Sanders From Cedartown

Cedartown, Georgia:  Summer 1940

Doug Sanders bends forward, croker sack in hand, over a plant ripe with cotton bolls. He’s 7 years old, wearing overalls, filling the bag under a blinding sun. He’s hatless, his bare feet dusty and stained from the fiery red dirt in the field. His brother James, who is 10, and other kids labor alongside. The only water they have is from nearby creeks. Their short hair is rife with lice.

His oldest brother—Ernest, 12—does not join them. He has been blind since the age of 4, when he picked up a live stick of dynamite in a coal yard and it took his sight. A decade later, James will lose one-third of his right arm when he picks up a grenade in Korea and tries to toss it away from his Marine unit. He will return to Cedartown a decorated war hero and serve for 14 years as Polk County’s coroner, an elected position. A good golfer before the war, James will continue to play at the local nine-holer with only his left arm. “He was the first one who took me and my brother to the golf course,” James’ son Darryl will later tell me. “He would hit with one hand and still knock the crap out of the ball.”

Doug Sanders hates picking cotton. The days are hotter than nine kinds of hell. Everyone carries bags made of burlap that some call a gunnysack or a pick sack, but my family and some others in Cedartown—where I was raised—call a croker sack. Sanders adjusts his croker and looks for rocks in the dirt to make it heavier before weigh-in time. In addition to rocks and getting the cotton wet, he occasionally sneaks in a small watermelon. “Sometimes we picked for strangers, sometimes for relatives, but I cheated equally on all of them,” he would write in his 1974 memoir, Come Swing With Me: My Life on and off the Tour. 

He and James pick cotton because their family is as poor as the dirt the boys stand on. Their father, George Luther Sanders, known as Luke, works as a truck driver and later will drive a taxi, earning meager wages he never spends wisely. 

Darryl says that Luke would come home from work every evening, sit in his chair, get drunk and flip loose change through the grate in the floor furnace, the coins clinking as they hit the bottom. “If he flipped it and it hit the carpet and didn’t go in there, he’d make you pick it up and throw it in there,” Darryl says. “He wouldn’t let you have it.”

Luke intended to one day remove the pan of the furnace and recover the coins like it was a piggy bank, but the plan backfired. “Somebody knew he’d done that, and they’d come in there when they [the Sanders] weren’t at home and dropped the bottom of the floor furnace,” Darryl says. “Cleaned all that money out.”

St. Andrews, Scotland:  July 12, 1970

Resplendent in a magenta cardigan, 36-year-old Doug Sanders bends forward, putter in hand, over his dimpled Slazenger Plus. It’s resting a mere 30 inches from the cup on the 18th green, on Sunday of the Open Championship. He is paid to use this putter and gets all the golf clubs he could ever want as part of the deal.

Croker sacks are only a memory for him, replaced with plush leather golf bags he collects by the dozens, bags that caddies carry for him. He studies the narrow chasm between the ball and the hole on the ancient turf where many believe the game was born. Jack Nicklaus, golf’s blond beast, sits in the clubhouse alone in second place, one stroke behind Sanders. Lee Trevino, to whom a British announcer earlier referred as “the extrovert Mexican,” held a two-shot lead at the start of this final round but has fallen three strokes back. Moments before, Trevino rolled in a 20-foot putt to claim sole possession of third. Bedecked in a red shirt and black slacks, the Texan adjusts his white cap and is transfixed, ready for the history Sanders is about to make, set to hug a fellow superstar who came from nothing to make it on one of golf’s grandest stages.

It’s a putt many would consider a gimme. Sanders is in his 14th year on the PGA Tour and has already won 18 tournaments and played for the 1967 Ryder Cup team. But he has never won a major. He has finished second three times: the 1966 British Open at Muirfield, the 1961 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills and the 1959 PGA Championship at Minneapolis GC. All three times, he lost by one stroke, most recently at the hands of Nicklaus. 

Sanders’ once dark, shiny pompadour, which he styled as a young player debuting on Tour at the age of 22, has become grizzled with streaks of gray. As he crouches over the putt, his hair is thick but wild, billowing in the harsh wind blowing off the North Sea. He has packed epic good times and three wives into those years on Tour, running with celebrities, including Sinatra and the Rat Pack, while bagging almost $1 million in tournament earnings and countless more on side hustles. Scores of girlfriends have come and gone, including Donna Douglas, the actress who played Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. He has played golf with presidents and vice presidents, including Spiro T. Agnew (he calls him Ted), who only five months earlier had shanked a ball that hit Sanders in the back of the head at a celebrity event. In the gallery at St. Andrews, his close friend Buddy Greco, the jazz pianist and singer, stands with Sanders’ third wife, Scotty, champagne and celebration on their minds. 

Sanders takes his time, kneeling down to study the line from both sides. As he takes his stance, he seems to be preparing to complete a religious ritual, contemplating finally crossing the threshold into golf immortality. The wind ruffles his slacks. Sanders, who says he spends $10,000 annually on clothes, knows that his sartorial splendor will pop in photographs of the annual champions dinners, which he plans never to miss. 

What he can accomplish with this 30-inch putt, claiming the claret jug at St. Andrews, is spoken about in hushed, august tones—an almost biblical form of language that rings ridiculous to the nonbeliever but to lovers of the game is the true word. To them, St. Andrews is as holy a city as Jerusalem. The tension and anticipation in the faces surrounding the green and watching from the ancient buildings grows as Sanders prepares to join Bobby Jones as the only other native of the state of Georgia to win the Open Championship at St. Andrews.

Sanders begins to bring the putter back, but he notices what he takes to be a speck of dirt in the path to the hole. He stops—stepping out with his left foot but keeping his right foot in place—and flicks away the tiny pebble the wind has blown across the green. The crowd twitters a bit, one lady laughing loudly. Trevino raises his left hand in a request for silence.

