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McConaughey? Bale? Lowe? Inside the wild Hollywood tale of a movie about golf’s greatest hustler
Words by Kevin Cook
Illustrations by Tavis Coburn
Light / Dark
If you’ve never heard of Titanic Thompson, you’re not alone. That’s the way he wanted it.
Starting a century ago, he roamed the country with his tools in the trunk of his car: left- and right-handed golf clubs, a pool cue, a bowling ball, a .45 revolver and a suitcase full of cash. For those who’ve seen the name and know some of the legends, he remains the most colorful grifter in history—a man who played big-money golf with Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, traded card tricks with Houdini, conned Al Capone, lost a million dollars to Minnesota Fats and then won it all back. “The greatest action man of all time,” Fats called him.
A master of the proposition bet, Titanic devised schemes old-timers still talk about. Riding through Missouri with a pair of gamblers, he pointed at a road sign that read “JOPLIN 20.”
“That’s a lie,” he said. “It’s no more than 15 miles to Joplin.”
“Five hundred says you’re wrong,” countered one of his companions.
The bets grew from there. Once they reached Joplin, the bettors checked the odometer: 15 miles. Titanic collected without mentioning that he’d paid two men to move the sign 5 miles closer to town.
In a career that spanned half a century, he won and lost millions playing golf, cards, pool, dice and horseshoes. An ambidextrous golfer, he’d bet $10,000 a hole while Hogan and Nelson were earning $10,000 a year. Asked why he never played the PGA Tour, Titanic said, “I couldn’t afford the pay cut.”
Along the way, he killed five men. “But they’d all tell you they had it coming,” he once said. He also married five women, each bride a teenager on her wedding day. When newsman Damon Runyon asked Titanic about writing his life story, Titanic told him to forget it: “Mine ain’t the kind of work publicity helps.” So, Runyon based his most famous character on him: Sky Masterson, the gambler-hero Marlon Brando played in Guys and Dolls.
In 2009, I set out to separate Titanic legends from the facts. While researching his biography, I debunked a few myths. He never pulled Capone’s pants down, for instance, though he did hoodwink Scarface Al out of $500. He didn’t survive the sinking of the Titanic by sneaking onto a lifeboat while dressed as a woman, but he did once hit a golf ball more than 500 yards—by waiting for winter and knocking his drive onto a frozen lake.
Before my book, Titanic Thompson: The Man Who Bet on Everything, was published in 2011, I connected with some people in Hollywood. A movie about Titanic was in the works.
Gary Foster, producer of Sleepless in Seattle and Tin Cup, was going to wait for me to finish the book. Gary McCord was ready to reprise his Tin Cup role as golf consultant. There was talk that Clint Eastwood might play the title role, but he was busy directing J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the FBI director who chased Titanic but never nabbed him.
With that all on the boil, I took a research trip to Texas, where Titanic—real name Alvin Clarence Thomas—spent his last years. In Dallas, I met his older son, Tommy, who’d followed his father into the family business. Tommy was so slick at dealing from the bottom of a deck that nobody could catch him. He cheated in high-stakes card games and nearly died in a shootout after one of them; the legendary gambler Billy Walters told me Tommy was “as dangerous as any cobra.” That moment changed Tommy’s life. He swore he “felt God’s presence” as bullets flew past him. He renounced gambling and became a man of the cloth, a tall, gray-bearded minister in a 10-gallon hat.
Titanic’s younger son, Ty, joined me for an overnight drive to Branson, Missouri, to gather family photos for my book. We got lost on hairpin turns in the Ozark Mountains. When I tried a shortcut, Ty yelled, “Stop!” We were a few feet from a sheer drop into the forest below. I backed up at a crawl, thinking of how Titanic used to win races by driving at up to 100 miles an hour—in reverse.
I was finishing my work on the book when Titanic’s last wife invited me to her home in the Rio Grande Valley. Jeannette Thomas Miller had long since remarried but still had fond memories of the charismatic con artist who’d swept her off her feet in 1952. Trim and bespectacled at 74, she lived in a trailer in the toe tip of Texas with her husband, Max. Relying on Social Security and Medicare, Jeannette wished Titanic had left behind one of the suitcases full of money he used to stash in the closet. She recalled helping him test his eyes by standing a hundred paces away and holding up playing cards while he identified them: “Nine of hearts…six of clubs…” She’d admired how he still worked on his golf game after his hands got too arthritic to deal cards. One day, he made a pair of aces on a par-3 course. When she marveled at the achievement, he said, “Well, that’s what I was aimin’ at.”
