cover of sandbaggers everywhere, large and small.

"It remained for two Mortimer Snerds from the New England hills," wrote Joe Williams, the Scripps-Howard sports columnist, "to focus public attention on racketeering in the noble game of golf."

At the U.S. Golf Association offices, President Isaac (Ike) Grainger issued a stern warning on high-stakes club gambling. Some PGA Tour events, notably the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am, stopped holding calcutta auctions. Some clubs banished calcuttas; all took a closer look at strangers' handicaps.