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Langer Had Shaky Start on the Greens

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What’s the most terrifying shot in golf? The 3-iron out of a fairway trap to a guarded green? The half-buried lie in the gorse at Lytham with the wind blowing in off the Irish Sea?

Nah. Piece of cake.

What’s the scariest spot on earth? The tip of South America with the gales howling as you round the cape in seas as high as the mast? A room in a castle in the Transylvanian Alps where the resident count has blue lips and no eyes and the wolves are baying at the moon?

A day at the beach.

The toughest shot in golf is the 7-foot downhill putt for a) the championship, b) the cut, or c) the whole $100 Nassau when you only have $20 in your pocket.

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The scariest spot on earth can be the 18th green at Riviera when you know you need a 3 to keep your playing card or maybe a 4 for $180,000. Dracula would be a pleasure. Doubling the cape would be like a Sunday sail off Montauk.

Do you think the most expensive real estate in the world is downtown Dallas or upper Park Avenue?

What about the 4 feet between you and the hole when the difference between first money and second can balance out to $50,000 a front foot? You could buy the Empire State Building at those prices.

You can see where the putt is one of life’s little horror stories. Guys standing over short ones for all the money might sell their soul to the devil to hear it go plunk in the bottom of the cup.

It was Ben Hogan himself who once said, “They ought to call one game golf and putting something else.”

It’s not a sport, it’s a curse. Sometimes, you negotiate 520 yards in 2 shots--and then it takes you 3 to negotiate the last 15 feet. Golfers fear lightning and a downhill putt with equal dread.

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Which is why a lot of us looked at each other wisely and nodded our heads when we got a look at the West German golfer, Bernhard Langer, practicing on a green here at the Nissan Los Angeles Open the other day.

There’s no right way to putt. Any way that gets it in the hole is right. You can go at it cross-handed, one-handed. You can close one eye, close both eyes. You can use the overlap grip, the reverse overlap, you can hold the putter like a chicken or a sword.

But when we saw Bernhard grip his putter firmly in his left hand and then place part of his right hand not only atop the putter but onto his left wrist, we knew exactly what Bernhard was coming from, what he was going through. Next stop, a straitjacket.

Sam Snead called them “the yips.” The diabolical sensation you get when the nerves desert you, when the putter becomes a live snake, the ball is laughing at you and you have to steel yourself so you won’t start screaming as you take the blade back. Actors call it flop sweat. Fear of failure in its worst form.

All golfers get it. It’s as nearly incurable as leprosy. You have to learn to live with it. Some can’t. Putting has ruined more careers than booze.

You only notice a guy can’t putt when the rest of his game is so gorgeous it makes the putting look even worse than it is. Like a beautiful woman wearing a flour-sack dress.

The great ones get noticed. Sam Snead was a very good putter. So was Hogan. But the rest of their game was so pretty and precise that, you figure the putting should be, too.

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Hogan hardly ever had a putt of more than 6 feet. Toward the end of his career, he had to lag them. You couldn’t bear to look. It was like watching a great Shakespearean actor blow his lines.

Bernhard Langer is no Hogan, but he’s one of the great strikers of the ball in the world today. To get to be a professional golfer at all from a standing start in Anhausen, West Germany, is a remarkable achievement all its own. To get to be a winner of the Masters strains credulity. More people in Germany know the Einstein Theory than know golf.

He had no golf books to help him. Teachers were mediocre, competition was non-existent. Just finding a golf course was an adventure. Augsburg was not Palm Springs. West Germany had parade grounds, not golf courses.

And yet, Bernhard Langer became, tee to green, one of the world’s great players. You knew that because people were saying early on, “If he could only putt.”

Most young golfers come out on Tour with the ability to putt. At their age, putting looks easy.

Putting anxiety usually comes with age. Bernhard joined the Tour with it. Bernhard came into the game with the yips. He reversed the normal order of things. The rest of his game was so impeccable that, if you watched his putter only, you would have guessed a 45-year-old was at the shaft, not a 21-year-old.

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Bernhard gradually became a good, then an excellent putter, but it’s fair to say that, had he come out on Tour right away with the putting confidence of the average American teen-age golfer, he might have doubled the 29 international tournaments victories he had, to say nothing of the 2 on the U.S. Tour.

He played, as you might imagine, a methodical, if not mechanical, highly precise game. Bernhard walks a course with a pedometer and a notebook. He knows a course so well when he tees it up that he could play it in the dark.

But it’s not distance that is critical in putting. It’s direction. And speed. It’s why it’s the second game.

Players plagued with the putting hex try everything. Hypnosis, voodoo, new putters, old putters, astrology, psychiatry, new diet, even prayer. There is very little doubt the resurgence of born-again religion on the Tour owes its existence to the evidence of God’s wrath that is the 7-foot, 2-break putt. There are no atheists on putting greens, either--the foxholes of golf.

So, when the wise guys of golf see Bernhard clutching his left wrist over a short putt, they figure he needs Dr. Freud.

Bernhard, who finished second in 2 British Opens and third in another, feels he can tough his way past this graveyard, too.

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“I don’t know whether my putting only seems worse compared to the rest of my game or whether it only seems bad,” he said. “I don’t have many 3-putt greens, after all. And there is a matter of luck. After all, we’re not putting on pool tables out here.

“I just try not to separate putting from the rest of the game. I try to treat a putt as just another shot.”

Putting just another shot? Oh, sure. And a flood is just another leak. And an ace just another card.

If Bernhard Langer can convince himself a putt is just another shot, he may win so many British Opens, Whitehall will break off diplomatic relations with Germany again and demand, “Who won the war, anyway?”

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