Florida’s Pros Good Bet in PGA : One Could Be 19th Different Winner in Last 19 Majors

If the last 18 major golf tournaments have been won by 18 different players, is there a No. 19 out there ready to win the national PGA title?

Look at some of the names missing from that list of 18--Curtis Strange, Tom Kite, Payne Stewart, Mac O’Grady and Paul Azinger, the year’s leading money winner--and the answer is a definite yes.

Gone, apparently, are the days when all Walter Hagen or Jack Nicklaus needed to do was show up--and the rest of the field was playing for second money. Golf, on the touring professional level, seems to have attained parity.

The 69th PGA Championship will start today on one of the PGA’s own National Golf Club courses--the Champion, a 7,002-yard, par-72 outdoor sauna dredged from the swamplands a few miles inland from West Palm Beach.

So, who are the likely candidates to become the 19th different winner of a major title?

The best bets may be sons of Florida--Azinger, Mark Calcavecchia and Andy Bean--golfers who grew up swatting bugs and dripping sweat in the sweltering days of August. Prevailing thought is that only someone used to it can survive the anticipated 95-degree temperatures--with humidity even higher.

Bean, 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, and Calcavecchia, 6-0 and 210, are Gators from the University of Florida. The slender Azinger, 6-2 and 170, is from Florida State.

Azinger is the beanpole who led the British Open after 70 holes before finishing with two bogeys and losing to England’s Nick Faldo. That was only two weeks ago and one might think the memory of that collapse would dim Azinger’s hopes.

No way.

“I proved a lot to myself during the British Open,” Azinger said. “What happened can only help me. I think I’ll put that experience to use next time I’m in that position.”

Bean, with 11 tournament victories, is without a major championship and dearly wants one to make people forget that he once wrestled alligators and bit covers off golf balls. This could be the week.

“I seem to play well in Florida,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I like putting on Bermuda greens.”

Bean has scored 4 of his 11 victories in his home state.

Calcavecchia, if there is such a thing in a major tournament, is the hometown hero. He learned his golf at the Bear Lakes Country Club in West Palm Beach.

“I ought to do well here,” he said. “I doubt if anybody’s played PGA National as much as I have. I know every hole. And I’ll have a lot of my buddies in the gallery cheering for me. That pumped me up at Eagle Trace (where he won the Honda Classic in Coral Gables, Fla.), so it ought to work here, too.”

Besides winning at Coral Gables, the 27-year-old Calcavecchia lost a playoff to Fred Couples in the Colonial Invitational this year.

If tradition didn’t signify that the PGA ranks as a major golf event, you would never know it by this tournament.

For the first time in the history of a major tournament, players will tee off for the opening round from both the 1st and 10th tees, just as they do in the Shearson Lehman Brothers Andy Williams Open, or the Manufacturers Hanover Westchester Classic.

That is a concession to the Florida summer, which lends itself to hurricanes, electrical storms and tropical downpours that come hurrying across the marshland from Lake Okeechobee.

The course itself is flat, drab and uninteresting.

“It’s a typical Florida course, and Florida terrain is seldom going to excite you,” said Texan Tom Kite, who played here in the Ryder Cup matches of 1983.

But the Champion course isn’t even rated as good by Florida standards. The list of top 10 courses in the state does not include any of the four PGA National courses.

There is water on all but two holes, but it seldom comes into play the way the professionals hit the ball.

Worse, the greens are terrible. And that description may be charitable. They’re better at the Los Angeles Royal Vista course.

“I don’t know the reason, but the greens are bad,” said Tom Watson, a golfer not known for criticism of anything. “They are inconsistent, and I mean they’re inconsistent on the same green. You can have a putt that will slide across a patch of one kind of grass and then slow down when the grass changes.”

A summer fungus is the culprit, a blight that left the putting surfaces looking as splotchy to the eye as they do uneven to the players.

“Poor putting surfaces will tend to help the poor putters,” Watson said, thus expanding the list of potential winners. “The good putters won’t be making as many as usual, while the poor putters are going to miss what they usually miss.”

Another equalizer is the rough, a dense growth of three-inch Bermuda grass that tends to engulf balls that stray from the narrow fairways.

“You miss a fairway, it’s a bogey,” said Greg Norman, the broad-shoulder Aussie who recently became a neighbor of Jack Nicklaus in the closed-gate community of Lost Tree Village, a few miles east down PGA Boulevard.

Nicklaus won the last time the PGA was played at PGA National--but it wasn’t the same course and it wasn’t the same time of the year.

The year was 1971, the course is now the JDM--for the late John D. MacArthur--and the month was February. The current PGA National is just across the Florida Turnpike from the JDM.

Heat and humidity in Florida in August are not conducive to fine shot making.

Then there is the field. Forty of the 150 starters are club professionals, such as Jim Petralia, an assistant pro at Pasadena’s Annandale Golf Club; Jack Kiefer, a driving range operator from Andover, N. J., and Fred Funk, a coach from the University of Maryland.

What chance do one of them have? Well, in the last 20 years, the best any club pro finished was a tie for 11th. It happened twice.

The course championship record--67, five under par--is held by three club pros but that’s because they are the only ones who have had a shot at the 7-year-old Champion course in competition.

Jim Albus, Ed Dougherty and Scott Mahlberg all shot 67s in PGA club professional tournaments. The hot round failed to help Mahlberg, however. The assistant pro from San Diego came up two shots short of making the final-round cut for the 1984 tournament.

Nicklaus’ teen-age son, Gary, shot a five-under-par 31 on the back nine during U.S. Amateur qualifying last year. It tied Arnold Palmer’s nine-hole PGA National record, which Palmer shot during the 1984 PGA Seniors tournament. The catch is, the course played 500 yards shorter when Palmer did it than it will play in this tournament.

PGA National really is a real estate development, a 2,340-acre residential and resort community. Its four courses are anchored by the PGA Sheraton Resort Hotel, which serves as the clubhouse.

Just inside the front doors of the hotel is the main pitch--a booth complete with hors d’oeuvres and champagne, where pretty hostesses will help you sign up for a $172,500- to $281,000-villa. Model villas are open during the tournament.

One of the talking points, in addition to the four golf courses, is the PGA National Croquet Club. It is the largest croquet complex in the Western Hemisphere.

The fungus has not invaded the croquet lawns yet. Croquet, anyone?

THE LAST 18 WINNERS IN MAJOR TOURNAMENTS

Event Winner Hometown or Country 1987 British Open Nick Faldo England U. S. Open Scott Simpson San Diego Masters Larry Mize Columbus, Ga. 1986 PGA Bob Tway Edmond, Okla. British Open Greg Norman Australia U.S. Open R. Floyd Miami Masters Jack Nicklaus North Palm Beach, Fla. 1985 PGA Hubert Green Birmingham, Ala. British Open Sandy Lyle Scotland U. S. Open Andy North Madison, Wis. Masters B. Langer West Germany 1984 PGA Lee Trevino Dallas British Open S. Ballesteros Spain U. S. Open Fuzzy Zoeller New Albany, Ind. Masters Ben Crenshaw Austin, Tex. 1983 PGA Hal Sutton Shreveport, La. British Open Tom Watson Kansas City U.S. Open Larry Nelson Marietta, Ga.