OH, MAC! : The World According to O’Grady Is a Very Different Place, Indeed.

They called a press conference for golfer Mac O’Grady Tuesday afternoon at La Costa Country Club and it almost turned into a seance.

“At times you feel like you are on the Apollo spacecraft sitting in the Saturn 5 rocket with 5 million pounds of liquid nitrogen in your stomach,” O’Grady said, among other things.

“It’s like it’s adrenaline and the engines are at full throttle and your insides are telling you you’ve got to abort takeoff because you’re afraid to swing the club because you know something’s gonna go wrong.”

Before he finished, O’Grady had touched lightly on such subjects as “self-narcissism,” “the jockocracy,” “pop-psychiatry” and “the five subcultures of golf.” Even veteran O’Grady watchers learned something new.

You had to hear it to believe it.

After that, they staged an impromptu shot demonstration on the practice tee that O’Grady turned into an ambidextrous exercise in incredulity.

After a brief warmup, O’Grady, one of the tour’s longer hitters, was soon booming metal-wood shots more than 270 yards. Without warning, he spread his stance and flexed his knees in an exaggerated imitation of Spanish pro Severiano Ballesteros. The ball continued to fly the same distance.

An elderly man carrying a black felt-tip marker approached O’Grady. He wore a white jacket covered with autographs of the top players. O’Grady pulled a red marker out of his bag and signed it his way.

“You did that to me last year, too,” the man grumbled.

Then O’Grady yanked a left-handed metal wood from his bag. He tugged the glove off his left hand, turned it inside out and put it on his right hand. Even TPC champion Sandy Lyle, a quiet Scot, stopped his practice session to watch--paying a kind of left-handed compliment. Four drives later, O’Grady was launching towering tee shots, all of them more than 250 yards, straight down the middle.

You had to see it to believe it.

O’Grady is the defending champion at the Tournament of Champions, which will start here Thursday. And he is the only player in the history of golf who will make you think of Herman Hesse, Carl Sagan, Norm Crosby and Kahlil Gibran in the same sentence. He never met a metaphor or starting time he didn’t like. And he’s got all day to tell you why.

“I love the game,” he said. “To be out there and see all those people, eyes focused on the golf ball as we send it toward the heavens, silhouetted against the horizon--to roll it on this topographical surface--to watch the ball get near the hole and half of the people are pulling for it to go in the hole and the other half are rooting for it not to go in.

“And none of them realize the ball has a consciousness of its own. It’s like the Jimmy Stewart movie, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ It’s priceless.”

So is O’Grady. The former Phil McGleno from Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles, O’Grady says he is still purging demons from his psyche. But he says he discovered the “missing link,” over the winter while preparing a book entitled “Golfing Prophet” that will be released in April.

Presumably sales of that book will increase O’Grady’s golfing profit. Last year he won $285,109. He was 35 years old and he wound up 35th on the money list.

“I really thought I was ready to take off,” he said. “But the missing link was missing. We’ll see this year. We’ll see if I’m free of the temper tantrums and see if I’m free of the emotional baggage. We’ll see if we can bring the ship home and sail it through the dangerous reefs.”

That’s the way O’Grady talks. He is about to start his sixth year on the tour. And he said he figures his “five-year residency” has ended. Last year was a year too soon. “I was still in the emergency wards. I wasn’t ready to go for private practice yet. I still had to go out there and watch my own blood.”

Colorful.

After all, he added, golf “makes social misfits of us all.” And, he said, the tour is nothing more than “a nomadic tribe--that circus that travels across the social parameters of America.”

Ben Hogan never quite put it that way. But Ben Hogan never warred openly with the Professional Golfers Assn. as O’Grady once did.

O’Grady said his goal last year was to make it through the season without being fined by Commissioner Deane Beman. And he almost did. Failure to sign up for a practice round in Florida was his only infraction. It cost him $250.

But O’Grady won’t soon forget the $1,000 fine, later reduced to $500, that helped create the aura he appears more comfortable with now. It happened four years ago in New Orleans where O’Grady allegedly criticized the USF&G; tournament for being the “worst run and most unorganized tournament on the tour.”

That incident eventually led to an article in Sports Illustrated that featured accounts of O’Grady playing football in a West Los Angeles cemetery and breaking into a Bel-Air mansion to sleep.

“That article established a biographical, historical tree that has followed me ever since and will continue to plague me,” he said later. “Every place I play, writers dredge up the article and perpetuate the falsehoods and inaccuracies.”

For a while he even stopped talking with reporters. But it was a much more mellow O’Grady who met the press Tuesday. He praised the Seniors, who will play in front of the guys from the regular tour this week.

“I think it’s wonderful that we are all brought together in one house, in one arena, for everyone to see,” he said. “(The Seniors) are the living, modern-day virtuosos of this tour.”

And he sympathized with Greg Norman, victimized in 1986 by Bob Tway’s sand shot that won the PGA on the last hole and then again in 1987 by Larry Mize’s 140-foot pitch that beat Norman in sudden death at the Masters.

“Poor guy,” O’Grady said of Norman. “The sword of the game has mutilated and slain him.”

Yes, O’Grady talked about death, too. And about how there’s nothing sadder than watching a player who has ascended to the highest “subculture” begin his decline.

“The first death you really experience on the tour is when you can no longer win the majors,” he said. “The second death is when you realize you can’t even win the tournaments anymore.

“That’s when you get socially and internally ostracized--not only among the press and your colleagues, but even the other part of your personality remembers the days when you were great. A mourning sets in. And it starts to drown you. Some guys lose their perspective.”

Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson never quite put it that way. But Hogan, Nicklaus and Watson never divided golf into subcultures.

Subculture No. 5 is getting on the tour. That took O’Grady more than 10 years and 17 tries at the qualifying school. No. 4 is staying on the tour. No. 3 is making money. No. 2 is winning, which finally happened for O’Grady in 1986.

Subculture No. 1 is winning a major tournament.

“It’s a very serious journey,” O’Grady said. “Not everybody can make it. Some of those who do are severely wounded. I just hope I can get to that level and keep my perspective.”

And dodge the downside.

“There are times when you sail the sea and it’s so smooth and it’s so easy and so graceful, and you’re never looking at your shadows and your face is before the sun,” he said.

“Then, at a moment’s notice, you realize you just passed through the eye of a typhoon and, boom! here come the tsunamis (tidal waves) and the capricious winds to torment you. And you look upward and there’s this black, nebulous cloud that’s ready to drown you, not only from the water around you but in your own emotions. The same sword that knights you is the one that lacerates you.

“For those who fail, a certain, dense decay and death of their dreams becomes an exercise of bereavement for the scarred and wounded soldiers who are never the same for battling that hard-core war of reality in competition on the PGA tour.”

Whatever you say, Mac.

Of course, none of this would have interested too many people Tuesday if O’Grady hadn’t two-putted from 60 feet on the 72nd hole of last year’s tournament here to edge Rick Fehr by one stroke.

It’s just that press conferences for defending champions don’t usually turn into Dungeons and Dragons. It was fun mostly because it was different.

At the end of the subsequent clinic, somebody asked O’Grady if he ever considered playing left-handed in a tournament. Mischief played across his face like a Gypsy fiddle.

“If I had a 10-stroke lead,” he mused, “I’d stay up all night before the final round, practicing.”

And then he was off on another tangent about how playing left-handed develops “both hemispheres of the brain--the agonist against the antagonist.”