GOLFER LEAVES CAREER BEHIND : Former Pro Now Only Tees Up on Weekends as Successful Amateur

Most of the time, the closest Brian Lindley gets to a golf course is when he goes to work at Douglas Aircraft Co., which happens to be next door to Skylinks Golf Course in Long Beach.

That represents a withdrawal for Lindley, who used to view the golf course as his work place, and briefly had co-workers such as Jack Nicklaus.

Following his brush in 1982 with professional golf, which ended due to a lack of immediate success, Lindley stayed close to the sport through just about every golf-related job imaginable--from selling clubs to retrieving lost balls from lakes.

Now, the 28-year-old Costa Mesa resident only goes to the golf course to play, and even then only a couple of times a month. It’s clear that golf is no longer so consuming a subject when Lindley explains that, nowadays, he spends more time swinging his clubs on mats and rugs--at the driving range and in his living room--than on grass.

Holding down a “real” job, however, has not done irreparable damage to his golf game. In mid-June, he became the only Southern Californian to qualify for the U.S. Public Links Championships each of the last two years.

In the regional qualifying tournament at Singing Hills Country Club in El Cajon, he shot a 142 for two rounds to become one of four players to qualify out of a field of 134. A total of 5,519 players entered this year’s regional qualifiers for the event, scheduled for July 15-20 at Wailua Country Club on Kauai, Hawaii.

All in all, Lindley, a graduate of Estancia High School and USC, only invests a fraction of the time he devoted to the sport in 1981, when he was on the threshold of breaking into pro golf.

That summer, Lindley was runner-up at the State Amateur in Pebble Beach and runner-up to Nathaniel Crosby at the U.S. Amateur at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. He won the Guadalajara Invitational and took the championship of a local tournament, the West Coast Amateur Invitational, by 10 strokes. Later in the year, he won the West Coast Amateur Championship.

His finish in the U.S. Amateur produced an invitation to Augusta, Ga., to compete in the Masters, where he played with Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf, Andy Bean, Hale Irwin and Greg Norman in practice rounds, and with Gary Player in his one tournament round.

Despite that success as an amateur, Lindley has learned that it may be easier to design airplanes made of materials such as graphite, his current professional project, than hit a good approach shot as a professional golfer.

Besides, the aerospace business--or almost any business--is more reliably profitable than golf, where the only green to be counted upon is made of grass. If being paid for an activity you enjoy turns it into miserable work, then being paid poorly is even worse, as Lindley found after giving up his first engineering job to try pro golf.

“I knew it was a risk, but I decided to take it,” he said. “There were a lot of advantages to it--the freedom and the opportunity to do a lot of traveling.”

From the start, the fairways provided Lindley a less-than-fair living. One potential sponsor immediately backed out and others turned unexpectedly cautious.

“It was kind of a bewildering experience,” Lindley said.

He made a little money, but the total earnings for his eight months of effort was less than he can earn in two months at his current job. Meanwhile, he built up debts while traveling from one tournament to the next, and living in between.

“It’s a tough life if you don’t play very well . . . I gave it as good a shot as I could,” Lindley said. “I would have liked to try it for a little while longer. The reason I went back to work was that I was running out of money.

“But I had no burning desire to be the best golfer in the world. That wasn’t my life’s goal.”

His current aim is to be the best golfer with a 9-5 job . . . away from the golf course.

“I’m really happy with my situation right now as far as my job,” he said. “And, as a golfer, I’m really doing much better than I expected to do.”