Hatalsky Upheld Area Honor in ’88

You think San Diego’s football players had a tough year in 1988?

Certainly, neither the Chargers nor San Diego State care to have their exploits etched in the community’s collective memory banks for very long.

However, I give you a group of area athletes who rather quietly and literally disappeared from the leader boards in their sport in 1988.

Professional golfers.

I came to this conclusion upon arriving at La Costa Friday to view the second round of the MONY Tournament of Champions. Being in a provincial mood, I scanned the pairings sheet for some of the familiar area names I have followed in the past.

I did not find, in alphabetical order . . .

Lennie Clements, whose best 1988 finish was a tie for eighth in the Hartford Open.

Ernie Gonzalez, whose best finish was a tie for 41st in the Hawaiian Open.

Gary McCord, whose best finish was a tie for 14th in the Texas Open.

Mark O’Meara, whose best finishes were second-place ties in the Panasonic of Las Vegas and the Tucson Open. (Close, but no invite to La Costa.)

Victor Regalado, whose best finish was a tie for 49th at the Centel tournament in Tallahassee, Fla., although he entered only six tournaments.

Jack Renner, whose best finish was a tie for seventh in the Buick Open.

Scott Simpson, whose best finish was a tie for sixth in the U.S. Open.

Craig Stadler, whose best finish was third in the Masters.

Indeed, Simpson and Stadler made their best runs in majors, coincidentally, tournaments they had previously won. And O’Meara had the best year in terms of consistency with earnings of $438,310, a modest 22nd on the money list.

Obviously, this was far from a banner year for what should be one of the great golf areas in the world. Players from Colorado, Wyoming, Ohio, Kentucky and Oklahoma--even one born in Paris--won in 1988. Those places have skiing and football and horse racing and perfume. So what do they need with golf?

Someone, of course, had to salvage some honor for San Diego golf, and there were two such someones.

Bill Glasson, a Fresno native who now lives in Oceanside, won the B.C. Open and the Centel. He is a late-coming transplant, but this was a year San Diego had to take pride in whatever it got from whomever got it when it came to professional golf.

And then there was Morris Hatalsky, born in San Diego and educated at San Diego High School and USIU. Hatalsky gave San Diego a victory in the Kemper Open, but there’s even a catch here. Hatalsky now lives in Ormond Beach, Fla.

“I get a little razzing from people saying I’ve disowned San Diego, and that’s far from true,” Hatalsky said. “It’s like the old saying, ‘You can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the boy.’ A lot of great things have happened to me here. When I come home, I like to just drive around and reflect.”

One of the great things was that he met his wife Tracy at USIU. He might not have won the Kemper had it not been for Tracy.

He had missed three consecutive cuts, and he was ready for a break.

“My game was absolutely shot,” he said, “and my attitude wasn’t very good. I went home and I was thinking of taking some time off to regroup. My wife said, ‘No, no, no. You have to go play.’ ”

So Hatalsky recruited a neighbor, former baseball player Tim Foli, as his caddy and headed for the Kemper.

“We had a great week together,” he said, “and everything fell into place.”

Hatalsky shot 68, 66, 68, 72 and beat Tom Kite on the second hole of a playoff.

This was a nice highlight in a year that did not start on the most uplifting note. Hatalsky was skiing about this time last year when he took a tumble in Beaver Creek, Colo., and broke his left thumb.

Now there are ailments a golfer can play through, a bad back likely being the most painful. But there is no way he can grip a golf club with a fractured thumb.

“I skied the rest of the week,” he said, “but it knocked me out of golf for 6 weeks.”

Forget the notion that this fellow has disowned San Diego. He attempted to come back, prematurely perhaps, for the Shearson Lehman Hutton Andy Williams Open, a tournament that has disowned San Diego in its name, and failed to make the cut.

So much for happy homecomings.

Hatalsky gets another homecoming this week. La Costa, in a sense, was home to him for a summer while he was at USIU.

“I worked here on the golf course,” he said. “I was fixing bunkers, picking up range balls, working in the bag room, caddying. Doing all that stuff.”

He even spent one Tournament of Champions working on the communications desk.

And now he is back for the third time as a player in the Tournament of Champions. His 36-hole score of 148 is a bit off the pace, but there is no cut for this group. This is the PGA’s All-Star game, and these guys go the distance.

Ormond Beach, after all, is really only borrowing Morris Hatalsky. San Diego needed all the champions it could claim from the 1988 PGA Tour.