Donald’s Star Shines After Open Fall

It’s the oldest cliche on Broadway. The understudy gets pushed onstage by the director who cries, “You’re going out there a nobody--and you’re coming back a star!”

It doesn’t happen much outside a Warner Bros. musical. In real life, you get to be a star the old-fashioned way. You earn it.

But Busby Berkeley would have loved the story of Michael William Donald. Real lump-in-the-throat, there’s-no-business-like-show-business stuff.

In the little theater of golf, Mike Donald is almost a Disney character--the little guy who came to town with a straw suitcase and a bus ticket. And became a folk hero.

Hale Irwin won the 1990 U.S Open. Forget that. It was the Mike Donald Open so far as the rest of us are concerned. After all, Irwin almost always wins the U.S. Open. That was dog-bites-man stuff.

You know, they say when you save someone from drowning or give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, you inherit that person for life.

I didn’t bring a flutter back to Mike Donald’s eyelids. But I picked him to win the U.S. Open, which is the next-best thing. So I found myself thinking like a kind of unofficial godfather. Not the Marlon Brando kind, the godfather in the biblical sense. You kind of have to see to the young man’s spiritual well-being from then on.

Besides, I’m out of golfing idols at the moment. Nicklaus is off playing seniors. Hogan is long gone. Palmer has all but retired.

So when I found myself in New York at a boxing writers’ dinner and noticed in the papers where the Buick Classic golf tournament was being played at nearby Westchester Country Club, I hot-footed it up to check on my, as it were, godchild.

Don’t worry about Mike Donald. When last seen, he was looking disconsolately at a putt he had just missed on the 19th playoff hole in the U.S. Open. After a valiant fight in which he had played something like 350 impeccable golf shots all week, he came up two feet short of being the most improbable Open champion in 20 years.

Mike Donald hasn’t turned back into a pumpkin.

When he arrived at Medinah, he was lugging his own golf bag and the gate attendant wasn’t sure whether he was a player or a caddy.

When Mike arrived at Westchester last week, he couldn’t get through the crush of spectators.

“I couldn’t get to the driving range,” he recalls with some awe. “I wanted to practice a full bucket, I got to hit six balls.”

He gets recognized in airports. Nobody down in Hollywood, Fla., asks his brother any more, “Exactly what is it your brother does for a living now?”

Mike has gone from Mike Who? to the second-most famous Mike in sports.

As he walked off the 18th green at Westchester Friday, the autograph lines framed the exit.

“Great show last week, Mike!” the fans called out. “Hey, Mike, loved your mother on TV. Your mother’s great!”

“All mothers are great,” Mike answers. Caps and pens are thrust in his face. He signs them all patiently.

“I was walking through a mall last night, trying to buy a pad, and some woman passes by. Suddenly, she turns and points at me ‘You, you’re somebody!’ she says. ‘I know, the golfer!’ ”

Another young girl looks at his waist line and says, “You’re thinner than you look on TV.”

Donald laughs.

“Did I look fat?” he wants to know. “I am a little.”

It’s heady, star-on-the-dressing-room-door stuff for a guy who was never more than a part of the chorus line up until Medinah.

How will Mike Donald handle it in the limelight? He sighs.

“I had a tee-off time of 1:04 Wednesday--and I hadn’t even have time to eat.”

The telephone is ringing when he checks into the hotel and it seemingly never stops. He eats his breakfast cold and in stages between autographs.

When a photographer has a heart attack on the fifth tee at Westchester Friday, it is Mike Donald who waves the medics up to the green.

“Something like this makes you realize how unimportant golfers are,” he remarks to the crowd gathered.

Will a star be born? Or will his meteoric appearance be followed by an equally meteoric disappearance?

Mike Donald, who hit something like 27 final holes--exclusive of playoff--in regulation in the U.S. Open last week, is still hitting the ball straight.

He shot a 70-68 for the first two rounds of the Buick and was solidly in the hunt.

As he walks up 18, the spectators--blase New Yorkers--rise for a standing ovation. Donald is touched.

“I’m not used to that,” he admits. “Usually when I come up 18, there are two marshals and a guy with a rake.”

“Do you think you are a symbol for Everyman--every weekend golfer everywhere?” a writer asks him, noting the nondescript shirt, faded visor, off-the-rack slacks. Mike looks like the kind of guy who might ask for strokes.

“I am Everyman,” Mike Donald says. “I don’t hit it particularly far. I carry two drivers. I don’t putt lights out. In fact, I might have won the Open if I’d been putting better.”

But his cover is blown. If he’d hung around a first green three weeks ago, he might have slickered his way into a $10 Nassau. He looked like another nine-handicapper with a hook grip.

Not anymore. His sponsor, Wilson, has upped the ante. He’s one of the elite invited to a 30-player shoot-out in Pittsburgh next week. He’s got an agent.

He has to give everyone shots now. Except, of course, Hale Irwin. Irwin won the tournament. Donald won the public.