Strange Will Go Down With Other Great Losers

If God is a golfer, Curtis Strange will win the 88th U.S. Open here today. If God doesn’t care, Bob Gilder will win it.

If He’s an Englishman, Nick Faldo will.

The case for Curtis Strange is basic. If golf were fair--which it isn’t--it’s his turn.

Consider this: Curtis Strange has won 14 tournaments in his career. That’s almost as many as 5 of the 6 guys closely pursuing him, as the Open goes into its final round, have total. Curtis has won 2 tournaments this year and 5 in the past 11 months. One of the guys following hot on his divots has not won since 1983; two of them won only two tournaments each in their careers, and one of them--the Brit, Faldo--has won only once in this country.

So, you would have to conclude Curtis Strange has no chance today. If you know golf, you’d advise him to get out of town. This is not a game, it’s a haunt. The Open is a particularly vindictive persecutor of prowess. Maybe God hates golfers.

Consider that Arnold Palmer won 61 tournaments in his career--75, if you take into consideration worldwide events--and only one U.S. Open.

Consider that Sam Snead won more tournaments than any man who ever lived and is commonly held to be the best or next-to-best who ever played the game and won no U.S. Opens and you begin to get the picture.

Mull over the notion that Andy North won two U.S. Opens--and only one other tournament in his life--and you begin to get the picture.

Curtis Strange is, by common consent, the best golfer playing today. Consider that he won the Arnold Palmer Award, emblematic of the best player and leading money-winner on the tour the year before, and two of the last three years. And you could see why he should consider not getting out of bed today.

The gods of golf are implacable. They have Curtis Strange right where they want him--right where they had Arnold Palmer in 1966 when he was leading the Open by seven shots with only nine holes to play, right where they had Ben Hogan in 1955 when he holed out with no one on the golf course within five shots of him except an unknown named Jack Fleck.

I can’t look today. Curtis Strange is going into the final round with a one-shot lead. He’s playing well. He’s won 2 of the last 4 tournaments he’s played in, his mental outlook is good, health, blood pressure, pulse fine, digestion good, and things all right at home.

I don’t know where he’s going to get it--the pond at 11, the trees to the left of No. 14, maybe that hell hole at No. 12. Maybe all three.

They’ve handled Curtis before. Remember the 1985 Masters? It was all his. All he had to do was lay up on 13 and par in and get the green coat. All of a sudden, he was in more water than a U-boat, and German and Spanish players and Raymond Floyd were going past him so fast he got dizzy watching.

Curtis has been the crown prince of the game ever since Jack Nicklaus’ and Lee Trevino’s and Tom Watson’s skills began to atrophy. Golf wants an emperor. He looked like it. The coronation was a matter of time.

But Curtis became a “Yes, but” player. Yes, he strikes the ball better than 90% of the players playing today, but he’s never won a major. Yes, he’s won more money than anyone else in the game lately, but there’s more to golf than money. And so on.

Curtis always was a strange one for golf. When he first came on tour, a hot-headed kid who thought every putt should go in, every drive hit a fairway and every iron a green, Curtis was curt. He was once publicly chastised by no less than Arnold Palmer for ungentlemanly language in front of patrons around a green. Curtis thought he was joining a game, not a House of Lords. He was apt to give snappish answers in interviews, forget to add the grace note in the ordinary commerce of the golf game.

But Curtis learned the social graces as well as he learned the cut shot or the power fade. He learned to confine his explosions to the sand traps, he became more good-humored. The hair got grayer, the outlook matured. He actually got to be a better player at the same time.

This should be his tournament to lose. There’s a sense of fitness to his joining the long gray line of victims who irked the fates of golf. It should be his turn in the barrel.

Aristotle called it “undeserved misfortune.” Someone wrote a book, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People,” and he could have had golf in mind.

Curtis Strange is, just simply, the most qualified of the half-dozen or so players in the hunt for our national Open today. One guy in there will, if he wins Sunday, now have won 5 tournaments lifetime--and 2 of them U.S. Opens. Those are the kinds of tricks U.S. Opens play. It’s a 72-hole jinx, a punishment for our sins. Another guy in there won a tournament in 1979--and one in 1987. He wins one every 9 years or so. Another guy in there holed out over the head of Greg Norman, no less, to win a Masters, no less, for only his second tournament win ever.

You get the picture. Curtis Strange thinks he’s going into the final round of the 1988 Open one shot ahead. He better play as if he is six shots behind. He has more to beat than Scott Simpson, Bob Gilder, Nick Faldo, D.A. Weibring and Larry Mize. He’s got an 88-year hoodoo. The guy he’s got to beat comes disguised as a tree, a brook, a foot slip, a clump of poison ivy and doesn’t play by the rules. He’s a hex. He’ll cough on your backswing, step on your ball, give you a spasm on your backswing--and he’ll look around for somebody completely unworthy to hand the tournament to.

You can hear his mocking laughter on every fairway every Open was ever played on. Hogan, Snead, Palmer can hear it in their sleep to this day. If Curtis listens, it may be echoing in his ears on the first tee today. Just before his approach lands out on Lee Street or up in a pine tree. Just remember this is the course where a young caddy named Ouimet beat the great Briton Harry Vardon, who never won our Open either.

If you can’t watch the Open today, just get a print of one of those Halloween movies where the guy doesn’t know the house is haunted when he goes in. I get the feeling that’s what one Strange golfer may be in for on a very gloomy Sunday.