By his early teens, Floyd was hustling army officers on the course at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Raymond was born in 1942 and where his father, L.B., was a master sergeant and the fort's golf pro. Raymond's only sibling, Marlene, played on the LPGA Tour. Their mother, Edith, was a club champion. When Raymond stopped asking for his allowance, L.B. discovered that his son had a profitable sideline: weekend money matches in a town 50 miles away. When he couldn't spot his opponents any more strokes, the brash youngster would play left-handed.

He was also a promising pitcher and at 17 was offered a $25,000 contract by the Cleveland Indians organization. (By comparison, the following year Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's home run record and earned $42,500.) He agonized before lingering knee problems pointed him toward golf. He dropped out of the University of North Carolina after one semester, turned pro in 1961 and joined the tour two years later.

His first three starts were missed cut, missed cut, win. His victory at the St. Petersburg Open Invitational came when he was 20 years old, earning him $3,500 and Rookie of the Year honors. After that grand debut, Floyd pretty much took the rest of the decade off. "Once he went out on tour and met Doug Sanders and Al Besselink and those crazy guys, he just went wild," says his sister, Marlene. "Sometimes he wouldn't go to bed; he would just show up for his tee time the next morning."

He had arrived on tour a year after Jack Nicklaus, but while Nicklaus -- who at 23 was already married with two children -- went out and won major titles, Floyd just went out. "I was enjoying the lifestyle," he says, settling into a chair in a quiet locker room at the SBC.Classic. "I was in awe when I left Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was loving the celebrity of the game and loving the people I met." He moved to Chicago in the mid-1960s and partied so often with Cubs players including Ron Santo and Billy Williams that he had a locker at Wrigley Field. "I'd go to the park every morning, take batting practice with them and shag balls in the outfield."

By necessity, he was a terrific player when hung over. One day a bleary Floyd was making his way to the tee when a reporter asked what color his eyes were. "Red," he said. When asked at the time if chasing women was his problem he said no, the problem was catching them. "I like women and partying and I'm not ashamed of it," he boasted. "It doesn't affect my golf. It's not like I turn into a pumpkin at midnight."

Forty years earlier, Walter Hagen had created the persona of the louche golfer, a man-about-town who could arrive on the tee in evening attire, champagne glass in hand. It was a life Hagen never actually lived; it was a psych job. But Floyd embodied everything Hagen pretended to be. He was a regular at the Condor Club in San Francisco, where every night Carol Doda would descend from the ceiling, topless and dancing on a piano. One of the first American women to have her breasts enlarged, Doda was immortalized as the "put-together girl" by Tom Wolfe in The Pump House Gang. Floyd "was a party animal," says Doda, who now runs a lingerie boutique on Union Street. "He'd hang out with the guys -- that's mostly what they did. I never went home with them to find out what else they did." The rat pack of tour pros -- Floyd, Miller Barber, Bob Rosburg -- would often step outside the club around 4 a.m. and hit golf balls down the Broadway strip. Around that time, Floyd was part-owner of a local bar called Coke's and invested in the Ladybirds, a topless band.

Throughout the 1960s, his playing reputation owed less to his accomplishments than to his stout appetite for high-stakes money matches. In 1966, Floyd was challenged by backers of a young club pro at the Horizon Hills course in El Paso, Texas. "I'll play anyone I've never heard of," he said. The club pro was Lee Trevino.

As Trevino unpacked the visitor's bag, Floyd asked, "Do you have any idea who I'm playing today?"

"You're playing me, Mr. Floyd," Trevino replied.

One of Floyd's backers invited him to check out the course. "I ain't going out to look at the course," he said. "I'm playing the goddamned locker-room attendant."

When Trevino won the first match, Floyd wanted to press for another nine holes. "I said, 'Mr. Floyd, I'd like to go with you but I gotta put the carts on the charger,' " Trevino says. "He said, 'Aw s---, I'm playing the cart man too.' " According to reports, by the third day, Floyd was in the hole for around $3,000 -- equivalent to almost $18,000 today -- but eagled the last hole to break even. "I've got easier games on tour," he said when the putt dropped. "Adios."

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