No saint, Doug Sanders still has no regrets about the fluffed putt at St Andrews that drove his life in a whole new wild – but far from ‘half-assed’ – direction

OU might have thought that the man regularly dubbed golf’s most famous choker, responsible for 30 inches of epic failure on a blustery St Andrews green 45 years ago, would be a shy and retiring fellow at best and, at worst, not at all receptive to being asked one more time about the fluffed putt before he’s even had breakfast. But it’s remarkably easy to track down Doug Sanders and, once my apology has been accepted for rousing him – this an epic failure of time-difference calculation – it’s pretty straightforward getting him to talk. “First I gotta go running and do my sit-ups – 500 of them every day,” he explains. Sanders, by the way, will celebrate his 82nd birthday as the last of the grandstands for this year’s Open is dismantled.

Full of beans and quick-witted, he has an incredible story to tell, and one which almost ended when he hired a hitman with the target of Sanders himself. He begins, though, with confirmation of his location, delivered in a sing-song voice: “I’m in Texas/along with all my exes/maybe I should be movin’ to Tennessee.” Ah, but the man dubbed the “Peacock of the Fairways” is bound for the Boot Hill of Major Dreams. “With God’s blessing I’m going to see another Saint Andrews Open but I think this’ll be my last. Say, can you give me a weather forecast for the tournament? I wanna know how many sweaters to pack…”

There will be plenty of golf pullovers for sale around the Old Course next week but few players have worn them with the flair of the Houston-based Sanders and no-one has matched them to a complete, coordinated ensemble, right down to glove and underpants. On 12 July, 1970 he was a vision in lavender, possibly in tribute to the thistle, after loving every minute of the Home of Golf experience up until that point.

“Do you know I was the first player to rent a house for the Open?” Sanders will make a few boasts today and who’s to doubt any of them. “This place was owned by a preacher. It didn’t have a refrigerator so I had to buy one. There wasn’t a key for the front door either and when I asked why, the preacher said he hadn’t needed to lock it in 40 years.

“My wife Scotty was with me and my good friend [easy-listening crooner] Buddy Greco.” Sanders, an honorary member of the Rat Pack, will name-drop many times during our rollicking hour. “The Scottish crowds were so knowledgeable and polite, even though there were no fairway ropes back then. They were such nice ladies and gentlemen and coming from the south, down in Georgia, I felt right at home. In Georgia if someone stopped you for a light, that was what the guy would want. Then he’d say: ‘Y’all go to church yesterday? Is your family good? God bless you.’ In other towns I’ve been you might have ended up getting robbed. But Saint Andrews was real friendly and everything was going great.

“I’d play good golf and then at night we’d have big dinners back at the house. A friend sourced me some lovely beef from Denver. He’d supplied the Eisenhower banquet, just one steak from each leg. Scotty worked for an airline and she helped smuggle it through.”

But neither Colorado beef nor Scottish encouragement were quite enough to help Sanders lift the Claret Jug. That two-and-a-half footer on the 18th would have done it. Scotty and Buddy couldn’t look, especially when Sanders got distracted by what he thought was fluff which had blown on to his line to the hole. “There was nothing. It was just that the sun had burnt the grass.” He returned to his ball, only to slightly alter his stance. “Ben Hogan was watching back in Fort Worth and told me later he was screaming at the TV: ‘Walk away, Sanders – walk away!’” But Sanders couldn’t hear him, only some titters from the crowd. “I thought, ‘I’ll bury these laughs’, although the ladies and gentlemen weren’t being malicious. I’d probably made them nervous. And the rest, my friend, is history.”

Jack Nicklaus won the play-off the following day. “I never gave up but I did think: how stupid was I? Listen, I’ve never really said too much about this but I reckoned I’d already won the Open, the greatest event in golf, and I wanted to entertain the folks. Not showing off as such, but coming up the last fairway I walked out front smiling away. You don’t get given a tournament, though, you have to win it. I kind of forgot you have to play 72 holes, not 71. I was just trying to be a nice old Georgia boy, only it didn’t work out.

“Jack was very sweet. ‘This should have been yours,’ he said. He’s always been a gentleman, a true guy. And of course the part that miss has played in my life has been unbelievable. Winning the Open would have meant hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions. I could have run my own plane. I might have become a golf course designer. But, you know, I don’t measure life in dollars. A private jet is not what makes a person. I don’t think there’s

“I sent a message to somebody to get a hitman to call me. We sorted out a deal over dinner for him to put a bullet in my head. Then I had the operation, where my heart actually stopped, but it worked. I stood Tony down, gave up drinking and found God”

anyone anywhere in the world who’s lived a better life than I’ve done.”

By “better” Sanders doesn’t mean blameless or in any way saint-like. In fact he probably means the exact opposite – wilder, more outrageous. We’ll come to all of that, but let’s find out how he got as close as 30 inches from glory because at one time that seemed as improbable as the Peacock matching plum slacks with a mustard shirt.

He was born in 1933 in Cedartown, Georgia in the middle of the Great Depression. On the free enterprise route were the panhandlers, moonshiners and gamblers. Sanders’ father Luke elected to walk the ten miles to and from the cottonfields for 50 cents a day and then his mother Pauline got a job paying 20 cents before Sanders joined the crews aged seven.

“We were so poor I didn’t own a pair of shoes ’til I was 12 but don’t feel sorry for me,” he says. “My brother Ernest was blind at four from playing with a dynamite cap which also took his fingertips off, and my other brother James was caught by a grenade in Korea and lost an arm.”

At first for Sanders, golf was a means to earn a little extra money. New balls were scarce around Cedartown so he’d hunt down lost ones for nickels and dimes. Then at ten he started caddying but would blow his earnings in chipping and putting games.

“When I walked the two and a half miles home – broke – the lightning bugs on the road were like ghosts. I went away and practised – chip, putt, chip, putt. Then one day the other caddies said: ‘Come on, sucker, we ain’t had any of your money for a while’. I beat them that day, and most days after that, and with five dollar bills in my pocket those lightning bugs suddenly looked like stars.”

A yarn often told, no doubt, but a good one. He’ll talk about anything, including how he lost his virginity at the age of 11 in a ditch. “It was on the way back from the course and she was the pro. What can I tell ya? I enjoyed it and just kept doing it.”

Sanders was now hooked on golf, not least when bearing witness to what he reckons was the greatest shot of all time: “I was caddying in a big money game at Cedartown and this guy Dallas Weaver – I’ll never forget his name – got stuck behind a tree.

“We all thought he was dead but there were railtracks running by our course and just as a freight train came through he turned sideways, took some kind of low iron and banked his ball off the side of one of the cars and almost on to the green.”

Sanders stresses again how he doesn’t need pity for such a tough upbringing because it was the making of him. “I tell parents now: set your kids hard but achievable targets, like when they get their first par give them a pullover or something. For me back then, a big goal was saving up $10.50 for a bicycle – a girl’s bike, mind you – so I didn’t have to walk home anymore.”

Both Sanders’ swing and swinging dresssense owe a lot to his modest beginnings. “Because of always having to wear hand-medowns I noticed nice clothes. Even the first time the laundrette put a crease down the front of my blue jeans was pretty exciting. So I was the first golfer to colour-coordinate, buy some dye and make my shoes the same as my slacks.” The swing started out quick and flat to avoid detection and stayed that way. “Caddies weren’t allowed to play the course but, when the pro went home for lunch, we’d sneak