Pebble Beach a Soft Touch in Sunshine

I’m certainly glad I didn’t go to the Crosby--or whatever they’re calling Bing’s golf tournament these days--this year.

I don’t know about you but tell me, do you like to see a toothless lion, a sore horse, a bird with one wing, a fish on a gaff?

Like to see Dempsey clinching, would you? Babe Ruth having to bunt? Bill Tilden hitting lobs? Like to see some quarterback dumping off to receivers behind the line?

If so, Pebble Beach this year was your cup of tee.

Pebble Beach in 80-degree weather with no wind howling off the Farallons, no clouds scudding in low and gray, no foaming surf crashing over the greens and fairways is like Samson shorn, Man o’ War limping, Muhammad Ali hanging on the ropes and bleeding. I can’t look.

It’s enough to make you gnash your teeth when you see players hitting 4- and 5-irons to No. 17, to see them teeing off with 3-woods on 18 and in general insulting the course as if it were some pitch-and-putt in Chillicothe. It’s like seeing the USS Missouri aground, the Titanic hanging off an iceberg.

Golf at Pebble Beach was never meant to be a walk in the park, a dance with your sister, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.

It’s supposed to be like a trip through Indian territory at night, a visit to a haunted house. Last week, it was like a minuet. You could have played it in a powdered wig.

I like Pebble when the pins are bent double and so are your tee shots, when a Force 10 gale rocks the peninsula and the guy who can break 80 is the leader in the clubhouse.

Birdies, to me, are like chocolate sundaes. One’s OK, two are fine--but too many of them and you want to throw up.

The thing about Pebble is that, when it’s its snarling self, the pros find out how the rest of the world plays golf. They find out that shots bend, clubs slip, putts drift--and the game isn’t just a drive and an 8-iron.

I have to think Johnny Miller couldn’t believe his good luck. He got out on the Monterey courses and must have thought he was in Tucson. Or the Quad Cities. Here was Pebble tied to the track and helpless. The Pacific Ocean didn’t come into play. Pebble had turned from an old sea dog with an eye patch and a peg leg into a fop in white flannels saying, “Tennis, anyone?”

Miller lost no time in going after it. He knew that Pebble without wind is like a general without an army, a tank without guns, a stag without antlers. He shot a 66. For Johnny, that was like robbing a poor box.

He has played Pebble often enough and strugglingly enough to know when that course is tied to the tracks, helpless and unable to protect itself.

If I had to guess, I’d say Johnny’s competition, Payne Stewart, never did catch on. He was playing the course’s reputation, not its condition. He appeared to be trying to smuggle a one-stroke lead into the clubhouse. He was not attacking.

If it were any place but Pebble, where the whole Pacific Ocean is a lateral water hazard and the nearest point of relief is Siberia, he might have gone for the jugular and not just the fat part of the green and the sure par.

He never did see that Pebble under those conditions was just a guy in a gorilla suit. He was just trying to defend himself against an opponent whose ears were ringing and legs rubbery.

Johnny Miller made no such mistake. He used to be the best there was at finishing off a golf course once he had it on the run or the ropes. There was no finer sight and sound on the tour than the young Johnny Miller on the spoor of first money with a 1-iron in his hand.

No one ever put up numbers like Johnny in his glory days, when his body was so supple and his movement so fluid you couldn’t tell whether he was swinging the club or vice versa. He used to hit shots so crisp and true they got tangled in the flag on every hole. Talk about the one-piece swing! Johnny almost invented it.

Miller’s not that golfer anymore but he can still tell when Pebble turns into a cactus track--or a dart board.

Pebble was so easy, the TV announcers fell into the trap of suggesting that the baseball player, George Brett, was sporting some kind of bogus 17-handicap just because he kept the ball in play at Pebble.

Well, George looked like a 17 from where I sat, all right. It was the course that had become a hacker. Pebble, without its ally, a roaring weather front, probably looked to George like a rubber mat course in Kansas City on an August afternoon. He knows a junk pitcher when he sees one.

Even 17s can play Pebble boldly with their best driving-range assortment of shots on days when the sun is out, the fairways dry and the wind fair and it’s June in January, as Bing used to like to croon.

It’s OK if your bag is under-par, instead of underwater, golf. As for me, give me Pebble when it forgets its manners, loses its temper.

Remember those old hokey movies where the leading man (Cary Grant?) would coo to the girl (Doris Day?), “I love you when you get mad. You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”? Well, that’s the way I feel about Pebble Beach. I love it when it starts throwing things back.