It Was More Exciting in Pre-TV Days

Golf used to be a head-to-head sport like bullfighting, prizefighting, tennis and cheek-to-cheek dancing.

You had your man right in front of you and you had 80 ways to beat him besides just scoring lower or hitting the ball better.

You could probe for psychological weaknesses. You could smile in the wrong places, work your man over with silences and do 15 things between shots that would affect his frame of mind, perhaps fatally. No one did this any better than Walter Hagen.

It made you a better competitor if not a better shot maker. They still play the game this way in almost 100% of the country clubs around, on almost any course in the world.

I don’t know when the game became a series of solo performances. Probably when the professionals began to come onto the scene, because professionals despise anything that does not hue to the percentages.

You see, in match play in golf, it is perfectly possible to shoot, say, a 79 and beat a man who is shooting a 69. This drives a guy making his bread and butter at the game up a ball-washer.

If you shoot an eagle in match play, all you win is the hole. If your opponent shoots an 8, all he loses is a hole.

It’s unfair. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.

Americans don’t like it. Gamblers don’t like it. Because, you see, gamblers don’t like to leave anything to chance. The word is misapplied when used to describe a man who makes his living pitting his skills against yours. Because a gambler’s stock-in-trade is not the gamble, it’s the sure thing.

The PGA, the third-most prestigious golf tournament in the world, used to be match play. So did the U.S. Amateur.

The Scots probably never even envisioned medal play for the game when they invented it. But they never envisioned television either.

Television needed smelling salts when it got a load of match play.

You see, the trouble with match play is, it introduces the human element.

The “stars” of the game got used to playing against a standard--like a skier competing against a clock. They perfected this kind of meticulous, cocoon-like game you could play almost by yourself. I believe you’ll find that such phrases as birdie, eagle, bogey, and “leader in the clubhouse” were all American inventions.

That’s the way they played the game at Brigham Young and Wake Forest and Houston, as a nice, sterile operating-room exercise. The players were soloists, like a guy giving a recital. The guy you had to beat might be five threesomes ahead or half an hour behind on the course. It was like locking Dempsey and Tunney in separate rooms and deciding the issue on the computed velocity of their various punches.

Television couldn’t live with match play. It forced both the PGA and the U.S. Amateur to go to the medal format, although the Amateur has since gone back to match play because nobody cared much about it in either form.

The PGA had been a great tournament in the days when great players coming up came out of the caddy shacks and hustlers’ groves and not the halls of higher education. You had some great finals, like Sam Snead-Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan-Porky Oliver, Tommy Armour-Gene Sarazen. Walter Hagen, of course, won it four times.

But the modern crop of players couldn’t handle the hand-to-hand combat. When they hung up red numbers on a scoreboard, they wanted to win more than one hole.

And they kept getting out-hustled. A lot of us thought this was funny, kind of charming. But when television got Walter Burkemo-Felice Torza, Chandler Harper-Henry Williams Jr. and Lionel Hebert-Dow Finsterwald, the guys who run it weren’t laughing. They cried, “Enough!”

The PGA went to medal play. It became just another Phoenix Open, but it sold beer and cars on Sunday afternoon.

There have been periodic attempts to revive the royal and ancient game as the Scots played it. Perhaps you saw the latest in Tucson over the weekend in the Seiko-Tucson Match Play Championship.

The results were predictable. The great names of the game went flying out of the tournament in Rounds 1 and 2, and the modern-day Walter Burkemos and Felice Torzas marched inexorably to the final.

Television finally ended up with the likes of Mark Wiebe, Jim Thorpe, Mac O’Grady, Phil Blackmar, Bob Tway and Jack Renner to buck the World Series and pro football.

I sympathize with their plight. Except that a lot of these guys won a tournament this year already. We have had to contend with the Mark Wiebes and Phil Blackmars all year long. And Jim Thorpe, the winner, is practically a legend. He won one tournament and was in a playoff for another this year.

If golf is going to be a game that has no marquee winners anyway, if it’s going to be a national lottery with a winner a week and no star system, why not have a tournament where when you turn sweetly to your opponent and say, “I believe you’re away,” it’ll mean something.

And he won’t be able to smile back and say, “I know, but I’m four shots ahead from yesterday.”

The nice thing about match play is, there’s no yesterday. The only better way to test a man’s nervous system is to make him play for his own money, too. I mean, isn’t that the way you and I play the bloody game?