CRAIG STADLER IS BACK IN THE HUNT : He’s Shooting to Improve His Golf Game, but Family, Hobbies Remain Targets of His Affection

In a grass hut on a plain in Zululand, Craig Stadler slept fitfully. The African night was black as sable, and full of strange noises.

So far, the safari had been everything he had imagined, short of having Streep and Redford along for company.

“Africa is amazing,” Stadler said later. “A world untouched. A true hunter’s ideal. No 7-Elevens, no Holiday Inns. But dangerous, too. Pythons and black mambas all over the place. They bite you, it’s sudden death.”

Suddenly, Stadler stirred from his half-sleep. Outside his little hut, a wild, high-pitched scream pierced the darkness. Stadler grabbed his rifle.

“I didn’t know what the hell was scratching at the door,” he said. “You never know what might come out of the bush. Could have been a tiger or something.

“Fortunately, it went away, after scaring the crap out of me. I found out later it was a hyena. Man, I sure was glad I wasn’t there by myself.”

He was there seeking big game--and escape from the pressures of the professional golf tour. Africa was the ultimate experience for a hunter who has ranged as far north as the Brooks Range in Alaska in quest of trophies and a better grip on himself.

Stadler is a man of contradictions. He is given to fits of anger that distort his ruddy face, with its bushy walrus mustache, a trademark that sets him apart in a sea of clones with perfect backswings and blown dry coiffures.

He’s also a softie who arranges his schedule so he won’t be away from his two young sons for more than two weeks at a time. What’s more, because of the danger, he may not undertake his dream safari--14 days in Zambia--until the kids are older.

He is a perfectionist with little tolerance for a bad shot, whether he’s gripping a driver or a .30-06. He abhors drudgery, such as fishing or practicing his golf game. Success has come easily, perhaps too easily, and he could retire in a few years with his financial goals achieved. But there might be an empty spot, an unsatisfied craving.

“I’m very competitive, but I know I don’t work hard enough,” he said. “The drive to make golf No. 1 in my life isn’t there. I’ve won only one tournament in the last three years after winning seven times in three years. I’d like to win some more, but not at the price of practicing five or six hours a day.”

Dick Harmon, golf pro at Houston’s River Oaks Country Club, is one of the few men Stadler has ever sought out for advice.

“He hasn’t made the sacrifices and he hasn’t reached his full potential,” Harmon said. “But it’s encouraging to me to see an athlete who puts his family way up there in his priorities.

“Craig knows he could work harder, and I think it’s important for him to prove he could have another year like 1982 (when Stadler won the Masters and three other tournaments). He’s got as much talent as any player you could name.”

Stadler is a largely self-taught golfer who used to swat rocks into a canyon as a kid in La Jolla. Recently he began tinkering with his swing, something he hadn’t done in 15 years. He believes he can trim a couple of shots off his average once he masters the new swing.

But his other interests--which embrace cooking and skiing as well as hunting--present distractions that may delay the refinement he seeks for his golf game.

The pressures and the complications seem to fall away when he’s on a mountain trail or wandering through the jungle in his pith helmet and khaki safari attire.

“There’s a lot more to it than just the desire to kill an animal,” Stadler said. “I’d probably get almost as much enjoyment out of it if I went hunting for five days and came back with nothing.

“Hunting is peaceful and relaxing, just you and the trees. I love the anticipation, the work of getting to a spot where few people have ever been and getting on the same terms with the animal. Well, almost the same terms. I do have the gun.”

He has bagged a Dall sheep, and lusts for kudu, a large, grayish brown African antelope. He isn’t interested in shooting lions, elephants or cape buffalo, preferring to go for more populous species.

“My wife doesn’t care for the big game I hunt,” he said. “But it doesn’t bother her if I kill birds, since she can still see 10 million of them the next time she goes outside.

“I stick to the big game that is bountiful and I go for the biggest head. That’s usually the oldest animal, which often would be dead in a year or two, anyway.”

