The Cormorant Of Frankie Laine

NEW FIELD, PAST PRICES
PLAYER	PRICE	YEAR
JIMMY DEMARET	$18,000	1957
DOUG FORD	17,500	1957
GENE LITTLER	16,500	1956
ARNOLD PALMER	15,000	1957
BILLY CASPER	11,500	1957
DUTCH HARRISON	9,000	1954
TOMMY BOLT	8,500	1956
BILLY MAXWELL	8,500	1957
GARDNER DICKINSON	8,000	1956
DICK MAYER	8,000	1957
AL BESSELINK	6,500	1954
ED OLIVER	6,500	1954
FRANK STRANAHAN	6,500	1956
WALTER BURKEMO	4,500	1954
GEORGE BAYER	?	DEBUT
ROBERTO DE VINCENZO	?	"
PAUL HARNEY	?	"
LIONEL HEBERT	?	"
HOWIE JOHNSON	?	"
BILL JOHNSTON	?	"
STAN LEONARD	?	"
KEN VENTURI	?	"
Twenty-two champions are entered in the 1958 tournament, eight of them for the first time. The best Calcutta prices of previous competitors are shown here. Sam Snead, who was bought for a record $20,000 in 1954, withdrew from the competition this year.

There is an old and skillful sport called cormorant fishing which the Japanese have been practicing for centuries. The cormorant trainer fastens a ring snugly around the neck of the bird and dispatches it to scoop from the sea, and bring back whole, any fish it can locate. The cormorant never swallows the catch. The ring sees to that. The bird merely takes whatever scraps the trainer volunteers.

Singer Frankie Laine has, in a sense, a cormorant working for him at the annual Tournament of Champions at Las Vegas. For the past three years, Laine has bought Golfer Gene Littler in the extracurricular Calcutta pool, and each time Gene has returned faithfully with the "fish"—a haul worth $237,663.

Though Littler, like the cormorant, can't help himself to any of the Calcutta catch, he has been rewarded by Laine with a total of $25,000 in cash, plus a new Thunderbird. This is in addition to the $10,000 first prize he has taken from the tournament each year.

This week Laine plans to send Littler forth again at Las Vegas, which hosts the world's most exclusive golf event. Participation is limited to winners of PGA-sponsored tournaments during the previous 12 months and to the Las Vegas defending champion.

Perhaps half the gallery doesn't know a par from a 10 the hard way. They are truants from the gaming rooms who are lured into the sun by the prospect of action. They'll bet on anything. The seventh hole, for instance, is a 221-yard par 3 whose green is partly blocked by a half-moon of water. Standard odds are 2 to 1 that the tee shot doesn't make the green. One will get you four that the ball lands in the water. A price of 6 to 5 was once posted that club-busting Tommy Bolt wouldn't finish a certain round with the regulation 14 clubs in his bag. Tommy surprisingly did. (The next day he finished with only 12.)

The side bets, however, are still incidental to the kibitzers' interest in the Calcutta pool. Each time a player raises his club, he is swinging for two people—himself and the guy who buys him in the Calcutta, which last year amounted to the staggering sum of $265,650.

A Calcutta pool is essentially an auction at which each golfer entered in the tournament is sold to the highest bidder. At Las Vegas 10% is removed from the pool for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund and the rest of the money is distributed on the basis of order-of-finish, with 40% going to the person buying the winner. The balance is divided up among the next six places.

In the last three tournaments the winner has been Littler, purchased in the Calcutta each time by Laine, who has collected, respectively, $72,900, $69,120 and $95,643. Seats are distinctly at a premium in Las Vegas on Calcutta auction night. The golfers are-put on the block in the nightclub of the Desert Inn, which sponsors the tournament. Ordinarily, most of the bidding is done by recognized plungers on the Las Vegas strip, but occasionally strange money shows. Frankie Laine's for example.

At the time in 1955 that Frankie received an invitation to help sell golfers at the tournament Calcutta, he was puzzled.

"I'm a Sunday hacker who shoots 95, not counting the misses," he says. "I didn't know a Calcutta pool from a Bombay duck. When I got to 'Vegas, someone explained it was an auction. My wife, Nan, said to me, 'Sounds like fun, honey Let's buy Gene Littler. I saw his wife's picture in the paper this morning.' "