Playing on the Fringe : Scores of ambitious golfers travel the back roads from Bangkok to Bakersfield, hoping their circuitous paths will lead to the promised land of the PGA.

Since joining the PGA Tour this year, Ted Lehmann has discovered that life in the double-polyestered world of big-money golf is also double-edged. In seven tournaments, the rookie has made just one cut--and $870. But he’ll take it, because being at the bottom of the top beats playing golf in far-off and forbidding places such as Calcutta, Bangkok and Bakersfield.

No matter how bleak it gets, going head to head with a bear named Nicklaus or a shark called Norman isn’t as bad as coming face to face with a real king cobra, or teeing off with Asian monkeys swinging from trees, dropping bamboo sticks on his head, as was the case during last year’s Malaysian Open.

Like many first-year players, Lehmann will stay on the PGA Tour until they kick him and his putter off, partly because it’s every golfer’s dream to play the tour and because he’s traveled too many side roads to look back now.

His minor-league journey to golfdom’s big league, the hallowed PGA, lasted three years from the time he graduated from Brigham Young in 1983. The refiner’s fire consisted of playing what are known as satellite tours or mini-tours.

Such tours have become, if not highways, at least well-traveled back roads to the big time. Calvin Peete, Bob Tway, Bruce Lietzke, Craig Stadler and Mark Calcavecchia, among others, served time on mini-tours before joining the PGA.

The tours are made up of predominantly younger golfers who compete in small-money tournaments in obscure places. Most of the mini-tours--there are five in the United States--are in Florida and California and are run by operators independent of the PGA.

Lehmann played three mini-tours and two foreign tours--the Asian and the Australian. He used them to make enough money to avoid starving--$15,000 to $20,000 annually--and get enough kinks out of his game to qualify for the main tour by finishing among the top 50 at the PGA’s qualifying school in October.

Since the PGA allows exemptions only for the top 125 money winners the previous year and accepts only 50 additional players from its annual qualifying tournament, hundreds of golfers are left holding their golf bags and their dreams for another year. Their only alternative is to play the domestic mini-tours or ship off for an adventure in Third World golf.

At the Asian tour’s Indian Open last year, for instance, some of the American golfers were shocked when security guards used sticks to beat back crowds outside the players’ clubhouse who wanted to earn $1 a day to caddy for the Americans. The skirmish almost became a riot. Guards eventually formed a line and hustled golfers from the clubhouse to the first tee.

“You see it all over there,” Lehmann said. “But you’ve got to play somewhere. Ninety-nine out of 100 guys have to spend one to five years on the mini-tours and foreign tours. Without them, I wouldn’t have made it to the PGA Tour. No way. Coming out of college, I wasn’t good enough. Most of the guys aren’t.”

Lehmann, who lives in Thousand Oaks, was one of six golfers who last year played California’s Golden State Tour to qualify for the PGA in 1987. Another was Duffy Waldorf, the former UCLA All-American from Tarzana, who in 15 tournaments last summer pocketed almost $15,000. That might be chump change on the PGA, but it was a glorious amount for so few appearances on the mini-tour.

The Golden State is typical of mini-tours. It offers 40 to 50 tournaments a year, the majority of which are single-day events, such as last Monday’s tournament in Valencia. This year, the tour added 10 additional 54-hole events, each with a guaranteed purse of $25,000. Because the tour has no commercial sponsor, the players basically compete for their own money. Anyone who wants to play must pay a $200 membership fee to join the tour and a $300 entry fee for each event. The entry fees are then used to pay the purse.

The winner of a three-day tournament typically earns $4,000 and from there, the payoffs trickle down to the top 38% of the field.

“In order to pay the purse, we have to have a certain number of players enter our tournaments,” said Doug Ives, who started the tour four years ago. “For our three-day events, we’ve been banking on the fact that we’d have at least 83 players show up so we could break even. In the first three tournaments, we’ve had 87, 95 and 108. If only 50 players came, I’d lose money. But there are so many players out there who want to play. We’ve been lucky.”