The crowd hushes once again. Sanders resumes his stance, his left foot back in roughly the same place—but not exactly—and stands for another beat. He takes the putter back no more than 2 inches and begins to nudge it forward.

Cedartown, Georgia:  Late summer 1940 to 1946

In addition to the Sanders boys, there is sister Sarah, 15, and baby sister Stella, the youngest, born in 1939, and their mother, Pauline. Pauline often waits until the six other family members have eaten supper before she herself eats. Sometimes she doesn’t eat at all.

Cedartown, where my mother’s family goes back for generations, sits in the southernmost reaches of the Appalachian foothills in northwest Georgia, 10 miles from the Alabama line. It’s less than a two-hour drive west of Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club, Bobby Jones’ home course, but that feels like a million miles away.

Sanders’ family moved to an area known as Benedict, south of Cedartown, when he was 7. Their home was less than a quarter-mile from a course called Cherokee Country Club, a nine-holer founded in 1924 by Charles Adamson, owner of the Cedartown Cotton and Export Company. The course started humbly, with sand greens and sparse fairways. It sat tucked in between Little Cedar Creek, winding around its south side—the first green is still bordered by water on three sides—and the train tracks that formed its east boundary. Not far from the first green, which slopes sharply down toward the creek, was the grist mill known as Old Mill. Built by enslaved people in 1848, it ground corn and wheat with its water-powered wheel for almost 100 years. 

In the mid-1930s, E.D. Hightower, proprietor of Peek-Hightower Lumber & Supply Company, rode a mule on the course, putting his caddie on the mule’s back in a match against Edward Graves. In 1961, when Ed Graves had become Ed Graves Sr. and established a successful insurance agency in town, he and a group of partners tried to buy the course at auction from the American Legion, which had owned it for 12 years. They lost the bid. According to Edward Graves Jr., on the drive home, his dad said, “Well, hell, we’ll start our own damn golf course,” which they did, 4 miles north. That new course paid homage to the old name of Cherokee, becoming the Cherokee Golf and Country Club. The old course, under ownership that would change several times over the years, became known as Cedar Valley Golf Course. Today, Cedar Valley has a full 18 holes, the second nine added in 2003. The entrance road is Doug Sanders Drive. They don’t take tee times. You just show up and get in line—if there is one.

In the summer of 1940, Sanders was walking home from another hot, hard day of picking cotton when he passed the golf course. “I saw some boy not much bigger than me pulling a cart along in front of men with sticks in their hands,” he wrote. “I asked one of the other children in our group what that boy was doing. When I found out he was being paid for walking, I knew I was in the wrong business. I never picked cotton again.”

Sanders became a regular fixture around the course with its clubhouse set on a high hill with a big porch—long enough that the highfalutin might call it a veranda—overlooking the finishing hole. That old building, which burned in the 1960s, had a distinctly Southern look, bringing to mind a plantation home posed over its fields. 

 Too small to carry a bag, but big enough to pull a cart around the course, Sanders caddied for 25 cents a round, lugging all four sets of clubs. Caddies were in need, as many men had been drafted for the war. He also scavenged for lost golf balls in the rough and water hazards. “I filled any cuts and nicks with soap, covered them over with white shoe polish and sold the balls for more than they were worth to out-of-towners,” he wrote. That scavenging spirit lives on in Cedar Valley’s pro shop, where they still sell used balls in egg cartons.

One night after Sanders and some other boys had cleaned about 200 balls out of a water hazard, they flipped coins for each ball. Sanders won toss after toss. “I had two coins in my pocket at the time,” he wrote, “one with two heads, the other with two tails.” 

It didn’t take him long to pick up a club and start sneaking in shots while caddying, developing his trademark abbreviated backswing in an attempt to hit the ball straight so he could find it quickly. His first book, published in 1964 after he had established himself with victories in the pro ranks, was called Compact Golf, partly a response to his style being derisively called a “phone-booth swing.” A 1961 Sports Illustrated story about him winning the Colonial National Invitation in Fort Worth, Texas, described Sanders as a “sturdy, handsome young Georgian who swings a golf club something like your Uncle George with a hangover.”

Golf took hold of young Sanders like a fever. Never academics-minded, he studied the game the way young Beethoven dove into symphonies and sonatas. Soon, his routine entailed arriving before dawn to play a full 18 and hanging around at dusk for another 18 or more. When the course wasn’t busy, he’d hit practice balls by the thousands.

He would eventually work in a greenskeeper role, mostly for putting practice. “Atop an old Ford tractor, I would sand greens to keep down the weed growth and smooth out the putting surface,” he wrote in Come Swing With Me, his second book. “I moved the cups in the morning, practicing my putting as I did so until I knew every possible break and angle for every conceivable pin position.”

Local golf gamblers took notice. At 12, Sanders was enlisted with an accountant in a match against two local merchants. On the final hole, he needed to make a 12-foot putt to win a quarter each for himself and his partner. He rolled it only about 6 feet. “I felt too bitter and ashamed to speak,” he wrote. “I vowed to myself right then that I would never let a putt scare me again. I’ve missed a lot of putts since that day, of course, but not for choking.”

He continued to hone his game and frequently play for stakes, winning far more than he lost. The days of selling 100-pound bags of cotton for $2 were over.

Once, on the first tee, an argument ensued as matches formed. Where he had formerly been the kid given a stroke or two, now everyone wanted him to give up shots. “They wouldn’t even consider playing me even,” he wrote. “I had reached a new level in my golfing.…I was thirteen years old….It was the day I stopped being a caddie and started being a player.”

