The Sandbag that Changed Golf: Deepdale, 1955

The concepts of honor and integrity in golf are inseparable from the inevitability of cheating. The former are prominent because the latter is so easy—when self-policing is the best hope for fair play, you better have a code of honor to work as a secondary enforcement. In 1955, at Deepdale Country Club on Long Island, that code seemed to fail when two unknown sandbaggers won a tournament and took home thousands of dollars thanks to an associated Calcutta auction. In fact, the code had not failed: A crisis of conscience led to a confession, the scandal became national news, and the USGA took action. For the two men at the heart of it, the fallout was swift and severe, and lasted a lifetime. On this episode, we look at golf's most notorious amateur scandal and the aftershocks that transformed the amateur game.