Vivid Green Is Color of Money

His last name is Green, his favorite color is blue, and he thinks the importance attached to golf’s four major championships is a “figment of the media’s imagination, Jack Nicklaus’ imagination and a few other golfers.”

His first name is not Hubert. It’s Ken. But he is not a doll. Although he does get wound up. Last year he broke five clubs. On the course.

Ken Green is not a clone either. Or anything else you might expect off the PGA’s sanitized conveyor belt, which for years has threatened to turn professional golf into Blondes-R-Us.

He wears his glasses thick, his dark hair short, his baggy pants pleated and his heart on his sleeve.

He speaks his mind when asked. And he speaks his mind when not asked.

He is 30 and the winner of more than a million dollars worldwide in 1988, a year in which he finished first in eagles, fifth in putting, 11th in scoring and fourth on the PGA money list.

He is part Tommy Bolt, part Mac O’Grady and part Thomas Paine, the early American moralist and author of Common Sense who once said, “Character is much easier kept than recovered.”

But mostly Green is himself.

“Ken Green,” says Paul Azinger, the PGA’s Player of the Year in 1987, “is Ken Green.

“A lot of guys are one way in a practice round and another way on camera. Ken Green is the same way. And he doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”

He is arguably the hottest golfer in the world, Curtis Strange notwithstanding, although a touch of flu and a 2-week layoff cooled him off Thursday in the first round of the MONY Tournament of Champions at La Costa, where he shot 77.

Green is never far in spirit from his Danbury, Conn., home. His regular caddie, Joe LaCava, from nearby Newtown, is his cousin. Before that, his caddie for 2 1/2 years was his sister, Shelly, who used to say you could tell her apart from the other bag-toters because of the “blue eye-liner.”

Green’s initial reaction to Augusta National, golf’s Sistine Chapel, was as unpredictable as his temper.

After firing a first-round 68 to share the early lead at the 1986 Masters, he said: “I am not impressed with Magnolia Lane.”

This, of course, was first-degree blasphemy. It is now almost 3 years later, but he refuses to back off.

“There are a lot more drives in Connecticut that are a helluva lot more prettier than Magnolia Lane was,” he said Wednesday. “That’s my honest opinion. I will tell you my honest opinion. I get a lot of abuse sometimes for the things I say. But that’s the way it is.

“My feeling is that if somebody watches me for 18 holes, they’re going to talk about that when they go home. Some people are going to enjoy what I do, they’re going to enjoy the golf, they’re going to enjoy my comments, they’re going to enjoy me flipping the ball around or the club around. Other people are going to hate it, and they’re going to go home and tell all their friends what a terrible young man I am.”

Early this week at La Costa, they threw a press conference for Arnold Palmer, a man the other players still refer to as “The King.” Palmer benignly held court on subjects ranging from “putting,” “course conditions” and “confidence” to the recent dominance over Americans by the Europeans in Ryder Cup play.

“The Europeans,” Palmer said, “have worked a little harder.”

Green, one of the hardest-working American golfers, rankled.

“I think that’s a crock,” he said of Palmer’s assertion. “The thing going on right now about the Europeans knowing how to win or working harder or wanting to win versus Americans is such a crock.

“First of all, I never knew you could compare players on the basis of alternate shot or best ball (the Ryder format). I don’t believe that’s how you determine who the best players in the world are.

“Maybe this is Arnold’s way or Jack’s way to give us (the Americans) a little push to play better. But it’s a crock.”

So, too, says Green, is the criticism leveled at the U.S. tour for its failure to produce a dominant player. Strange, he points out, has won the money title 3 of the last 4 years.

“What do they expect?” Green asks. “Four out of four? Jack never did that. What Curtis has done should shut everybody up. But it hasn’t.”

Let’s quickly review the bidding here: Magnolia Lane is unimpressive. Arnold Palmer’s proclamations on European golfers are a crock. Female caddies are all right. Breaking clubs is honest emotion. And the majors are a figment of Jack Nicklaus’ imagination.

“We’re in a world right now where, as golfers go, supposedly there’s no one out there that has a personality or any color,” Green says. “Then, if you find someone that’s a little radical, he gets criticized for being radical. It’s a no-win situation.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the golf world eyes Green warily. The feeling is mutual. He is perched on the precipice of their establishment, and he isn’t sure whether the next step is up or down.

“We’re incredibly spoiled,” he says of professional golfers, too many of whom get bent out of shape when the courtesy car and keys aren’t waiting at the airport each week.

Green rented his car this week.

