Take a Peek Into Future of PGA Tour

The PGA Tour, which runs tournament golf in this country, would dearly love to have a sixth “major” to go along with the existing five. It doesn’t have any of them now. The U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open, the Masters and PGA are all run by other groups.

So is the tournament being held this week at the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village, which has every credential to be the real sixth major.

What would you think of a tournament that has been won in the past couple of decades by Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin, John Mahaffey, Ben Crenshaw three times, Scott Simpson twice, Curtis Strange, Jay Haas, Scott Verplank? A tournament in which Arnold Palmer was runner-up twice, Gardner Dickinson once, and in which practically every key player on the tour today has participated.

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament has long since passed the U.S. Amateur in both importance and degree of difficulty to win. It has tomorrow’s stars in it, not some yesterday’s field of overage stockbrokers with nice putting strokes. These are crack players. Golf’s future. Tom Watson played in it. So did Lanny Wadkins, Tom Kite, David Edwards, Bob Tway, Bob Murphy. These collegians could give the U.S. Amateur field two a side.

You don’t ordinarily think of golf as a team sport. The collegians do. It’s the one tournament where it’s not really whether you won or lost, it’s whether the team did.

When you think of dominance in intercollegiate athletics, you think of Notre Dame or Ohio State or Alabama in football. UCLA or Kentucky in basketball.

In golf, it’s Oklahoma State. It used to be Houston that, legend had it, was the only institute of higher learning in the world where the entire student body came to class in cleats.

Oklahoma State has either won this tournament or been second for six years in a row. It has won the NCAA title 5 times in the past 10 years. It has been second most of the rest of the time. That’s not domination, that’s oppression.

Good golfers don’t just fall into a university any more than good football players or good basketball players do. They are magnetized, and the magnet is usually a coach. Notre Dame had its Rockne, Ohio State had Woody Hayes, Alabama had Bear Bryant. UCLA had John Wooden, Kentucky had Adolph Rupp and Indiana has Bobby Knight.

And Oklahoma State has Mike Holder.

Like a lot of great mentors in sports, Mike was not a great player himself. A low-handicapper from Texas, he was a bit of an overachiever, actually surviving the pro tour qualifying school cuts--but missing his card by five strokes--despite a swing that no one ever mixed up with Ben Hogan’s from one fairway away.

Mike Holder knows golf is difficult, not to say diabolical. He knows it will expose a character flaw quicker than almost any other game. Bear Bryant with 40 scholarships a year could take a chance on a pouter, a malingerer, a rebel. Mike Holder, with 1 scholarships a year, had to try to find Hogan.

Golf is the most ruggedly individualistic sport there is. Even tennis depends on what somebody else does with your serve. In golf, every man is an island.

The last thing you would think it needs is a tough guy at the helm. But Holder’s record speaks for itself.

Is he a martinet, a la Lombardi, who cracks helmets, kicks lockers, yells at his players? Well, not exactly, although he once got so fed up with Bob Tway’s griping about the quality of the practice balls that he went up on the tee and tied his star, 6-foot 4-inch player into a hammerlock Argentine Rocca would have been proud of (Holder also wrestled at Oklahoma State).

Is he given to locker-room pep talks?

“If a boy needs motivation, I don’t want him,” Holder says, shrugging.

Is he a pure pedagogue? Holder shakes his head.

“If a boy doesn’t have his swing by the time he gets to college, he won’t be on scholarship. You can’t teach him how to hit it, you can teach him where to hit it.”

But Holder is the boss, the head man. He doesn’t have to clamp headlocks on his players or arm-wrestle to get them to do what he wants. Scholarships are for one year.

Golf is sometimes seen as a game played by a field composed of equal parts neurasthenics and portlies, about as athletic-looking as a line at an outpatient clinic.

Mike Holder wants his team in the condition of a Rose Bowl team. His teams practice aerobics five times a week. “You can’t tell whether they’re practicing for the U.S. Amateur or the Bolshoi,” cracked a visiting pro. They also lift weights.

“Golf is very demanding mentally,” Holder says. “You can’t be mentally fit if you’re not physically fit. The day has changed when you could be overweight, underweight or suffering from a bad diet.”

Holder feeds his team at a separate dining table the way football coaches do. “They don’t have to do my exercises,” he says, grinning. “They can quit school.

“Golfers have the best image of any athletes on view. They don’t spit tobacco, they don’t pile on ballcarriers, they don’t throw tantrums on center court in front of the royal family. They accept being role models--and it all begins in college.”

So does the career of just about every champion in the game today. If you want to see tomorrow’s Palmer, if you want to see the winners of the Masters, Opens and PGAs in the 1990s, get out to that “other” but real major beginning at North Ranch Wednesday.