Payne Stewart Can Only Hope for Better Daze

Golf is the most exasperating game known to man.

First of all, it’s perverse. You hit the ball right to make it go left, up to make it go down, hard to make it go easy, easy to make it roll on and on.

It is a game of compromises. Ben Hogan said if you hit five good shots a round, you have probably played as well as you can. The tolerances are infinitesimal. Perfection is a mirage. Sam Snead said it is a game where you have to play your foul balls.

It is an athletic game from tee to green, a chess game from fringe to cup.

It is a game in which the ideal is to achieve control, but it is best played in a somnolent state, like a guy pulled along in his sleep by forces he cannot comprehend, a stage somewhere between consciousness and comatose, a place over the rainbow where the mind leaves the body and turns it over to automatic and the winner comes out of it.

The player turns into a zombie, the game into voodoo. The player sometimes comes out of it in the “Where am I?” frame of mind of a guy who has been on a spaceship for two years.

Witness last year’s U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in Southampton, N.Y. The eventual winner, Raymond Floyd, somewhere between the 10th green and 11th tee, suddenly got what the tour calls “that look.” This is sometimes the dazed expression of a guy who just got hit over the head with a sash weight or the glare of a man who suddenly caught you making a pass at his wife. The eyes bulge dangerously, the mouth gets set, the pace quickens, the face seems to glaze over.

Payne Stewart, the man who was playing with Floyd on that last round that day, noticed it right away. “Raymond looked as if he were walking a little bit above ground level, as if he was floating around the course,” Stewart said. “I knew right then and there the rest of us were playing for second place.”

That’s because Payne Stewart knows that look well. He has been there himself.

And he only hopes he can cross over into that other world, that place where time is suspended and birdies fall, in this year’s Open here in the fog and chill of the Olympic Club, golf’s Barbary Coast.

Payne Stewart is an interesting case study. Almost to a man, he is the pros’ choice as the man to beat in this Open, a player who has the game, the temperament and the drive to cross into that twilight zone, that Nirvana where the shots make themselves, the rough disappears, the cups get larger and the player seems, to himself, to be standing outside the action looking on in wonderment.

“You can’t manufacture that zone,” Payne Stewart warns. “You get in it early in the week and then go on instruments. But you don’t know how you do it.”

Hogan used to call it “muscle memory,” a phase in which you trusted your game to your instincts, honed by years of practice and discipline, that you could call up in a crisis.

It’s not exactly like having a guardian angel with a slow backswing and a good short game. And it’s not given to an erratic rookie or a guy with a three-piece take-away and a terminal sway. The muscles have to remember something correct.

To the public at large, Payne Stewart is just another pretty face in plus-fours on the tour. Lots of people don’t know him in long pants. He stands out not because of his game but his garb. He is the first guy since Gene Sarazen to wear knickers in every round.

You see him on a tee and it’s 1926 again and you look around for Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones in the threesome. Then, he swings, and you know right away it isn’t Jones.

Not that Stewart is bad. Lee Trevino, no less, thinks Stewart is the next great player out here.

Stewart has won only three championships, but the Open is no noticeable respecter of reputations. Four times in the last 25 years, the man winning the Open was winning his first tournament.

One player, Andy North, has won twice as many Opens, two, as any other tournament. And Arnold Palmer, who won 63 other tournaments, has won only one Open. Snead, who won more tournaments than any other player, never won an Open.

Besides, Payne Stewart was second three times last year, third once, and fourth twice.

“I’m starting to get credit for my ability instead of my clothes,” he was saying on the eve of his tee-off in this year’s Open.

But Thursday was, on the whole, not a good day for knickers--or creative funks.

For Payne Stewart, wearing powder-blue short pants and matching cap, the course shook him out of his self-hypnotic state early--with a triple bogey on the second hole.

That will wake you up and tend to set you to checking the instrument panel. Payne crept through the next 14 holes, carefully patching and pasting his game together, never quite daring to put it on remote control or turn it over to his inner self. The way things were going, that would have been like falling asleep on the Hollywood Freeway.

But he came up to 17 with the wheels back on, coasting on three birdies and a bogey back nine, trying to smuggle a 1-over-par score into the clubhouse.

And he four-putted.

Now, of all the calamities that can befall a golfer, a four-putt green is the worst. Better his house should catch fire, his insurance lapse, his wife run off with his best friend and his dog die. Better he should whip it out of bounds, into the water, over into a bed of poison ivy. Almost better he should shank.

He would rather make a 7 any other way than four-putt it. That’s for 14-handicappers from Borrego Springs. That’s for the guy playing with his boss. Chumps trying to win the truck drivers’ flight at a Texas municipal.

No one four-putts an Open. You can’t blame the wind, the rough, the noise in the gallery. Your foot doesn’t slip on a putt. The caddy doesn’t club you wrong. It’s not the press’ fault.

It’s like spilling soup on the Queen.

A reporter was waiting for Payne Stewart as he stalked off 18 -- stormed would be a better word. Word of the fact he had four-jiggled No. 17 had not yet reached the press room. The writer was interested in the bigger picture.

“Were you able to create a trance for yourself out there today?” he asked the golfer, his pencil poised.

Payne Stewart, a cheese sandwich poised halfway to his mouth, stopped and stared. “I haven’t found any way to do it,” he allowed, looking as if he wanted to tap himself on the side of the head.

The reporter pressed on.

“What happens when you do? I mean do you picture the shot in your mind, does the crowd tend to disappear on you--what?”

Stewart shook his head in wonder. “The crowd becomes a blur,” he said. “You don’t see faces, just outlines. The world tends to recede. It’s just you and the shot.”

“Were you able to do that today?” the scribe persisted. Payne Stewart put his sandwich down. He looked like a guy whose dog had just bit him.

“Where have you been?” he said through clenched teeth. “I just four-putted the 17th green!”

Lots of guys have shot 74s and worse in opening rounds and come back to win the Open. Raymond Floyd shot an opening 75 last year, for example. Jack Fleck opened with a 76 on this very course 32 years ago. Even Hogan did it once.

But can a man with a 74--and the memory of four putts--regroup and put himself in the creative funk necessary to win this Open?

Or should he just put himself on a bus? Or under?