“I wasn’t the love of his life,” Jeannette told me. That was Alice Kane, a pretty pickpocket Alvin Thomas met when he was 25 and she was 17. They had the ultimate meet-cute: Alice had her hand on his bankroll when he clutched her wrist and wouldn’t let go until she let him buy her an ice-cream cone. Alice was fearless, and she could handle a gun. One day, after Titanic cleaned out a poker game in Pittsburgh, she showed up in the getaway car. Two men stepped from opposite sides of the street, pistols raised. She grabbed a Luger from the glove box and started shooting while Titanic emptied his .45 and pedestrians ducked for cover. Bonnie and Clyde had nothing on Alice and Ti.
It was Jeannette who helped me crack a cold case that had stumped investigators for almost a hundred years: Who killed Arnold Rothstein?
Rothstein was the New York crime boss who fixed the 1919 “Black Sox” World Series. (Michael Stuhlbarg played him in Boardwalk Empire.) Titanic double-crossed Rothstein in a notorious 1928 poker game that cost the mobster $320,000, equal to nearly $6 million today. After he refused to pay, somebody shot him dead. Newspapers called it “The Crime of the Century.” Up until the Rothstein murder trial, Titanic had used his real surname, Thomas. But when reporters misidentified him as Alvin “Titanic” Thompson, the star witness liked that name with its tommy-gun echoes. He went by Thompson after he skipped town.
I was pushing Jeannette’s shopping cart at a Walmart when she revealed what Titanic had confided to her. “It was the bag man,” she said. Hyman Biller, a mid-level thug whose job was to collect from Rothstein, was the one who plugged him. And Biller didn’t just get away with murder—he changed the course of criminal history. With Rothstein dead, Italian crime families took over the rackets in New York and, soon, the rest of the country.
Jeannette also told me about a morning in 1965 when she and Titanic were having breakfast at a Denny’s. A young Tour pro stopped by to pay his respects. Ray Floyd shook Titanic’s hand and said, “I am the greatest golfer in the world.” Ti was impressed with that kind of moxie. He liked the kid enough to arrange a money match between Floyd and an unknown assistant pro at Horizon Hills Country Club near El Paso: Lee Trevino. After a spectacular three-day battle between the two future Hall of Famers ended in a stalemate, Floyd said, “Adios, amigo. I can make easier money on the Tour.”
Because of the famous criminal names he often connected with, the FBI pursued Titanic for decades. Jeannette remembered the G-men who came knocking on her door. She told them to get lost. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I found a sheaf of FBI telexes tracking the movements of “notorious gambler Alvin Clarence Thomas,” but the feds never caught up with him. The documents that mattered most to my research, however, were in a Harlingen, Texas, bank. That’s where Jeannette opened a safe-deposit box to show me their 1954 marriage license and Titanic’s last will and testament, in which he left Jeannette and his sons an estate consisting mostly of a Ford LTD.
It’s said that every real gambler dies broke. Titanic wasn’t quite broke when he died at 80 in 1974. He was living in a nursing home, beating other patients out of their Social Security checks. At the end, with doctors and nurses clapping defibrillator paddles to his chest, he couldn’t speak. He kept pointing to the bedside dresser, where Jeannette found Titanic’s last bankroll, a wad of $20s that amounted to $400.
Not long before she died in 2014, Jeannette hand-embroidered a Christmas tree ornament for my kids and mailed it to New York.
Clint Eastwood passed on the Titanic movie, but Foster still wanted to pursue it. Then I heard good news: Mark Wahlberg’s people were interested. Wahlberg is a single-digit golfer. His company, Closest to the Hole Productions, was riding high with the HBO hit Entourage. But then a friend from my Sports Illustrated days trumped all other proposals by bidding $50,000 to option the book, five times what anybody else was offering. I figured we were on the road to Hollywood.
But soon that first option, like most movie deals, was going up in smoke. It ran out before there was a script, much less a star with the antihero’s unsinkable charm. Titanic’s next screen suitor was a dashing BBC presenter, Alexis Conran, who barnstormed through Texas and the Ozarks on his way to New York City for a three-part TV series called Hustling America. “I want to know if I’m good enough to follow in the footsteps of the greatest hustlers of all time,” he announced, “and I’m starting out with the very best, the legendary Titanic Thompson.” Conran couldn’t flip playing cards into a derby hat with Ti’s skill, but he still won a bet by making 52 out of 52. He did it by tossing a new deck—while it was still in its package—into the hat. He outran a horse in a 100-yard sprint by making the race 50 yards down and 50 yards back. (A horse has a far bigger turning radius than a BBC host.) Conran had the charisma and con-artist chops to play Titanic, but nobody wanted a British TV guy to star in a film about an American original.
