Tournament of Champions : Waking Up Behind Bars : Golf: Greg Twiggs, the 1989 Shearson Lehman Hutton winner, says a scrape with the law last month is going to turn his life around.

Greg Twiggs sat in a jail cell for eight lonely hours last month, staring at three bare walls surrounding him and the steel bars in front of him, wondering what was going on in the outside world.

The telephone, he knew, would be ringing in his hotel room. There probably were security guards storming through the door making sure he was all right. And Lord only knows what PGA officials were doing.

His tee time for the final round of the JC Penney Classic in Largo, Fla., had been set for 8:48 that morning.

The last time he asked one of the guards, it was approaching noon.

Oh, man, was he ever in trouble now.

He burrowed his head into his hands, trying to figure out how a year that could start off so wonderfully--giving him illusions that he was going to be a star on this PGA Tour--could skid into 10 months of problem after problem.

He laughed softly to himself, thinking back to the day when he came so close to giving up this stupid game of golf for a job driving a beer truck.

Hell, now even that was out of the question. After you crash into a parked car at 2:30 in the morning, register a .189 blood-alcohol level on the sobriety test--nearly twice the legal limit--and are hauled into jail for driving under the influence, no one’s going to give you a job behind the wheel of anything.

“For a while I just sat there feeling sorry for myself,” Twiggs said. “I mean, I hadn’t even had a traffic violation in 12 years. Not speeding. Not a parking ticket. Nothing.

“Then I got caught for something I’ve gotten away with a million times.

“I kept thinking, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why now, of all times?’ Then I started thinking about what I’ve been doing all my life. How I’ve been letting so many people down. How I wasn’t living up to my responsibilities in life.

“I look back now to that night, and you know, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

When Twiggs pulled out his driver and teed off at 10:08 Thursday morning in the first round of the MONY Tournament of Champions at La Costa, it marked the dawning of what he calls a new era.

Oh, he’s not saying his horrors of 1989 are going to make him a better golfer. His opening round two-over-par 74 proved that.

He’s not even saying his eight-hour incarceration in the Pinellas County Jail is going to keep him from never taking another drink.

“What I’m saying,” Twiggs said, “is that you’re going to see a changed man this year.

“You’re going to see a change in my responsibilities toward the game.

“You’re going to see a change in my responsibilities toward my life and family.

“I know a lot of people have given up on me. Hey, I’ve had people saying, ‘That no good SOB, how could he do that to us for everything we’ve done for him? He shouldn’t even be on the tour.’

“Let people think whatever they want, but I’m doing this for myself and my family, and I really could care less what anyone else thinks.”

Well, actually, few people have given much thought to Gregory Wofford Twiggs, anyway.

Here’s a guy who has lost his playing card four times in his five-year career. His expenses exceeded his winnings by, oh, some $200,000 on the first four years on the tour. In fact, when Twiggs won the 1989 Shearson Lehman Hutton Open and the $126,000 that went along with it, he earned more in four days than he had in the previous four years.

Of course, one look at this guy, and you’re asking yourself, “What is he doing trying to make a living at this game in the first place?”

While everyone else on the course Thursday was looking as if he just stepped out of Gentleman’s Quarterly, along came Twiggs.

His forehead perspiring, his shirt open three buttons, chest hairs poking out . . . why, he looked more like a drummer in a wedding band on a 10-minute break.

Twiggs tips the scale at 232 these days, but he boasts that’s 13 pounds fewer than he weighed a month ago.

“You take one look at me, and you know I don’t do anything for health reasons,” said Twiggs, who just happened to graduate from San Diego State in 1983 with a degree in sports medicine. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t care how I looked.

“But there are some companies that sponsor me who just don’t want to hear that. They want me to look like . . . I don’t know, more like a golfer, I guess.”

The good old days, when you could pick Twiggs out of a crowd by locating the guy with the tobacco stains on the front of his golf shirt, are over.

You can just imagine how that went over with the boys from the PGA each time they’d see Twiggs flick his tongue over the chew, purse his mouth and then spit a brown stream of juice all over the fairway.

“There are other guys who chew,” said Twiggs, his eyes dancing mischievously, “but I was a rebel in the chewing department. I was the one who’d spray it out on the TV screen.

“I remember once TV caught me pretty good. I must have got 50 letters the next week, people telling me, ‘You look disgusting. They shouldn’t even allow you on TV.’

“Well, I found out there are some companies who actually don’t care for that, either.”

Also gone are the days Twiggs can be found at the clubhouse bar having a cold one after a round. For the past seven weeks, Twiggs hasn’t touched so much as a glass of sherry.

“The Greg Twiggs everyone talks about and jokes about is not an alcoholic,” he says. “I’ve never been an alcoholic. I’ve never had any alcoholic tendencies.

