The Bing dynasty: on the 100th anniversary of Crosby's birth, we celebrate the granddaddy of celebrity golf

Golf Digest, May, 2003 by Tom Callahan

"That was a great game of golf, fellas."--Bing Crosby's last words

One hundred years ago this month, 26 days and 5,000 miles apart, Leslie Townes Hope and Harry Lillis Crosby were born. Hope-and-Crosby. Not only when it came to golf, but especially in that sense, they were one. At the greening of the game, the great gardeners were Bobby Jones, Dwight Eisenhower, Arnold Palmer and

Hope-and-Crosby. This was history's indispensable foursome. Representing a kind of Grand Slam of their own, they were the ones who cultivated golf in America.

Who was older? Bob or Bing?

"Each one said the other was older," says Kathryn Crosby, Bing's widow. "Older and fatter, and a worse golfer."

In fact, Crosby was older--May 3 to May 29--but Hope never knew it. And, now that he comes to his own centennial, bedridden in Southern California, Bob is probably unaware that he won the argument. By the evidence of a Washington state baptismal certificate, Bing's long-professed birth date (1904 in most of the annals) has recently been corrected to 1903. "Part of my life," Hope once said, "went with Bing."

In a decidedly mixed blessing, Hope has survived his friend by more than a quarter of a century. Walking off a Spanish golf course near Madrid, after shooting 85 and winning a $10 bet, Crosby had a heart attack and died. He was 74. It was Oct. 14, 1977, a surprising date to me.

"I never play golf after the shooting season opens in October," Crosby told Jack Murphy and me a few years earlier in a house above the 13th fairway at Pebble Beach. Bing's winter pro-am, the famous "Clam-bake" without clams, was about to reconvene. "October is the time for the ducks and the quail and the pheasants," he said, "and for getting reacquainted with your dog."

Murphy, the elegant sports editor of The San Diego Union, had invited me to share his appointment with Crosby, who was mostly genial but slightly odd. Bing alternated between amazing loquacity and uncomfortable silence, puffing on his pipe and staring out the window. He may have been afraid that one of us was about to hit him up for a spot in the tournament, his constant fear.

"Pebble Beach is the Louvre," he said. "It isn't just the Louvre, it's everything in the Louvre, too, with all of the artists gathered 'round." Bing didn't care for Hope's snappier description--" Alcatraz with grass"--but he nearly smiled when Murphy quoted Olympic swimmer and Tarzan portrayer Johnny Weissmuller, one of the amateur celebrities, saying, "I've never been so wet in all my life."

More than just a vocabulary filled with $2.50 words, Bing effectively had his own language, delivered in that familiar boo boo boo patois of Father Chuck O'Malley. For instance, discussing Bing's Del Mar racetrack (headquarters of another of his sporting passions), even poets are usually satisfied with the phrase "where the turf meets the surf." But Crosby called it "that pretty little horse hippodrome by the sea."

Parties were "soirees," and drinks were "toddies." He described the most devoted drinkers (see: Phil Harris, Crosby's second in command) as "bibulous." "Crosby weather," part of our vernacular, didn't cover the meteorology of the matter nearly well enough for Bing. To him, Carmel's perennial, if not annual, cloudbursts were "ring-tailed twisters" that required the spectators not just to don boots and long johns but to break out their "mukluks" and "balbriggans." I liked L.A. columnist Jim Murray's line, but Bing made a face when I repeated it. Playing off the Hope-and-Crosby "Road" pictures, Jim dubbed Bing's tournament, "The Road to Pneumonia."

In Crosby-speak, if you were in a bunker, you were "in the loge." Jack Lemmon wasn't swinging a golf club. He was "basting a turkey." Of course, Lemmon was more at home in "shooting galleries" (movie theaters). And, if Bing didn't quite get what you had just said, he announced, "I'm playing infield here."

It was a little challenging to converse with him, but fun.

Crosby and Murphy had black Labrador retrievers in common. Jack's was a whiskery old fellow named Abe of Spoon River, certainly the only dog in the world that munched cheese balls and fetched readers. Bing's Lab was called Remus. Short for, in a far less politically correct time, "Uncle Remus."

"I suppose in every man's life," Kathryn says, "he gets the dog that he loves so much. When Bing and I were married about five or six or seven months, we went to the ranch, the Elko Ranch [Nevada], and there was a new litter of pups. Remus was the special one. Bing worked him and trained him and went hunting with him always at the duck club. He was just his best companion and friend."

Remus had a profound influence on Crosby's stewardship at Pebble Beach.

"You know, I think Remus is the reason we sold the place at Pebble," Kathryn says. "When the children were very very small, Remus got in the surf right across the fairway from the house. It was hard for him to get out. And, you know, Labs are water dogs. Bing worried that, if Remus was having a difficult time, the kids were in danger. So we sold the house."