THE LOS ANGELES OPEN : As for Intestinal Fortitude, He’s Way Above Par

To play tournament golf successfully is easy. All you need is 20/20 vision, a temperature in the 98s, a pulse rate in the low 60s, blood pressure in the low 100s and as little as possible on your mind other than making a 4.

Your appetite should be excellent, your ambition limitless. It helps if you have this gorgeous one-piece swing like Snead’s, or this hard Teutonic stare like Nicklaus’, which can reduce even the toughest par-5 to eagle range.

If you had all of that going for you today--and could putt--you might make a living on tour.

The truly remarkable thing about Anthony Irvin Sills is, he had none of the above going for him when he set out to make his livelihood on the golf tour.

First of all, he had a more or less chronic fever. His blood pressure had to be watched, his head tended to ache, his heart to pound and, his hands sometimes shook over even short putts.

He not only didn’t have any appetite, he couldn’t keep the food down when he did eat. He was so pale and skinny that he looked like something they found in the bottom of a pyramid.

When he was 18, the question was not whether he would make a pro golfer, it was whether he would make 19. Tony had a condition known as degenerative ulcerative colitis, which is the next-best thing to having no stomach at all. He gradually withered away till it was hard to tell him from his 1-iron on a cloudy day.

This was too bad for all reasons but particularly since the young Tony Sills was one of the best golf players ever seen on the greens and fairways of Riviera Country Club. If you’ve never seen Riviera, that is a little like being the prettiest woman in Paris.

Tony was a plus-3 at Riviera. That means he had to give three shots even to a scratch player and that he was three over par on the first tee before he even swung at a ball. This was remarkable shooting for a guy who never had a well day in his life and seemed, if the X-rays could be believed, to be slowly bleeding to death.

Tony’s life was saved by radical colostomy surgery but, at the time, it was felt that the surgeons had moved more than his stomach; they had taken out his golf game, too. You can play golf with a makeshift set of clubs but you can’t play golf with a makeshift colon.

Or so everybody thought. Fortunately, Tony Sills wasn’t one of them.

Dreams die harder than stomachs. Although he was 100 pounds under his normal weight and 50 shots over his normal score, Tony struggled back onto the course as soon as they took the tubes out of his nose.

There were setbacks. They had to take Tony off the course in an ambulance once, and the word around the course was, Tony was the only guy in the club who needed to rent a stretcher instead of a cart to play.

His friends wished he would pick up and get into something he could do sitting down--or even lying down. Something that didn’t require the muscle control and concentration and violent action of a golf swing.

They reminded him that he was bucking the toughest wheel in sports and that guys who had all their intestines and indoor plumbing couldn’t even make it. It was like he was spotting them strokes, the best players in the world, yet.

They had reason on their side. Sills went up the hill, trying to get his tour card, six times--and came rolling back down without it each time. When he finally got it, things didn’t improve much. He went six months without even making a cut.

Tony Sills would never blame his infirmity. “It’s my game, not my gut,” he said. But it is a fact that his game improved dramatically when a procedure he calls “a continent ileostomy” was performed. It made swinging a golf club a less harrowing experience.

Tony Sills has not yet won a tournament. He has not even played in a Masters or British Open. But the way things have been going, when he does--and he will be in the Masters this year--he may even be the one to beat.

Tony Sills’ improvement, for a guy the doctors didn’t think would be able to stand up for 72 holes, much less par them, has boggled the golf tour.

He improved from $47,488 in 1983, his first year, to $90,055 the next, and to $125,255 last year.

But this year to date, Sills has been shades of Ben Hogan. As he tees it up in the 60th Los Angeles Open at Riviera this week, Tony Sills is looking back on six weeks of impeccable golf. He has been second and third in two tournaments, Phoenix and the AT&T; Pro-Am; has shot under par in 18 of 19 rounds, and has made $89,168 already this year.

The worst round he shot was 73. That’s a lot of people’s best.

These would be staggering statistics for a guy who had all the requisite plumbing and never had a wart in his life. For a guy who lost half his insides before he was old enough to shave, they are little short of awe-inspiring.

But you can say one thing for Tony Sills: He is one guy who doesn’t need more guts. Turns out he had plenty to replace the ones he lost in surgery.