WAS HE GOOD, OR JUST LUCKY? : Does Anyone Give Larry Mize Credit for <i> Winning</i> ’87 Masters? Norman Does

Can a person be lucky and unlucky at the same time? It has been nearly a year since Larry Hogan Mize made a lucky shot that won the Masters and then, through unseen, unusual and unexpected forces, found himself propelled toward one of the worst labels a golfer can have.

Is Larry Mize unlucky?

Well, consider this: What do you call it when you chip in a shot from 140 feet in a playoff to beat one of the game’s best players and win one of the world’s greatest golf tournament?

“A fluke, that’s what a lot of people say it was,” said Greg Norman, who was on the receiving end of Mize’s shot, whatever it may be called.

“I feel sorry for him, I really do,” Norman said. “He’s not very lucky after what he did. I don’t think Larry has gotten enough credit for that shot. A lot of people call it a fluke. They tell me it was too bad I had to lose on such a lucky shot. I keep telling those people that he wasn’t trying to make a bogey. He was trying to make that shot, and that’s exactly what he did.”

Before Mize made that shot, he had the recognition factor of a geranium. People sometimes knew he was a golfer, just not which one.

But once that ball disappeared into the hole and right after he knocked the visor off his head and leaped, screaming, on the green, life began changing quickly for him.

He had won the Masters in the city where he was born, 28 years before.

He did win, didn’t he? He must have. After all, Jack Nicklaus had helped him into the traditional green jacket. Then they gave Mize a check for $162,000.

Flukes don’t get this treatment, do they?

“Of course, I don’t think it was a fluke,” Mize said. “People can think whatever they want, though. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t have any trouble with it. Remember, I played 73 other holes before that shot.

“It was an incredible shot,” he said. “But that’s the way it goes. It can go in from anywhere. And sometimes, it does.”

For a while, it didn’t appear that Mize would get a chance to put it in the hole from anywhere. He needed an 8-foot birdie putt on the 18th, the tournament’s 72nd hole, to get into a playoff with Norman and Seve Ballesteros.

So the gallery that lined the fairways and circled the greens chose their favorite.

Norman.

Ballesteros.

Larry Mize?

He had won only once before in his career. He had collapsed more than once. Larry D. Mize, they called him.

Check the Mize folder. In 1986, he shot a final-round 76 and lost by a shot. That same year, he also lost in his only other playoff, when Norman beat him on the sixth extra hole.

When Mize began his final Masters round last year, he was two shots off the lead held by Ben Crenshaw and Roger Maltbie, one shot behind Norman and Bernhard Langer, and tied with Ballesteros.

Mize wasn’t worried. In fact, he felt pretty lucky with the way things were coming along.

“Going into the last round, I felt comfortable,” he said. “In Saturday’s round, through 12 holes, I was three over and I played the last six holes three under. That gave me a lot of confidence.

“With all the guys so bunched up, everybody was looking at Norman, Ballesteros, Crenshaw, and rightfully so. But I liked my position. I was right there behind everybody so I could sneak in there.

“That’s what I planned on doing. I was playing well and I felt very good because I was kind of unnoticed.”

Mize said the last nine holes of regulation were the most intense he had ever played.

“I felt a great deal of pressure,” he said. “I walked off the 10th tee, looked at the leader board, saw my name up there and said ‘quit doing that.’ I got a little nervous.”

A three-way tie and a playoff was created by birdies on the last two holes. Ballesteros birdied the 17th, Mize birdied the 18th and then Norman birdied the 17th with a 35-foot putt.

Norman could have extended the losing misery for Mize on the 18th, but his 22-foot putt stopped rolling on the lip of the cup and a birdie became a par instead.

As they walked toward the 10th for the first playoff hole, this was the lineup: Ballesteros, a two-time Masters winner. Norman, the 1986 British Open champ. And Larry Mize. It looked like a mismatch.

“I was pretty nervous standing there with them two boys,” Mize said.

Ballesteros dropped out when he bogeyed, missing a 5-foot putt. Norman and Mize each had a par. Ballesteros cried. Norman and Mize moved to the 11th hole, 455-yards guarded by Rae’s Creek along the left.

Mize wanted to stay right, but his second shot, a 5-iron went way right, about 50 feet to the right of the green. Norman was sizing up a 30-foot birdie possibility when it was Mize’s turn to chip.

He was 140 feet from the pin. He wasn’t thinking about getting lucky.

“The main thing I was thinking about was to hit a good, aggressive shot,” he said. “I knocked it in the water at 15 and in the pond at 16 and after that, I said, ‘You’ve got to be aggressive and get the ball to the hole.’ ”

Mize didn’t want to leave the ball in the fringe, so he took his sand wedge out and pitched it low. He thought that if he pitched it high, the rye grass would stop it. All Mize wanted to do was put the ball on the green and see what it would do.

