Hope Pro No. 80 Isn’t Like All the Others

The rap against modern professional golfers is that they’re like crocodiles--they’re all alike. Seen one, you seen ‘em all. They all came from that great cookie cutter in the sky. They walk alike, they talk alike, they swing alike. They’re interchangeable. Wind ‘em up, set the dial and they all go out and shoot the same 68. Except one. Hope Classic Pro No. 80, you have to concede, is unique. He stands out like a triple bogey. Oh, he doesn’t show up in a Napoleon hat, his nose doesn’t light up, he doesn’t play with a hoe, a rake handle or blindfolded. He stands up to the ball funny. His clubheads are all turned around. The Vs formed by the thumb and forefinger point to the wrong shoulder. He’s all turned around. He plays the game backward. His slice goes left, his hook goes right. You look at him and you think he’ll never make it. He’s left-handed. Now, if this were baseball, tennis, or even no-limit poker, no one would even look up. But left-handers in golf are like elephants in Cleveland. You know they exist. You just don’t expect to see any there. There’s only one left-hander in pro golf history to make the record books. New Zealand’s Bob Charles won a British Open, no less. Ben Hogan was left-handed, but they turned him around. That’s what they used to do with left-handers. In parochial school, the nuns used to wrap you across the knuckles if they caught you writing with that wrong hand. Society frowned on left-handers. You know what the Latin word for left-handed is? Sinister. It went into the English language meaning something dark and foreboding. Fearful. Something threatening. Villainous. Know what the word for right-handed is? Dexter. It went into the language meaning dexterous, i.e., deft, correct. Admirable. Skillful. A guy who could go both ways was ambidextrous, not ambisinistrous. Left in politics meant the wild side. the bomb-throwers, Bolsheviks, anarchists, revolutionaries. Guerrillas belong to the left. On the other hand, right is old Establishment. Conservative. Proper. Rock-ribbed. Solid. The Left Bank of the Seine is the repository of the world’s kooks, the bohemians, artists, reckless, unwashed. Impecunious. It doesn’t matter which side of the river it is, the minute these people congregate there, it becomes the left bank automatically. A left-handed compliment is no compliment at all. It’s an insult. Left-handers are popularly supposed to be erratic, not apt to consult their brains in a given situation but to trust their own, so to speak, sinister impulses. Left-handers are southpaws, portsiders, screwballers. No one ever called right-handers northpaws, starboarders. Right-handers throw the fastball. They neither are nor have screwballs. Golf is the most conservative of sports. It’s the last bastion of Republicanism on the sporting scene. These guys are all freebooters, rugged individualists, logical successors to the guys who went west in covered wagons. Not team players. Calvin Coolidges in cleats. They don’t want handouts, they want you to get out of their line and they’ll help themselves. Make their own luck. Right-handers to a man. Well, not quite to a man. There’s Pro No. 80, Russell Earl Cochran. Lefty. He louses up the parade of the wooden soldiers, the Babes in Toyland aspect of the pro tour. He attacks the doglegs from the wrong side, ruins the orderly scheme of things. No one knows why there aren’t more lefties in pro golf. Most of the great tennis players from McEnroe to Navratilova swing from the odd side. Baseball has almost more left-handers than right. Football quarterbacks who are lefties go to the Super Bowl. There were lots of left-handers in boxing, but they weren’t that popular. Boxing a left-hander upset the grand scheme of things, too, for generations of classic boxers. The one-time lightweight champion, Joe Brown, used to contend irritably that all left-handers should be drowned at birth. “They make you look bad,” he complained. Russ Cochran has not exactly made anybody look bad on the tour. Nor has he crept into the hearts of the golfing gurus. Nobody is bringing out a line of turnaround clubs yet. There are no Russell’s Rebels or Cochran’s Corps fan clubs. But Cochran did make $133,342 on the tour last year. That’s pretty good even for a right-hander, 5lst on the money list, an elite exempt for the year. A left-hander from Paducah, Ky., is not exactly the savior golf is looking for. Not even if he was born in a log cabin. Lefty Cochran wasn’t born in a log cabin, but he played through enough hazards to build an Open course. He had to learn to play not only left-handed, but with a set of women’s clubs. Not a full set, but 3-, 5-, 7- and 9-irons and a 3-wood. He filled these in with assorted wedges and putters dredged out of a remnant barrel. When he played well enough with these to win a state junior title, someone wondered how he would do with a regulation set. Prevailing mythology is that golf courses are set up for players who hit from the orthodox side of the tee. Cochran disproves this. Golf courses are neutral. Or ambidextrous. Cochran shot his way onto the tour by winning two satellite tournaments, the Magnolia and Greater Baltimore, and by leading that mini-tour in money won. He was low left-hander in the Hope Classic here this week, one under par for three rounds. Unfortunately, a 74 in the fourth round was not low enough to keep him in the tournament where the right-handers’ world prevailed as usual and they went around shooting numbers like 20 to 21 under par. All of which has no bearing on the fact that, no matter what he shoots, he’s still the most recognizable young pro on this circuit.