Take an accomplished player, totally ambidextrous but with the ability to disguise his talent. Take a caddie who will one day be good enough to play in the Ryder Cup. Put the two of them together with devious intent and it would be difficult to imagine greater potential for golfing skulduggery.

This was Titanic Thompson and his caddie, Ky Laffoon, who between them could relieve their victims of cash, more successfully than a team of the slickest pickpockets. Their salad days were the American prohibition years between 1920 and 1933, before Laffoon progressed to legitimate play as a tournament professional.

Born in the town of Zinc, Arkansas, in 1908, Laffoon went on to become acknowledged as one of golf's great eccentrics. Part Native American, he was known to his colleagues at The Chief and became so successful as to win four tournaments in 1934 when he also captured the Radix Cup for best stroke average.

Thompson never played tournament golf but was described by the 1934 and 1938 USPGA Champion, Paul Runyan, as "the best left-handed player in the world until Bob Charles came along. He could really play. Deft is the word to describe his ability to hit any shot in the bag."

Tommy Bolt, the 1958 US Open champion, said of him: "He could have been the greatest. He had great everything, including a solid, compact swing. Not one of those long swings like Hogan's where you had to practice every day to keep it; Ty had a gambler's swing. No telling how great that guy could've been, except back then he made more money hustling oilmen in east Texas than he could have made on the tour."

This was praise indeed, coming from a player described by Christy O'Connor Snr as the best ballstriker he had ever seen.

Other observers less interested in Thompson's golfing talents, described him as a kind of American Robin Hood except that when he stole from the rich, he kept it. Born Alvin C Thomas in Monett, Missouri, in 1892, he lived the life of a millionaire but was penniless when he died in a Texas nursing home in 1974.

Immensely proud of his achievements, he boasted that he could "outsmart, outcheat, outconnive and roll higher than 'em all in my day. And that's no lie."

Some years ago, in a fascinating assessment of this remarkable man, Dave Kindred wrote in Golf Digest that Thompson married five women and killed five men, "not because he heard money talking, but because he could do it and would do it and because, he said, sunshine in his smile, `They needed it'."

Kindred referred to a day in the Arkansas of 1928 when the seven of diamonds sailed through a transom-window space and fluttered to the floor, followed soon afterwards by the deuce of hearts. "Each card spun in the air as if controlled by an agency with supernatural powers. Titanic Thompson was that agency.

"He sat in an easy chair halfway across the room. Thirty-five years old, a thin man with a delicate face and shining dark hair, he wore a white dress shirt and a silk tie. His last wife thought of him as `a fern of a willow, a litheness to him.'

"He held the deck of cards in his right hand and with his left, snapped cards across the room, over the transom and into the hallway. `What are you doing?,' inquired a man at the door. `Practising.' `Practising what?' Titanic Thompson replied: `You can't tell when some sucker'll bet you $1,000 you can't sail 51 out of 52 cards through that transom'."

The sobriquet came to him in a poolroom in the spring of 1912, shortly after the tragic sinking of the great ocean liner. Responding to a bet that he couldn't jump across a pool table without touching it, the then Alvin Thomas took a running start, dived head first across the table and landed on the far side without touching an edge. On being told that nobody knew the stranger's identity, a local pool shark remarked: "It must be Titanic, the way he sinks everybody." Thomas liked the sound of it and when a newspaper later mistook his name, he happily became Titanic Thompson.

He was almost 30 when he came to golf, in 1921 in San Francisco. A mastery of hand-eye coordination made him an extremely quick learner. Though he generally played left-handed, he would often start right-handed against a prospective pigeon and when the stakes began to rise, would generously suggest: "I tell you what. I'll play you double or nothing - and I'll play lefthanded."

With Laffoon by his side, the options became all the more attractive.

Like saying contemptuously to an opponent after beating him right-handed and left-handed: "Why, even my caddie could beat you." The bet was duly struck and Laffoon would get his share of the resultant winnings.

Thompson told his biographer Jon Bradshaw: "It was the easiest thing you ever saw. I played golf almost as well as I breathed."

By way of proving the point, he teased a local professional that golf was only a child's game. Thompson could probably pick it up in the morning. Shucks, he could probably go out and beat the pro then and there.

Gladly accepting the challenge, the pro beat Thompson on nine successive holes to pick up $90, whereupon Titanic moaned endlessly about his bad luck and his borrowed clubs and his aching back from all-night poker. Then came the re-match - at $1,000 per hole.

With the pro conceding a stroke a hole, there was a total of $60,000 at stake, including sidebets by local gamblers. Thompson's first tee shot sailed 275 yards down the middle of the fairway and when the match was over, he picked up a total of $56,000. As he liked to remark: "I never shot more than a stroke or two better than the opposition. If a man shoots 89, I shoot 88. If a man shoots 68, I shoot 67. I never liked to add insult to injury."

Setting a standard for all other hustlers, his philosophy was that with a pigeon in one's grasp, the prudent thing was simply to pluck a few feathers: never break a wing.

In 1934, members of Byron Nelson's club in Dallas arranged a match between Thompson and their young hero for a reported side-bet of $3,000. As Nelson remembers it, Titanic, who was receiving three strokes, shot a gross 71 while the professional had a 69. "He was a nice-looking man, pleasant and polite, with very sharp eyes," recalled the great man 60 years later. "Those eyes could look a hole through you."

When Raymond Floyd was engaging in a little hustling in Dallas in 1965, he noticed an old man among the trees. "He was a tall, slender gentleman and I had seen him watching me," Floyd recalled. "He introduced himself as Ty Thomas. I'd heard of him, of course, and he asked me if I'd heard of Lee Trevino."

On being told "No", Titanic went on to inquire if Floyd would be interested in playing Trevino. "Certainly," came the reply. "I'll play anybody I've never heard of." "On his course?" "I'll play anybody anywhere that I've never heard of." The pair played at El Paso CC over three days, Trevino winning on the first two days and Floyd winning on the third, with maybe $1,000 changing hands.

Floyd said of Thompson: "I remember most his hands - long, elegant, linear fingers, just perfect, like they'd been drawn. It's an odd word to use about a man's hands but they were just beautiful."

Placing Thompson in context, Bradshaw wrote: "In the early part of the century, the professional gambler was still a romantic figure - perhaps a fallen man, and evil, if the melodramas of the period are to be believed. He was a freebooter, a man who took the long chance at a time when the country still believed in dark horses. Titanic Thompson was at the heart of that belief."

When he entered the nursing home in 1973, Thompson said with a sly grin: "It won't be so bad. I'll beat those old geezers out of their social security money." A year later, golf's greatest hustler was eventually outsmarted - by the grim reaper.