Open and Shut Case for Floyd

You think the National Basketball Assn. is tough? You think it is difficult to win consecutive championships in professional basketball? Nobody has repeated as champion of the U.S. Open golf tournament in 36 years, since Harry Truman was in the White House, and Dwight Eisenhower was campaigning, and Lee Trevino was caddying, and none of them had ever heard of orange balls or graphite shafts.

This is not tennis, where Martina wins women’s Wimbledons back to back to back to back to back. This is not yacht racing, where the previous America’s Cup winner is automatically seeded into the next time’s finals. The way U.S. Open defending champion Ray Floyd is playing these days, he would be happy if someone at San Francisco’s Olympic Club would simply assure him of making the 36-hole cut.

“That was a pretty significant player who won in 1950 and ‘51,” Floyd said Tuesday, after a practice round.

Yes, it was. It was Ben Hogan, a man we remember for many good deeds, a man we hold in high esteem, a man we think about at times like these, particularly since he is in such poor health.

When you set foot here on the hills and holes of Olympic, the first thing you might remember is the 1955 U.S. Open that Hogan had in his bag until Jack Fleck came along and beat him in a next-day playoff.

Or maybe you recall the other Open held here, the one in 1966, when Arnold Palmer squandered a huge lead on the back nine and wound up in a playoff with Billy Casper, which Arnie lost.

You examine the field for this year’s U.S. Open, the one that begins Thursday, and it strikes you that only Floyd, Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin and Johnny Miller have come back to pay another call. Irwin was an amateur then, and Miller was a 19-year-old local boy who signed up to caddy in the tournament, ended up qualifying and placed eighth.

As for Floyd, the kid who grew up on the Ft. Bragg Army base in North Carolina, fantasizing more about pitching for the Cubs than about pitching to the green, he has done all right for himself. Once he settled on golf, he went right out and won a tour event at age 20, then spent the next quarter of a century winning such many-splendored things as the 1969 and 1982 PGAs, 1976 Masters and 1981 Tournament Players Championship. He took 21 tournaments in all.

And the one he welcomed most came a year ago, at Shinnecock Hills in New York. Floyd finally won the U.S. Open. Won it by two strokes. And he rejoiced, because just over the next bunker he could see the Senior tour beckoning, and the thought of being put out to pasture without having a U.S. Open cup in his trophy case was distressing. He wanted one, at any cost. And he got one.

And then, he got the bill.

First, there came the demands on his time, the awards banquets, the collegiate Hall of Fame induction, the endorsements, the instruction video that took all his spare time for a week, the things that kept him away from his family and kept him from practicing and turned his game into the sorry shape that it is in today. For this, he blames nobody but himself.

“I always could have said no,” he says.

What confounded him more was a reaction that followed his victory at Shinnecock, the one that suddenly made him feel that if he hadn’t won a U.S. Open before he was through, others might have viewed his career as nothing extraordinary. Never mind how unfulfilled he, himself, might have felt.

He noticed that the Open triumph “was perceived as a tremendous thing,” as something that only now certified his place among the greats.

And here all along, Floyd had thought he already had been accepted. “People said to me, ‘Well, looking back at your career, don’t you feel like you’ve been cheated, playing in the shadow of a Nicklaus?’ And I said, ‘I’ve never played in anybody’s shadow. We all came out here equal.’ I’ve never felt that I was cheated at all.

“I think my peers have been aware of my abilities and what I’ve accomplished. I’ve never had any problems with how people think of my game. There’s a lot of things in my career that I haven’t accomplished, and I would imagine that when I pass away, there’s going to be a whole lot of things that I haven’t accomplished. The Open probably meant more to the people who are novice golf fans, the ones who don’t follow it week by week. The purist golf fan has always been aware of Ray Floyd.”

Even so, it got to him. Great athletes usually are at least conscious of what their legacy might be, and in whose hands it might be left. Some of them end up thinking about it simply because they are often being asked how they would like to be remembered when they are gone.

Floyd feels he knows the answer to that. “Somebody asked me what I want to be remembered most from my career, and I said, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart, that I don’t care about my records or anything like that. I would want to be remembered as a person who conducted himself in a proper manner, a person children could look up to, that parents could point to and say, ‘There’s Ray Floyd. Look at him. Watch him conduct himself while he’s playing a round of golf.’

“I’m not going to go out there and throw clubs. Golf is a game of integrity. Gentlemen play the game of golf. That’s the way it was designed. That’s the way I want to be remembered playing it. My records, they don’t mean anything. However people want to look at what I accomplished, that’s up to them. To ask them to praise you forever, that’s just selfish. You know, the more I think about it, I don’t want to be remembered for anything.”

Something obviously has struck a nerve. Floyd admits that his attitude is not even what it used to be, that he has “been so busy that it’s taken a toll on my personality,” that he has been on edge ever since winning something that he presumed would improve the quality of his life. He is upset with himself for not giving his family enough time, while handling the obligations that have come with the title of Open champion.

“I’ve let the defense of the U.S. Open interfere with my life,” he says. “Maybe I’d like to go fishing, but I can’t. Because there hasn’t enough time to be with the people I care about. Not even at Christmas. And, I’ve cut back on practice time, which has affected my golf. And, there’s nobody to blame but me.”

Hadn’t it occurred to him that the U.S. Open title might create demands on his time?

“I didn’t even think about it affecting my life style. Because I had already won three major championships. I didn’t realize just how big this was.”

From a golf standpoint, Floyd says, “I haven’t had a very good year by anybody’s standard. I started the year hitting the ball all over the lot.” Of late, his putting has gone kaput. He has missed the cut in five of his last seven tournaments, and has won slightly more than $13,000 on the year.

The Open title alone last June brought him $115,000. Floyd was too involved in what he was doing to enjoy it at the time, but later he got to view a film of the final round, and the significance of his victory finally sank in. “If ever I choked (up) badly in my life over a game of golf,” he says, “it was watching that film.”

Now, there is one more major to win. Maybe Floyd will not win another U.S. Open, but the British is in his thoughts, so much so that he plans to go to Brussels soon and enter a weekend event just to regain the feel of European golf and get in the right frame of mind. He needs only a British Open to become the fifth golfer to win all four Grand Slam events.

Some people wonder if his game is suited for certain courses. Others tell him his game is tailor-made for one layout on the PGA tour, or not right for another. Like all the other generalizations, Floyd is bothered by this.

“It’s hogwash,” he says. “A good player will play well anywhere. It’s amazing how many players never win a major championship, and you always wonder why. Well, you have to have your whole game in order to win a major. It isn’t the course. It’s you. It’s how competitive you are, no matter how old you are, how long you’ve been around.”

And that, too, is taking a toll. “It’s getting harder and harder,” Floyd says. “I can’t keep up the way I used to. Week after week you go into, and I’m not using these towns for any specific reason, the Greensboros and the Washingtons and the L.A.s, and it’s monotony, just plain monotony. That’s why it’s fun now to play in the majors. Because it’s not so often, and it means more.

“Staying competitive has meant a lot to me. After 25 years, it’s one of the things I’m proud of. You see a great number of good players who are good players for two or three or four years and then you never hear of them again. I’m pleased at whatever it is inside me that has enabled me to stay around this long.

“But like I said, it’s getting harder and harder.”

Harder to win. Harder to handle.