The Course Is Way Ahead on Points

It’s what the fight mob would call an “agony fight.” A waltz, a gavotte. If it were in St. Nick’s Arena, someone would be sure to break into a rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” The gallery would stamp its feet and whistle through its fingers.

The first two rounds of a U.S. Open are like the early rounds of a championship fight. The opponents have a lot of respect for each other. There’s a lot of feeling out, a lot of clinching, a lot of jabbing and very little real mixing it up.

If someone gets in a lucky punch, he may swarm to the attack, but in general, they make their fight at long range, like two battleships circling each other across the horizon.

The golfers go around this course as if they hear it ticking or like minesweepers going through the nets of an enemy harbor. The idea is not to get yourself blown up, to self-destruct before the real action starts.

They treat this course as if it were a sleeping lion or an oil-slicked corner at Indy. Nobody wins this tournament in the first round, they like to point out. Ben Hogan shot a 76 in a first round once--and won by two shots. Jack Fleck opened with a 76 a few years later and beat Hogan in a playoff.

The idea is not to open with a 76, of course, but the idea is not to get in a toe-to-toe slugfest with the course, just to exchange jabs with it. Keep off the ropes, out of the corners. Don’t leave yourself wide open. Save the hooks and roundhouses until later. Don’t go for the quick knockout or you’ll be the knockee. An Open course can take it.

Is the golf course really this tough? Or are these guys flinching at shadows? Is it running a bluff on the players? Does it have only a deuce in the hole if called?

Any Open course has its flaws, too, and you have to find these out.

To the naked eye, this is a three-hole golf course. The game begins on the 10th tee. If you make it to the 13th without crashing and burning, you can make it to Sunday, get past the cut. You can’t win if you’re not here. The course runs the ribbon clerks out, the guys who bump on short money.

Holes 10, 11 and 12 are Dempsey in a crouch, Musial with a 3-and-2 count, Lendl at the net. The 11th is supposed to be The Country Club’s Sunday punch. It’s a wicked dogleg left into a green as hard to find as a mosquito in a dark bedroom and it’s guarded by two ponds big enough to house bullfrogs you could saddle.

But the 12th is no day at the beach, either. What you do with either one is just try to tie it up and wait for the bell. Just get your par and tiptoe past. Don’t try to be a hero. You might wind up as the unknown soldier.

No. 12 is three yards shorter than No. 11 but it fights dirty, sticks a thumb in your eye, so to speak.

The least a golf hole can do is stay on the same plane. I mean, you deal stud, you play stud. No. 12 changes the game. You hit the ball halfway through a narrow opening in the trees and suddenly you come up against a high-rise. The green is up there in the clouds.

It’s kind of like knocking the ball to the base of the Empire State Building and having to knock the next shot through a 10th-story window. It can be done, but you better plan to take a 5.

Severiano Ballesteros is a dashing young Spaniard. In another life, you’d expect him to be the scourge of the Spanish Main, running a pirate frigate and preying on the men o’war and treasure ships of the Empire.

Seve’s game is attack! Go for the jugular. Charge. Use the driver. Swing from the heels. Win from the parking lot if you have to. Take no prisoners. Don’t lay up. Play for 3s. Heck, 2s. Eagle everything. Kill or be killed. What trees?

Not here. Seve acts like everyone else here--as if he’s in Indian country and just saw smoke from the hills. He is defending himself from the course, just like everyone else. He’s folding the hand, throwing away two pair. He’s gotten prudent.

Everybody remembers what happened to Arnold Palmer here in 1963. That was a year in which Arnold thought he could par Rhode Island if the creeks didn’t rise. He didn’t know you could make 7s but he made a whole bunch of them the last two rounds. Arnold played 11 in scores of 7-7-6-4 but he also played 12 in 6 over par.

“I made a lot of bogeys there,” he recalled last week.

Arnold’s pileup still scares guys 25 years later.

The course is ahead on points this week. When the best first-day score is only three under par on a day when no wind blew and heat and humidity were in the upper registers, you know Brookline is scaring everybody to death.

When Seve Ballesteros goes around with his guard up, fighting for a draw, you figure these guys think they’re in Dracula’s castle, that this is a course that sleeps in a coffin.

“Can you attack this course?” Seve was asked after he had shot a timid 69.

“I’d like to take some matches and set fire to it. But, no, you can’t,” Seve admitted. “You have to play the course the way it is set up. You have to be short. You have to lay up--that’s the way the greens are positioned.”

The greens at The Country Club, to be sure, are small to non-existent. I have seen bigger napkins. The 12th you cannot see any way, except from the blimp.

But Seve Ballesteros lay up? Babe Ruth bunt? Willie Mays play one on a hop? Ted Williams take a called third strike?

The course that can do that should be made into a parking lot, a shopping mall, read its rights and stood up against a wall.

Some years ago, at a fight between two over-cautious old veterans, I sat behind a portly old party who got increasingly aggravated as the rounds went on and the action regressed. Finally, he could stand it no more. He rose in shrieking rage and frustration, shook his own fist at the ring and roared, “Somebody knock somebody down!”

You feel the same way about the 1988 Open. Enough with the clinching! Stop the sparring! We didn’t come here to watch lag putts, irons off the tee, the flex defense.

We want Dempsey-Firpo, not Veloz and Yolanda. Somebody, please, at least swing! The course isn’t armed.

Or is it?