The Tournament of Champions Could Use a Few

If you had three guesses and a clue, what would you guess a Dan Forsman does for a living?

Interior lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Interior decorator?

Sorry, you lose.

How about Bill Glasson? Care to take a stab at his occupation?

If you really like Trivial Pursuit, see if you can figure out Mark Wiebe’s line of work.

When I tell you that these guys are in the top 30 in their profession, you can be pardoned for wondering if their profession is nuclear spying. Or maybe they’re Trappist monks.

I’ll give you a hint: They’re world-class athletes.

Give up? I thought you would. Very few people other than their immediate families or sports junkies could pick these guys out of a crowd of stockbrokers. Even guys who know what they do don’t know what they look like.

The first golf Tournament of Champions I ever saw, more years ago than I want to cop out to, had a roll call of names that were household words in the sport. There were Sam Snead, Jimmy Demaret, Dutch Harrison, Jackie Burke, Doc Middlecoff, Art Wall.

There were characters: Julius Boros, playing as if he were fast asleep. Gary Player playing like a windup toy, 5 feet 7 inches of coiled intensity. Tommy Bolt missing a putt and glowing like an overheated boiler.

Even the upset winners were colorful. Al Besselink would bet you on the color of the eyes of the next man who walked by on the street. Stan Leonard, the gritty little attacker from Canada, was all guts and no swing.

It was the most surefire format in all of sports. You shot your way into it. No elections, no polls, no blind draws. Win a tournament or stay home.

Ben Hogan qualified for it but wouldn’t play in it. Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus took it over when their turns came. It was the royalty of golf.

The Tournament of Champions hasn’t changed, but golf has. It has gone from Who’s Who to Who Cares?

Parity is one thing. Anonymity is another.

Parity is getting to be a dirty word in big-time sports. Parity is getting boring. If we’d had parity in their day, we wouldn’t have had Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey--or Jack Nicklaus, for that matter. Red Grange would really have been a Galloping Ghost. We wouldn’t even have had Napoleon or Caesar. Or Lincoln or Washington. We might as well all have numbers.

The players in this tournament need numbers. In a Tournament of Champions 20 years ago, you could recognize and identify a silhouette of a contestant three fairways away. Here, you should get a free lunch if you can tell one from his caddy three feet away. And, these are the elite of their game, the best of breed.

The golf curators protest that the game is the same, that it’s we chroniclers who miss the point. After all, they point out, even Hogan was an unknown at one time.

But there are eight first-time players in the MONY Tournament of Champions down here at lush La Costa this week, nearly a third of the field. One of them isn’t even a pro. Can you name any other sport in which one-third of its all-pro lineup are rookies?

What has happened? Are the new players getting that much better? The thought here is, it’s not the new players who have changed, it’s the old ones.

Do you think Tommy Bolt, for instance, would have let what he used to call “them flippy-wristed little college kids” take over his game? Old-timers then had more pride. Also, more know-how. More pure cussedness.

Oh, it wasn’t that they would jingle coins, cough or hum to rattle a rookie. They were more subtle than that. They wouldn’t buddy-buddy with him either. The only secret they would share was whether he was away or not.

They were hungrier in those days. The old lions would see to it that they would eat first. They took care of their games. They didn’t win a big tournament and then go lollygagging around the world giving exhibitions and outings until their games had hopelessly atrophied.

They were jealous of who won their money. For one thing, there wasn’t that much of it. Not enough for them to smile while some tinhorn took it from them.

The total prize money when this tournament started in 1953 was $35,000. The winner makes almost three times that today. The total purse is half a million. Plenty for everybody. That’s just the trouble.

There is one striker of the ball here who bridges that generation gap. Raymond Loran Floyd is a throwback.

Floyd is not of your “Nice shot, son” school of modern golf etiquette. He comes to beat you. Hit a nice shot on Raymond and he’ll hit you a better one.

That’s why he was able to win $378,989 last year. It’s like being in a card game with a drunk.

Floyd has been in this game for 24 years and he remembers when $10,529 in a year put you in the top 60.

Parity hasn’t overtaken him. He’s playing in his 14th Tournament of Champions, more than anyone in the field and third most in history.

A lot of his contemporaries aren’t here. Nicklaus isn’t here. Tom Watson. Open champions like Johnny Miller, Jerry Pate. Masters champions like Ben Crenshaw. Craig Stadler.

Floyd thinks the new system is to blame. “We need a Joe Namath out here, but the new qualifying system (125 exempt players instead of 60) won’t produce it,” he said.

“In the old days, you had to first learn how to qualify. You had to go out on Monday mornings with your heart in your mouth. Then, you had to learn how to make the cut. Then, you had to learn how to make money. Then, you had to learn how to win.

“No short-cuts. You learned how to handle pressure, and believe me, Monday morning qualifying on your last few bucks was pressure with a capital P.

“You learned your game, all right. These guys today get a free ride. They pass the qualifying school, they find a tournament that suits their game, they hit a 300-yard drive and a 175-yard 8-iron, and they win one tournament--and then never win any other but they keep themselves exempt for life with minimal ability.

“They don’t have the trouble shots, they’re not consistent. I’ve won 19 tournaments, a Masters and two PGAs, but I’ve paid my dues. We went through the crucible. Nobody sent a car for us.

“It’s non-competitive out there. It’s not the game I love. It’s a watered-down game. It’s not golf.”

It’s more like a dance. A masked ball.