Titanic Thompson
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Titanic Thompson alias of Alvin Clarence Thomas (1892 - 1974), legendary American gambler, poker player, golfer, card cheat and dice manipulator, billiard player, champion bowler, marksman, and proposition better.
Thompson was born in Arkansas but conducted his nomadic and lucrative career of hustling across the United States in the late 1920s. Blessed with extraordinary eye-hand coordination, he was a crack shot and an ambidextrous golfer good enough to turn professional, except that he "could not afford the cut in pay". Where a pro golfer could make $30,000 a year, Thompson could make that in a week.
Thompson's genius was the proposition bet, where he would wager that he could hit a golf ball 500 yards (across a frozen lake), he could flip a playing card to the second story of a building (with the advantage of an updraft, and practice), playing the second round of golf double or nothing left-handed (he was ambidextrous), or guessing the number of watermelons on a truck (having bribed the farmer to count them beforehand).
He became well known to the public through his involvement with the 1928 murder of mob figure Arnold Rothstein; he was a suspect in the murder until he agreed to testify for the prosecution, then suffered a dramatic lapse of memory on the stand. Thompson was the model for the Damon Runyon character Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls , with Rothstein the model for the character Nathan Detroit.
The penultimate chapter of John Bradshaw's book on hustlers, Fast Company details many of Thompson's most famous proposition bets, including betting two men that a highway mileage sign was incorrect -- which he knew because he had dug it up and moved it the night before.