Later that year, he carried his burgeoning confidence into the Georgia State Junior tournament in Augusta. “I was a rough-looking boy with long black hair and blue jeans. I had no money and carried my own clubs,” he wrote. “In my first match I faced a local city boy who had his own caddie and a weekly allowance. I teed up my ball and said, ‘I’m Sanders from Cedartown. I’ll play five, five and five.’”

His challenge to play a Nassau bet that could yield up to $15 in 1946 dollars rattled his opponent so much that the city boy’s “hands started shaking. He couldn’t get his tee into the ground.”

In a 1987 retelling of the story, Sanders wrote, “I had won the match before the first ball was hit.”

Durham, North Carolina: August 1951

Ten Cedartown businessmen chip in $10 each to send 18-year-old Sanders to Durham, North Carolina—some 450 miles northeast—to compete in what was then known as the National Jaycee Junior Golf Tournament. It’s an elite event with players all lodged in posh Duke University dorms alongside college students. 

The first night, someone steals his wallet with the cash. He reports it to tournament organizers, who give him $10 “to tide me over.”

He takes that 10-spot, joins an all-night poker game with summer students and cleans up, winning, he says, $800 over two days, plus a couple of sweaters, a suit and a tuxedo. He even wins two suitcases to carry his newfound wardrobe home. 

He also wins the prestigious tournament, besting players from all over the country who won their way in through qualifying rounds. He does it while winning myriad side bets along the way, using, he says, “my gambler’s adrenalin to get my playing sharp early in the week.”

The trophy presentation is one that a randy poor boy from Cedartown, Georgia, could only dream about. “I’m standing there holding the trophy, a big trophy, and Miss North Carolina is standing there,” he said in a 2015 interview with GolfPunk, a British magazine. 

Photographers, he says, tell her, “‘Give the national junior a kiss.’ She bends over and kisses my lips. And a few minutes later they said, ‘Give him another kiss.’ She gave me another kiss. I don’t know how much time later, they said, ‘You’re kissing too quick. Just put your lips together and hold ’em until we get some pictures.’” 

He would be fine with it lasting into the next morning. It is a seminal moment for Sanders, who’d graduated from high school that spring and turned 18 less than a month before the tournament. The victory earns him a full scholarship to play golf at the University of Florida, propelling him into big-time golf circles. 

That week resonates deeply. His naturally sky-high confidence and preternatural internal motor that always runs full speed are emboldened to the point where he feels that nothing can stop him from becoming a star golfer, a gambler of the highest degree and a playboy of epic proportions. Going forward, he expects to win every tournament and kiss all the beauty queens as they sashay down the runways of life to present him with towering golden trophies bearing his cotton-picking Cedartown name.

Southern storytelling

If these stories sound too good to be true—and I feel certain some are—at the very least they’re embellished. I found several instances of inaccurate names and dates in all three of his books. “Doug said a lot of things,” Jamie Morris, president and CEO of a successful printing business in Cedartown, says with a smile. Morris, who got to know Sanders and his third ex-wife well, facilitated the rehabilitation and design of a building in Cedartown to house the Doug Sanders Museum, which opened in August 2020—only four months after Sanders died in Houston, Texas, at the age of 86. 

Sanders was a real-life character who could have sauntered down a dirt road in the fiction of fellow Georgians Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell and Harry Crews. If O’Connor had written a golf story, Sanders would have ridden a mule from town to town, hustling the rich men and loving up all the ladies after their golf lessons. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met anybody that had more fun every day of his life and enjoyed his friendships with other people more than Doug,” says Bucky Ayers, 79, a semi-retired PGA professional who grew up in Cedartown. His father, Doc Ayers, was a legendary Cedartown High School football coach. As a first-grader, in the early 1950s, Bucky got to know Sanders while he was playing at the University of Florida, shagging balls for him when he visited. “He always would meet people and tell stories and carry on with them,” says Bucky. “I don’t know how he could remember as many jokes as he always did.”

There is a line from a standup-comedy routine by Junior Samples—another native Georgian, most famous for his faux used-car-lot commercials on Hee Haw in which he would remind viewers to call the number B-R-5-4-9—that I once heard on the radio. Samples tells the story of a man and his wife going around town. To each acquaintance they encounter, the man tells a fishing story, alternating the length and weight of the big bass. In one instance, he says it was 16 pounds and 28 inches long, and in another he says 12 pounds and 26 inches long. His wife asks him afterward why his story changed each time. The man says, “I don’t want to tell a man anything more than he is willing to believe.”

You won’t find a better example of the pliability of Southern storytelling. As Sanders writes in his third book, Action on the First Tee: How to Cash In on Your Favorite Sport, published in 1987, “Like a lot of golf stories, that one might not have happened.” That could likely go for many of Sanders’ yarns, as well as the ones that are spun about him. For example, he told GolfPunk that he didn’t own a pair of shoes until he was 12, a dubious claim that would mean he caddied barefoot for five years. I suspect starting with $10 and winning $800 in poker, along with two suits, a tuxedo and two suitcases, has some poetic storytelling license as well.

Some tales about Sanders have been told and retold around Cedartown to the point of outright distortion. My favorite is about the shot that caromed off a train car and onto the green. I first heard it from Tony Tuck, my cousin Gwen’s husband and a master welder in Cedartown, who is a good golfing buddy of mine. Tony grew up playing at Cedar Valley 50 years ago, riding his bicycle there when he was 12. He says his late Uncle Clyde told him that Sanders was stuck behind a tree on the right side of No. 8, which is bordered by railroad tracks. He decided to ricochet the ball off a freight train that was stalled on the line. It ended up on the green. 

The version of the story Bucky Ayers tells is that Sanders knew the train schedule, heard the whistle coming down the line and waited for the passing train, using it as a backboard to bounce the ball up near the pin.