“They ought to give the courtesy cars to the guys who just came out of the qualifying school,” he says. “Those are the guys who need to save 200 bucks.”

Is Ken Green good for golf?

“I don’t know,” Azinger says. “I wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, he’s definitely good for golf.’ I wouldn’t say he’s terrible for golf either.”

Fact is, the golfing establishment hasn’t quite figured out what to make of Ken Green. He is consistent in his ability to defy prediction.

“Ken Green is as unpredictable as the weather,” Azinger says.

But, Azinger adds, Green is immensely talented. Long enough off the tee to rank 27th among the tour’s drivers. Delicate enough around the greens to have finished 13th in sand saves and second last year in the overall category that combines all the tour’s statistical departments.

And confident enough now to finish first regularly.

“He could win seven tournaments out here this year,” Azinger says matter-of-factly.

It’s even fun to watch Green practice. On the chipping green, he will wedge a handful of balls near the cup. Then, without picking them up, he will feather the balls back into the rough 10 yards away, taking a full swing that touches nothing but the ball, which arcs softly before plopping back into the long grass.

Azinger remembers the days when he used to play practice rounds with Green and Green’s good friend, Mark Calcavecchia. Before teeing off, Calcavecchia and Green would stand around dreaming up wild wagers. Like placing a ball on top of a stake 3 feet off the ground and laying 7-1 odds on $10 they could chip it into a bucket 40 feet away.

“Innovative,” Azinger said. “They’ve got imaginations. They didn’t always wedge it into the bucket. But that’s just the way they were, always making crazy bets. But paying up when they lost.”

“Nothing he (Green) does surprises me,” LaCava says. “But he’s great to caddie for. I’d caddie for him over anybody.”

CBS-TV golf announcer Gary McCord nicknamed Green “Flipper” when Green started nonchalantly tossing his putter to LaCava after making putts. The two have perfected their act to the point where Green doesn’t even look for LaCava anymore before flipping the putter behind his back or over his shoulder. LaCava says he hasn’t dropped one yet during a tournament.

“Good hands people,” Green says.

Green won his first 1988 tournament last September, the Canadian Open. The following week in Milwaukee, he shot a 61 on Saturday, equaling the lowest round on tour all year, and eventually won by six strokes. This despite chest pains and dizziness on Sunday that almost forced him to withdraw.

“On about the sixth hole, he turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to finish this thing,’ ” LaCava said. “I told him, ‘You’d better.’ ”

Green did. A cardiologist later diagnosed the problem as a pinched nerve or muscle spasms.

So Green continued playing. Two weeks after Milwaukee, he finished sixth at the B.C. Open. Then second at Pensacola. Then 12th at the Walt Disney. Then fourth at Tucson. Then third at Nabisco.

Four times in 1988, Green earned 6-figure paychecks. Then he jetted to Japan, where he won another $221,000 by finishing first in something called the Dunlop Phoenix. His U.S. tour earnings in 1988 were $779,180. The victory in Japan pushed him over the million-dollar mark, an accomplishment obscured when Strange became the first player to make more than a million in one year on the U.S. tour.

“It was an incredible stretch,” Green says. “Yet I think I should have won six tournaments instead of three.”

All this from a golfer who failed twice to get his players card and had to enroll in the PGA’s qualifying school three more times before graduating for good in 1985.

In 1984, Green finished 156th on the money list with earnings of $20,160. To put that in perspective, LaCava made almost three times that much carrying Green’s bag in 1988.

“1984 was probably my nightmare,” Green says. “I got to know Freddie (Nightmare on Elm Street) Krueger in 1984. It was scary. Everything was a disaster. My personal life was splitso. My golf was psycho. It was just a combination of everything.”

Golf, his first love, was no longer fun. But he decided he would give it one more shot.

“Panics, in some cases, have their uses,” Thomas Paine once wrote. “They produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before.”

In 1985 Green bounced back to win $151,355 and the first of his four PGA Tour titles, the Buick Open.

In 1986, he found Ellen Targett, a woman with common sense and the one who would soon become his second wife. They had known each other in high school, but hadn’t connected then.

“She gets a ton of credit from me,” Green says. “If you want to have a good life on tour, you’ve got to have a good wife. It was like in the movies when you fall so much in love with somebody that it makes such a difference. It’s like Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour all over. But it’s real.”

So are the dollars they’re paying him to play a sport that most others pay their own money to play when they aren’t working. He is Green without envy.

“People forget how lucky we are, other golfers forget how lucky we are,” Green says. “It can be difficult out here. And you can bitch and moan. But a day doesn’t go by out here where I don’t think I’m a lucky person.”