U. S. Open Cut Leaves No Scars : Jon Fiedler Failed to Qualify for Event’s Final Rounds but Memories Are All Fond

Please excuse Jon Fiedler for a while if his mind seems to wander as he stands at the Las Posas Country Club practice range, giving lessons to one of those guys who swings a golf club like he’s harvesting wheat.

When Fiedler, the assistant pro at Las Posas, swings a club these days--or shows someone else how to--he does not gaze down onto the field and see a practice range. He sees Oak Hill Country Club. He does not see an insurance salesman named Ed standing beside him, he sees Lee Trevino. Or Tom Watson.

Fiedler sees and feels the United States Open, one of the most prestigious golf tournaments in the world. He played in it last week, and he hasn’t quite gotten around to hanging up the jacket of joy that he wore for a week.

“I might be like this for about six months,” Fiedler said Wednesday, his second day back at the Camarillo course. “I’ll think about what I did, and what I might have done. I’ll remember situations, certain holes, certain shots.

“Back at the range here at Las Posas, I look out and imagine it all, all the situations I was in back at the Open. I’m thinking about every bad shot I hit, and a lot of the very good ones that I hit.

“I guess I’ll always think about it.”

For the record, the performance in Rochester, N.Y., was not the best example of high-caliber golf that the former USC star has displayed. He began with a round of 77 and, after a double bogey on the first hole the next day, he carded a second-round 83 and missed the cut.

Still, the memories are good ones.

“I played a practice round with Trevino and Watson three days before the tournament, and what a thrill it was,” he said. “The crowd was fantastic. It was like playing in a final-round pairing. It was the biggest crowd I had ever had following me. Of course, maybe some of those people were following Trevino or Watson.”

Fiedler laughed when he said that. But despite being disappointed with his scores, he wants it known that there is nothing funny about qualifying for, then playing in, the U. S. Open.

“Overall, the feeling was great,” he said. “Going in I expected fully to make the cut and play some good golf. I’m a good golfer. I don’t shoot 83s. It wasn’t luck that I got into the U. S. Open. I had to beat a lot of very good golfers in qualifying to make it.

“But all in all, the memories are good ones. After the second round a little kid came up to me and asked for my autograph. I told him I had just shot an 83 and he said, ‘I don’t care. You’re a pro golfer.’ It made me feel pretty good. But I felt like signing Ben Crenshaw’s name or Hal Sutton’s name or any other blond golfer like me who was doing well.”

The problem, Fiedler said, came off the tee. He is a power golfer who can hit the ball out of sight. But on the tight, narrow fairways and scrubby rough of Oak Hill, hitting the fairways was a necessity. Fiedler didn’t visit too many of them.

“If I could change anything about that week, I would have gotten there sooner and done a better job of figuring out the course,” he said. “I would have adjusted off the tee just a bit, maybe sacrificing some distance for a little more accuracy.

“If I had had more time for preparation, I think I could have cut back on my swing and kept the ball in the fairway more. That made all the difference. I putted really well and still shot those high scores, so you can see just how bad I was hitting it off the tee.”

Fiedler, an Air Force brat, learned the game in Japan at age 13. His father, a colonel who is now retired, and his father’s friends--and even complete strangers--worked with Fiedler until he began to beat them.

His parents, who live in Oxnard, made the trip to Rochester last week to watch their son. That, Fiedler said, was perhaps the highlight of it all.

“Having them there to watch me was really great,” he said. “I talked with them as I played and just couldn’t help looking at them during the rounds. My dad was proud of me, and you could see that.

“It was nice to have them back there to see it. I felt like I was giving something back to them after all the time they gave to me.”