Golf’s Not on Par With Other Sports

OK, I’ve had it with Golf. That does it.

When a guy winning his first tournament ever wins the PGA, it’s time to put out the lights and lock up.

The mob has taken over the palace. The rabble is running the country. It’s anarchy out there.

Maidens don’t win the Kentucky Derby. Rookies don’t bat .400, win the Triple Crown. Pugs don’t make their first winning fight the heavyweight title.

Only Golf is nonchalant about its top honors. Golf doesn’t care who it lets in.

Do you realize that since 1963, four guys who won the U.S. Open were winning their first tournament ever?

Even before that, it was a pushover. Sam Parks Jr. in 1935, Tony Manero in 1936, and Julius Boros in 1952 were winning their first tournaments ever. Golf is about as democratic as a waterfront saloon. Sports is supposed to have royalty. Players are supposed to have titles. Here, high society is for butlers and maids.

The PGA was supposed to be the last bastion of the Old Guard in the great game. This venerable tournament was never won by a Who’s He? of the game but a Who’s Who.

Not anymore. Another standard lowered. Another tradition breached.

I’m sure Jeff Sluman is good to his mother, I’m sure he pays his taxes and votes and, for all I know, puts splints on butterflies but, hey!, he has won only one tournament in his life and it’s a major and it’s a tournament Arnold Palmer, who won 61 tournaments in his life, never won. It’s a tournament Tom Watson, who won 32 tournaments in his life, never won. Tell me that’s fair.

Golf isn’t fair. “Unknown Wins Open” is almost a stock headline. Someday, a guy in a mask is going to win that tournament. But the PGA, historically, did its best to keep the riffraff out. The only player winning his first professional tournament at the PGA was Lionel Hebert and that was in the days of the match-play format.

As for the rest, the PGA has the Hagens, Hogans, Sneads, Nelsons, Sarazens, Nicklauses, Players and Trevinos on its trophy. The living legends of the game. Now, Jeff Sluman.

It used to be the conceit here that one of the reasons for the defections of the U.S. Open, one of the reasons for its eccentric winners was that the United States Golf Assn. took to tricking up its Open courses too much. The game became a lottery. The USGA seemed to be producing an annual mystery guest winner because its efforts at course management seemed to reward the lucky rather than the skillful.

The PGA leaned more to the British Open approach. Let them play the same course their ancestors played. If they all shot 62, well, the state of the art has advanced, so what? The Brits didn’t plant trees, grow hip-high rough, wax the greens. And they always had a satisfactory winner. Nobody won the British Open the first time out.

The PGA certainly didn’t trick up the Oak Tree course in Edmond, Okla., last week. There weren’t patches of barbed-wire rough, the greens seemed to be made out of grass, not glass, and usually, you could see what you were aiming at. It wasn’t like a U.S. Open course where a guy’s head always seems to be stuck in a tree while he is swinging or, when a guy goes into a bunker, you can only see his hat.

It was a Pete Dye course, which means you wouldn’t know when you walked or whether you were on a golf course or the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, whether to say, “Where’s the first tee?” or “Where’s the dining car?” Or even, “What time does this train get to Tulsa?” Jesse James would have tried to rob it.

It was a good, game course. I like fighters who get up, teams that come back and generals who say, “Surrender, hell!” The Oak Tree course, slammed up against the ropes in the first two rounds, came back to land a few haymakers before the week was out. When the wind blows, it can stand toe-to-toe with anybody. When the wind doesn’t blow, it’s Chuck Wepner. It’s fighting in its own blood.

It wasn’t the course that shook the big guys out and shook the ribbon clerks in. It was the malady endemic in the great game today--inconsistency. Glaring inconsistency.

Do you realize Jeff Sluman is the seventh first-time winner in the last seven PGA Tour events? That the game has produced the following “champions” in the past two months: Jim Benepe, Tom Sieckmann, Blaine McAllister, Mark Brooks, Jodie Mudd and Scott Verplank? And now Jeff Sluman? Gimme a break!

The worst part of it is, these guys can’t seem to remember how they did it. They win a tournament one week and they can’t make the cut the next and, in a year or so, when their eligibility runs out, they’re back cleaning clubs.

Andy Warhol would have understood. Everybody on tour gets famous for a few minutes, then disappears.

Jeff Sluman may be made of sturdier stuff. That would be nice. After all, Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino won a major the first time out and went on to become legendary. Sluman, who looks like a cross between Mickey Rooney and Huckleberry Finn--Andy Hardy Goes To The Open--may not be just another one of those flippy wristed college kids (as Tommy Bolt calls them) who found a four-day groove and played unconscious golf to the victory stand.

He did have the good grace to say, as he was handed the cup, “It’s unbelievable to me my name is going to go on there with the Gary Players and the Ben Hogans and Walter Hagens.”

A lot of other kids would have said, “Who’s Walter Hagen?”