Maltbie Learns It Can Be Just as Much Fun Without a Party

Jolly Roger Maltbie shot a 66 Friday at the Masters and moved within one stroke of the lead. Should he win this thing Sunday, the guys who run the tournament will slip his arms into the green jacket’s sleeves.

Then, they will slip a check for $144,000 into the jacket’s pocket.

Then, Donna Maltbie will slip up alongside her husband and kiss him.

Then, she will slip her hand into his pocket and pick it.

And then, since she has good sense, she will catch the first airplane leaving Augusta, connect in Atlanta, fly all the way to San Jose, drive home to Los Gatos and deposit the check in the bank, before Roger ever knows what happened to it.

Roger will still be in Georgia, raising glasses with the boys. But he will be unable to buy any rounds, unless he has brought enough cash with him.

And he will not wake up the next morning in a fog and start fumbling though his pockets and go into a panic and start wondering what the hell he did with that $144,000 check.

Maltbie was a swinging bachelor when he won the Pleasant Valley tournament at Sutton, Mass., back in 1975. He was a rookie on the PGA Tour and really, really jolly. Soon as he could, he stuffed his $40,000 winner’s check into his pocket, stopped off at a saloon called T.O. Flynn’s and started buying rounds for the boys.

Well, not just for the boys. There were representatives of the opposite sex in the bar, and Roger and his buddies figured a check for 40 grand would work a whole lot better as a come-on than “Don’t I know you from someplace?” or “What’s your sign?”

Maltbie still isn’t sure if he forgot the check on the bar or if it fell from his pocket or what. It was one of those evenings, he said, that is “still a little cloudy.”

He does remember that he telephoned T.O. Flynn’s the next morning and asked if anybody had found a check.

“What’s so important about it?” the guy who answered asked.

“Well, it’s for $40,000,” Maltbie informed him.

“Oh,” the guy said, and went off to hunt for it.

No luck.

Maltbie made another call. He phoned the man who ran the Pleasant Valley tournament, a guy who “owned about half of Massachusetts, I think,” and told him about the check. The man laughed and said don’t worry. He would stop payment on the first check and issue Maltbie a new one.

“Uh, that’s fine,” Maltbie said. “But can you do me a favor? I had about $500 cash in my pocket last night and that seems to be gone, too. I don’t even have any money to go home.”

The man who owned half of Massachusetts advanced Maltbie a couple hundred dollars and wished him luck next week on the tour.

Maltbie made the most of it. He played hard, on and off the course. Tour life, he had discovered, was “like the greatest party of all time. Coast-to-coast golf, good money and good times.”

Not that he needed much encouragement to have a good time. Maltbie could have a good time in a closet.

He had fun at San Jose State and he had fun at Candlestick Park, following his beloved 49ers. He had fun at the 1975 Ed McMahon Quad Cities Open, along the Illinois-Iowa border, when he won for the first time on the tour, and he had fun at his favorite watering hole in Tallahassee, Fla., where the owners of the establishment dutifully have maintained the Roger Maltbie Memorial Bar Stool.

He partied and drank hard--often too hard. This was a guy who even got gassed at a gas station. During the fuel crisis, Maltbie used to go out after midnight, park his car near a gas pump after a neighborhood service station had closed for the night, then bum a ride home. At dawn, he grabbed a six-pack of beer, returned to his car, sat in it and drank the beer until the station reopened for business.

No better time did Maltbie ever have than at the Memorial golf tournament Jack Nicklaus originated at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, in 1976. Nicklaus’ idea was to create a new “major,” and he would not have minded if a Tom Watson or a Lee Trevino, a big name, had gotten the event off to a glorious state. The winner, instead, turned out to be this wild and crazy Maltbie kid.

Maltbie, 24 at the time, beat Hale Irwin on the fourth hole of a playoff. On the final hole, Maltbie’s shot flew the green, only to strike a gallery stake and bounce back onto the green, three feet from the pin.

Ever the sober professional, Maltbie charged into the post-tournament press conference with the stake in his hand, held it up and said: “I’m gonna have this (bleep) thing bronzed!”

Only years later did Maltbie begin to settle down. For one thing, he met Donna, whom he married in 1980. At that point he was coming off a year in which his total earnings had amounted to $9,796. He hadn’t won another tour event since the Memorial.

It took him nine years, until 1985, to win another. The two tournaments he took that year helped bump his money to $360,554, which was nearly as much as he had earned over the previous seven years.

Maltbie had tried just about everything to turn his game around. That included--as another good-time guy, Paul Hornung, once suggested in a TV commercial--practice, practice, practice. But for some golfers, it is not the right approach.

“You can use the standard work ethic,” Maltbie said after Friday’s six-under-par 66. “You can try harder. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder. You can try so hard, you get in your own way.

“Then, sometimes, you can make a discovery, as I did. One day a sports psychologist asked me, ‘What makes you think that you can’t still have fun?’ He pointed out that with a lot of people, it’s important to relax, to stay loose.

“You don’t have to walk off the course like you’ve just been in the Great Crusades. It’s supposed to be fun. You’re not supposed to act like you’ve just been in a war.”

Maltbie himself had acted that way. “You betcha I did,” he said.

He started counting his blessings and lightening up. Playing less and enjoying it more. Even the fact that he never did any better than 20th place in any of the scant six tournaments he entered before the Masters gave Maltbie the slightest distress. When he brought 6-month-old Spencer Davis Maltbie to Augusta National and stuck a club in his hand and watched his son make his first golf shot, Roger was one proud dad.

“Must have went a good four inches,” he said.

The kick that he got from shooting a 66 in the second round was no more of a high than the 76 he shot in the first round was a low. Maltbie made sure of that. He tempers his highs and lows now, at least as much as he can.

“You complain about the conditions of a golf course, and then you walk off the 18th green and see somebody sitting in a wheelchair, and it straightens out your priorities in a hurry,” he said. “Sometimes we all need a big dose of reality.”

Maltbie has simply decided to be himself, take him or leave him. He continues to smoke a pack of cigarettes per round, against the wisdom of surgeon generals. He continues to do a brew or two in pubs, although T.O. Flynn’s, the joint where his lost $40,000 check was eventually found and displayed on the wall above the bar, has been shut down for good.

Winning the Masters would be a big deal for Maltbie, but he has made up his mind not to worry about it.

“Hell, I could win this tournament and 10 others, and still be remembered for losing that check,” he said.

Maltbie smiled like a guy who had the world in his hip pocket.

“I can live with that,” he said.