Seniors Shoot-Out : Hill Edges Palmer After an Unlikely Tiebreaker on 18

Some spectators had a hunch that this was not the final round of the Masters when one of Orville Moody’s playing partners switched golf balls on him on the 10th tee, snatching the real ball and replacing it with a plastic replica that emitted a bizarre shrieking sound as it whined off the tee and disappeared into a lake about 75 yards away.

And if any in the gallery at Tuesday’s Seniors Shoot-Out at the Wood Ranch Golf Club in Simi Valley still had not gotten the point that this competition was being conducted mostly in the name of yuk-yuks, they probably began to understand a few moments later when The King himself, Arnold Palmer, strode purposefully up to Moody’s second teed-up golf ball and very casually stomped the ball and the tee deep into the earth.

Moody, you see, had won last week’s Seniors tournament in Indian Wells near Palm Springs, blitzing the field with a record-setting 25-under-par performance. So Tuesday, his buddies made sure that his head didn’t get too big for all those neat golf hats he owns, singling him out for some harpoons in the shoot-out, a prelim to the start Friday of the 54-hole GTE Classic. And, on the fourth hole of the nine-hole event, Moody was brought back to earth with a thud. Or rather, a splash. He knocked his tee shot into a lake, and this time it counted.

The errant shot knocked him out of the shoot-out, leaving Palmer, Dave Hill, Bob Charles, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Al Geiberger and Dale Douglass still in the competition. Bruce Crampton, Butch Baird and Doug Sanders had been bounced from the field in the first three holes.

About three hours after the shoot-out had begun, the field had been knocked down to two. Palmer, a four-time winner of the Masters, vs. Hill, four-time winner of the Memphis Open. Both hit booming tee shots on the par-5, 513-yard 18th hole, their golf balls stopping near the 300-yard markers. Hill’s approach stopped 35 feet short of the pin and Palmer’s went right, settling in the fringe about the same distance from the pin. Both of them got down in two and the contest now became very simple:

They marched 40 yards back down the fairway, dropped their golf balls and chipped back to the pin. Palmer’s ball rolled 16 feet past the pin and stopped. Hill’s ball rolled 18 feet past the pin, but caught one of two hills on the giant green and rolled back toward the cup, squeezing past Palmer’s ball by an inch.

Winner: Hill.

“You don’t beat Arnold like that very often,” Hill said, laughing. “When it comes down to someone looking down on things and giving his blessings, Arnold has gotten them more often than not. I couldn’t have beaten him by much more than an inch, though.”

The inch was worth $2,500 to Hill. Palmer earned $2,000. Bruce Crampton was eliminated on the first hole and earned the smallest check, $350. He faded his tee shot badly on the 10th hole--the first of the competition--and knocked his second into a deep grass bunker near the green. He knocked it out and two-putted for a bogey-5. The other nine players parred the hole, and Crampton marched off the green and back toward the tee, 422 yards away. Or about 600 yards away if he took the same erratic path that his golf ball had taken on the way down.

An hour later, he was seen on the same hole, by himself, playing it again.

On the next hole, play was held up as Rodriguez gave a quick golf lesson on the tee to Sanders, instructing him exactly how to keep his elbows tucked against his sides, his knees bowed outward, his hands twisted grotesquely and his upper body cocked badly to the left. As the spectators roared, Sanders tried out the new stance but quickly announced, “Damn, Chi Chi. I can’t swing like this.”

To which Rodriguez responded, “Good. Let’s play.”

Sanders, even with his own stance, was gone one hole later. Rodriguez bowed out on No. 16. Most of them took the defeat graciously. But only Hill, 50, who earned $232,189 and finished 11th on the Seniors money list in his rookie year of 1987, did not have to. He probably earned less for winning a legitimate PGA event--the 1961 Home of the Sun Open--than he did for winning Tuesday’s nine-hole show.

“I wasn’t out there to practice. I did that Monday and I can do it Wednesday and Thursday in the pro-am,” Hill said. “I was out there to win that thing.”