O’Grady Wins by One at La Costa : Fehr a Close Second on Course, Far Behind in Interview

Mac O’Grady, bless his beleaguered soul, won the MONY Tournament of Champions Saturday at La Costa, receiving a check for $90,000. After the trials and tribulations he survived, no one could say he didn’t earn every cent of it.

O’Grady, the PGA Tour’s leading spiritualist, shot a one-under-par 71 for a total of 278, one stroke better than Rick Fehr and two better than Greg Norman and Mark Calcavecchia.

When it was over, O’Grady, 35, described his tour of La Costa in much the same terms as Dante did Inferno.

He said that at one point during Saturday’s round, he . . . It’s better to let him tell it.

“The demons just come,” he said. “They’re there to haunt you. You feel so isolated, so alone. You’ve got both feet in the grave. You wonder what in the hell you’re doing out there.”

He said that at another point, as he was standing over a putt, he realized he had lost his confidence.

“I was afraid the ball would explode like a hand grenade,” he said.

That caused him to catch a case of the yips, something everyone can relate to, except that he called them “focal dystonia myoclonus.”

He said his “equilibrium was sabotaged.”

He said his “conscious mind was hemorrhaging.”

He said the “nerve endings in my fingertips were misfiring.”

He said “fear was rampaging.”

Not Fehr. Fear!

Fehr sat spellbound in the interview room as O’Grady described his round, then admitted later he didn’t understand a word of it.

Fehr played with O’Grady Saturday, even shot the same score, 71, but he looked afterward like a man who had been playing golf, not fighting demons.

“Maybe the guy out here who isn’t so bright has an advantage,” said Fehr, 24, a Brigham Young graduate. “He can make a mistake and go on like nothing happened.

“If I was thinking about nerve endings firing out the ends of my fingertips, I don’t know if I could pull the club back. I’m glad I don’t know anything about that.”

There is probably no one on the tour who knows more about the inner game of golf than O’Grady. After a lengthy research project, on which he estimates he has spent $150,000 out of his own pocket, he and a friend plan to publish a book later this year on how a player’s brain works during a round.

The obvious question is that if O’Grady is so smart, how come he had won only one tournament in four years on the tour until Saturday? He won the Hartford Open last year.

The answer, other players say, is that O’Grady is too smart.

Fuzzy Zoeller says that golf is a simple game. “You hit it, find it and hit it again,” he says.

O’Grady hits it and heads for the analyst’s couch.

But he overcame everything Saturday, including his own mind games, to hold off the challenges of some of the biggest names in the game.

And one of the longest names.

Calcavecchia made a run at O’Grady, catching him at nine-under on 14 before losing a stroke on the next hole and finishing with a 70 for a 280 total.

Norman, who also finished at 280, got to nine-under on 16 with a 30-foot putt, but, needing one more birdie to tie for the lead, he pushed his drive on 18 into the trees and bogeyed for a 71.

That left Fehr and O’Grady.

Fehr, who started the round one stroke behind O’Grady, moved into a tie with a 25-foot birdie putt on No. 3.

But after O’Grady birdied the next hole, Fehr never again was in the lead, even though O’Grady gave him plenty of other opportunities.

The first came on No. 10, where O’Grady three-putted from nine feet for a bogey. But Fehr also bogeyed, missing his par putt from one foot.

Fehr actually giggled.

O’Grady fretted.

“Vin Scully asked me before the round if I trust the game of golf,” O’Grady said.

“I told him no. At the most unwarranted moment, the brutal, the bizarre and the unbelievable can take place.”

O’Grady had another of those moments on 12, when he again three-putted for a bogey.

“I could see the championship going out the window,” he said. “This game discounts you and discredits you. It lacerates you.”

Fehr had a par on 12, but he was still one stroke behind.

“If they want drama, they’re going to get it,” O’Grady told Bob Goalby, an NBC commentator, as they walked down the 13th fairway.

It never materialized.

O’Grady appeared ready to fold, but he remembered a conversation he had with Seve Ballesteros.

“I asked him what you do when the atrocities begin to eventuate,” O’Grady said.

Ballesteros, the one who speaks English, told him, “Forget it.”

O’Grady took his advice Saturday, developing what he called “anterograde amnesia.”

“That means you immediately forget what happens,” O’Grady said.

It must have worked because he won the tournament on 14, where he made a 48-foot birdie putt for a two-stroke lead over Fehr.

Fehr could get only one stroke back, sinking a 12-foot birdie putt on 16.

O’Grady had nothing but pars all the way home.

He was so excited on 18 that he putted out from one foot, even though Fehr was waiting to chip from off the green.

It could have created a problem if spectators on 18 had begun to scatter before Fehr finished, but they didn’t. He got down in two for his par and a $55,000 second-place check.

“If I was wrong for doing it, I apologize to Rick,” O’Grady said. “I didn’t know what the rules were. I just knew I had to get that putt down.”

When it was in the cup, he finally could breathe a sigh of relief.

“I brought the ship home,” he said, “through the hurricane and the tsunami, the cargo and crew intact.”