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"That was a great game of golf, fellas."--Bing Crosby's last words

One hundred years ago this month, 26 days and 5,000 miles apart, Leslie Townes Hope and Harry Lillis Crosby were born. Hope-and-Crosby. Not only when it came to golf, but especially in that sense, they were one. At the greening of the game, the great gardeners were Bobby Jones, Dwight Eisenhower, Arnold Palmer and

Hope-and-Crosby. This was history's indispensable foursome. Representing a kind of Grand Slam of their own, they were the ones who cultivated golf in America.

Who was older? Bob or Bing?

"Each one said the other was older," says Kathryn Crosby, Bing's widow. "Older and fatter, and a worse golfer."

In fact, Crosby was older--May 3 to May 29--but Hope never knew it. And, now that he comes to his own centennial, bedridden in Southern California, Bob is probably unaware that he won the argument. By the evidence of a Washington state baptismal certificate, Bing's long-professed birth date (1904 in most of the annals) has recently been corrected to 1903. "Part of my life," Hope once said, "went with Bing."

In a decidedly mixed blessing, Hope has survived his friend by more than a quarter of a century. Walking off a Spanish golf course near Madrid, after shooting 85 and winning a $10 bet, Crosby had a heart attack and died. He was 74. It was Oct. 14, 1977, a surprising date to me.

"I never play golf after the shooting season opens in October," Crosby told Jack Murphy and me a few years earlier in a house above the 13th fairway at Pebble Beach. Bing's winter pro-am, the famous "Clam-bake" without clams, was about to reconvene. "October is the time for the ducks and the quail and the pheasants," he said, "and for getting reacquainted with your dog."

Murphy, the elegant sports editor of The San Diego Union, had invited me to share his appointment with Crosby, who was mostly genial but slightly odd. Bing alternated between amazing loquacity and uncomfortable silence, puffing on his pipe and staring out the window. He may have been afraid that one of us was about to hit him up for a spot in the tournament, his constant fear.

"Pebble Beach is the Louvre," he said. "It isn't just the Louvre, it's everything in the Louvre, too, with all of the artists gathered 'round." Bing didn't care for Hope's snappier description--" Alcatraz with grass"--but he nearly smiled when Murphy quoted Olympic swimmer and Tarzan portrayer Johnny Weissmuller, one of the amateur celebrities, saying, "I've never been so wet in all my life."

More than just a vocabulary filled with $2.50 words, Bing effectively had his own language, delivered in that familiar boo boo boo patois of Father Chuck O'Malley. For instance, discussing Bing's Del Mar racetrack (headquarters of another of his sporting passions), even poets are usually satisfied with the phrase "where the turf meets the surf." But Crosby called it "that pretty little horse hippodrome by the sea."

Parties were "soirees," and drinks were "toddies." He described the most devoted drinkers (see: Phil Harris, Crosby's second in command) as "bibulous." "Crosby weather," part of our vernacular, didn't cover the meteorology of the matter nearly well enough for Bing. To him, Carmel's perennial, if not annual, cloudbursts were "ring-tailed twisters" that required the spectators not just to don boots and long johns but to break out their "mukluks" and "balbriggans." I liked L.A. columnist Jim Murray's line, but Bing made a face when I repeated it. Playing off the Hope-and-Crosby "Road" pictures, Jim dubbed Bing's tournament, "The Road to Pneumonia."

In Crosby-speak, if you were in a bunker, you were "in the loge." Jack Lemmon wasn't swinging a golf club. He was "basting a turkey." Of course, Lemmon was more at home in "shooting galleries" (movie theaters). And, if Bing didn't quite get what you had just said, he announced, "I'm playing infield here."

It was a little challenging to converse with him, but fun.

Crosby and Murphy had black Labrador retrievers in common. Jack's was a whiskery old fellow named Abe of Spoon River, certainly the only dog in the world that munched cheese balls and fetched readers. Bing's Lab was called Remus. Short for, in a far less politically correct time, "Uncle Remus."