Stadler recently bought a home at Rancho Santa Fe, about 20 miles north of San Diego. His wife, Sue, saying she wanted to get back to civilization, prevailed on him to abandon Lake Tahoe, where the family had lived for the last several years. They still have a home at Tahoe, which makes a good base for Stadler’s skiing and hunting forays.

He can’t leave his perfectionism behind, even when he’s out in the wild.

There was an expedition to British Columbia two years ago. Stadler, a friend and a guide were hunting bighorn sheep. Before dawn, they mounted their horses and rode for five hours before sighting several rams at a higher elevation.

Leaving the horses, they began climbing toward their prey. With considerable effort, they got within 350 or 400 yards, close enough for a decent shot.

“I took aim, squeezed off five shots and missed on every one of them,” Stadler said, still sounding disgusted. “Of course, the rams were gone then. I was really down.

“By the time we got back to camp, it was nearly midnight, which meant it had been a 20-hour day. I felt bad for the guide for putting him through all that. The next day, my friend stayed in camp and was still asleep when we returned. I got my ram that day.”

He didn’t get much satisfaction from a recent appearance in the Andy Williams Open in San Diego. He’s hoping he can do much better this week in the L.A. Open. The imperfections in his new swing were a decided handicap.

On a gray, blustery day, he teed off at Torrey Pines, a heavily used municipal course where he often played as a kid. Familiarity wasn’t much consolation, however, as Stadler quickly played himself out of contention.

His first drive sliced into the gallery--an omen of what was to come. As he walked briskly down the fairway, he looked tense. The crowd parted as Stadler approached his ball.

“Almost gotcha,” he said to a woman tying a scarf around her head. She nodded in affirmation.

There was a touch of humor when Stadler missed a short putt for par. He clenched his fist and pumped his arm, like Bob Uecker in the beer commercial. The crowd ringing the green laughed as one, maybe a little relieved. Stadler had not cursed or broken a club.

When he pushed his next tee shot into a fairway bunker, Stadler reached for a rake and tossed it aside in disgust.

Awaiting his turn to putt on a seaside green, Stadler stared off at the flecks of white on the windy ocean and watched hang gliders swooping and diving.

He probably longed for an escape after taking his fifth bogey in the opening five holes of his round. “This course could use a par-6 hole,” he said to a friend.

Stadler continued to play poorly and wound up missing the cut by one stroke. A day later he had put aside his disappointment and was able to talk at length about the vexations and the promise of his new swing.

“This is the first time I’ve altered my swing since I was 17 years old, and when it’s off, I’ve got no clue where the ball is going,” he said.

“I have to get the feeling I know where I’m going with this swing. Right now, there’s still a chance for my game to go haywire here and there, like it did when I bogeyed the first five holes the other day. This sort of thing may continue for several months until I get confidence in my swing, but I think it’s going to make a drastic difference in the long run.”

By altering his swing, Stadler is attempting to put a new face on his game. He’s always been able to fade the ball from left to right. Now he wants to be able to draw it from right to left.

“This will give his game more variety,” said Harmon, his instructor. “There have been others, like Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino, who hit most of their shots from left to right, but they didn’t cut across the ball like Craig was doing.

“Craig reached the point where the ball was curving more than he wanted it to do. We’ve looked at film of a lot of his tournaments, and it’s clear he wasn’t cutting across the ball so much when he was winning big in 1982.”

Stadler is driving the ball 30 yards longer with the modified swing, and he expects to hit two or three more greens per round. That would give him several more chances for birdies and could mean saving a couple of strokes in his average score.

“I haven’t set any new goals yet, because I don’t want to get down if I’m not able to reach them,” Stadler said. “Once I get the swing down, where I don’t have to think out every move, I might set some goals.

“I now have the ability to hit a draw for the first time in my life, and I should be able to hit 14 or 15 greens per round instead of the 10 or 12 I was averaging. The only thing I have to do is avoid getting down on my putting. I’ve always been a good putter, but the putts haven’t been dropping for me this year.”

Striking a golf ball is torment enough for the average soul. For a temperamental perfectionist such as Stadler, the agony is etched in his face whenever a shot strays from its target.

