The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf and Armed Robbery by Leigh Montville
As I perused Border's a few weeks ago, I passed this book in the new release paperback section. I had remembered being somewhat interested in the topic when a little blurb for it ran in Sports Illustrated...and I had a $100 gift card...so I figured, "What the heck?" and I bought it.
Leigh Montville has been writing sports biographies for several years now and has had two very celebrated books which I have yet to read, Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero and The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. More importantly, he wrote the book on the definitive athlete of an entire generation: Manute: The Center of Two Worlds. I actually had no idea that any book on Manute Bol even existed...but now that I do, I have to own it.
Anyway, back to The Mysterious Montague. The book tells the true tale of Laverne Moore, a bootlegger from New York in the 1930's who (allegedly) fled the scene of a crime and went all the way to Hollywood where he went under the alias of John Montague and made friends with some of the biggest names of the time. He made his name in Tinsel Town as a trick shot golfer, knocking birds off of wires and beating Bing Crosby on a hole using a rake, a baseball bat and a shovel. Many big time celebrity names, including Grantland Rice, the premier sportswriter of the time, supposedly played with him and considered him the greatest golfer of a generation, despite his never having entered a tournament. Montague/Moore regularly broke course records at various Los Angeles-area golf courses, but very little was known about the man. He refused photographs...and it took a photographer using a telephoto lens in 1937 to actually get his picture and publish it, the police in New York recognized him from the picture...and that's pretty much where the story takes off. Or...at least, that's where the story should take off...
While a fascinating book, Montville runs into a problem. Once Montague has his trial and is acquitted...his fifteen minutes run out fairly quickly. He plays in golf exhibitions against the likes of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, enters into a pro tournament in the Phillipines, and tries twice to qualify for the US Open, succeeding in 1940, but missing the cut. And...that's pretty much it. Obviously, Moore/Montague wasn't going to succeed, considering I had never heard of him before the book came about...but it's interesting that the last quarter of the book or so focuses on the fact that after his US Open...Montague/Moore essentially did nothing. Thus, Montville really doesn't have all that much to write about. There is no story of redemption...no sympathetic failure...no fall from grace, since Montague never really was "in grace"...just the story of a local golfer who many across the country believed to be overrated...who turned out to be just that.
Montville succeeds in providing plenty of suspense in the story. He gets you to keep turning the pages and he takes a huge chance by essentially writing a rags-to-rags story. In the end, one could call it a success. While I was disappointed with the resolution of the book, the mundane end to Montague's life is not Montville's fault. There's only so much you can write about a quasi-celebrity who died alone. The fact of the matter is that it is well written and it is intriguing...but, once I was finished, the book left me largely unsatisfied...there was no "mystery" to the "Mysterious Montague".
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