Golf : Senior Tour Is Coming to the Southland for Two Tournaments

Here come the Seniors. While the regular Professional Golf Assn. tour moves from Los Angeles to Florida, the Senior Tour is headed for Southern California.

The Seniors will be here the next two weekends, beginning with the Vintage Chrysler Invitational in Indian Wells this week and the GTE tournament at Wood Ranch in Simi Valley from March 9-13.

Most of the top names will be competing in both events. The field includes Arnold Palmer, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Bruce Crampton, Miller Barber, Dale Douglass, defending champion Bob Charles, and the latest Senior up-and-comer, Al Geiberger. Gary Player has confirmed he’ll play in the Vintage but not the Wood Ranch tournament.

The Senior Tour, for players 50 and older, enjoyed an expected lift when Palmer joined the tour in 1980, but it has since developed its own identity.

This is where Rodriguez has flourished, taking Senior events and turning them into his own little carnival of one-liners and, more profitably, one-putts. Rodriguez was the Seniors’ top money winner last season and has been attracting big galleries.

Anyone who saw him in the Senior Skins in January understands why. Rodriguez out-foxed Palmer, Player and 75-year-old Sam Snead for $300,000 of the $360,000 purse, more than eight times what Rodriguez made in his final year on the regular PGA tour. Last year, he swashbuckled his way to $509,145, wowing crowds with his clubs as well as his wit. In barely three seasons on the Senior Tour, he has amassed $916,017, and he won only $7,700 in 1985. So far this season, Rodriguez is fifth on the money list with $43,475.

Geiberger is second, behind Player, with $47,700.

Unlike the L.A. Open, which in the past has been been hurt by players opting to practice in Florida to prepare for the Sunshine State swing--which includes the Tournament Players Championship--the Senior events have had no trouble bringing in nearly all the biggies. The prize money--$350,000 for the Vintage, $275,000 for the GTE--also helps.

Add Florida: The next four PGA events are there--the Doral Open this week, the Honda tournament at Coral Springs March 10-13, Bay Hill in Orlando March 17-20, and then the TPC at Ponte Vedra’s Sawgrass March 24-27.

Once again, the TPC field is a strong one, stronger than any of the four majors. The TPC features 77% of the tour’s leading players, the criteria being $1 million in career earnings or a top 30 finish in the money leaders from the previous year.

Still, the TPC yearns to be a major.

A news release from Ponte Vedra is quick to point out that from 1985-87, the tournament hosted 17% more of the leading players than the Masters, 16% more than the U.S Open and 5% more than the PGA Championship, from 1985-87.

Add Majors: The TPC may provide an inundation of statistics and percentages, but all it takes is a quick flip through the green book provided by Augusta National to see what sets a major, and particularly the Masters, apart from other tournaments.

The 1988 Green Book, which lists records of Masters tournaments, 1934-87, contains a section of letters from former winners to tournament chairmen. Some excerpts:

Byron Nelson: “The course, itself, is the most beautiful we play and it requires our best efforts as regards both skill and judgment. Each hole represents an entirely different picture--and a different problem.”

Ben Hogan: “Dignity is the keynote of the Masters Tournament where the game of golf is elevated to the high position it deserves. I am happy and very proud to play a small part in it.”

Arnold Palmer: “As far as I am concerned, there will never be another tournament to equal it.”

The 1988 Ladies Professional Golf Assn. player guide features a drawing of last season’s Player of the Year on the cover, which may not be enough to identify the woman who won $466,034 on the ladies tour last year.

In Japan, Ayako Okamoto is, well, the best-known women’s golfer in the world. On the LPGA tour, galleries know little about her except that she often walks off with the winner’s trophy.

This weekend, Okamoto, 36, won the Ladies Open at Hawaii, where she picked up golfing in 1973.

“I was about 20 at the time,” said Okamoto, who was a pitcher for her company softball team when she came to Honolulu in 1973. On a sightseeing tour, Okamoto spotted a golf course from the hills above Pearl Harbor.

“I learned that it was the Pearl Country Club. I decided to take up golf from then on.”

Both the Southern California Golf Assn. and the Northern California Golf Assn. have officially adopted the slope handicap system, affecting more than 225,000 golfers statewide effective Jan. 1, 1990.

On that date, the associations will assign slope ratings at nearly 600 golf courses in California. Slope ratings, which are in effect in associations in 45 other states, allows golfers from courses with varying degrees of difficulty to compete on a more equal level.

Golf Notes

Both Jay Haas, winner of the Bob Hope Desert Classic, and Steve Jones, winner of the AT&T; Pebble Beach Pro-Am, are eligible for the $250,000 being offered to the winner of either of those tournaments and the Panasonic Las Vegas Invitational. If one player wins all three, the prize is $1 million. . . . Glendora CC is hosting the Otto F. Baumann Memorial tournament Monday. Proceeds go to a rehabilitation fund for Leo Blakeman. Baumann, Bud Schaub and Blakeman were shot by a disgruntled employee last Dec. 22 in the office of the O & G Water company, which Baumann owned and where all three worked. Baumann and Schaub were killed, and Blakeman was left blinded by the gunman, who was later arrested. The entry fee of $150 includes green fee, cart, and a dinner afterward. For information contact tournament director Shorty Feldbush: (714) 599-3905. . . . Peter R. Stilwell, marketing and communications specialist at Pinehurst Hotel and CC in Pinehurst, N.C., has been named director of PGA/World Golf Hall of Fame. . . . In connection with the year-long celebration of “The Centennial of Golf in America,” Golf Magazine has named Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who won 31 tournaments and 3 U.S. Women’s Open championships, and Ben Hogan as Players of the Decade for 1948 through ’57.