My lifelong friend Mark Russell, however, says that it wasn’t Sanders at all. It was a golf pro named Dallas Weaver—a story that I found Sanders himself confirmed in a Golf Digest article in 2010, noting that Weaver’s ball went “almost onto the green.” I’m guessing “almost” in this context means it could have been as far as 150 yards away. 

Cedartown character

I never met Doug Sanders. He was of my parents’ generation, long gone by the time my family moved back to my mom’s hometown in 1968. I also must confess that I was and am still a much better tennis player than golfer and was not as deeply interested in golf then as I am now. My younger brother Dan is the real golfer in our family, although I’m trying. Now in my late 50s, I know my tennis game is only going to decline as I get older and slower and weaker; my golf, however, sitting at a 20 handicap as I write this, can only improve. Growing up, I knew of Sanders, and it’s likely we crossed paths more than once. I regret missing him.

But after a great deal of reading and talking to people who knew him, poring over the tremendous archives in the Doug Sanders Museum and the Polk County Historical Society Museum, and playing his course, I feel I understand his character. I know well the place from where he sprung. I have written novels peopled with characters like Sanders, rogues some Yankees might scornfully call “good ol’ boys” but whom I think of more fondly—and I do mean fondly—as “Southern bullshitters,” men who sometimes believe in their own lies but are not sinister. (There are, of course, truly sinister characters, but those are another story—not Sanders’ type.) Even though I’ve been “gone off up North now” for 24 years, mostly in New Jersey, where I continue to reside, my Southern-bullshitter genes remain. (Most of it comes from my dad’s side, and I can see the Cedartownians who know us nodding their heads as they read this.)

My mom is five years younger than Sanders and did not know him personally. But in a town of slightly more than 10,000 residents, if you don’t know somebody, you know of them. Mom, whose memory in her 85th year is spotty at best, still remembers that, even in high school, he was known around town as “a ladies’ man”—one a girl five years younger should be wary of.

Mom left Cedartown after high school to attend Stetson University in Florida, later landing a teaching job in Atlanta, where she met my father. After my dad’s brief departure from teaching for an unsuccessful attempt to sell books in Alabama, where I was born, they returned to live in Cedartown when I was 1. Dad became the principal of Benedict School, the elementary school a few hundred yards from Cedar Valley Golf Course, near the home where the Sanders family had lived. Doug Sanders would have attended that school years before, and his nephew Darryl fondly remembers my dad as his principal at Cedar Lake School, where my dad transferred after Benedict School closed. Mom became an English professor at what was known as Floyd Junior College when it opened up the road in Rome in 1970, meaning that a large percentage of people in my hometown were either disciplined by my dad (and he liked to paddle back in those days) or had their essays marked up severely in red ink by my mom.

I never picked cotton. But, like Sanders, I left Cedartown at the age of 18 for a big Southern school—in my case, the University of Georgia—and never moved back. Although I haven’t lived in Cedartown since 1985, I’ve returned hundreds of times and recently, after a few years away, have happily reconnected with friends and family there. I’ll be visiting more regularly. It’s as flawed and imperfect as any other place I’ve lived, but it is also deeply charming and serene and beautiful in its own way. After living in and around Atlanta, Houston, New York and now Philadelphia, I appreciate the easy parking and brief commutes from one spot to another. And with three 18-hole courses, Cedartown is a great spot for golfers. 

I also am both charmed and sometimes a little uneasy that seemingly half of everyone in town seems to know who I am. But it’s home. It’s in my blood and always will be. 

It was in Sanders’ blood too. He never forgot Cedartown, carrying it with him all over the world. It’s where he says his “fate was sealed, after all, when I gave up cotton picking for caddying,” writing that his character “was molded in Cedartown.”

I’m from that same mold. Instead of entertaining folks on the golf course and in the bars with stories that might be partially true (although I have done that more than twice, I must confess), I’ve found an honest outlet for my own bullshit: writing stories.

The PGA Tour, girlfriends galore and running with the Rat Pack: 1956 to July 1970

After a run that included nine amateur tournament victories and a successful career at the University of Florida—where, he admits, he never studied and rarely went to class—Sanders was invited to play the PGA Tour’s Canadian Open in July 1956 as an amateur. “I’m 22 years old and never played a professional tournament, and I won it,” he told GolfPunk.

That put him on the very short list of amateurs to win a PGA Tour event. It has been done only three times since: Nick Dunlap in January 2024 at the American Express, Phil Mickelson at the 1991 Northern Telecom Open and Scott Verplank at the 1985 Western Open.

The win vaulted Sanders onto a big stage, earning him an invitation to the Tournament of Champions at the Desert Inn Country Club in Las Vegas the following April. It’s not the golf he played there that Sanders remembered, but the friends he made and would cherish for the rest of his life. “All the movie stars, Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin and Andy Williams and everybody was there,” he wrote. 

Sanders from Cedartown somehow fit right in with the Hollywood crowd, rubbing and raising elbows with the stars. “I met all those guys and we drank and partied,” he wrote. “That started my life running with the Rat Pack.”

In this instance, he’s not just a country boy spinning a yarn. He knew these fancy folks well. Evidence of these connections is on display in Cedartown at the 5,000-square-foot Doug Sanders Museum: photos with and letters from Sinatra, including a pool-table felt from Sanders’ home that Sinatra signed, as well as letters from and photos of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and many others—presidents and vice presidents and the king of Morocco. A collection of postcards from Phyllis Diller are scribbled with pithy hilarity, such as, “Move it, driver, I think he’s going to squirt!” James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, signed a photo, “To Cracker Boy.”

