Was Lee Trevino the original sandbagger?
Let’s take ourselves back in time, to an era before we could pull our handicaps up on iPhones to figure out who’s giving who strokes, and how many. Imagine stepping up to the first tee, ready to put some stakes on your match with a money game. Your opponent is eventual six-time major champion Lee Trevino. He tells you he plays off scratch. You’ve lost before you’ve even teed off.
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That was a real experience that golfers facing Trevino–apparently the original sandbagger–would have. In an exclusive interview with Chad Mumm and the Vanity Index Podcast, Trevino revealed that prior to his legendary success in professional golf, he was already making money on the golf course by hustling his competition.
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To be fair, he certainly wasn’t alone. According to Trevino, anyone who was gambling was going to give themselves a few extra strokes if they could.
“If he’s a four (handicap), he’s going to tell you he’s a seven,” Trevino said. “If he’s a five, he’ll tell you he’s an eight. Well, I was a plus-six.”
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But if you had been on that first tee, asking Trevino what his handicap was, he would have told you he didn’t have one. He might even say he didn’t really know what a handicap was. By the end of it, you’d be walking down the first hole playing the World Golf Hall of Fame member as a scratch golfer.
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“The man is dead before we tee off,” Trevino said. “He’s absolutely dead.”
The stunt probably got a lot harder to pull off after Trevino started winning major championships–his success coupled with his personality made him as recognizable a golfer as there was on TOUR. But I’m pretty sure he’d take the trade-off of winning a couple more money games for six major championships.
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