Lopez Minus Part-Time Caddy Today : Husband Ray Knight Goes Home After Having Problems at Rancho Mirage

Nancy Lopez won’t have her part-time caddy with her this weekend at Rancho Park and it’s a mixed blessing.

Lopez is the defending champion of the 54-hole AI Star/Centinela Hospital golf tournament that begins today.

Her caddy, Ray Knight, a retired major league baseball player, also happens to be her husband.

“I was going to fire him at the Dinah Shore tournament,” said Lopez, laughing. “We got into it one day. I said, ‘Don’t caddy for me. Go home. Don’t even watch me play tomorrow.’ ”

It’s not unusual for husbands and wives to bicker, even on a golf course. Seldom, however, does a husband serve as caddy for a player as prominent as Lopez.

“He felt so bad. He gave me wrong pin placements one day,” Lopez said. “The placements were for the first and second holes, and we were playing 10 and 11.

“That was all right, but later on he added wrong and stopped me when I took the club back. Otherwise he did a good job. I appreciate his lending himself out that way.

“I never thought he’d caddy for me, but I wanted him to so he’d stop asking, ‘Why did you hit that shot in a bunker?’

“He realized that when you’re working out there, you’re trying to make your best effort. Sometimes you have to guess about a shot. He realized how tough it was to caddy, and he said if he did it again he’d try to do a good job.”

Lopez recalls that during the Dinah Shore tournament at Rancho Mirage, she hit what she thought was a good five-iron shot from the rough although it landed 25 feet short of the green.

However, Knight asked her why she didn’t hit a four-iron.

“I said, ‘How can you say that? If you were on the other side of the ropes, you would have been happy with that shot.’ I was offended by everything he said and he was offended by everything I said. So it didn’t work very well.”

Lopez, a member of the LPGA Hall of Fame while still an active player, hasn’t won a tour event this year. However, except for her putting, she’s happy with the way she’s playing. She has finished second twice and third once and is second on the money-winning list, earning $126,862.

Lopez, who has 39 career victories, won an astounding nine tournaments, including a record five in a row, in her second year on the tour in 1978.

She believes that run inspired other female golfers to improve their game.

“Everybody kind of grew together and their games got better and the tour got tougher,” Lopez said. “The caliber of golf now isn’t what it was 11 years ago. The girls coming out now have gone through college and have gotten their experience in amateur golf and are really ready to play the tour.

“In other years, girls who had graduated from high school came out and they weren’t mentally ready for the tour. Now the players have experience before they get out here and that’s why it’s tougher to win week after week.”

Lopez says she plans to play full time until her oldest daughter, Ashley Marie, begins school. Then, she says she’ll cut back her schedule to about 15 tournaments. “I want to win, especially when I’m not with my family. They’re home (in Albany, Ga.) now,” Lopez said. “I feel if I don’t play my best golf I’m wasting my time.”

It has been written that the LPGA tour is struggling for its own identity inasmuch as the PGA Tour is flourishing and the Senior Tour has become increasingly popular.

More television exposure would help the women’s tour, but Lopez said there’s more to it than that.

“I hope it (TV exposure) will get better,” Lopez said. “For so many years we’ve tried to get women’s golf on television, but they’ve said the ratings aren’t good.

“They just don’t spend the money to do up close and personals like they used to. People want personalities brought to them in their homes, not just golf.”

Lopez said that the players are now being urged by the Bill Blue, the new commissioner, to promote the tour the way established stars such as Lopez have done in the past.

“They always compare women’s golf to men’s golf. They should compare women’s personalities to men’s personalities on both tours,” Lopez said. “I guarantee whoever plays with the women (in pro-ams) has more fun playing with the women they than do with the men.

“I think the girls are friendlier. They’re willing to help the amateurs who come out, give them a little tip, or something.”

She said the men do that to a certain extent but are more restrained.

“I think women feel they can show emotion more than men do and they’re a little warmer than men are,” Lopez said. “I know I’ll go up and touch some man and say, ‘What a great putt.’ I don’t think the men will do that. Plus, I think they like to be kissed once in a while on the cheek.”

Patti Rizzo had a notion that the LPGA tour would be a piece of cake. After all, she almost won a tour event as an amateur in 1981, losing in a playoff.

But when she joined the tour in 1982, she discovered that there was a lot of stress and pressure in the week-to-week grind. Even though she was named rookie of the year, she said she really didn’t play that well.

She’s confident now, and that confidence came from winning three of the last six tournaments in Japan.

“I concentrate better there than I do here,” she said. “There are a lot less distractions (here). I’m confident from the time I get off the plane. When I came back here, I was going to be the new Patti, playing with the same confidence that I had in Japan.”

The “new Patti” finished fourth in a tournament in Phoenix, wound up 15th at the Dinah Shore after an opening round of 77 and then won the Red Robin Kyocera Inamori tournament last week in Poway, Calif., her fourth career victory.

Although she said she isn’t a drinker, she acknowledged that she had too much fun and too many mai tais in Hawaii at the outset of the tour and missed the cut in two tournaments.

Now she’s determined to play to the expectations everybody had for her when she first joined the tour.

“There were a lot of expectations, from myself and the press. It was kind of like a Scott Verplank (the last amateur to win a PGA Tour event) story,” she said.

Golf Notes

The total purse for the tournament is $450,000 with the winner earning $67,500. . . . USC’s Terri Thompson, a freshman from Savannah, Ga., qualified for the tournament as an amateur. . . . USC will play host to the Pacific 10 Conference women’s championship golf tournament April 23-25 at Annandale Country Club.