Stories from Sanders’ life during his years on the PGA Tour sound more like they could be from the tour bus of Willie Nelson (another friend of his) or a Lynyrd Skynyrd after-party. In one instance, James R. Greenway—a native of Cedartown and one of Sanders’ best friends, who traveled with and supported him on Tour for years—hid $7,000 cash for Sanders in a potted plant in a hotel during a long night of drinking. He forgot where he had hidden it for several days, until a maid watering the plant triggered his memory. Another time, Greenway jumped into a pool fully clothed—with Sanders’ bankroll of $16,000, bills that had to be hung up to dry like laundry in his room. Greenway added hellraising flair to the Sanders traveling entourage. “My daddy could command a room,” says Greenway’s daughter, Kay Rutledge, who knew Sanders well.

In his 1987 book, which was mostly advice on gambling interwoven with recycled pieces from his earlier books, Sanders tells the story of winning $13,000 off his friend Evel Knievel after only nine holes. Knievel immediately wanted to double the bet, but didn’t have the payment on hand. Sanders demanded Knievel drive back to his home to get more cash. “I had no intention of winning any money I couldn’t collect on the spot,” Sanders wrote. (In another version I heard, Sanders won $50,000 from Knievel at a tournament in Las Vegas.) 

In a story not unlike Waylon Jennings giving up his seat to the Big Bopper on the flight that killed Buddy Holly, Sanders decided at the last minute to stay one more night in Akron, Ohio, after a 1966 tournament at Firestone Country Club. He opted out of a reserved seat on a private plane hired by his friend Tony Lema, a 32-year-old who’d won the Open Championship at St. Andrews two years before. Sanders attended a party in Akron that night, where he heard “the numbing announcement that the Lema plane had crashed and that there were no survivors.”

A lover of the ladies

In addition to three wives, Sanders had a seemingly never-ending stream of girlfriends. The most famous was Donna Douglas, the actress from Tennessee known for playing Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. Rutledge remembers a moment in the early 1960s when Sanders had arranged for Douglas to telephone. “She called and my mama handed the phone to me and she told me her name, which didn’t ring a bell,” says Rutledge, who was 9 at the time. “And then she started talking like Elly May. I was jumping up and down, I was so excited.”

Millard Greer, 91—who, although older, was a year behind Sanders in school due to being held back because of polio—says stories still abound about the time Sanders drove around Cedartown in a red convertible, showing off Douglas to his home folks. Greer, today president of the Polk County Historical Society, was not close to Sanders, but remembers boxing with him in a high school PE class. When I tell Greer and his wife, Charlotte, that it appears Sanders missed his senior portrait, which I was trying to find in the 1951 high school yearbook in the historical society’s archives, Charlotte says, “That sounds about like him.”

Rutledge says her father told an anecdote about when he met Douglas at the Atlanta airport on Sanders’ behalf. He’d whistled for a taxi when Douglas said, “Step aside, James,” and let out the loudest Elly May Clampett–style whistle he had ever heard.

Sanders’ girlfriends were not a secret, and the chapter “Sex and the Single Golfer” in his 1974 memoir, published in his sixth year of marriage to Scotty, is astounding for its frankness. Imagine Tiger Woods revealing the details of his third-rate romances and low-rent rendezvous.

Sanders wrote, “I never felt ashamed of my sex drive.…I grew up in a town where, like many other places in the south, sex was part of the landscape, just like haystacks and Coca-Cola signs.” He went on to recount taking off his clothes in a crawl space with a girl when he was 7 and claim that he lost his virginity at 11, in a ditch, to a 14-year-old girl. He says that in high school he and a girlfriend would “get there early on a regular basis and make love in a coat room or a broom closet before classes began.” When he first saw a short film made about him winning the National Jaycees tournament, called The Boy Next Door, he was at a drive-in: “I untangled myself from the girl in the backseat and stared in amazement at my image on the screen.” The image he saw was Miss North Carolina kissing him.

A sampling of stories from his life on the PGA Tour in this semi-pornographic chapter include: having sex with a girlfriend in a hospital bed in Atlanta after a knee surgery, falling out of bed and reinjuring his knee; poking his snub-nosed .38 revolver in the back of a woman’s boyfriend who had kicked down her door while he was in bed with her (one of several dangerous-liaison stories involving “Revengeful Boy Friend” characters, a category cited in his book in uppercase); sneaking into a shower with a friend’s date; and so on. He wrote that his daily calendar during his “extravagant bachelor period,” when he lived in Miami in the late 1950s, included notes at 6 p.m. to “drink martinis and make love” and at 3 a.m. to “make love and sleep.” The rest of the day consisted of one round of golf and two sessions of gin rummy.

He says elsewhere in the book that only “sex with a beautiful woman compares with travel to exotic places,” that he remained ready to “entertain the fair sex at any hour.” He jokes that he wishes golf tournaments would line up the women in the galleries this way: “Put the married women on the right side, the unmarried ones on the left, and the ones who don’t care in the fairway.” He also compares each of the major championships to women: The Open Championship is “a quirky old aunt who wears floppy hats and swears a lot,” the PGA Championship is a “beefy pioneer woman,” the U.S. Open is a “severe New England banker’s daughter” and the Masters is “a willowy and wicked southern debutante.”

This doozy of a chapter concludes with his advice for other men to be as successful in their conquests, including one paragraph that says simply, “Get a vibrator.” His closing advice is to a young 30-plus handicapper who complained of premature ejaculation—described as “shooting off in the bushes.” Sanders tells him to think about his terrible golf game during intercourse.

I asked his third wife, Scotty, who stayed wed to Sanders from 1968 to 1995, what it was like to be married to him when the book came out. “All I told him was, ‘You know, someday your son’s going to read these.’ It didn’t matter to him a lot, but he did cut out a few things.”

I wondered during the interview (and still do) what those stories that he cut out could be, but I didn’t have the courage to ask—nor did I want to embarrass her. 

