GENE THE MACHINE : One Rival Says: The Only Thing Bad Ever Said About Littler Was That He Putts Too Damn Good

Doug Sanders, the Aesop of the PGA Seniors Tour, appreciates a good story. He tells a better one.

You may remember Sanders as the golfer from the ‘60s with the pastel shoes, the lavender pants, the fuchsia golf shirts, the purple vocabulary and the Kodachrome personality.

Right now he is sitting under a corporate tent sipping a light beer. He has just finished a round of golf with four amateurs who have paid handsomely for the right to see him hit wedge shots and hear him spin yarns.

The subject today is Gene Littler.

“Gene the Machine,” Sanders begins lyrically. “What a pretty swing. . . . Poetry in motion. . . . Probably envied by all the players. . . . They wished they had his swing. . . . Smooth and nice as it was.”

So tell us a Gene Littler story, Uncle Dougie.

The amateurs are poised in a semi-circle.

“There are no stories about Gene Littler,” Sanders says quietly.

The truth is that there is one Gene Littler story. But it isn’t a funny one.

Littler underwent major surgery in 1972, at which time doctors removed a cancerous tumor underneath his left armpit. Doctors also removed some of the muscles used in the golf swing, saying afterward that Littler would never play golf professionally again.

“The thing that was hard to take was that I had never smoked, never drank and never abused my body at all,” Littler said. “And all of a sudden, I had this. You see all kinds of guys destroying their bodies, and they’re fine.”

Sixteen months later, and still recovering from an unrelated stomach virus that had required hospitalization early in the week, Littler shot 66-66-68-68--268 and won the St. Louis Children’s Hospital tournament.

“It was a great thrill,” Littler actually said. “I mean nobody ever thought I would get close to doing something like that.”

He has been beating golf balls and the odds ever since.

Littler’s story is one that even Doug Sanders isn’t about to attempt to top--no matter how much his listeners would like to hear him try.

Earlier, Art Wall Jr., the 1959 Masters champion, brightened when asked about Littler. “I just love the guy,” he said. “I’m glad he crossed my path.”

Australian golfer Bruce Devlin added this: “If you had sons, you’d want them to grow up to be like Gene Littler.”

But there have been so few newspaper stories written about Littler, a San Diego native, that when a reporter asked Peter Thomson about Littler, the five-time British Open champion was genuinely startled. “What?” he said. “Is he retiring?”

Thomson is a stern Aussie who designs golf courses in Japan, favors classical music in his chambers and once ran for the Australian Parliament.

“We all wish we could swing like Sam Snead I suppose,” Thomson said. “Yet nobody ever could. Snead’s swing was the most natural. But on his best days, Gene Littler was mechanically perfect. That’s not a bad way to put it. Mechanically perfect.”

Actually Littler is very retiring. As in shy. But he said he plans to play golf as long as he can keep shooting decent scores.

Littler, 58, is 14th on the seniors’ 1988 money list with $103,950. Nobody older than he has earned more money this year. In 35 years as a professional, he has won 29 regular PGA events, 9 senior tournaments and $2,724,986. Through 41 competitive rounds this year, Littler averaged 71.37 strokes.

Fine. But there must be something bad about Gene Alec Littler.

“You’ve come to the wrong store,” Sanders said. “Bad? I’ll tell you something bad about Gene Littler. He putts too damn good. He’s too good a player. He’s beat me a few times I wish he hadn’t.”

Like by one shot in the 1961 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills C.C. in Birmingham, Mich. The great Ben Hogan had won the Open on the same Robert Trent Jones course 10 years earlier.

Littler three-putted the first hole of the 1961 Open. Next, he missed a short birdie putt on the second.

“Boy,” he told himself, “this is going to be a great week.”

But mostly he was mechanically perfect the rest of the way.

Sanders, meanwhile, bogeyed Oakland Hills’ par-3 ninth hole during the final round. Then he needed three putts on No. 10 and four more shots from the fringe on No. 11. “I couldn’t have lost to a nicer guy,” he said at the time.

