He’d Played It <i> Too</i> Straight Away From Tee

Roger Maltbie was due on the first tee. So, like any good pro, he checked his bag for the implements necessary for victory on the course.

Happily, they were all there. The carton of cigarettes, the lighter. His cap with the beer ad on it. His credit cards in case he wanted to stop at the liquor store for bourbon on the way home.

The encouraging news was brought to him that one of his playing partners, an amateur, was at that moment getting ready himself by sitting in his condo Jacuzzi with a cocktail in hand.

All the elements pointed to a fine round for Roger Maltbie. The signs were all propitious. He was dealing from a position of total contentment and, for Roger, some moral superiority.

A glance in the mirror told him the eyes weren’t red, there was no after-taste in his mouth. The diet wasn’t working too well, but you can’t have everything. A man needs a good breakfast.

Everywhere Roger looked was money. A photographer was ready to shoot a beer commercial. There might even be time for practice if he played his cards right--and felt like it.

Roger Lin Maltbie is the nearest thing to Walter Hagen on the golf tour today. You will remember Walter Hagen as the guy who used to show up on the first tee direct from Texas Guinan’s, in tuxedo or tails and white scarf and trailing an aroma of champagne drunk from a slipper. He’d go out and shoot 68 in patent leather pumps and top hat.

Roger Maltbie has never quite topped that act, but he does have a few distinctions of his own on the golf tour. He once lost a $40,000 check in a saloon near the club where he won his first tournament, for instance.

Roger has pretty much shown up at every tournament in cleats and slacks, instead of white tie and tails. And he has never had more than one beer for breakfast or Bloody Mary before noon and doesn’t put too much ketchup on his fried potatoes.

But what has happened to Maltbie in the last two years is one of the biggest blows to clean living since Joe Namath won a Super Bowl.

You see, Roger set out to shuck his Walter Hagen image a couple of years ago. The fast life was disagreeing with him. He thought.

Roger, it so happened, won two tournaments in a row in his rookie year, an almost unheard-of feat. He laughed his way through the Ed McMahon Quad Cities Open, then left his check on a bar nearby.

When he won the Pleasant Valley Open the next week, he put his check in a safe place but still managed to buy the house a drink or five that night.

Roger, a blithe spirit out of San Jose, never saw a game so easy in his life. You could make 80 grand in two weeks without even getting a good night’s sleep. It was like being on a riverboat with your own deck, or owning the wheel.

So, when he won the Memorial tournament and $117,736 the following year, someone began to wonder what might happen if Roger took care of himself.

I mean, supposing he got to bed early, put all his checks in the bank instead of the bar? What if he ate salads, drank tea, worked out? What if he cut down to two packs a day, read Scripture, got eight hours sleep a night? Jack Nicklaus’ records might not be safe. Why, you might not be able to tell Roger from any other young pro out of Brigham Young or Wake Forest. Even his slacks would fit better.

It made sense to Maltbie. He hit the sawdust trail. He not only made himself look slimmer, he all but made himself invisible.

His earnings got slimmer, too. He tumbled from $117,736 and $51,727 down to $12,440 and finally $9,796.

Roger’s liver and lungs and heart were never better, his eyes never clearer. It was his golf game that was terminal. It was his scores that needed intensive care. It was his swing that had a hangover.

“Every day was like going to war,” he recalls. “I felt as if the Spanish Army were making me play. It was grim. You know you play this game on a life-or-death level, you try to keep a smile on your face, and it’s like facing a firing squad every morning.

He went from 18th on the money list to 155th. He went from “What did Roger Maltbie have?” to “Where did Roger Maltbie go?” Every tournament was Roger and out.

Ordinarily, when a tour pro’s game goes sour, he takes it to a teacher, a swing analyst. Maltbie took his to a psychoanalyst. He suspected the trouble was not physiological but psychological. He was losing his grip but not the one on his golf club.

Some guys are born to be 9-to-5 guys. They show up early for work, do what they’re told, live by the book and keep everything neat and tidy. The sports psychologist, Bob Rotella, quite quickly saw that Roger Maltbie was not one of those. His new psyche was like a suit two sizes too small. The halo was strangling Roger Maltbie.

Most people on the golf tour thought he had disappeared altogether, gone into another line of work.

“It’s because you’re not being Roger Maltbie,” the psychologist told him. “You’re trying to be someone you aren’t.

Whoever he was trying to be couldn’t play golf as well as Roger Maltbie.

So, Roger Maltbie let Roger Maltbie out of the bag, the losing bag, two years ago. He didn’t leave any checks lying around on a barroom floor--a new bride, Donna, saw to it they went to the bank instead of a beer.

The return of Roger Maltbie produced a guy who doesn’t drink champagne from a slipper or disco all night, but neither does he sit in a motel room all night and worry about par-threes over water.

Walter Hagen would have understood perfectly. Roger (Himself) Maltbie went from a low of $9,796 on the tour to $360,554 last year. He won his first tournament since 1976 and then, to prove he was back, he won another, the World Series of Golf.

“I can’t be Jack Nicklaus or Gary Player,” he said. “I have to be Roger Maltbie, I found out.”

When he won at Firestone last year for the second time in the year, a radio announcer was excitedly trying to describe for his audience “the new Roger Maltbie.”

A bystander tapped him on the shoulder. “That’s not a new Roger Maltbie, that’s the old one,” he told him. The old Roger was back. He had discovered a swing in his flaw.