Sanders’ first two wives didn’t last nearly as long. He married hometown sweetheart Betty Jane Estes, who had been a majorette at Cedartown High School, in December 1956, two weeks after he turned pro. They had a son, Brad, a year later, but the marriage, he wrote,  “came to a skidding halt before it was time to get the third anniversary present.” He divorced Estes in 1958 and in 1960 married Joan Faye Brown, a vivacious model and water-skier at Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first theme park.

His match with Brown started out fiery and got hotter. Sanders writes that the first time he kissed her, he backed into her stove while they were making hot chocolate and the burner caught his coat on fire. They fought incessantly. In Las Vegas at the Tournament of Champions in 1961, he says, she hit him in the head with an enormous lamp. Four months after they’d appeared together on the cover of Sports Illustrated in January 1962, he claims, they were in Augusta for the Masters when she hit him in the arm with a spiked high heel and threw his clothes out on the lawn during a rainy night in Georgia. “A closet’s worth of custom-designed slacks and shirts was piled in the grass and mud,” he says. Later that year, they divorced, which Sanders described as “another onerous financial settlement.”

In 1964 he met Scotty, a calming presence who worked in public relations for American Airlines. They dated for four years before marrying in 1968. She brought some sanity to his life and remained married to him for 27 years—as long as she could tolerate his philandering.

“That’s who he was,” Scotty says. “I knew that before I married him, and I kind of realized that’s just who he was. He was kind. He was generous. He loved people. He just had an addiction for women.”

Lack of load management

Sanders was frequently injured and missed a lot of time on Tour. In 1959, he gave up a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit after suffering severe chest pains and an inexplicable inability to begin his backswing. 

His most successful season came in 1961, when he won five tournaments, and he credited it to being healthy, his first “injury-free year.” In the early 1960s, he quit drinking every January and tried to stay sober until he won a tournament. “That worked fine so long as I won by February or March,” he wrote. “But if it got to be June or July and I still had not won, I would renege on the deal on the grounds that going to bed with Minute Maid every night was ruining my image.”

Bucky Ayers says Sanders living the high life full tilt was at the expense of his results on Tour. “If he would’ve taken good care of himself and just had a little bit more focus on his golf day to day, instead of chasing the girls and playing gin rummy and betting on other golf games, he would’ve probably won 40 tournaments,” he says. “He was that good.” 

Ayers says Sanders’ routine on Tour consisted of at least seven rounds with no day of rest. He would play four days of each tournament, and on Sunday morning, his traveling partners, Greenway and Andy Smith, would pack up his wardrobe—his matching shoes and alpaca sweaters and custom clothing—and drive ahead to the next event, arriving at the club in search of  gamblers willing to play for stakes on Monday and Tuesday. Sanders would fly in and play two days of money matches. Next, he would play the pro-am or whatever official event was on Wednesday, then dive into the four days of PGA Tour competition. “His body just kind of wore out as far as just not taking real good care of himself,” Ayers says. “Nicklaus and Palmer would take a couple of days off, while Doug never took time. He always had a game going and something happening with ladies.”

A fact of his life that Sanders never clarifies in his books seems obvious: He drank heavily and was accident prone, a classic cause and effect he never connects, at one point instead referring to being the victim of “another freak motel room accident.” He grew up about 9 miles from Esom Hill, a rural community deep in the pines west of Cedartown at the Alabama border that was infamous for its moonshine stills. (When I got my driver’s license at 16, I started to drive out to Esom Hill regularly to buy beer at a convenience store with no questions asked. Not coincidentally, that was the age when my junior tennis career began to decline.)

He partied hard with fellow pros, once telling of a time in Hawaii when he and Jimmy Demaret drank 76 banana daiquiris in one session. It’s easy to see how running with lushes like Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack could do harm to a professional athlete, although he may have corrupted them more than they did him. He once introduced famously heavy drinker Dean Martin to moonshine. “It was 190 proof and I told Dino to take only tiny sips,” he told The Scotsman in 2015. “I didn’t know he was gargling a big mouthful as I was about to light a cigarette. ‘Careful, Doug,’ he said, ‘or we’ll both explode.’”

The million-dollar miss

If you know anything at all about Doug Sanders, you know that he misses the putt at St. Andrews. He knows it is stubbed off to the right as soon as he touches it, reaching down with his putter as though to grab it and redirect it into the hole as he has done thousands of times on short misses, but instead he pulls his putter back and lets it die. He taps it in, picks it out of the cup and plods off the green, his head down. A British newspaper calls it, in war-sized headlines, “The Million-Dollar Miss.” 

The story of his missed putt has been told ad nauseam; it’s the lead anecdote in his obituaries. One episode not included in those tributes is that the night after missing the putt, he walked out into a Scottish field near the rural home where he was staying to be alone, taking some sugar with him to feed to the grazing cows. After contemplatively lying down “in the manure of my missed putt,” he got up and started toward a cow. “I climbed aboard the startled beast and kicked it in the ribs with my gleaming sixty-dollar patent-leather loafers with the magenta tassels,” he wrote, concluding that “when I jumped off and started back to the house, I felt a lot better about everything.”

But not so much better that he could fight off the Golden Bear. Nicklaus led the 18-hole playoff most of the way, although Sanders carded two birdies down the stretch to make it a one-stroke margin on the final hole. Nicklaus, being Nicklaus, rolled in an 8-foot birdie putt to win it and flung his putter high into the air over Sanders. As it plummeted, Sanders covered his head with his arm and ducked, as though someone had screamed “Fore!” at Cedar Valley. Unlike his second wife’s lamp in Las Vegas and Spiro T. Agnew’s errant shot, Nicklaus’ putter missed his head, though not by much. 

Sanders would never win a major, and he would win only twice more on the PGA Tour before unceremoniously stepping away from most tournaments in 1975, at the age of 42. 