To this day, Sanders can’t find anything bad to say about Littler.

“I don’t know if he knows about Chateau Lafites and Haut-Brions and Latours and Margaux,” Sanders said. “And what years are what. I don’t think he does too many corporate outings. Maybe he isn’t the greatest at standing up and telling jokes in front of people. But Gene Littler is a quiet gentleman. You’ve got to respect a man that doesn’t have enemies.”

None, at least, that anybody knows about.

A bottle of 1945 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild can be had for about $1,000. Over the years, Littler has shelled out substantially more than that for his precious fleet of classic Rolls-Royces, Packards and Lincolns that once numbered 20.

The fleet has dwindled to six, now that his two children have left home and prize money for the seniors tour has grown like a mushroom.

“If I were home now, I’d get bored with the cars after a while,” he said. “That’s the great thing about the seniors tour. It gives us golfers over 50 something to do.”

Despite suspicions to the contrary, Littler’s horizons have always been wider than the first cut of rough at Chicago’s Medinah No. 3, site of next month’s Senior Open. But he never sacrificed his family. While his children were growing up, he never played more than three consecutive tournaments on tour without returning home to spend a week with his wife, Shirley; son, Curt, and daughter, Suzanne.

“I probably would have performed better and won more tournaments had I not wanted to go home so often,” Littler said. “But I guess I loved my family so much that that was the most important thing in my life.”

Shirley Littler said: “That’s all that ever mattered to him. We were gifted by his presence. One time he told me: ‘Forget the house. Forget everything. The children won’t be here forever.’ ”

The first time Shirley Warren met Gene Littler was on a blind date at San Diego State. She will never forget that, either. The event was something called the “Bluebook Ball.” Friends had arranged the meeting, but Littler had already spotted Shirley several rows ahead of him in a history class.

On that first date, he teased her for not having noticed him in class. He asked her if she had ever heard of Sam Snead. She said she had not. She asked if Snead played baseball. He said Snead did not. They both blushed.

They were married a year later. He was 20. She was 19.

“His values attracted me,” she said. “I just kept learning and learning from him. I still don’t understand how someone can come up with those values at such an early age.”

Actually, Littler wanted to be a baseball player until he was 14. At least that’s what he dreamed about when he wasn’t hanging around Mission Beach, dodging riptides. His father helped nudge him toward golf.

“I was lazy and not very ambitious,” Littler said. “I could have been a beach bum real easy. Then I got to be interested in golf and started working at it. As I got better, I got more interested.”

The swing that later inspired San Diego sportswriter Jack Murphy to coin Gene the Machine was pretty much self-taught. Its beauty was in its simplicity and Littler’s ability to repeat it, again and again.

By the time he was 16, Littler was occasionally playing 18 holes in fewer than 70 strokes.

“I was having even more fun at it,” he said. “It started to snowball.”

Wall remembered the first time he met Littler. It was in 1954 on the first tee at Pebble Beach, in what used to be called the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am. Wall was the pro, Littler the amateur partner assigned to him.

Three days later, Littler and Wall had tied for first place with three other teams.

“I think they had it reversed,” Wall said. “I think I was the amateur and he was the pro. He played that well. All week.”

The winning 54-hole pro-am score was 193. The names of the three other teams make for great golf trivia. They were Bud and Harvie Ward; Walter Burkemo, the 1953 PGA winner, and former major league baseball player Lefty O’Doul, and Doug Ford, the 1957 Masters champion, and Monty Mondrief.

That was the same year Littler won the San Diego Open as an amateur.

Littler turned professional at 23, shortly after his San Diego win. That victory had provided an immediate exemption. And subsequent success meant that Littler never had to qualify for a PGA tournament.

Also in 1954, Littler found himself hooked up in a stirring duel with Ed Furgol at the U.S. Open at Baltusrol’s famed Lower Course in Springfield, N.J.

