No Rough Grows Under These Feet

Lanny Wadkins plays golf as if he were robbing a bank and the alarm just went off.

He doesn’t exactly run between shots, but guys have moved slower leaving hotel fires.

Most guys play golf as if they were going to the electric chair or cutting the world’s biggest diamond. They stand over the ball till the cobwebs begin to form or they need a shave. They look as if they would welcome an earthquake. Any interruption.

Lanny, on the other hand, behaves as if the ball were ticking. Or lying on top of a rattlesnake.

Some guys treat a round of golf as a day at the lathe. Two hours at the dentist. Lanny acts as if he’s at an all-night party.

He got into the habit of playing golf fast because, as a kid, he always wanted to get in 72 holes before dark, if possible. He does everything fast. He walks fast, talks fast. He got into the habit of eating fast for the same reason--so he could fit as many holes of golf into a day as possible.

The realities of the game are, no one ever got penalized for playing golf too fast. Almost everyone plays the game too slow. It’s the only game in the world that’s already in slow motion, the only game played with a ball where speed is not only not critical or essential but also not even advisable.

Some of the great fidgeters of our time have excelled at the game. Cary Middlecoff used to stand over a ball as if he were waiting for it to hatch. Jack Nicklaus sent a whole generation into a catatonic state when he joined the tour and stood over putts until pigeons lit on his shoulders, mistaking him for a statue of Beethoven.

A million golf course starters cursed the day Nicklaus learned to play chess golf. The trouble was, when they penalized Jack two strokes, he only won by four. A whole generation of truck driver golfers got the idea that the way to play the game was like the retreat from Moscow--do everything but blow up bridges behind you.

There have been other fast players. Doug Ford used to tear through a round as if he just heard a bear in the bushes behind him, or had a plane to catch. But the vast majority of golfers act as if they were whittling a ship to put in a bottle.

So, a lot of people had a vested interest in seeing J. Lanston Wadkins do well when he came out on tour. He had a chance to reverse a trend that had been stunting the growth of the game in recent years, the practice of playing the game at the pace of an icejam on the Yukon.

Lanny stood on a fairway at a golf course down here the other afternoon and studied a lie in a sand trap as casually as if it were a beer can lying in a roadway. Without losing a beat in his conversation with two journalists, he suggested offhandedly to his caddy, “Six-iron, Herman?” then took a club, hurried through the hazard, slashed--and drove the ball 170 yards and down on a green seven feet from the pin. He stamped the sand out of his shoes and went on talking.

The moral of this story is that four out of five pros, maybe even five out of five, would have taken a look at that shot, contemplated it, lit a cigarette, walked in and out of the trap several times, thrown a blade of grass in the air, studied the position of the sun in the heavens, changed clubs once or twice, called home, taken charts out of their pockets--and then finally, just as the sun was dipping toward the west, hit the same 6-iron for the green, not necessarily the pin.

Lanny Wadkins scorns this waste of time.

“I work at my game,” he said. “I don’t just hit it and go find it. I have a plan in mind.”

He doesn’t make up his game as he goes along, in spite of appearances. But he never arrives at the ball in the throes of indecision. The paperwork has been worked out in his mind. The geometry has been plotted, the blueprints memorized. If he can see the pin, and sometimes even if he can’t, Wadkins knows precisely what he wants to do.

And fortunately, how to do it. Lanny Wadkins is one of the few stars in what is not exactly the Milky Way of sports. He has won 15 tournaments in a game in which you get clubs named after you if you win three. Most guys who have won more are either retired or have been on the tour longer.

Lanny has won only two “majors,” a U.S. Amateur and a PGA, but there are double-figure winners on tour who have never won any, and he thinks that slowing down is not the way to win any tournament. “I didn’t realize I played fast or bold till you guys brought it to my attention,” he said to the press types at his elbow. “That’s just the way I grew up with the game.”

A round of golf, in short, is not exactly building a bridge, is Wadkins’ view. “In most other sports, you react to a situation. You react to a curveball, a forward pass or a crosscourt serve. Here we have to act, not react.”

It’s not a thing that calls for a special session of Congress, Lanny figures.

As defending champion at the Bob Hope Chrysler tournament here this week and second-leading money winner last season, Lanny is a role model, a player to emulate.

In baseball, he’d be a first-ball hitter, a pitcher who threw strikes. In football, he’d never call time to consult with the bench. In basketball, he’d be throwing up three-pointers from midcourt.

In golf, he’s the last best hope of every guy who ever stood in the middle of a fairway and watched helplessly as the foursome ahead huddled over every shot as if it were a Versailles peace treaty or an operating-room consultation, the patron saint of every guy who ever yelled, “Let’s go!” or, “Hit the damned ball!” at the parade of paralytics up ahead.

Lanny’s book should be titled, “Golf in the Fast Lane,” or, “How to Get Through Before Your Clubs Rust or the Sun Sets.” It’s a more urgently needed instructional work than where to point the V’s on the shaft at address.