Some tours haven’t been as fortunate financially. Last year, the Tournament Players Assn. Tour, which was supposed to be an upscale version of other mini-tours, offering bigger purses and tournaments coast to coast, finished its season down and out. The TPA was in the hole $672,000.

There were changes in management and amid the upheaval, players complained that they were not paid prize money. Waldorf, who also played the TPA, said he was paid $13,000 in August from a tournament he won in San Diego in June. He said he still hasn’t received $1,500 he supposedly earned with a 12th-place finish in July.

“When I won the first tournament,” Waldorf said, “they gave me a big plastic check afterward and I remember thinking, ‘That’s probably what my check is worth--plastic.’ But it happened a lot. Some guys have never been paid.”

Tom Kidd, commissioner of the tour, said the TPA has reduced its debt to $250,000 with new capital and that, eventually, all players and creditors will be paid off. “We made mistakes last year. We had higher expenses than we thought we’d have. We did things by trial and error and we’re still learning,” he said from the tour’s office in Jacksonville, Fla.

“But our player debt is down from $400,000 to $80,000. And we think we’ll have a good season this year.”

The TPA has scheduled 28 tournaments in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Illinois and New York for 1987. In the first eight events, Kidd said, the tour had fields of 120 to 160 players. He said the TPA has paid as much as $15,000 to event winners and $80,000 in total purses.

“We’re trying to get rid of lingering ghosts from 1986,” he said. “We’ve attracted sponsors and some communities have guaranteed us a minimum amount of dollars for tournaments. And we have the potential for television coverage.”

The TPA has granted a broadcast license to Schineller Broadcast Enterprises Inc. of New York and hopes television exposure will lure corporate sponsors to help bail out the tour.

As a whole, though, sponsorship has been almost nonexistent for mini-tours. Companies want tournaments with players like Jack Nicklaus, not Jay Delsing.

“We’re not even looking for sponsors, because we know we can’t get them,” said J. C. Goosie, a former PGA player who founded the Space Coast mini-tour in Florida 14 years ago. “Businesses can’t get any mileage out of these young kids just out of college. They just don’t want it.”

Nonetheless, Goosie has managed to keep his tour in business longer than any other mini-tour. In 1973, his first year, he coordinated 10 tournaments, and in subsequent years the tour grew until it peaked in 1979. That year, the Space Coast regularly had full fields and awarded $1.6 million in prize money.

Since then, the tour has scaled down--mostly because of a neighboring competitor, the Florida tour, which has cut into Goosie’s player pool.

The tour, which offers 30 tournaments a year, has about 150 players who compete for $25,000 per event. Like the Golden State Tour, Space Coast collects entry fees and pays the field from that money. Goosie pays expenses, has a staff of five on the payroll and takes a percentage for himself. He wouldn’t say how much he makes but did say, “It’s been a good living.”

“We’ve had thousands of golfers come through here during the past 14 years,” he said. “And a lot of them have gone on to make it--Craig Stadler, Calvin Peete, Gary Koch, Paul Azinger, David Frost, Bob Tway, Larry Rinker, Jeff Sluman, Mark Calcavecchia, Mike Hulbert, Bruce Lietzke.

“If players come here to play, they find out if they’re good enough to make it. It’s not easy. It’s a tough life style and the competition gets tougher every year. There are 3,000 golfers who want to play.”

Still, Goosie said his tour, which offers events in Florida, will not grow bigger. “We’re right where we want to be--a laid-back little tour that gives guys a chance to learn about the game and make a little money.” And that keeps Goosie’s Cadillac full of gas and running.

It is noteworthy that the PGA, unlike baseball, leaves the minor-league business to smaller operations like the Golden State and Space Coast. The point is amplified by the nature of the game itself, which, like baseball, is too demanding for most players straight out of college.

The PGA dabbled with a developmental tour four years ago, but the Tournament Players Series, which included 10 tournaments, subsequently was dropped. “We wanted to see if it could sustain itself,” said Tim Smith, deputy commissioner of the PGA. “It couldn’t. It was useful, but it’s tough to make it financially viable.”