On the last hole of the tournament--a 538-yard, par-5, dogleg left--Furgol drove into the left rough. He deliberately played his next shot onto a fairway of the adjoining Upper Course from where he pitched down to the green on the Lower. That enabled him to beat Littler, playing in his first Open, by a stroke.

“If I had had any experience at all, I might have won,” Littler said. “But I was just a green kid trying to win the Open.”

Littler’s undoing on the final day was a bogey on the 216-yard, par-3 16th.

Inexperience was the convenient explanation of the day. But four years later, Paul Runyan came to realize that Littler knew much more about the science of golf than he cared to disclose.

Before match play was abandoned, Runyan won the 1934 PGA on the 38th hole from Craig Wood, and the 1938 PGA from Sam Snead, 8 and 7.

Runyan became an excellent teaching pro when he stopped competing and he was a teacher when he met Littler at La Jolla Country Club late in 1958.

According to Runyan, Littler already had a great swing by then. And, Runyan said, Littler knew why.

“Gene Littler was much more knowledgeable about golf than his quiet disposition would lead one to believe,” Runyan said. “He was a superstar before I met him. So I just acted as his eyes. I simply told him if he was deviating from his normal swing pattern and how he was deviating.”

For the 1958 season, Littler had changed to a stronger grip, trying to gain more distance off the tee. It hadn’t worked and Littler went back to Runyan for help.

The results were immediate. According to Runyan, Littler had been averaging 240-245 yards with his driver. That average quickly jumped to 265-268. Runyan, 80 years old and still teaching, is very precise in his memory on this.

“Now, for at least 40 holes in every 72-hole tournament, he was approaching the greens with two clubs’ more loft,” Runyan said. “We know what kind of an advantage that is.”

In 1959, Littler won five tournaments. Two years after that, he beat Sanders at Oakland Hills for his only major championship victory.

He had at least two other excellent opportunities in major tournaments. At the 1970 Masters, he shot 74 to Billy Casper’s 69 in an 18-hole playoff. In 1977, at 46, he squandered a five-stroke lead with nine holes to play at Pebble Beach and lost the PGA to 27-year-old Lanny Wadkins on the third hole of sudden death.

That loss apparently still hurts, although Littler insists it doesn’t. Whatever the case, it’s painful to hear him talk about it.

On the first playoff hole, Wadkins rammed in a long putt for par that probably would have rolled off the green if it hadn’t slam-dunked into the cup. Pfft, is Littler’s description of how the putt sounded.

On the second playoff hole, Wadkins drove into drought-dry rough. He got a free drop onto the fairway because his ball had landed in an earth crack. Then he hooked his second shot toward the out-of-bounds stakes.

Jack Nicklaus later told Littler that a friend had told him Wadkins’ ball was heading out of bounds until it hit a rock and jumped over a greenside bunker, onto the putting surface.

“Nobody ever said how lucky he was on that hole,” Littler said. “And that kind of bothered me. He even never said anything about it. He just accepts he won the tournament like he was supposed to. That bothered me a little bit, too.”

Doug Sanders said he has never heard Gene Littler say anything derogatory about anyone. Littler’s small displeasure with Wadkins is about as nasty as it gets. And the last impression Littler wants to leave is that he’s pleading a case for people to think he should have won the tournament.

“There is no case,” he said.

Many in golf’s younger generation remember Littler only for his “collapse” against Wadkins. And nobody has ever been harder on Littler than himself. Maybe he did have an enemy. Maybe it was himself.

“Had he been a little less pessimistic about all of his successes, he could have been a superstar of superstars,” Runyan says.

Even Littler once admitted: “I was always my own worst critic. I never gave myself enough credit. If I could change anything, I’d change my attitude.”

Littler never sought the kind of publicity that helped turn Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player into golf’s “Big Three” in the ‘60s.

