Drive For Show, Pitch For Douqh

Dave Maddux answers the door to his Las Vegas home wearing a striped shirt from Augusta National Golf Club, a Christmas gift from his youngest son, Greg, who has played a round or two there. When the visitor casually mentions that he was out playing golf with Greg the previous day, Dave chuckles like someone who has just been told the opening line of a familiar joke. Yes, Dave Maddux has heard this one before. "Let me guess," he says. "Did he skip one across the water? Knock one off a tree and on the green?"

Well, not exactly, but....

"See, we call him Nate Luck," Dave says. "I was in the Air Force, and we were living in Spain. Greg was in the third grade. One day the teacher gave out a sample paper of how to do homework. At the top of the paper it said, My name is..., and it had the name Nat Yates. Well, Greg put Nat Yates on all of his papers.

"Ever since then we've called him Nate. The whole family picked up on it. If we're at a stadium, we'll just holler 'Nate!' and he knows it's one of the family and turns around. We've made it into Nate Luck because he gets all the luck. Or that's the way it seems. He's always been that way. We've always been a big card-playing family. We played Crazy 8s, games like that, when the kids were growing up. He always seemed to win.

"Now we'll go out to dinner, and afterward Greg will say, 'Let me go to the blackjack table.' If the bill's $150, Greg will bet $150. And he'll get blackjack. It's just amazing."

From about 230 yards out, Greg Maddux chunks a five-wood second shot on the par-5 3rd hole at the Tournament Players Club in Las Vegas. The ball hardly gets off the ground before nose-diving into one of those godforsaken desert gulches that in old westerns are usually dotted with decaying cattle skulls. The ball thwacks against a rock and ricochets forward, still on line. Then it smacks against the top of a second rock. Finally it bounces out of the Georgia O'Keeffe landscape and onto a fluffy patch of grass just below the elevated green. At that moment you swear you hear harp music being carried on the warm desert wind.

"I have never," Maddux says, "seen a ball bounce twice out of the desert like that. And look at this: a great lie." He flips the ball onto the green and bangs home a short putt for birdie.

Nate Luck lives in the city where Luck is the patron saint, though in truth that is just another phantasm in a garish excess of neon, silicone, peroxide, toupees and man-made volcanoes that erupt in stereo. When he stands atop the rocks of his backyard waterfall after sundown, Greg Maddux can see the nuclear glow of Vegas's core, the Strip, a place where the house wins more than luck does.

But Maddux—card player, golfer, Jeopardy! savant and indisputably the greatest pitcher at work today—keeps beating the house. Even though he just turned 29, the Atlanta Brave righthander cuts no more imposing a figure than he did the day, in 1986, when he came up to the big leagues with the Chicago Cubs and his manager mistook him for a batboy. Maddux has such small hands and fingers that he can't break off anything better than a below-average curveball. Radar guns get a giggle out of his 85-mph fastball.

Behold, though, the jackpot hanging on the wall of a second-floor hallway in his relatively modest home: three Cy Young Awards won unprecedentedly in three consecutive years, including 1994, in which Maddux had one of the most efficient seasons in the history of baseball.