Dinah Shore Golf Tournament : Spencer-Devlin Rides the Wind to Lead

Think about wind. The kind that turns golf balls into unguided missiles and transforms the tee-to-green experience from a nice little walk into a bad trip.

This is the kind of blustery, gusty breeze that blew across Mission Hills Country Club Thursday when a field of the best women golfers in the world began sprinting for the Nabisco Dinah Shore title, and most of them got winded.

Gusts of up to 35 m.p.h. allowed only 8 of 110 players to break par. The wind brought just about everyone to her knees, including first-round leader Muffin Spencer-Devlin, who talked to the media from a kneeling position after shooting a 68.

Spencer-Devlin said she was protecting her back because she has a disk problem.

“This keeps the disk from going disco, if you will,” she said.

Devlin, who described a round of “wonderful” 7-irons and “beautiful” pars, held a one-shot lead over Jan Stephenson and was two shots in front of Marta Figueras-Dotti, who played earlier in the day when the wind was blowing a lot harder.

“I don’t think it was as strong later in the day, although standing on the 18th tee, it was whipping in our faces,” Spencer-Devlin said.

The first-round leader, one of the more colorful LPGA players, is sort of unusual.

She believes in reincarnation, wouldn’t mind being an astronaut and represents, among other things, the Pacific Whale Foundation.

She is probably the women’s golf equivalent of Mac O’Grady. In fact, Spencer-Devlin was asked whether she and O’Grady had ever discoed.

“Not in this life,” she said.

Maybe on another planet?

“Possibly.”

She was pretty good on Earth Thursday. One under par after nine holes, Spencer-Devlin moved ahead of Stephenson with four birdies, somewhat offset by a three-putt bogey on No. 14, with an offensive-minded approach to her round.

“I charged all day,” she said. “It’s Thursday. Pourquoi pas ?”

Why not, indeed? Wind is not only a weather condition, it’s also a state of mind, Spencer-Devlin insisted. She said she likes the wind, anyway.

“I was lying in bed this morning, listening to the wind in the trees,” she said. “I was imagining being the wind, being on the wind, being in the wind. I do rather like the wind. I like to think I was born in a tempest.”

Stephenson, born in Sydney, Australia, also likes the wind. Last year, she won at Santa Barbara under conditions similar to Thursday’s round.

One tournament she hasn’t won, however, is the Dinah Shore. The $500,000 event is worth $80,000 to the winner, and Stephenson is quite serious about putting together four good rounds here this time.

“I’m a nervous wreck about this tournament,” she said. “I want to do so well. It’s the only major I haven’t won. It means so much to me. I’ll probably only win the thing when I least expect it. I want to win this thing before I retire.”

After starting with a bogey on No. 1, a 351-yard par-4, Stephenson recovered quickly with a birdie on No. 2 when she sank a 6-footer. She got three more birdies, dropping a 20-foot putt and a couple of 6-footers.

“I feel like I played better than I scored,” she said.

Many played poorly and scored the same way. Patty Sheehan, who lost last year’s Dinah Shore to Betsy King in a playoff, shot an 80. King had a 77 Thursday.

U. S. Open champion Laura Davies drove the ball far, although not necessarily straight, and had a 78.

Three shots off the lead were five golfers, headed by Ayako Okamoto, the 1987 LPGA player of the year. Also in the group at 71 were Shirley Furlong, Chris Johnson, Barb Bunkowsky and Amy Alcott.

Alcott found out early it would probably be better to assume a philosophical stance about her day playing in the wind tunnel.

“I hit five balls before the round dead into the wind and you could hardly stand up,” she said. “On the first tee, if somebody had said to me, ‘Amy, you can have a 71 and let’s go watch old ‘I Love Lucy’ reruns’ I probably would have taken it.”

Figueras-Dotti, a USC All-American, graduated cum laude in 1982. She caddied for her father, Luis, president of the Spanish Golf Assn., as a 5-year-old at Puerta de Hierro in her hometown of Madrid.

She seemed surprised by her round, especially since she was playing with some new clubs for the first time.

“It was a little risky,” she said. “You don’t normally change clubs two days before a major.”

Maybe, but you also don’t normally leave Spain for Los Angeles and try to continue medical school speaking only Spanish.

“I didn’t know a word of English,” she said. “They said to me, ‘You want to be a doctor and you don’t even know how to say hi?’ I’d still be in school.”

Instead, she’s not far from the lead, not far from Spencer-Devlin.

Then again, Spencer-Devlin seems a long way from most.

A science fiction devotee, Spencer-Devlin reaffirmed her interest in being an astronaut.

“I would still like to do that if I could figure out a way to make my body younger,” she said.