Game Has Changed, and So Have Players

Lee Trevino has won 27 golf tournaments, not counting two British Opens, a Mexican Open, a Morocco Grand Prix and a Canadian PGA or two. This puts him on a ladder with the registered elite of the game. The only people ahead of him are either dead, in a hall of fame or about to be in a hall of fame. It is not likely that anyone coming along will seriously threaten Trevino’s place or anyone ahead of him in his career. Winning has become a lost art in golf. Lots of guys can play. Lots of guys can make money. Hardly any have mastered the art of winning. There were 41 individual tournaments on the PGA trail last year. There were 38 different winners. Only three players won more than once. Match this against the fact Byron Nelson once won 19 tournaments in a single year, 11 of them in a row. Ben Hogan once won 13, Sam Snead 10. Nicklaus and Palmer used to win seven or eight a year. And, then, golfers lost the hang of it. Golf became a crowd shot. Multiple winners, like .400 hitters in baseball, 10-goal players in polo, became as rare as the bison. A guy wins two tournaments today and they retire him to stud. What has happened? Courses tougher? Clubs lousier? Ball deader? Game changed? Hardly. More likely, the opposite is true. The standard excuse is the competition is tougher. Tougher than Sam Snead? Ben Hogan? Walter Hagen was a soft touch? Byron Nelson? Jimmy Demaret? These were hackers? Get outta here! The truth is, the swings are better, the equipment is more scientific, the balls go farther, the courses are better manicured. By a process of elimination, that leaves the players. Either that or the grass is too high, the sand too coarse or the sun too hot. Maybe it’s sunspots. Is the tour that was once a lion hunt now an egg roll? Did the guys who played with wooden clubs have steel in the backbone where it counted? Lee Trevino is a throwback to the days when players came out of the caddy shacks of Texas and not the groves of academe, when golf was a hustle not a profession, when a guy had a putter in his hands and a marked deck in his pocket and could play both of them. Is that a better preparation than a scholarship at Brigham Young or Wake Forest? Lee Trevino ponders the question. First of all, he concedes the competition is deep today. “It’s maybe too deep for someone to come out and surround the game any more.” On the other hand, Trevino acknowledges the old-timers had to have resources today’s crop can’t call upon. When you had to play golf in the moonlight, in the rain and wind on the days the members couldn’t play, when you had to sneak on the courses, when you had to hide when the ranger showed up, you developed a golf game you can never learn in college. “You see those old players in those tournaments on TV where they’re in jail, no way through, and here comes this shot rolling up on the green and you say: ‘Where did he get that shot? Did he invent it?’ But, no, he’s had that shot for a long time. He learned it in some crisis. Used to be you had to have a lot of trick shots in the bag where we played!” In some respects, it’s like the difference in learning pool in the basement of the family mansion and learning it in a poolroom against guys with pistols stuck in their waistbands. “Look at the game these guys learn to play,” Trevino continues. “The courses are all manicured, the greens are immaculate. They just get out there and hit the drive and the 8-iron. They never played on a course where you had to chase the cows. And watch out for the cops. “You know, if I was starting somebody out, I wouldn’t let him have a full set of clubs. To learn this game, you got to start out with a set of hand-me-downs--no more than three clubs. You got to have clubs where you put some tape on them to keep the head from falling off. You got to learn to make those clubs do everything. You change your hands, your grip, you make those clubs sing. “Today, they give you a set of clubs like they’re out of a jewelry store, they’re all matched and balanced. And somebody says: ‘Oh, I got a shot here I don’t have a club for. It’s a between shot. It’s between a 7 and an 8. What do I do?’ We had shots it didn’t matter what it was between. All we had was a 6-iron anyway. We could make that 6-iron sing ‘Carmen’. “ Lee paused. “I notice the way these guys handle pressure. When they win a major, I think: ‘Wait. Now they’re going to see what it’s like to be a champion, to have somebody expect something of them.’ That’s the first time golf isn’t any fun for them. Now they got to handle two things at once. And they haven’t got the club for that, either. “How many guys won a big major and then disappeared? To me, pressure was playing for the rent money, not playing for $100,000 of some insurance company’s money. Some of the biggest putts I ever made were not for the U.S. Open. They were for did-I-eat-the-next-day. Against some guy who would say, ‘What did you claim your handicap was again?’ That was pressure, not the two British Opens I won.” To Trevino: “Golf is like the difference between amateur or Olympic boxing and pro boxing. You get in Olympic boxing with the headgear and the referee stepping in every time the action gets heavy. Then, you get in the pros in some little club on the border and the other guy is kneeing you, thumbing you, hitting on the break, rabbit-punching and elbowing, he might even be looking to bite you and you say: ‘Wait a minute! What kind of sport is this?’ But, if you came up through those clubs, you give it right back. You expect it.” Unhappily, Trevino will be in the broadcast booth and not a sand trap this week at the Bob Hope Desert Classic. Does this faze our hero? Lee snorts. “There’s only two things I fear on a golf course: lightning--and the clubhouse buffet.”