“When he hits a shot six feet from the flag, he might be mad it’s not two feet,” Sue Stadler said. “If the ball lips the cup, he’s upset he has to take a birdie instead of making an eagle.

“I think he dies with every putt that doesn’t fall. If I could twitch my nose like the lady on ‘Bewitched’ and make the ball drop, I’d do it every time. But about all I can do is bolster his confidence and try to squash his anger.”

The public perception of Stadler as a man who is constantly mad is not without merit. But it is misleading in two respects: Stadler’s temper is generally directed at inanimate objects, not at other people, and it’s almost exclusively a golf course phenomenon.

Besides, he doesn’t even have the worst temper in the family. Sue said her own anger can be deeper and longer lasting. If she were a golfer, she’d be breaking clubs left and right, she said.

“I’ve had some real donnybrooks with know-it-all fans on the golf course,” she said.

There are plenty of opportunities, because she follows her husband to a majority of the tournaments he enters. As she spoke, the dark-haired mother of two was standing near a green as her husband holed a par putt.

“Boy, if he missed that one, he’d be plenty PO’d the rest of the day,” said a fan, who may have recognized Stadler’s wife.

“I hate guys like that,” she said to a reporter. “The ones who think they have so much insight into Craig.”

She vigorously snapped a twig she had been holding.

“Craig is not the person you may think from reading the papers or watching TV,” she said. “He never vents his anger at anyone on the course, but he does seem to keep it inside until the cameras are focused on him.

“He might seem like a pain in the neck on the course, but give him 10 minutes after a round and he’s fine. Once he’s home or in the hotel room, it’s hard to be angry with two little boys crawling all over him.”

Over the years, Stadler has been wounded by printed references to his temper, but he believes there’s a better understanding of him now.

“I had some run-ins with the press because of the constant references to my temper and waistline, and there was a lot of hurt,” he said.

“I think some of that has been laid to rest, because I’ve mellowed. I’m at a point where I’ll stay. . . . I’m not mad at anybody out there. I just get disgusted with myself. Certain shots upset me, but I’m OK by the next swing. I may look like I’m steaming, but inside, I’m fine.”

There are limits to the mellowing process, of course.

“I’ve never been one to walk down a fairway with a big smile just because the fans want that,” he said with a hint of defiance.

It’s not that he’s particularly stubborn or rebellious. It’s just that he has his own values and lofty expectations and won’t compromise.

The pressures of the tour are more easily reconciled when Sue and sons Kevin and Christopher are present.

Until last fall, when Kevin entered first grade, the family accompanied him to nearly every tournament. There was a memorable three-week trip to Europe with a 11 suitcases, a baby-sitter, strollers, car seats, teddy bears and security blankets.

“It’s insane at times, but Craig’s a lot happier when we’re with him, and the boys really like the travel, too,” Sue said. “To my kids, home was a hotel room in the first years of their life.

“When we moved back to San Diego and Kevin started school last fall, he asked when we were going to ride the airplane and the elevator again. He wanted to go with his Dad, not to school.”

For Sue Stadler, who grew up in Los Angeles, life as a tour wife represents a compromise. She has thought of starting a catering business, but that would deprive her of the freedom to hop a jet and fly off to Hawaii or the Swiss Alps for the next tournament.

“I have a choice--a career or being a wife and mother--and that’s what women’s lib is all about,” she said. “It only bothers the wives who don’t have a strong sense of self.”

As part of her commitment, she walked 18 holes at Pebble Beach two days before Kevin was born. Her role, as she sees it, is to “balance out” her husband when he’s irritated or sluggish.

There were moments in their courtship when Stadler was a bit slow in taking the initiative. She supplied the tickets for their first date--a Dodger playoff game in 1977--and waited patiently for a year for him to make up his mind about marriage.

When he finally proposed finally came, the couple were seated in a casino in Reno.

“We’d been visiting at Tahoe for a few days, and she just loved it,” Stadler said. “I thought it was a good time (to propose). I had been planning to ask her over dinner, but I couldn’t handle it. After I had a few drinks, I got bold enough. It didn’t matter that we were in a casino.”