“It’s stuff that I got away with a million times, you know, and I figured it would go on forever.”

The night of Dec. 3, when Twiggs slammed his rental vehicle into a parked car, changed all of that. Everyone on the tour heard about that night. It was enough, of course, that he was stone drunk while driving. But what in the world was he doing drinking six hours before tee time?

“It was a bad mistake, a day where I was drinking a lot of beers, too many beers,” Twiggs said. “But it will never happen again. None of it. I won’t even be back in a bar drinking so that I let someone else drive, because that’s not taking responsibility, either.

“I’m not touching the stuff.”

The only vice in Twiggs’ life these days is cigarettes. When the TV cameras are off, when the gallery is looking away, Twiggs will pull out a light Marlboro and quietly puff away while contemplating his next shot.

“Hey, I can only quit one thing at a time,” he says, laughing. “Give me time.”

Twiggs hears the whispers reverberating around La Costa. He senses the criticism behind his back. He watches his detractors look away when he makes eye contact.

He knows they’re all asking themselves the same question:

What’s a fun-loving duffer doing in a tournament like this?

The MONY Tournament of Champions is exactly what the name conveys. It’s a tournament in which only those who won on the 1989 tour are invited. That’s why the field is limited to just 33 entrants, with even the last-place finisher guaranteed $9,000.

But look it up. There it is for all of the world to see. Greg Twiggs was winner of the 1989 Shearson Lehman Hutton Open at Torrey Pines Country Club on Feb. 19 with a 17-under-par total of 271.

The victory provided him an exemption from PGA qualifying until 1992. It gave him an entrance into the Tournament of Champions and the Masters. And, most important of all, he said, it gave him the confidence that he can indeed play with the big boys.

“Well, that’s what it was supposed to do, anyway,” he said.

Instead, it resulted in a huge albatross that draped around his neck the rest of the year.

“I’ll never say that winning a tournament could be detrimental,” Twiggs said, “but after that happened, I blew everything out of proportion. There was all this added pressure. I expected to win every tournament, and when I started struggling again, I revolted.

“Here I was, a winner for the first time in my career, and I turned it into a negative thing. I kept thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I winning.’ Then I started thinking, ‘I’m no good. I was lucky to win that tournament.’ ”

Twiggs’ career, which never was all that pretty in the first place, got downright ugly.

Hoping to show what a little confidence would do, Twiggs followed up the Shearson Lehman Hutton tournament by shooting a 78 in the first round of the Doral Ryder Open, withdrawing by nightfall.

He lasted just two rounds in the Honda Classic, failing to make the cut. He managed to hang around for the whole tournament in the next four tournaments, finishing in a tie for 43rd at his first Masters.

It was only the first week of April, and Twiggs already was mentally shot for the season.

He missed the cut in eight of the next nine tournaments, and on July 8, after shooting a 77 in the second round at Hartford, he quit.

He sat out the next five weeks trying to sort out his problems, returned for the PGA Championship, where he finished in a tie for 63rd, and then missed the cut in four of the final six tournaments he participated.

He finished the season earning $154,302--$130,000 more than his total winnings the previous two years. But considering that just $28,302 was earned in the final nine months, Twiggs knew he was only kidding himself if he considered it any more than another rotten season on the tour.

“You can believe all you want about winning a million dollars,” Twiggs said, “but you just can’t expect it to happen. I didn’t put forth the effort that I needed to. I learned in a hurry that you can’t carry a bushel when you can only carry an apple or two.

“By the time the season ended, I was worse off than when I started.”

Although his victory purse in San Diego enabled him to put a down payment on a house in Rancho Mirage, the way he was playing, he felt fortunate just to cover the electric bills.

“I knew I had to make some changes in my life, and fast,” he said. “No one ever said anything to me, or made any threats, but I think it was a case where they (PGA officials) were thinking, ‘Either you take care of your problem, or we’ll take care of it for you.’ ”

Outwardly, Twiggs still is his gregarious self. He joked with the gallery Thursday, called himself a few choice names after lousy shots, and spent time between holes talking baseball with George Brett of the Kansas City Royals and Buddy Black of the Cleveland Indians.

And away from the golf course, he still can be found racing dragsters, doing a little sky-diving and hang-gliding over the Pacific.

“I’ve never been scared of dying,” he said. “But I am scared of failure.”

It’s impossible for Twiggs to convey this feeling, and certainly his golf score did little to substantiate it, but he left the course Thursday believing that 1990 is going to be altogether a different season than anything he has experienced.

“The moment I hit my driver today,” he said. “I viewed this as a new beginning, like a fresh new start.

“I know I didn’t play anywhere near like I can, but you know, I feel like I belong again.

“I feel like I’m one of the lucky ones. I got a second chance. Now I want to show everyone the real Greg Twiggs.”