He did not get to dress sharply for the champions dinner at every Open. 

He has not been inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

A 30-inch putt kept him out. 

A player who wore pink and orange and every bright color known to man, who cherished his nickname, “Peacock of the Fairways” (fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor also embraced peafowl), would be better remembered for the St. Andrews miss. “I won 20 times on the PGA Tour, and if you gave me one birdie, four pars and a bogey wherever I could put them, I’d have five majors,” he wrote in Golf Digest in 2010. “But it’s that putt everybody remembers. What can I say? It’s what I remember most, too.”

The limelight fades

Sanders kept his permanent home in Houston for the remainder of his life. He played on what is now called the PGA Tour Champions, winning once, got involved in some unsuccessful business deals and hung around a lot of golf tournaments, asking pros to sign golf gloves for him.

In 1988, Sanders began hosting the Doug Sanders Celebrity Classic golf tournament, a Houston stop on the senior circuit, which ran through 1994. President George H.W. Bush competed in the 1990 event while in office. Sanders also ran an international junior golf tournament and raised money for scholarships, efforts that continue today. In 2024, proceeds from the Fourth Annual Doug Sanders Charity Classic will benefit junior golf and need-based scholarships in the Cedartown area. 

As long as he was able, Sanders continued to play golf, including on trips home. And he was always willing to put on a show. In one of my recent visits, I ran into Ardell Davidson, a regular at Cedar Valley Golf Course since the 1950s. He said that when he once was playing with Sanders, they came up to No. 7, a short par 3 that requires a tee shot over water. “He said, ‘I’m going to skip this shot over the lake,’ and he did,” Davidson remembered. “He skipped the shot about four times on the lake, and it went over the cart path and onto the green.”

Davidson, who still plays at 87, has known Sanders since he was in his late teens or early 20s. “There wasn’t nobody like Doug Sanders,” he told me. “I’ll tell you that. Doug, he was a character. There wasn’t but one of him.”

Sanders frequently returned to Cedartown. “He always loved his hometown, and he talked about it a lot,” Scotty says. “He always wanted to show everybody all the places where he lived, where he played, where he did all kinds of things. He always said that he would never forget where he came from, and he always cared about the kids who were wanting to go to school who didn’t have the money.”

Sanders’ influence on golf in Cedartown resonates today. When he was playing, Sanders told about a dozen sons of friends or relatives that he would give them a new set of clubs the first time they broke 80. Bucky Ayers was one of them.

When Ayers carded his first round in the 70s in high school, he wrote a letter about it to Sanders, who promptly delivered on his promise. “I played with those clubs until my junior year at Auburn before I got another set,” says Ayers, who would eventually live in Houston with Sanders for a while after playing college football and golf at Auburn. 

Ayers went on to a long career as a PGA teaching pro, which included mentoring another Cedartown native, Fred Griffin. Griffin became a PGA teaching pro and founded the Jack Nicklaus Academy of Golf in Orlando in 1986. (Now known as the Grand Cypress Academy of Golf, its first class included Bill Murray and the Smothers Brothers.) 

Griffin, who still teaches in Orlando, says in the 1940s Sanders had caddied for his father, Bobby Griffin, whom everyone in Cedartown called “Griff.” I remember Fred Griffin fondly from the mid-1970s, when I was 11 and hanging out at the Cherokee Golf and Country Club tennis courts and swimming pool. He was a cool 22-year-old running the pro shop. He left Cedartown for a golf job in Augusta in 1978 and has not lived there since.

Griffin remembers that when Sanders played Atlanta tournaments, he drew a crowd of home folks. “It was a caravan to watch Doug play in the tournament,” he says of a trip when he was 12. 

Although Griffin, who was born the year Sanders turned pro, met him only twice, the Cedartown hero inspired him. “I’d come back and play some of my best golf after watching the pros play,” he says. “It’s one of those things that influenced me a lot when I was young. I’d get out there and hit so many balls, my hands would bleed.”

Others from Cedartown who followed in Sanders’ golfing tradition include Joe Guillebeau, Bruce Ware and Bill Robinson from Griffin’s era, and the late Macklyn Sartin and the late Van Tanner from Ayers’ era. All PGA professionals, “all out of that small town,” Griffin says. “It’s amazing.”

Loyal for life

Two stories stand out to me about Sanders’ unwavering loyalty to those he loved. When his lifelong friend James R. Greenway came down with colon cancer in 1975, Sanders was the first one he wanted called. “Doug made a beeline to be with him,” Kay Rutledge says, noting that her father turned 45 in the Cedartown hospital less than a month before he died. “My dad, once he found out he had cancer, he never came out of the hospital. Doug was a good man. He was a good friend of my daddy. He was there when he died.”

The second story involves Sanders’ mother, Pauline, who had made sure he had enough to eat in the Depression days. Scotty says Sanders had taken over caring for her after his father died in 1965 and had bought her a home in Cedartown. In the early 1980s, she says, “a doctor called Doug and said, ‘Your mom is dying. She’s got a bad heart, and if you want to see her again, you better come to Cedartown.’ 

“Doug asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘Well, her heart is bad and we can’t operate. She’s too old and too sick to operate on her.’

 So Doug said, ‘I’m going to send an ambulance plane to pick her up and bring her to Houston.’ [The doctor] said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ And Doug said, ‘If she’s going to die anyway, we’ve got the best 

heart institute in Houston, and Denton Cooley’s a good friend of mine.’” (Cooley, whose groundbreaking heart surgeries landed him on the cover of Life in 1970, was the first to perform an artificial heart transplant.)

“Doug sent an ambulance plane to Cedartown and brought her to Houston,” Scotty says. “We picked her up in an ambulance, took her to the hospital, and Denton Cooley looked at her and came out and he said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your mom’s heart. She’s suffering from malnutrition.’ He said, ‘She just eats biscuits all day.’ She weighed about 300 pounds, and he put her on a diet. We kept her in Houston. 