So what did it do? The ball bounced three times in the rye grass and then hit the green, from where it rolled 90 more feet, smacked up against the pin and dropped into the cup.

“I had the right line and it went in,” he said simply.

While Mize was still in the air, celebrating his good fortune, Norman knew he still had a chance. But after watching Mize’s shot, Norman seemed shaken. He rolled the 30-footer to the left of the hole.

It wasn’t hard to understand Norman’s frustration. Just the year before, Norman lost the 1986 PGA when Bob Tway chipped in from a bunker on the final hole. Tway. Mize. Norman is philosophical about it all now.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time twice,” he said.

The Masters? It’s really not that much different, Norman insisted.

“You win a golf tournament, you put on a green jacket and you go home,” he said.

Mize wasn’t heading home though. He jumped in his car Monday night and began driving to Hilton Head Island, S.C., for the next tournament. Something came over Mize on the way. Mize said he felt lucky.

“I just started yelling and yelling in the car,” he said. “Just me by myself. If somebody else was there, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

“But you know, I was real excited when I won and jumped up and down. Then you have to really calm down even though you still want to go crazy.”

Mize finished 1987 winning $561,407 and that placed him sixth on the money list. He had nine top 10 finishes in 23 tournaments. It was a good year for him. The golf clothing and club companies he endorses re-negotiated Mize’s contracts after the Masters, giving him more money.

“Just a little bit, but it surprised me because they didn’t have to,” he said. “They always say that winning the Masters is worth a million dollars. Well, I’ll tell you in a few years. But it’s been good financially.”

The Mize family--Larry, wife Bonnie and son David, who will be 2 years old on Thursday--moved out of their condo in Columbus, Ga., in December when they bought a house. That may be the only real change in Mize’s life style after making the shot of his life.

Mize has a videotape of the 1987 Masters and when he gets to the last part, the rewind and play buttons on his tape player get pushed pretty regularly.

“I haven’t just sat home and watched it over and over, but I have seen it more than a few times,” he said. “And it still gets me excited every time. My heart really gets pumping when I watch it, even now.”

It’s a good thing Mize has his special moment on videotape. This year’s highlights are pretty brief. He hasn’t had much luck so far.

Eight tournaments. Missed three cuts. Highest finish tie for 11th. Total money won $27,198.

Mize missed the cut at his last tournament, The Players Championship two weeks ago, but he still felt encouraged about his game as he got it ready for the Masters.

“It’s getting better,” he said. “I feel like I have a chance. I’ve got to have my head screwed on straight.”

When he was a kid, the Mize family moved around a lot. His father worked for Southern Bell. Larry was born in Augusta, but that only began the Mize whistle-stop tour of the south.

Augusta, Macon, Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta again, Atlanta again, Columbus.

“He got transferred a lot,” Mize said of his father.

Mize got his middle name of Hogan, not because of Ben, but because it was his grandmother’s name. Mize loved golf, no matter who he was named for. He picked up his first clubs at the age of 9 and his father, a scratch golfer, gave him a few points. Mize took it from there.

Young Larry once worked at Augusta National, where he changed the numbers on a scoreboard at the third hole. He watched the best players and wondered if he would ever be lucky enough to walk those same fairways lined with tall Georgia pine trees.

For the last year, Mize kept a new green jacket in his closet, the one that Nicklaus had helped him into because Mize had been that lucky, after all.

Mize got to keep the green jacket at home for the year of his reign as Masters champion, but when he arrived here this week, he brought the green jacket back to the clubhouse. It can never leave the grounds again.

He said he really hasn’t changed his opinion about the role of luck, no matter what has happened to him in the last year.

If he is lucky that 140-foot chip fell in the cup, or if he’s unlucky because many people think of it as a fluke, Mize refuses to spend any time sorting it all out.

He does not know why he made that shot. He plays golf. He is not a philosopher. He does not know why he was chosen to do something so spectacular in a forum of such importance in a game to which he had devoted his life.

It’s not in the makeup of Larry Mize to worry about such things. All that stuff interferes with his golf.

“I can’t really think about that,” he said. “I just work hard to try and be the best golfer that I can be.

“You know, sometimes it works out, like Augusta, and sometimes it doesn’t. I believe it all comes out in the wash. If you don’t think like that, your attitude is not correct.

“But I don’t wonder why it happens here or there. I just feel that if you keep your head up, you’ll have your share of times.

“Who knows? You might get lucky.”