Who Is Utley and How Did He Get Here?

A Tournament of Champions field is the elite of golf. You don’t get in this lineup just because you won an Open or a PGA back in the days when Eisenhower was President and coffee was a dime. You have to have shot your way in here by winning a tournament in the past 12 months. You’re news, not history.

So, naturally, you expect to see Tom Kite and Curtis Strange and Greg Norman and Mark Calcavecchia in here.

But Stan Utley?! Wait a minute! You want to run that by me again?! Stan Who !?

Who in the world is Stan Utley and what is he doing walking down a fairway with Greg Norman in the opening round of the MONY T. of C.? I mean, give us a break! We thought the pro-am was over.

O.K. Granted golf, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. We are somewhat accustomed to headlines, “Unknown Leads Second Round at Centel Classic.” But this is no four-ball at a rubber-mat open in Texas. This is a tournament that’s been won by Jack Nicklaus (five times), Arnold Palmer (three), Gene Littler (three), Sam Snead, Gary Player and Tom Watson (three). Recognizable silhouettes on a fairway. The top guns. The big boys. Portraits in the clubhouse. So, who asked Stan Utley to this party?

You know, some spoilsport computed there were 232 golfers listed by name in the 1989 PGA Tour guide. Every guy who ever got the ball in the air in a tour event was listed, as well as a few who didn’t.

Stan Utley’s name was not among them. He was as little known to the chroniclers of the game as the guy who rakes the traps. He was a non-person.

Golf has been identified by Tom Kite, no less, as “a cruel sport.” It is malicious, capricious. To play it at the highest level, you have to be magnificently gifted.

No one is born a great golfer. (Well, maybe, Sam Snead.) You have to work at this game. It’s a skill, not an art. More than any other sport, it depends on experience. It’s the toughest club in the world to crack. You don’t surround the game of golf, you creep up on it a step at a time. You pay your dues.

Stanley Frank Utley was probably the best player (non-tour) in Missouri. At least, he won the Missouri State Open two years in a row with record scores.

That probably makes you, oh, 560th overall in the country, or 1,000th in the world. That’s how tough this game is.

To bust into this high-stakes crap game, you have to go through something called Q (for qualifying) school. That’s where you play six lump-in-the-throat rounds against hundreds of hungry players such as yourself for a measly 50 spots open each year.

Five times, Stan Utley marched up this hill. Five times, he came back down without his card. A lesser man might have said the hell with it. Gone and got his lunch pail or his briefcase and become the weekend player nature apparently intended him to be.

But Stan Utley had a lot of faith in Stan Utley. So, fortunately, did his wife.

When you don’t get your card, you do this: You buy a used car, you get a friend to bankroll you, you start around the country teeing it up in mini-tour events--honing your game and hoping you break even.

You also write to every tournament sponsor in the country every week. There is a chink in this wall around golf called the sponsor’s exemption. The people who put on tournaments can invite eight players of their own choosing.

Sponsors are not looking for unknowns. There’s enough of those already. Sponsors are looking for Seve Ballesteros, Johnny Miller or maybe some legend of the game temporarily down on his luck. Some Who’s Who, not some Who’s He?

When you open a letter and it’s from someone named Stanley Frank Utley, your heart doesn’t leap. You don’t send a car. You think you’ve got somebody else’s mail. Stan had about as much chance of winning a lottery as a place in most tournaments. It was the next-best thing to putting a note in a bottle at sea.

But when he tried the Chattanooga Classic sponsorship last year, he had a hole card to play. He had shot his way into this tournament the year before (via Monday morning qualifying for four open spots) and he had not only made the cut, he had shot a final-round 65. He got his exemption.

The papers call these features Cinderella stories.

Stan opened with a 69 at Chattanooga last year. But Mark Hayes shot a 62. He shot a 66 in the second round. But Ted Schulz shot a 63.

Then he went out on the third day and shot 30 for nine holes. And the next thing he knew, play was suspended for the day due to lightning and rain. Something seemed to have it in for Stanley. “You can imagine how sick I felt when I had it going that good and had to put the thing in the hangar,” he recalls.

The good news was, it didn’t go away overnight. Stanley began the final 27 holes the next day five shots out of the lead but he proceeded to shoot the last 27 holes in 98, and 64-64 for the last two rounds. He won the tournament by a shot.

So, golfer Utley got in this MONY T. of C. the same way Nicklaus, Palmer, Watson, Player and every other legend of golf got in it. The old-fashioned way. He earned it.

They put him in with Greg Norman, no less, for the opening round. That’s like making your first movie with Hepburn or a duet with Sinatra. Norman threw a little 66 at the course--with a double bogey. But rookie Utley kept the wheels on--a one-under-par 71.

As he started out, it was, “Who’s that with Greg Norman?” buzzing through the galleries. Stanley hopes the day will come in this tournament when they will say, “Who’s that blond guy with Stan Utley and how in the world did he get in here?”