“She eventually went down to 120 pounds, and she had more fun than she said she’d ever had in her whole life those last few years. We bought her all new clothes, and she was going to church. And I mean she just loved it.”

Pauline lived another five years, passing away in 1987 at the age of 81. She’s buried next to her husband in Cedartown’s Northview Cemetery.

Scotty says Sanders’ generosity stemmed from his challenging childhood. “I think he always remembered where he came from and was very grateful that he got out of that,” she says. “And he was always very kind to people who didn’t have money. He was kind to everyone. We’d go to a restaurant, and if he’d see somebody sitting by themselves, he’d invite them to come and sit with us.”

Darryl Sanders says his Uncle Doug always stayed in close touch and on good terms with his father, James, and their family, visiting often and frequently sending his son, Brad, to stay with them in Cedartown during the summer. “About two weeks before Brad would come, there’d be about five brown grocery bags full of fireworks that would show up at my grandmother’s house or our house,” Darryl says. “And Daddy would say, ‘Doug’s sending Brad.’ He’d be here in the next week or so.” 

Fireworks were a favorite of Sanders, Darryl says. In one of his books, Sanders describes a time when, showing Brad how to “handle firecrackers safely, I had managed to practically blow off one of my thumbs.” He almost missed a tournament due to the injury.

Darryl has nothing but good memories of his famous kin. “I loved Uncle Doug,” he says. “He was always good to us. To me, you couldn’t find a better man.”

Many of Sanders’ friends felt that way. Sanders wrote in 1974 that at least 13 of his friends had named their sons after him. I knew personally one of those namesakes: Doug Andrew Greenway, James and Betty Ann Greenway’s youngest, was in my circle of friends and a year ahead of me in high school. He was named for both Sanders and Andy Smith, the other partner in their notorious traveling trio. When he broke 80 in a high school match, a new set of irons courtesy of Sanders arrived the next week. I lost touch with him after I left Cedartown and was sad to learn that he died in 2008 of a heart attack at the age of 41, four years younger than his father had been on his last day.

A sober, spiritual end

Sanders quit drinking for good in 2000, about five years after Scotty divorced him. He was 67. “It started going to my head more than it used to and was too hard on my body,” he wrote in 2010. “All of my tricks—drinking a glass of milk every fourth cocktail to coat my stomach, for instance—didn’t work anymore. Drinking is a young man’s vice.”

Even though Scotty left him, she says “he called me every single day. He would call me every day wanting or needing advice for something.”

Sanders lived out his last days in an assisted-living facility in Houston, with Scotty often by his side. “When I found out he had dementia, it just was the right thing to do to take care of him,” she says.

She says about four days a week she would pick him up and take him to Houston’s Memorial Park Golf Course driving range in a wheelchair. “He would hobble to the practice tee, and I could hear people say, ‘What is this old guy going to do?’” she says. “But all of a sudden he would straighten up and become a world-class golfer. He would hit 100 balls perfectly. Pretty soon he would have a crowd around him amazed at how he hit the ball—which he loved.” The routine, she says, continued until a few weeks before he died.

Jamie Morris, who worked with Sanders and Scotty to plan the Cedartown museum, often visited the facility, which had set up a spot where Sanders could swing a golf club and putt around. He says that when Sanders would pick up a club, he seemed like his old self again: “It seemed like Doug was fine until he would put down the club.” 

Scotty, who has remarried and lives in California but continues to visit Cedartown and stays in touch with Sanders’ friends and family, has become the unofficial keeper of his legacy. It’s clear to me why everyone I spoke to described her as a saint.

Unlike many in Polk County—which is solidly Bible Belt and populated with many churches and the Southern Baptists who attend their services as often as three times a week—Sanders did not grow up going to church. With Scotty’s encouragement, he found Christ later in life, attending Houston’s First Baptist Church. 

When Sanders died in April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, his funeral was held outdoors, officiated by Gregg Matte, senior pastor of the church’s downtown campus, and streamed live online. Matte said in his eulogy that when he was 7, he had stood in line to get Sanders’ autograph, and he was thrilled later in life to get to know him as a parishioner. “He would be in there listening in the worship services, and there’d be thousands of people, and I would be nervous because Doug Sanders was on the 12th row,” Matte said. After the service, “Doug would come up and be the first person to shake my hand, and he would encourage me.”

Matte said that Sanders studied Scripture and often asked Matte to pray for him. “Anytime we’d get together, he’d say, ‘Pastor, would you pray for me?’ And he’d stretch his hand out and over and he’d hold my hand, whether it was [at] a restaurant or his house.”

I suspect that the born-again Sanders would regret including many of the stories in his book that turned 50 years old in 2024. In his 2010 Golf Digest piece, he confesses to not being a good husband, an understatement if ever there was one. He and his son, Brad, who died at the age of 62 only months after Sanders, had been estranged in the last years of their lives. 

At Sanders’ memorial, which featured bagpipes—a Scottish sound that brought to my mind the cruel, windswept 18th green at St. Andrews—Matte said Sanders’ eternal life had two chapters. The first was the remarkable story of him going from poverty to golfing with presidents. The second chapter consisted of his eternal life in heaven. “If you just kind of picture Doug in your mind,” Matte said, “picture him with the biggest smile, the brightest-colored clothes he would be wearing at that moment, this moment right now. Picture, if you will, him in heaven, the fairways of heaven.” 

If you are willing to take that leap, let’s go one more step and picture him in the afterlife with another chance on that ancient, enormous green at St. Andrews. His head is down, magenta sweater billowing, ready to pull his putter back and send that Slazenger Plus into the center of the cup.