They Played Game of Putting Your Best Ball Forward

How would you like to play Jack Nicklaus’ tee shot for 18 holes?

How would you like to have Lee Trevino putt for you?

Think you could win the money? Have a shot at the course record?

They had a tournament down here Monday called a Desert Scramble, an illegitimate offspring of Golf the Father in which you can win $125,000 having Nicklaus drive for you and Trevino putt for you. That’s like stealing the money.

My notion is, these guys should have my tee shot to play, try to make birdie from where I would put the second shots. A better idea would be to make them play with my swing and have to smother-hook and top-shot their way to the hole and arrive there with this ball with a little cut in it.

You would think a Nicklaus-Trevino duo would be like having Dempsey to punch for you and Ali to jab, Babe Ruth to hit and Willie Mays to field, Nick the Greek to deal and Pittsburgh Phil to bet.

I mean, if you had to have one man to putt for you to save you from the gallows, Lee Trevino would be your man. If you had to have one man to put you in play off the tee, Jack Nicklaus, the longest straight driver who ever lived, would be the one. Nicklaus will be able to reach par-5s in two on his deathbed, and Trevino is the man who said pressure isn’t putting to win the U.S. Open, pressure is putting for a $20 Nassau against a man with a scar on his cheek when you only have $2 in your pocket.

They matched these two against Golf’s Odd Couple. If you saw Greg Norman and Ian Woosnam and you didn’t know who they were, you’d be reaching for your wallet and dreaming of closing out the press by the 15th hole. This is the original Mutt-and-Jeff-on-the links act.

You’d be very careful about giving the tall one strokes. Don’t let the bleached-blond hair and the sunburned good looks fool you. Greg Norman didn’t arrive by surfboard. Check the 48-long shoulders and the 32-inch waist first and adjust the bet accordingly.

But his playing partner at first glance looks like something that arrived by tricycle. Ian Woosnam is just bigger than his 7-iron. He has this cherubic face of the guy who would play the angel at the Christmas pageant. You don’t know whether to hand him his putter or a lollipop. You don’t know whether Greg Norman brought him along to play with or to mark his ball with. Put him in a mouse hat and you’d think he just got lost from his parents at Disneyland.

But Ian Woosnam is, inch-for-inch, the best golf player in the world today. You may have to be big to play basketball, football. Golf mocks the lanky types.

Anyone can play impeccable golf on the manicured, watered, raked and mowed million-dollar acreages of Palm Beach and Palm Springs. Ian Woosnam grew up on the Welsh-English border, where they had to chase the sheep before teeing off. He learned the game hitting out of hay fields not the pool-table fairways of the Sun Belt resorts or the nursery fields of the Masters.

He had to take the game to Africa, not to the universities of Wake Forest and Houston. He had to learn to putt fighting mosquitoes and checking the water hazards for crocodiles before wading in to hit out. His edge is that, no matter how difficult the shot is today, it’s still easier than aiming it through a cloud of tsetse flies or under an elephant.

He won $1.8 million last year with a golf club. They love him in England where he’s “Wee Woozy” and can hit the ball farther than anyone his size has any right to. He earned his way in this one-day tournament, he wasn’t invited for the novelty or Tom Thumb effect.

The purpose of a scramble is to ensure you will never have to play your bad shots. As Nicklaus put it, “For a change we don’t have to go out and play our foul balls.” Its origins are lost in the mists of golf, but not antiquity. Its original purpose was to close the gap in a foursome between the best and worst players and speed up play, but it has proliferated. Not apt to be embraced by the Royal & Ancient, it is the most popular form of outing golf in the United States.

The best recollection of Jerry Pate and Lee Trevino is that a form of it was invented by Ben Hogan in Texas, a sporting version where Ben would spot his opponent in a game in which he and opponent would each hit two balls at a time and the opponent would get to play the best of his two shots and Hogan the worst of his two.

It was expertly believed the first Scramble would be made to order for the internationalists of Norman and Woosnam, who had youth on their side. “We’ll be waiting for the old fellows on every fairway,” laughingly predicted Norman.

Be that as it may, it took youth 17 holes to catch age. It took them 19 to close them out.

The Desert Mountain course, where this novelty event was held, is a nice place, if you’re a rattlesnake. The kind of a place where, if they saw smoke signals 90 years ago, they’d circle the wagons. They write songs about country like this and sing them around the campfire.

Birdieing it is something else again. The over-and-under betting on this event settled at 63. The “overs” won the bets but the unders (Norman and Woosnam) won the match.

The British Open, it wasn’t. But, trash sports it wasn’t either. Son of Skins game should do as nicely as its predecessor. When you win $250,000 in extra innings with a 12-foot putt, it takes it out of the realm of an old-timers’ game and may make it as permanent and exciting a fixture on the American scene as, say, the USF&G; tournament.