The mysterious Montague: a true tale of Hollywood, golf, and armed robbery

John Montague was a boisterous enigma. He had a bagful of golf tricks, on and off the course. He could knock a bird off a wire from 170 yards, and when the big man arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s, he quickly became a celebrity among celebrities. He played golf with everyone from Howard Hughes to Babe Ruth and his close friend Bing Crosby, whom he famously beat with only a rake, a shovel, and a bat. Yet strangely Montague never entered a professional tournament, and he never allowed his image to be captured on film. When a photographer snapped his picture with a telephoto lens, police in upstate New York recognized him as a fugitive wanted for armed robbery. As Montague was indicted, hordes of national media descended and turned a star-studded legal carnival into the most talked about trial of its day.--From publisher description.