Then, another twist. In 2015, endodontist-turned-producer Jim Kreutzer reached out to option my first book, Tommy’s Honor, a father-and-son story set in Scotland at the dawn of professional golf and published in 2007. He asked if I’d like to write the movie version. I quickly learned a lesson about turning a book into a film: It helps to live with a talented screenwriter.
I knew nothing about screenwriting except that it’s a kind of storytelling with rules of its own. Lucky for me, my wife, journalist and author Pamela Marin, had taken a deep dive into screenplay structure—reading and outlining scripts, pounding out a few of her own. We had a long conference call with Kreutzer and his chosen director for the film, Jason Connery—the son of Sir Sean Connery, who took up the game in the early ’60s so that James Bond would look like he could play in Goldfinger. Jason had the game in his bones.
We went to work on a script, and by “we” I mean mostly Pamela, who collaborated with Jason for months while I chipped in historical details like, “The golfers had a fistfight in a bunker at Musselburgh.” Jason arranged to shoot a Tommy’s Honour (British spelling) fight scene in the very bunker where it had happened 150 years prior. He cast Scottish icon Peter Mullan as Old Tom Morris and rising star Jack Lowden as Tommy. (Jack would go on to star with future Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots and married her in July 2024.) Both actors claimed to be longtime golfers, which is what you do when you’re up for a part. In fact, neither of them had ever played. The late Jim Farmer, honorary professional at the R&A, taught them swings that were true to the era, but not even he could help Peter sink a putt on a bumpy 19th-century green. In one scene, Old Tom holes a 10-footer. Peter must have missed 20 times in a row. Each time, he smiled gamely and resolved to sink the next one. Each time, Jason reset the shot and called “Action!” while the extras in the crowd held their breath, praying that Old Tom would make his putt. At last he knocked one in, and the crowd roared like he’d won the Open.
Another movie lesson was learned when Pamela and I came up with a grand, historically accurate scene that we thought would impress: a re-creation of when England’s Prince Leopold traveled to St. Andrews to play golf in 1876, riding in a carriage pulled by a team of white horses past rows of trumpeters and cheering crowds.
“It [was] epic,” Jason said. “And filming the scene would cost more than the rest of the movie.” So much for the prince.
Pamela was making final tweaks to the script when Jason called. “Sam Neill might be available to play our big, bad Captain Boothby,” he told her. “We need a big scene for him.”
She wrote a showdown between Tommy Morris and the pompous Boothby, who carries a chessboard with him. In the final cut, it was thrilling to hear actors like Lowden and Neill say their lines better than we’d imagined them when we wrote them. But in Pamela’s draft, Tommy had the last word. Looking at the board, he was meant to say, “Only the pawn can change his station.” That line ended up on the cutting-room floor—so it goes when you’re writing for a movie star.
Tommy’s Honour got solid reviews, won the 2016 Scottish BAFTA for Best Feature Film and has aired umpteen times on Golf Channel. Pamela was now an award-winning screenwriter. Our next shot at a movie came at a 2016 lunch with the Burberry Brothers (not quite their real name) at a trendy bistro in New York. Two of their recent films had a combined gross of more than $500 million. We pitched a Titanic Thompson biopic featuring Ti and Alice shooting their way out of the Pittsburgh ambush before she died in a historically accurate car wreck that might have been arranged by Capone.
The Burberrys didn’t seem interested. A couple weeks later, to our surprise, they publicly announced that they had acquired my book and signed Woody Harrelson to play Titanic. But they got out over their skis and had to retract their statement: We had another producer who’d been waiting for his chance.
Steve Bing, whose $600 million inheritance made him a Hollywood player at the age of 18, produced Get Carter with Sylvester Stallone and The Polar Express with Tom Hanks. We went back and forth with Bing about a Titanic movie. He sent Pamela’s pitch to Todd Phillips, director of The Hangover (and, later, Joker, with Joaquin Phoenix). “I think he’s our director,” Bing told us.
Then came devastating news: In the summer of 2020, Bing leaped to his death from his 27th-floor condo in Los Angeles.
Other producers have since wooed us, only to bail when it was time to ante up. Five years later, there is still no Titanic Thompson movie. “It’s gotta happen sometime,” says Gary McCord. “He’s the most cinematic sumbitch who ever walked the earth.”
Who could play Titanic? “Clint, obviously,” McCord said before Eastwood aged out of the role. The list of leading men potential producers have talked up includes Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale and Rob Lowe. Fifty years after Titanic cashed out, he’s still waiting for his time in the spotlight.