Simi Valley Seniors Golf : Going Out Swinging : Old-Timer Fred Haas Still Putting Along After More Than 60 Years of Teeing It Up

Included in the first round of the GTE Classic at the Wood Ranch Golf Club in Simi Valley was Fred Haas, 72.

Is that good? Very good.

Because 72 wasn’t Haas’ score. It’s his age. The second-oldest man on the Seniors Tour behind Sam Snead, Haas shot a 2-over-par 74 Friday after being one under through 13 holes.

“A 74 is good for me,” Haas said. “I’d like to have shot my age. I’ve done that a few times. But this is a difficult course. If I could shoot my age here, I’d win this tournament.”

Haas does not believe that will happen.

“At this stage,” he said, “I’ve probably lost about three-and-one-half strokes per round off my game. I used to average 70.5. But now I just seem to throw away about four strokes a game, no matter what I do. I think it’s just lack of concentration.

“I am able to maintain my putting because I understand that part of the game. And if you do that, you can maintain some degree of excellence.”

Haas has certainly had some practice putting. Just imagine how many he’s sunk in 66 years of play.

It was his father, Fred Sr., who first introduced him to the game in North Carolina. The older Haas was so determined to be good at golf, he took 25 lessons before he ever played a round. It paid off. He broke 90 his first time out.

In the early 1930s, the Haas family moved to Arkansas. The country was in the throes of the Depression and Freddie Sr. concluded the only way his son was going to go to college was on a golf scholarship. The problem was, the nearest golf courses were 35 miles away in opposite directions, one in McGee and the other in Eudora.

“The only way to get there,” the younger Haas recalled, “was on a gravel road. I wound up with one, two or maybe three flat tires every trip.”

And it was not exactly a country club atmosphere once he got there. The “greens” on those courses were hardly green. They consisted of sand and oil.

“We had a couple of cows,” Haas said, “serving as our mowing machine.”

So Fred Sr. built his own small course and his son learned to play well enough to make it all the way to Louisiana State.

When he got out of college, though, the last thing on Haas’ mind was turning pro.

“It was 1937,” he said, “and there was not enough money or tournaments to make it worthwhile.”

Instead, he went into the life-insurance business. In 1946, Byron Nelson, a superstar of his day, entered the Memphis Open with a streak of 11 consecutive tour victories.

That streak ended in Memphis thanks to a 29-year-old amateur named Fred Haas.

“I had been playing for the fun of it until then,” Haas said. “But after I won at Memphis, they lined up a whole bunch of tournaments for me. The problem was, I still needed to earn some money. I was going to have to turn pro if I wanted to play. I didn’t want to wake up at 50 or 55 and regret that I hadn’t tried it.”

He won five tournaments before joining the Senior Tour in 1980, but those five victories, the last coming in 1954, earned him $5,000.

“We played some tournaments,” Haas said, “where the total purse was $3,000.”

In 34 years on what Haas calls “the junior tour,” he won a total of $150,999. Starting his eighth year on the Senior Tour, he already has pocketed $163,788. It is unlikely that he will win a great deal more. He has developed an artificial turf for greens and wants to channel his energy, of which he still seems to have plenty, into selling it around the world.

But give up golf? Be serious.

“I’ll play,” he said, “as long as I live.”

After all, on the day his father, then 76, suffered the heart attack that eventually killed him, the two Haas’ had played a round of golf.

“Did good that day,” the son said. “Had a birdie.”

Probably shot his age, too.