Red Baron Attacks U.S. Golf Tour

If you’re from Italy, no one is surprised you can sing. If you’re English, they assume you can act. If you’re from Texas, they figure you can ride, and if from Hawaii, you can swim. If you’re Swiss, they figure you can make a watch; the Spanish can fight a bull. The French are great at hand-kissing, and an Arab can make a rug.

If you’re German, they make book you can march and shoot. And that you’re great at heel-clicking.

What you don’t expect to find in Germany is a guy who can putt. Or a guy who knows a 1-iron isn’t a plumbing tool.

Augsburg, West Germany, is not exactly the golf capital of the world. Palm Springs has more courses than the entire country. Finding a German in golf is about like finding a camel in Antarctica.

Golfers come from Brigham Young and Wake Forest, parts of Texas and Latrobe, Pa. If they talk funny, it’s because they come from south of the Mason-Dixon line, not west of the Elbe.

Germans come in leather coats and caps with silver eagles, not alpacas and beltless slacks. They’re all named Von Something Or Other, and they’ve got this dueling scar and a plan to take Paris.

We’re so conditioned to the stock company or Warner Bros. German that when Bernhard Langer appeared on the golf tour, people expected him to show up in a spiked helmet and monocle and to goose-step his way to the first tee.

It was unthinkable that he could really play. I mean, how can you learn to play golf in jackboots? Germans are ski instructors, not one-putters. Golf is not a game that lends itself to regimentation, organization. It’s a game for lone wolves, wild geese, not Wehrmachts.

But Langer comes from the Germany that produced the Red Baron, not the Iron Chancellor. In a self-reliant sport, he’s as independent as a Bedouin.

Golfers are the kind of guys you could put down on an ice floe in the North Atlantic with an ice pick and a sand wedge, and they’d find a way to survive. They look at life and try to birdie it. They can’t have any nerves; they have to be as single-minded and purposeful as prowling lions. Langer fits the mold.

If there’s one thing Germans can do, too, it’s study terrain to figure angles of attack. Bernhard Langer does this better than anyone since Ben Hogan.

No one calls him Ben yet, but no one calls him Fritz, either, or twits him that, “Paris is that way.” No one says: “Very cute, but you don’t belong here.” Johnny Miller, no less, considers Langer one of the top 10 professional golfers in the game, maybe one of the top five.

How do you get that way in a country where 99% of the citizenry has no idea what a bogey is, what a 1-iron is for, or looks like? It may be one of the incredible athletic feats of our day.

It’s no trick for a guy who grew up in the land of Arnold Palmer and Bobby Jones and who probably got his first set of golf clubs for his 5th birthday to become a world-class player. It’s quite another for a guy who probably got a glockenspiel on his 5th birthday.

You get some idea of the comparatively low esteem in which the royal and ancient art of golf is held in Germany when you know that Langer is the first native-born German ever to win the German Open. He is the first German to win a lot of opens. He is the first German ever to finish second in the British Open--and he did that twice.

Germans, of course, are brave, and Langer may be glad he was born in an era when bravery meant taking a wood for a second shot on a par-5 over water, and not storming a machine gun nest. His father, he confides, was a common soldier in the German Army who fought “everywhere--France, Russia, all over,” because, Langer admits sadly, “Hitler went to war against everybody.”

His bravery manifests itself in his attack on the American PGA golf tour. As a winner of 16 tournaments on the international scene, including the Dutch, French, Irish, Spanish and Italian opens, Langer could become a world legend of the dimensions of a Roberto De Vicenzo without ever taking on the violently competitive U.S. circuit, where there may be some guys who could win the Dutch Open left-handed. European heroes have been known to have the heart taken out of them and their game in the crucible of the winter tour here.

Langer does not expect to be taken prisoner. In fact, Langer’s career has already started backward. In most golf careers, the putting yips usually occur in a player’s 45th to 50th year. The nerve endings start to jangle even before the eyes dim and the hair grays.

Langer had the yips as a youngster. It may have to do with the fact that he copied his golf style--and putting style--watching German types at the Munich Golf and Country Club, where you have to think the club champion was a 12 anywhere else. Bernhard did not grow up having Sam Snead’s swing to copy or Jackie Burke’s putting stroke. He might have been modeling his swing after the spasm stabs of some guy who lost his nerves in the snow of Stalingrad.

Johnny Miller thinks he is the “strongest player, pound for pound, we have out there.” Adds Miller: “He has this superior muscle fiber. You can tell the way he strikes the ball. He can hit it out of anything. He may have a too-strong right-hand grip. But he’s one of the best players under 30 we have out here.”

Al Geiberger and Lanny Wadkins are two other pros at this week’s L.A. Open at Riviera who marvel at Langer’s deliberate play.

“They must have some good courses in Germany. He learned some place,” Wadkins says.

Geiberger points out: “He leaves nothing to chance. He has this wheel to measure distances on the course, even though we get this yardage chart.”

Well, of course. No good officer goes into battle without first-hand intelligence. Particularly against something as heavily fortified as Riviera. It makes the Maginot Line look porous.