She Can Pretend It’s Fun

Golf is not a game, it’s a punishment. Retribution. Payment for our sins. Not meant to be enjoyed but endured.

Most players know it. Most players, male and female, play it as if they were sure the next hole will be a bogey, and the next shot will probably end up in the water, or under a tree or under a lip of a trap. Or it will break a plate-glass window in the clubhouse.

Disaster is the golfers’ natural habitat. There have been players heard to murmur, “Ah, no! That’s no good!” on their backswing and to groan, “Oh, no! Not over there!” before they have even hit the ball. Golfers know whom they’re dealing with. Clubs are enemies, courses are haunted houses or torture chambers, tournaments are where one guy is happy and 150 are sad.

There are, then, as many ways to play golf as there are people to play it. The preferred, or Ben Hogan, method is in tight-lipped, poker-faced silence, as grim as a guy going to the electric chair. You go into an 18-hole funk where you shut out the world and concentrate with tunnel vision on the problem at hand, which is to make a whole bunch of threes. It is also known as the What-dog? method of play, as in, Did you see that dog on 18? What dog? (What elephant?)

Prevailing opinion is, this is the best way to play this game. It worked for Hogan, it worked for Jones, it must be the best way for everybody.

Not everybody subscribes. Walter Hagen was the early-day exponent of the This-is-just-a-game style of play. Hagen played with the insouciance of a playboy on a cruise. The Haig was not above showing up on the first tee in dancing pumps and top hat.

Jimmy Demaret was next. Jimmy was a chatty, wisecracking, rainbow-dressing blithe spirit whose game seemed to improve the more he bantered with the gallery.

In the modern era, Fuzzy Zoeller doesn’t play the game as if he were in an oxygen tent with a week to live. Neither does Lee Trevino. Trevino always plays as if something good was sure to happen next. Usually, for him, it does.

The women’s tour, which is gathering for the annual Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament, has had its share of dour players who look more like Gothic characters out of a Victorian novel than athletes, but by and large, it doesn’t produce the club-throwing, cooler-kicking, caddie-bashing style of behavior the men favor.

Patty Sheehan, for instance. Patty Sheehan manages to pile up an annual $255,000 to $326,000 without even frowning, biting her lip or looking around for someone to blame.

Patty Sheehan found out early in life the nature of the game of golf--evil. Malevolence. She quit it at the ripe old age of 9. “I hated the game,” she recalls. “I only had a two-iron to play with, and it frustrated me, eluded me; I thought it was stupid and I gave it up.”

Giving up golf is like giving up the Mafia--easier said than done.

But when Sheehan did get back to it three years later, she was not a wide-eyed young ingenue. She knew she was attached to a rogue who, so to speak, would come home late, lie, deceive, cheat and be heartlessly indifferent to her suffering. She knew she wasn’t going to reform it with her love. It would stay the unregenerate wretch it always was, true to no one. She would have to live with its infidelities or move out.

“I played kind of fearlessly. I played confidently. But I had no illusions,” she recalls. “I decided if I wasn’t going to just sit around a swimming pool the rest of my life and get chunky in the middle, I had to put up with the game, warts and all.”

It was just the right attitude, because Sheehan shortly became one of the best players on the women’s tour. She won the national college championship for women when she was at San Jose State. She won the California and Nevada state amateurs and was runner-up in the U.S. Amateur. She won the qualifying school tournament for the pros.

She still didn’t expect to have the game eating out of her hand, and when she won her first pro tournament--the 1981 Mazda in Japan--she startled her hosts by doing a series of cartwheels and somersaults on the 18th green.

For Patty Sheehan, the secret of keeping your sanity on a golf course is to keep your composure. “I try not to act as if I’m having a terrible time out there, as if I wish I were somewhere else,” she says. “I try to look as if it’s fun, even when it’s not. There are days when you know there is something wrong with the swing; there are days when you know you will have a cold round.” The trick, she says, is to expect them, deal with them and cut your losses with a smile, not a growl.

It is an attitude that has resulted in Sheehan’s winning 21 tournaments, including the Ladies PGA twice in a row, and more than $2 million. It has also seen her on the cover of Sports Illustrated as Sportswoman of the Year, both for her golf winnings and for the fact she funnels a part of them into the Tigh Sheehan home for abused children in Santa Cruz.

Even her career expectations are cautious. Sheehan would like to make the LPGA Hall of Fame. Unlike some such halls, this one is not elective. To enter, you must have won 30 tournaments with two majors, or 35 tournaments with one major, or 40 tournaments with no majors.

Incongruously, Sheehan’s two majors only count as one since they were the same tournament a year apart. But this, of course, is exactly the kind of skewed logic you’d expect from a game in which it sometimes seems no good shot goes unpunished and no bad one unrewarded.

Patty Sheehan is a success because she found out 25 years ago that if you don’t expect too much from the game of golf, you won’t be disappointed.