PGA Trying to Withstand Big Mac Attack

Mac O’Grady plays right-handed and putts left-handed. He made 17 tries at the PGA Tour Qualifying School. He runs in marathons. He speaks Japanese.

He also rocks the boat.

At the moment, O’Grady has the PGA Tour boat seriously atilt.

His criticisms of tour Commissioner Deane Beman--bitter, vitriolic and, at times, outrageous--have pushed aside most other locker-room conversation topics.

He has threatened to file suit against Beman and “the hierarchy of the tour.”

And he has been notified of proposed disciplinary actions that, if imposed, would be the most severe Beman has leveled in his 12 years as commissioner. Sanctions could include up to $12,000 in fines, 12 weeks suspension and one-year probation.

Just who is O’Grady? To start with, he wasn’t always Mac O’Grady.

He began life as Phil McGleno. In 1978, at age 27, he had his name legally changed to Phillip McClelland O’Grady. O’Grady is his mother’s maiden name. Bob McClelland was “like a father to me for years,” he said.

Raised in Southern California, O’Grady began caddying at age 12 at both the Riviera and Bel Air country clubs in Los Angeles. He also played the game, left- and right-handed.

In 1971, he made his first try at the PGA Tour Qualifying School. Twelve years and 16 tries later, he made it.

The years in between consisted of numerous odd jobs; the word “poverty” appears often in published biographical material. As one story goes, O’Grady lived in a packing crate in Los Angeles a few months because he was so poor. But a tour player who has known O’Grady since childhood says the story is false.

O’Grady played the European and Asian pro tours. He took a Japanese wife.

Always, however, he returned to the United States to try to gain his playing rights. Persistence paid off, and in 1983 he joined the U.S. tour, winning a total of $91,000 during his first two seasons and $223,808 last year.

“Being on the PGA Tour is like celebrating Christmas every day,” he once said.

The holiday spirit didn’t last, however.

In March 1984, a volunteer at the USF&G; tournament in New Orleans charged that O’Grady insulted her, prompting a $500 fine from Beman. The penalty was upheld by a three-man appeals committee in December 1984.

O’Grady, who has denied insulting the volunteer, was quoted as saying he wouldn’t pay the fine. So Beman requested the $500 be withheld from O’Grady’s earnings in the Bob Hope Classic in January 1985.

About the same time, O’Grady took exception to a story about him in a national magazine. And so, while he led the first three rounds of the 1985 Bryon Nelson Classic in Dallas, he refused to speak to reporters.

He also declined on-course interviews in early tournaments this year, but this time he said he wasn’t talking so he could “embarrass Deane Beman.”

Then began a series of off-course interviews -- in Hawaii, Los Angeles, Florida. And the man who refused to talk started getting himself in trouble for talking too much -- usually wide-ranging verbal attacks on Beman and PGA Tour officials.

It was all triggered by the $500 fine and the way it was intercepted by the commissioner.

O’Grady began referring to Beman as a “thief with a capital T,” a “dictator” and as having “Russian ideology.’

In rambling discourses on Beman he would invoke the names of Watergate figures G. Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman, and H.R. Haldeman. He’d also refer to the Constitution, petty dictators and the rights of man.

O’Grady’s complaint was that the commissioner had overstepped his authority and was exercising it in a capricious manner.