Ives said, however, that the PGA never fully committed itself to the short-lived minor league. “The PGA doesn’t care about the younger players,” he said. “They offered $100,000 seed money for each event, but it cost the players $1,000 to try to qualify. Most of them don’t have that much. Deane Beman, the PGA’s commissioner, went out and said the players didn’t support it, but that wasn’t true. The PGA just didn’t care.”

Said Smith: “There’s a certain validity to that point. We had to face the fact that our first obligation is to our tournament sponsors. They are our bread and butter. I think, though, we gave it a good shot.”

But he admitted that the PGA didn’t want to be in the mini-tour business. Just as the Tournament Players Series got under way, it was undercut by another fledgling tour that could be sold to sponsors--the PGA Seniors Tour. While the Seniors Tour flourished, the developmental tour was scrapped.

The mini-tours, therefore, despite being separate from the PGA, actually help it by providing a place for young players to develop. “We take the heat off Beman’s office,” Goosie said, “because we fill in a little gap for them. Beman even told me that.”

“I’d call it peaceful coexistence,” Smith said.

Although the PGA and the mini-tours seem to have a harmonious relationship, some disagree with the whole setup. Gary Player, whose son Wayne has played in mini-tour events, said keeping the all-exempt PGA Tour separate and out of the reach of mini-tour players slows their development.

“There are so many guys who can play, who will never get to play in PGA events,” Player said. “It’s not the American way. The mini-tours are magnificent, but you don’t create the champions there. They need the experience of playing on the big tour.”

What about players like, say, Bob Tway who have developed by playing mini-tours?

“Bob Tway made it, sure, but we need lots of Bob Tways,” Player said. “There are a lot of guys who need to develop on tour.”

Until 1982, the PGA gave only the top 60 players exemptions, the remainder of the field had to qualify from week to week. Smith said the current all-exempt rule probably will remain, but added, “We’ve got open minds. We’re going to study it.”

Said Waldorf, who has earned $9,842 on the PGA Tour: “I think I would have progressed faster if I’d had the chance to play the PGA last year, just because of the high level of competition. But I didn’t lose much by playing the mini-tours and in Asia. The competition on the foreign tours is strong.”

Players who make good showings on the U.S. mini-tours pick up a passport, pack their bags and head for Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand or Japan. Waldorf and Lehmann paid $6,000 to play the Asian tour a year ago. The fee covered room and board and transportation costs, as well as entry fees. All for the privilege of playing in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, India and Thailand.

“Over there, you learn to play in bad conditions,” Waldorf said. “It’s tough, the way tournaments are run and the conditions of the golf courses.” If Waldorf missed the jungle-lined fairways in Thailand, he needed a banana knife to find both his ball and his way back out.

Even worse was the isolation from family and friends, language barriers and strange food. Lehmann said a lot of the players suffer stomach ailments and never wander more than a 9-iron away from a restroom.

Players find themselves honing their games and nursing a case of culture shock at the same time.

“When I was in Calcutta,” Lehmann said, “I couldn’t believe the poverty there. It made Tijuana look like a resort. I’d never been around starving people before. The Asian tour makes you realize there are worse things than playing bad golf. It helps you put things in perspective.”

Lehmann’s play in Asia was hot and cold. But he added: “I became mentally tough in those tough conditions. That trip was the best thing ever for me.”

Despite the weather, the snakes, the monkeys and the food, Waldorf’s game improved on the Asian courses. He didn’t win a tournament, but finished second in the Singapore Open and was ranked 13th overall.

Both players joined the Golden State Tour after returning to Southern California last spring. And both battled through the PGA’s regional qualifying to earn a spot at the national qualifying school in Palm Springs in the fall.

Lehmann, who had failed in three previous attempts to make the PGA Tour, and Waldorf were among the top 50 at the six-round tournament and both qualified. Now they’re trying to finish among the big tour’s top 125 money-winners or it’s back to the qualifying school, the mini-tours, the jungles of Southeast Asia and the Kaopectate.

“I’m glad I played the mini-tours,” Waldorf said. “If you want to be a touring professional, you’ve got to play them. They provide a chance for a player to compete, make a little money and dream a little.

“As rough as it seemed at times, I had fun. But I don’t want to go back again.”