It’s Not Easy Being Green

The thing I like about Hubert Green, the PGA champion, is that, like Jack Dempsey used to, he fights out of a crouch.

He sets up over the ball like a guy looking for a collar button in the dark, then he takes this lusty swipe at it as if he were cutting beef.

I know a million guys who play like that--and they all shoot in the low 100s. Green wins U.S. Opens and PGAs with that 20-handicap lunge. If you saw him on the practice range, you’d reach for your wallet and try to get him in a friendly game of bingle, bangle, bungle. With that swing, he’s got to be hitting a whole bagful of smother-hooks.

It’s refreshing. If Green were a fighter, he’d be a swarmer. He crowds a golf course. He never lets it get set.

He used to have a putting stroke where he had his nose five inches from the ball, but now he’s got one where he looks as if he’s trying to step off a high curb.

He gives hope to us slashers. It’s monotonous how the tour nowadays has a whole fairway full of guys who not only look alike, they swing alike. I mean, they all stand up there nice and straight, knees slightly flexed, and then they have that nice smooth takeaway, that rhythmic one-piece swing and fluid follow-through.

It’s depressing. The ball just plops out there 300 yards or so and they have a wedge shot to the green. Makes you want to throw up. Or kick a ball in the rough.

Ever notice how, when they show somebody’s swing in slow-motion off the tee and the announcer rhapsodizes about its perfection, they never show Hubert’s?

Green shows there’s no right way to hit a golf ball. Thank God.

You get the ball in the hole any way you can. That’s what Hubert does. Probably better than anyone on the tour. You don’t have to remember 27 things. I get the feeling Green never bothers to check where his thumb is on the shaft, where the Vs are pointing, whether the ball is precisely opposite his left heel or where his shoulder is at address. I doubt if he keeps his head still over putts.

Even the way he waggles over the ball smacks of the indecision every weekend player feels.

Green is not one of your cookie-cutter pros. He’s not your basic blond from Brigham Young. He has these deep-set eyes and raven-black hair like the guy guarding the gold on the stagecoach on the Chisholm Trail.

When he went head to head against Lee Trevino in the final round of the PGA Sunday, it was kind of like Zale-Graziano. A brawl. Two hustlers who find themselves working the same side of the carnival.

Trevino is like Green. Although his swing is a bit more classic, it still isn’t Harry Vardon. Or Horton Smith. Just like Bobby Locke used to duck-hook the ball all the way up to the green and then one-putt it, Trevino just keeps slapping these little fades out there, then spits in his glove and knocks those 40-footers dead in the cup.

These guys went toe-to-toe for 18 holes, staring one another in the eye, each waiting for the other to blink.

Neither one did. Green won because his nerves are seven years younger than Trevino’s, but you had the feeling these guys were throwbacks.

Trevino once said that pressure is playing for $5 when you’ve only got $2 in your pocket, and Hubert Green defined pressure as needing a two on the 18th hole or taking a slow freight home.

But their presence up there on the leader board affirmed once more the importance of the PGA tournament in the fabric of golf in the 80s.

The tournament has been held up to considerable scorn, largely because of a tone-setting article, “The PGA: Fourth-Rate Major?” by Charlie Price in Golf Digest.

Now, hardly anyone knows more about golf than Charlie Price. And a lot of people have never forgiven the PGA for abandoning its match-play format.

But, the great god television will never again hold still for a style of play that might give you a Sunday afternoon show featuring Walter Burkemo and Felice Torza. That point is not even moot. It’s dead.

Actually, the PGA began to abdicate its position years ago when it took to staging its championship tournament on inferior, usually real-estate huckster courses. It righted itself in the 70s when it began to contract with the established tracks known in the lore as U.S. Open courses.

The PGA in the last decade has been played at Congressional, Pebble Beach, Oakmont, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill, Southern Hills, Riviera and now Cherry Hills.

The next thing the PGA does, or rather doesn’t, is trick up these courses. You don’t have to grow more hair on a gorilla or file a lion’s teeth.

One result is, you get a truer tournament, one with recognizable masters of the game in contention in the final stages.

Compare its record in this regard with the U.S. Open’s in the last 10 years. Jack Nicklaus had to beat Bruce Crampton in 1975. Dave Stockton had to beat Ray Floyd and Don January the next year. Lanny Wadkins beat Gene Littler at Pebble Beach. John Mahaffey had to beat Tom Watson at Oakmont. David Graham beat Ben Crenshaw at Oakland Hills. Nicklaus beat Andy Bean at Rochester. Larry Nelson beat Fuzzy Zoeller in ’81. Floyd beat Wadkins in ’82. Hal Sutton beat Nicklaus at Riviera.

You compare those names with some of the mystery guests who starred in the Open in recent years and you tell me which is the correct philosophy of golf.

Between them, the as-it-were finalists in the PGA last week have won 46 tour tournaments between them, excluding Trevino’s two British Opens. They have won eight major championships between them.

We have had winners in the lordly U.S. Open winning their first tournament. The winner this year was posting his third, and he was beating out a Canadian, a Rhodesian and a Taiwanese nobody had ever heard of.

A tournament that gives you a sock windup of Green vs. Trevino and doesn’t have to grow knee-high rough, move in fully grown trees overnight or wax the greens or flood the fairways is not my idea of fourth rate. Particularly when it’s won by a guy with the kind of swing I always get for a partner.