Stadler said there was a marked improvement in his golf after the wedding in 1979. After four relatively mediocre seasons, he won his first tournament in 1980, and two years later, he won four times and earned $446,000.

“Having the family with me gives me encouragement,” he said. “There’s nothing to do when I’m out there by myself. I won’t be away from the kids for longer than two weeks this year, and that seems too long to me.”

Craig and Sue disagree on one important aspect of his makeup: confidence.

She maintains that he lacked it until several years ago. She said she had to prod him into believing he could be one of the best.

Not so, he argued.

“I never lacked confidence in my game; I always knew I could succeed,” he said. “But it’s certainly true I had a horrendous start in my pro career, and it was a struggle for several years.”

Golf had always been his favorite pastime--he remembers the set of Arnold Palmer irons he received as a kid--but he was also a promising baseball player. That is, until he was switched from shortstop to left field in Pony League, and he quit two games later.

His stout dimensions (5-foot-10, 215 pounds) made him a natural fullback and linebacker in high school, but it was golf that won him a scholarship to USC, where he was a three-time All-American.

After winning the U.S. Amateur in 1973 at age 19, he made up his mind he would become a pro. It was hard for him to guess at the tortuous times ahead.

He might not have made it through qualifying school but for an accident.

Unable to find a drive in the rough, he was about to take a penalty stroke that could have prevented his earning a tour card. But then his partner, Woody Blackburn, inadvertently stepped on the ball, saving the round and starting a friendship that endures.

Once on tour, it got tougher. He missed the cut in his first tournament, at Milwaukee, and he failed to qualify for the next eight tournaments. He thought of quitting before he made the field at Hartford late in the summer.

For the year, 1976, he won the grand sum of $2,706. The next season, he began the ascent up the pyramid. He made $42,000 in 1977, and the total increased every year until 1983, when he dropped from $446,000 to $214,000.

The fallout from his great year in ‘82, when he won the Masters and the World Series of Golf, was painful.

“He really enjoyed being patted on the back,” Sue said. “He thought he could just show up the next year and win five tournaments. There was a harsh return to reality.”

Stadler doesn’t know exactly what went awry.

“It seemed like I was in a rut, a really good rut, all through ‘82,” he said. “I lost a playoff in the last tournament of the year and then took a month off, figuring I could pick it right up again.

“But, when I came back in January, I missed the cut in Tucson and Palm Springs and I just started swinging badly and putting poorly. I know I was putting too much pressure on myself.”

Stadler rebounded in 1984 by winning the Byron Nelson tournament and earning $324,000. Last year, he had two second-place finishes and set a record for money won without a victory, $297,000.

Although he said his chief goal now is to provide economic security for his sons, there are signs that Stadler has other targets as well.

It’s been two years since he won a tournament, and that gnaws at him. “Second place means nothing to him,” Sue said.

Stadler has little doubt he could match or surpass his best year if he could find the will to work at his game.

“Sure, I could be more successful if I ever put down the other things and just paid attention to golf,” he said.

“But I don’t want to cheat my family by practicing five or six hours a day when I’m not competing. So you probably won’t see me become as successful as Watson or Nicklaus.”

Could he be a dominant player? The question clearly intrigues him.

“If I went at it like I did when I was 14 or 15, God knows what could I do,” he said. “Hell, I’d play from 3 o’clock until dark every day after school, and then all day Saturday and Sunday. My hands got blistered from swinging a club so long.”

Since turning pro, however, his habits have changed.

“I’ve got pretty near the top rung without much input from others or too much effort of my own,” he said. “I’ve been able to get away with doing it this way, and be successful.

“Of course, I might regret it one day. I’ll admit I’d like to win again. And things just might change dramatically with this new swing. It’ll become easier to work harder once I start seeing results. And I really believe my prime years are just coming up. I just need to win another tournament.”

So hold off on the requiem for the guy with the pained expression, the pizza lover’s belly, the walrus head covers and the trophy room filled with antlers.