Five Top Players to Bypass This Week’s British Open

The absence of five top U.S. players and what Jack Nicklaus calls a missing “winning attitude” shifts the focus of the 1985 British Open Golf Championship from long-dominant Americans to onrushing Europeans.

The 114th renewal of the game’s oldest championship will begin Thursday at Royal St. George’s in the medieval port city of Sandwich.

Among the missing, in the quest for the title considered golf’s world championship, are:

--U.S. Open champion Andy North, who had prior commitments;

--Calvin Peete, the 1984 Vardon Trophy winner and holder of two 1985 American PGA Tour titles. He said he didn’t want to subject his ailing back to the long plane flight;

--Hale Irwin, a two-time U.S. Open champion and winner of the Memorial Tournament earlier this season, who simply decided not to play;

--Ray Floyd, a winner at Houston earlier this season and holder of three major titles. He discovered he would be forced to qualify for the British Open and decided not to bother;

--Curtis Strange, the only three-time winner on the U.S. tour this year, runner-up in the Masters, the leading money-winner with more than $520,000 and the leading contender for Player of the Year honors. He said the British Open didn’t fit into his schedule.

Those five players have a combined total of eight victories and more than $1.4 million in earnings this season. Any one, or all of them, would have to be considered among the leading contenders. But, for a variety of reasons, none is included in the international field of 150 in the chase for one of golf’s Big Four titles.

The most prominent names in the U.S. contingent of some two dozen players are Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, key figures in the American domination of this event for the past two decades.

Nicklaus, 45, has won the British Open three times, was second a record seven times, and twice finished third after missing a playoff by a single shot.

Watson, 35, is one of only five men, and the only American, to win the British Open five times. He was denied a record-matching sixth title last year when he ran afoul of the famed Road Hole, the 17th, in the final round at St. Andrews.

Neither, however, has won in the last 12 months. Both are well back on the money-winning list and both missed the cut in the U.S. Open. Only their histories of outstanding play in this event place them on the list of likely challengers.

“It is becoming more and more difficult to win, for me or anyone else,” Nicklaus said. “There are more good players now than there have ever been before.

“There are just so many good ones, that no matter how well you’re playing, someone is likely to come out of the pack and beat you,” he said.

For that reason, Nicklaus said, it is all but impossible for any one player to dominate the American tour now as he and Watson and some others have done in the past.

“And if you’re not winning consistently, you don’t develop that winning attitude. You know you can’t expect to win every time,” he said.

But the leading European players, particularly Seve Ballesteros of Spain and Bernhard Langer of West Germany, have been able to dominate the European tour. They have had success in beating America’s best in the United States and so have developed “an attitude that they fully expect to win every week,” Nicklaus said. “ I know what it feels like. I used to have that attitude.”

That “attitude,” along with other factors -- less than impressive performances by Nicklaus and Watson, the absence of some other potential challengers -- make Ballesteros and Langer the men to beat.

Ballesteros, twice a Masters champion, is the defending title-holder He won once in the United States this year, tied for second in the Masters, made a late run at the U.S. Open title and has two Masters and two British Opens to his name.

Langer scored consecutive victories in the Masters and Heritage Classic earlier this year, and twice has been a runner-up in the British Open, including the last time it was played at Royal St. George’s.

“Winning the British Open would be very important to me. I am a European. And to Europeans, this is the most important title in the world,” he said.

Greg Norman of Australia is another major threat.

The leading American contenders include Lee Trevino, the 45-year-old PGA champion who insists “I’ve got a very good chance if the wind blows,” plus Tom Kite, Fuzzy Zoeller, Hal Sutton, Johnny Miller, Craig Stadler, Lanny Wadkins and Corey Pavin, each a two-time winner this season. There’s also Bill Rogers, who won the Open in 1981, the last time it was played here.