Golf / Grahame L. Jones : At Least, Chris Johnson’s Prize Money Is Nothing to Sneeze At

A golfer with allergies?

Nothing unusual there. After all, there are about as many of the former as there are of the latter.

But a professional golfer who’s allergic to-- grass? Yes, grass, the same stuff usually found covering the tees and the fairways and, heaven forbid, even the greens on golf courses from Kaanapali to Cape Cod.

Chris Johnson, 28, a former University of Arizona All-American, has been playing golf since she was 5 and has been sneezing her way around courses for almost as long.

Even when she’s not in the rough, it’s rough.

“I’ve had trouble with (allergies) for a long time,” Johnson said last week during a visit to Los Angeles. “I’m sure it’s affected a lot of other people, too. Some people’s eyes swell shut. My reaction is I get a runny nose and I sneeze and at the end of the day my eyes are swollen.

“It’s no fun standing over a putt and feeling a sneeze coming on and trying everything to get over the sneeze.”

At first, Johnson said, she thought the allergy was seasonal, something confined to the spring. But as successive LPGA springs turned to summers, she realized her mistake.

“It turns out to be grass,” she said during an interview at the Oakmont Country Club in Glendale, where next March she will be defending the Glendale Federal/GNA title she won with a four-under-par 212 in this year’s rain-shortened tournament.

The joke at Oakmont was that the rain had contributed to her victory by cleaning the air of grass cuttings, pollen or whatever it is that causes her to sneeze from tee to green. More likely it was her course-record final round of 67.

“I’ve been taking something (medication) at night,” Johnson said, adding that the problem hasn’t mowed down her game.

“I can’t say, ‘Well, I lost that tournament because of the allergies,’ ” she said.

The victory at Oakmont was an early highlight in a tremendous year on the LPGA tour for Johnson. She finished as the LPGA’s eighth-leading money winner with $200,648, which, in itself, was nothing to sneeze at. The sum almost equaled her previous earnings of $264,527, garnered over six seasons.

“My goal when I went into the year was to win $100,000,” she said. “I felt like I would surpass that. Then, when it looked like I was going to, I had this $200,000 dream. Then, around August, it wasn’t such a dream, it looked like something that I’d be able to do.

“Next year what I’m going to look for is just playing more consistent. I made a lot of cuts this year. I missed the first cut and then I made all the others the rest of the year. That’s a neat thing to do. It doesn’t sound like much, but at least you have a chance of making money when you make the cut. I’d like to continue that string. I’d like to have more top 10 finishes.”

This has been Johnson’s best year on the tour. She finished in the top 10 in eight tournaments and her scoring average of 72.26 was 11th-best in the LPGA.

Besides winning at Oakmont, the third victory of her career, Johnson tied for second in the Mayflower tournament at Indianapolis and in the LPGA national pro-am at Denver. She was third in the Rochester International at Rochester, N.Y., and third in the Women’s Kemper Open at Kauai, Hawaii.

Away from the course, it was also an eventful year. She was married, and she and her husband, Don, bought a house, giving her, she said, somewhere to come home to and relieving the burden of constant travel somewhat.

Johnson remains pleasantly surprised by her golfing accomplishments. Life as a professional golfer was not something she’d dreamed about.

“Some girls dream about it,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t dream about it. I was an accounting major (at Arizona), and even in high school I thought that I’d (more likely) be in the business world than on the LPGA tour.

“I wasn’t convinced that I was tour material until I was a senior in college. People around me just assumed that I was heading for the tour, but I had to have my own inner confidence.”

That confidence is evident now, in both her personality and her game.

And now that she has made her mark as an established professional, is she happy? Apparently so.

“I’ve heard so many people get there (onto the tour) and then say, ‘Is that all there is?’ Everyone’s heard that, and I don’t know what they’re looking for in the game,” Johnson said. “It’s so satisfying to go out there on Sunday and know that you have to shoot a good score to have any chance of making the top 10 because of the scores that have been shot already.

“It’s so satisfying to go out there and shoot 68 or 69. It’s a great feeling. Maybe (it’s because) I’m not looking at golf for my total identity. There are a lot of other things that I have now.”

Everything but a grass skirt. The allergies, you know.

As if Houston were not having enough problems, now comes word that the city has lost the $300,000 LPGA Mazda Hall of Fame tournament.

LPGA Commissioner John Laupheimer announced last week that the event has been dropped from the tour because of summertime heat and humidity, and the area’s poor economy.

“It was a difficult decision for us,” Laupheimer said. “We like being here in Houston. Sometimes you just have to make decisions that are hard.”

The tournament was played on the LPGA’s home course and site of the organization’s Hall of Fame, Sweetwater Country Club, nicknamed Sweatwater by some players after the heat-humidity index rose past the 100-degree mark during the 1986 tournament.

Several leading players chose not to play in the event this year and others indicated they would not play in the 1987 tournament, which had been scheduled for July 2-5.

Attendance, too, was down in 1986, when the tournament drew just 32,116 spectators. That was 4,000 fewer than the previous year.

“We did not really get as much fan support as we hoped for,” Laupheimer said. “We just didn’t want to have a tournament of our own like this where we couldn’t have the best players in the world.”

Golf Notes

Bob Tway and Pat Bradley have been named Golf magazine’s 1986 players of the year. They were selected on the basis of a poll of 60 touring PGA pros and 100 LPGA tour pros. Greg Norman and Juli Inkster were the runners-up. . . . The Spalding Invitational Pro-Am has increased its purse to $250,000, with the winner receiving $50,000. The tournament will be played Dec. 31-Jan. 3 at three Monterey Peninsula courses. Latest entries include Ken Green, Don Pooley, Mark Wiebe and Roger Maltbie. . . . Three-time tour champion Scott Hoch of Orlando, Fla., has won the Vardon Trophy as the PGA member with the best scoring average on the tour. Hoch averaged 70.08 for 90 rounds, the lowest average since Tom Kite’s 69.80 in 1981. . . . Steve Miletich of Los Angeles, a member of the Braemar CC, has been elected president of the Southern California Golf Assn. . . . The team of Sadao Kihara, Norm Stachler, Carolyne Murray and Alan Jarvis won the VNE (for former Judge Vince Erickson) Invitational at Woodland Hills CC. The tournament is a charity event benefiting International Guiding Eyes. . . . Dan Murray of La Verne won the 20th annual senior’s tournament played at the Palm Springs Municipal GC. . . . Joe Stack and Tracy Lehman, both of Palm Desert, won golfer-of-the-year honors for their performances this year in the Desert Junior Golf Assn’s. tournament program. . . . Paul Lemcke, head pro at Butterfield Country Club in Oak Brook, Ill., has been named director of golf at Desert Horizons CC in Indian Wells, where he will serve during the winter months.