"I suppose in every man's life," Kathryn says, "he gets the dog that he loves so much. When Bing and I were married about five or six or seven months, we went to the ranch, the Elko Ranch [Nevada], and there was a new litter of pups. Remus was the special one. Bing worked him and trained him and went hunting with him always at the duck club. He was just his best companion and friend."

Remus had a profound influence on Crosby's stewardship at Pebble Beach.

"You know, I think Remus is the reason we sold the place at Pebble," Kathryn says. "When the children were very very small, Remus got in the surf right across the fairway from the house. It was hard for him to get out. And, you know, Labs are water dogs. Bing worried that, if Remus was having a difficult time, the kids were in danger. So we sold the house."

The tournament traces to 1947 on the Monterey Peninsula. But it goes back to 1937 at the Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club, near San Diego, where Sam Snead won the original $500 first prize and insisted on cash. Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Randolph Scott were among the drowned amateurs (prophetically, the inaugural round of the Rancho Santa Fe Amateur-Pro was washed out). After the rain stopped, everyone repaired to a barbecue soiree under the pepper trees on Bing's ranch.

Reportedly, pro Toney Penna was the one who put the bug in Crosby's ear. But Bing was the man who invented pro-ams. A year before, 1936, he won the first of five club championships at Lakeside in North Hollywood, an industry course where actors, directors and film technicians dominated and, to the annoyed growls of W.C. Fields, Howard Hughes walked Jean Harlow down the fairway.

"I played a little as a kid in Spokane," Crosby said. "Caddied some. But I don't suppose I played seriously until I came down to California and got into vaudeville in 1925."

Meanwhile, Hope, a prize fighter in his youth (his ring name, "Packy East," stayed his identity on little gold locker-room plates all over the world), didn't tumble to golf until around 1930, also during vaudeville days. On a boring afternoon in Seattle, several partners on the bill, the Diamond Brothers, came clattering through the lobby wrangling their clubs. They invited Bob to trail along. A couple of years later, Hope and Crosby met for the first time on the street outside New York's Friars Club. Pretty soon they were improvising an act at the Capitol Theater and "between shows [Hope told Dwayne Netland in Confessions of a Hooker], we'd go over to Alex Morrison's driving range under the 59th Street Bridge and hit balls. That was the genesis of a close friendship that endured 45 years."

Bob said, "I liked Bing right away. At the studio or the golf course, he made me feel comfortable from the start. Bing was always a little better than I: a 2-handicapper. At my best, I was a 4. But, mostly, I was a 6. Bing took the game seriously. I liked to play it for laughs, but he worked hard on his swing. On the picture sets, whenever we had a break, he would ask, `How long?' Then he'd head over to Wilshire Country Club, 10 minutes away, and hit balls until they called him back. Finally the producers partitioned off a part of the set and installed a net so we could practice. We almost killed off a couple of cameramen."

Crosby said, "I may have been a bit better than Hope, but he was a better bettor."

Both were competent enough at the game to sign up for a British Amateur, Bing at St. Andrews in 1950, Bob in Wales the following summer. (Crosby actually qualified for a U.S. Amateur.)

"I filed an entry for the British," Bing recalled, "but at the time of the tournament I was enjoying myself in France and I really didn't intend to compete. At the last minute, I changed my mind and crossed the Channel. My arrival on the first day of the tournament, without a practice round, annoyed the local press. They felt I was not taking the event very seriously."

His opponent was a Scot named Wilson. They attracted quite a following.

"Most of the spectators came to see an actor hacking it around," Bing said. "Well, I opened with a birdie, which raised a few eyebrows. Then I birdied the next hole, followed with a par, then birdied two more holes. By this time, the gallery was really getting excited. Then I shanked a shot and, of course, pretty soon I was shanking the thing regularly, and Wilson finally beat me, 2 and 1."

Even shanks, Crosby could recount with a lilt. "For me, golf has been a kind of passport," he said, "to relaxation, and to happiness."