He Follows the Straight and Narrow

The pros call him Radar.

This is because his shots, like heat-seeking missiles, always find their way to the targets: the center of the fairway, the bottom of the pin and the heart of the green.

He never hits it far but he never hits it often, either.

He looks less like a golfer than anyone in the field. He looks like a clerk in a hardware store. If he were any paler, you could see through him. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and he always gives the appearance of having a head cold. He has been on the tour 14 years, but has the complexion of a guy whose job keeps him in the cellar a lot.

It’s not that he’s always in the trees. The only guy on the tour who puts the ball in the fairway more often than he does is Calvin Peete.

He went 11 years on the tour without winning a tournament. But he picked up more than $910,000 in the process.

Mike Reid is one of those guys who always manages to look as if he’s forgotten something and is trying to decide whether to go back and get it. He plays golf with the kind of bemused expression of a guy who thinks he should be home doing the windows or fixing a carburetor. He has a puckish sense of humor. He seems to keep golf in perspective. He’s popular with his fellow players but completely overlooked by the public.

He has no gimmicks. He doesn’t wear knickers in a football team’s colors. He’ll never have an army, he’s not particularly chatty, but he grins a lot. He’d make a perfect spy. Even his on-course garb runs to gray and black. If you saw him in a locker room, you’d be tempted to hand him your shoes.

But, he’s one of the best players out there. He can do almost everything Tom Kite or Curtis Strange can, but he does it mechanically, without flair.

That hasn’t stopped him from piling up $365,334, $533,343 and $401,665 in earnings the last three years. This hasn’t kept him from being solidly in the hunt in the 31st annual Bob Hope Chrysler Classic this week. The tour’s Radar was firmly locked in on a victory orbit after four rounds of the Hope, which saw only one golfer ahead of him, Peter Jacobsen with 20 under par to Reid’s 18 under

Mike Reid first burst onto the consciousness of golf in the U.S. Open in 1976 when, an unknown amateur, he led the tournament with a 67 after the first round.

“I was a celebrity for 25 holes,” he recalls. “On the 26th hole I hit the ball into a swimming pool.”

How did that happen?

Reid grins. “I was so green I didn’t know clubs had different distances. I hit a seven-iron 170 yards. I thought only five-irons went 170 yards.”

He faded to rounds of 81 and 80 after that.

“You don’t win too many Opens with rounds in the 80s,” he explains cheerfully.

He was a semifinalist in the U.S. Amateur at Bel-Air that year and got his tour qualifying card on his first try, which led a lot of people to believe Mike Reid was going to be heard from in the future. All you heard was that he went the longest of any regular player on the tour without winning. He didn’t have a career, he had a blackout.

Not even when he finally broke though and won the 1987 Tucson Open did he become what you might term a celebrity. He had a typical Mike Reid reaction to the breakup of his long losing streak. He cried.

What endeared Reid to a lot of people was the other time he cried. That would be when he went into the press tent after one of the most nightmarish finishes in tournament history in the PGA at Kemper Lakes last year.

Reid had that tournament right in his locker. He led it for three rounds and 15 holes. He was ahead by three strokes with only three holes to play. Most guys start combing their hair for the cameras at that point. Mike began combing the brush for his ball.

First, he hit it into the water. Next, he hit it into the fringe, hitting that most damnable of golf shots, the all-purpose chili dip, in which the ball plops on the ground instead of bouncing or rolling onto the green. He threw away his advantage over Payne Stewart with two horrendous swings but still had a makeable seven-foot putt on the 72nd hole to--at least--tie. He missed.

When he gallantly showed up in the press room afterward--most pros would have fired their clubs into the trunk of the car and been over the horizon before taking their cleats off--Reid had tears in his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I cry at supermarket openings.”

In the locker room afterward, tour legend records, Jack Nicklaus, who has had his own share of last-hole horrors, came up and said, “Mike, I just want to say I never felt so bad for anybody in my whole life.”

Although he threw away his “major” and has won only two tournaments in his career, Mike picked a quality one to win. His 1987 victory in the World Series of Golf gave him a 10-year exemption on the tour.

Mike sat in a press room the other afternoon at the Arnold Palmer course and assessed the career of Mike Reid. Did he have goals in mind, someone wanted to know. Reid shook his head.

“Goals have a nasty habit of turning into expectations,” he said.

And expectations have a nasty habit of turning into bogeys, balls into water, and chili dips.

“You know,” Reid went on, “nobody starts a tournament and says to himself, ‘I think I will go out and finish 11th here.’

“Winning is an attitude and losing is an attitude. And I am working on my attitude. I used to think it was all mechanics. If I could be the best mechanical player on the tour, it would all fall into place.

“Goals are the same for everybody. Who doesn’t want to win tournaments? Who doesn’t want to be the leading money-winner? Who doesn’t want to win the Vardon Trophy? You have to find a way to get on a mental level to do these things.”

Did the disaster in the PGA raise ghosts for him, he was asked.

“Those kinds of ghosts you have to look back on as if they didn’t happen,” he said. “You close that book. I have to look back on 69 holes I did everything right. I have to concentrate on how I did that.”

If Mike Reid can do that, it may be the rest of the tour’s turn to cry.