She’s the Biggest Japanese Import Since Godzilla

From those wonderful people who gave us the Honda, sushi, Sony, Panasonic and the Yamaha grand piano, we now get the Okamoto.

Like all Japanese exports, it’s compact, beautifully designed, economical in concept and outsells and outperforms the domestic market.

Imagine Madame Butterfly hitting a high 5-iron two feet from the hole on a trapped green and you have Ayako Okamoto. Cho-Cho San, my ear. One fine day, she may sail away and leave all golf to fall on its sword. Let’s see Puccini make an opera out of that.

Madame Okamoto was Golf magazine’s player of the year in 1987. That’s all golf, not just the Japanese variety. She was LPGA player of the year, the first non-American ever to win that honor. She won more money--$466,034--than any player on the tour, and only one player in the history of women’s golf (Pat Bradley) ever won more.

You look at the numbers and you picture a truck driver or sumo-sized striker of the ball. You look at Okamoto and you want to ask, “Don’t they make geisha girls any more?”

The eyes are soft and brown and twinkle a lot. The nose is pug. The teeth are even and white and can break into a smile at any time. Particularly, when she turns to an opponent and says, “I believe it’s you.”

On the tees and fairways of America, she may be just another Japanese import. On the Ginza, she’s a combination of Princess Di and Sadaharu Oh.

Watch her as she walks to the first tee at the Nabisco Dinah Shore golf tournament down here this week. Suddenly, Japanese journalists erupt from the press tent in squad strength. Cameras pop at the ready from the shoulder-strapped Nikons to the lenses the size of railroad guns. Okamoto may be the most-photographed sports personality in the world. If she’s up and awake, a camera is trained on her. If she’s on a golf course, there are batteries of them. If she showed up with the Mikado, they’d say, “Who’s that with Ayako Okamoto?”

She plays golf the way Perry Como sings--without apparent effort. She swings slow, repetitively, deliberately--and deadly. They don’t make the green she can’t reach in two. Like most Japanese, she is disciplined, not reckless. She puts the ball where she wants it to go, not where it wants to go. If she’s not on a fairway, it ain’t Okamoto. If she’s behind a tree, she’s either an impostor--or hit a rock.

She doesn’t hit it far, just straight. She’s from the Lanny Wadkins-Julius Boros school of don’t-just-stand-there-hit-it.

Golf is a game best played if taken up at birth, if not sooner. Most great players’ first pair of shoes had cleats in them. Okamoto did not take up the game till she was 23. For golf, that’s practically in your dotage. Most people who don’t take up the game till they’re 23 never get lower than a 20.

Okamoto never was a 20. She took to golf like Paderewski to the piano. It wasn’t as if she stepped out of a kimono and an August moon teahouse. She had been a left-handed pitcher, the best one in Japanese softball. Pretty soon, she was the best right-handed golfer in the Japanese tour. The first nine holes she ever played she shot a 47. Within two years, she was setting money and scoring records for the Japanese tour. She has since won 40 tour events on the Asian and European tours.

She took her game to Broadway and the Palace in 1981. In the United States, within a year, she had won her first American tournament and $85,267.

It was like seeing your first Toyota on Wilshire Boulevard. You knew it was only the beginning. Within three years, she was winning her third, fourth and fifth tournaments (including the women’s British Open) and $251,108.

She spurted to an early, four-under-par first-round lead in Dinah’s tournament Thursday, before her game began leaking shots like a Tijuana bus on the back nine. A chill, windy, blustery day moved her ordinarily straight shots around like a Hoyt Wilhelm knuckleball.

Like the four-door Honda, no one expects they’ve seen the last of Madame Okay. She’s already won her 12th tournament in five years on the American tour. She was runner-up only last week. She has the best scoring average on the tour (70.73) to date.

She won four tournaments on the U.S. tour last year and lost in a playoff in the U.S. Open.

The golf tour better get in line behind the rest of the economy. Invaded by a quality Japanese product which is claiming a lion’s share of the market. It’s just a question of workmanship, as usual. Lt. Pinkerton, go home. It’s your turn to be waiting on the dock. Cho Cho’s in a sand trap.

Dinah Shore Tournament: Muffin Spencer-Devlin is leading. Thomas Bonk’s story, Page 4.