“First of all, he didn’t belong in that sort of propaganda group,” Peter Thomson said. “But I think that was all right with Gene. He wouldn’t have stood that kind of publicity and the responsibility that goes with it. He wanted to resume his private life when he was through playing for the day.”

And it was Littler’s devotion to his family that probably saved his life. In March of 1972, he was at home between tournaments. After repeated calls to the family doctor, Shirley Littler finally got her husband an appointment for a routine check-up.

The doctor found a small lump under Littler’s left armpit and sent Littler to another doctor, whose resultant biopsy confirmed everybody’s worst fears.

“I could have waited until next year for the routine physical,” Littler said. “If I had, I would have been gone.”

Instead, the April operation was a success. Even so, nerve damage left Littler with a temporarily paralyzed left arm.

Rehabilitation began with a 1-pound dumbbell.

“Cutest little thing,” Littler said. “I’d lay it down and struggle to get that sucker off the table. At first I could not move it. It just would not go.”

Soon, though, the nerves regenerated to the point where Littler could swim. Sort of. The idea was to build up the muscles that were left around the region where surgeons had removed the cancerous tissue. Whenever he waded into the pool, Shirley was terrified.

“I thought he was going to drown,” she said. “It scared the daylights out of me.”

Next came tennis. Littler had to strap his left arm to his body before he could go out and hit balls with Curt.

Said Runyan: “All I know is he paid a terrible price to regain the strength on his left side.”

The first time Littler tried to hit golf balls was ugly.

“Shanked every one,” he said.

But it got better. All the experts had always insisted that golf was a left-sided game. “We found out that’s not true,” Littler said.

His family rallied behind him.

“It was a rich time,” Shirley Littler said. “You can really get wonderful times out of hard times.”

And Littler had a perfect excuse to be harder on himself than ever before. It was the only way he was going to fully recover.

Six months after the operation, Littler packed his golf bag, flew to the Orient and finished in the top 10 at the Japanese Masters. Ten months after that, he won in St. Louis.

As they say in golf, ho-hum.

Melanoma, the kind of cancer Littler had, spreads fast. It typically comes from a pigmented mole and may spread anywhere. In Littler’s case, doctors never found the primary source. He worried about that for a long while. But it has been 16 years now.

“I think it’s gone,” Littler said.

The metronome that is his golf swing remains. Only he really knows the cost of the survival.

“Gene would never tell you about what he had to go through unless you asked,” Art Wall said.

But when Wall underwent rotator cuff surgery at Los Angeles’ Centinela Hospital Medical Center in 1983, Littler called to see how he was doing. When a family tragedy jarred Wall’s personal life, Littler called to offer condolences.

Ho-hum again in February 1984, when Littler fell off a ladder in his Rancho Santa Fe garage and broke his left arm. He had been installing a clutch in one of his antique cars. He wound up having a 4-inch steel plate and nine screws installed in his arm.

“Worst thing I ever did,” Littler said. “My short game completely disintegrated.”

He didn’t rejoin the seniors tour until early August that year but still won $131,122, good for ninth on the list. Things got better when doctors finally removed the plate. He won $200,981 in 1985 and $293,195 last year, finishing eighth on the money list. The most he had ever made on the regular tour was $182,883, fifth place, in 1975.

Bruce Devlin said that Littler is swinging as well now as he did 30 years ago.

“If you put a composite together of all the swings that people think are great, you’re going to end up with Littler’s swing,” he said. “It’s that simple. It’s so simply great there’s not too much you can say about it.”

Not long ago Littler found himself away from home without any clean golf clothes. Always before, he had gone back in time for his wife to replenish the supply. But now he found he needed to be told how to operate a washing machine.

“How long does this thing go?” he asked.

“Thirty minutes,” was the reply.

Littler looked for his watch, then realized that he had left it in his pants, which were now churning around inside the machine.

Fortunately, everything came out in the wash. Including the watch.

It had taken a licking and kept on ticking. Gene Littler knows how that works.