Secret of Their Success Is Look but Don’t Help : Golf: Lopez and Knight love each other, but he couldn’t cut it as her caddie.

Nancy Lopez and Ray Knight are living proof that sports marriages work, provided the retired athlete never caddies for the non-retired athlete.

That is the rule that rules their lives today: Daddy Don’t Caddie. As Ray follows Nancy around the Los Coyotes Country Club during this week’s LPGA tournament, he does so at a careful distance. Nancy’s golf game may be a beautiful thing to behold, but Ray has found it much better to behold from afar, sequestered in the gallery while Nancy attends to golfing and marital bliss on her own.

“I’m too intense,” says Ray, which is obvious to anyone who ever watched him during his baseball days. Ray was the third baseman who replaced Pete Rose in Cincinnati in the late 1970s, both in body and spirit. He rocked double-play pivotmen, he rolled in the dirt. This can be a great trait for a major league infielder, but not so good for a major league caddie. Especially when you’re handing clubs to the same person who cooks your dinner and diapers your daughters.

“Nancy and I have always had this relationship where when we feel something, we express it,” Ray says. “As a husband, I can do that. It doesn’t make any difference--I can tell her she looks heavy, or the clothes she wears are not good or her hair doesn’t look good, and she accepts it.

“But on the golf course, I could not say anything--right, wrong or indifferent.”

Ray’s chance to pinch-hit came two years ago when Nancy’s regular caddie at the time, Dee Darden, had to beg off a tournament in Florida because of a bad knee and a bad hip. Nancy was left in a lurch. “It was the first of the year, and all the good caddies were taken,” Nancy says.

She was desperate.

Soon, Papa had a brand new bag.

“We’d talked about it before,” Ray says, “and it was always, ‘Hey, yeah, I’d like to caddie for you sometime,’ but I never thought I would subject myself to it. But she didn’t have a choice. She really had no one else.”

Their first round together, “Ray was a little nervous,” Nancy remembers.

Ray remembers a little more:

“The first day, she hits a drive. I’d walked the course the day before, so I got all the yardage down and I got familiar with the sprinkler heads. So I walk over to find my sprinkler head and then I walk back and give her the yardage: ‘Honey, it’s 210 to lay up.’ ”

“Nancy says, ‘Well, aren’t you going to give me my club? Where are my clubs?’ I’d walked off and left the bag by the sprinkler.

“On the fourth hole, she hits into the bunker off the tee. She has it up against the lip, and I really don’t think she has much of a shot. But she hits a great shot, right up on the front edge of the green, and I was so excited, we start walking down the fairway and we get 40 or 50 yards when she looks back and says, ‘Honey, did you rake the trap?’ I didn’t realize I was supposed to do that.”

By the final day of the tournament, Nancy was tied for the lead, ball-and-chain and all. Ray was pumped. On the 13th hole, Nancy chipped onto the green, two inches from the hole, and Ray was so thrilled he forgot to pull the flag.

“I was just sitting there, spellbound,” he says

Finally, another caddie had to step in and do the job for him.

“The next hole,” Ray says, “I felt a little embarrassed about doing that, so when Nancy asked me for a tee, I gave her a pencil. She looks at me. ‘Honey, you want me to tee it up on this?’ ”

OK. So anybody can make a rookie mistake, or two, or three. By the time Team Lopez hit Hawaii for a second tournament, Ray knew his tees from his pencils and was starting to feel his oats. In the third round, Nancy was set up about 180 yards from the 18th hole, downwind, and asked Ray for a four-iron.

Ray: “Honey, I really feel you should go with a five. It’s a smooth five.”

Nancy: “I’m going to choke up on a four.”

Ray: “I really think it’s too much club.”

Nancy hit a four-iron.

The ball sailed over the green.

The next day, Nancy and Ray arrived at the same hole, the same spot, only with the wind blowing at them.

Nancy: “Honey, you want me to hit that five-iron here?”

Ray: “No, use the four today. You’ve got the wind in your face.”

Nancy: “I don’t believe I can get this four close. The green’s so hard. I better hit the five.”

Nancy hit the five.

The ball landed in the water.

“We had a big argument after that tournament,” Ray says. “I said, ‘Why do you ask me if you’re not going to listen to me anyway?’ ”

Says Nancy: “I’m real stubborn. I don’t like anybody to tell me too much. He got feeling real comfortable and thought he could say a little bit more, and that didn’t work.

“There were times when I knew what I wanted to hit, and he’s asking why would I want to hit that ? Well, I don’t think I have to explain myself. I’d look up and say, ‘Ray, just trust me. I never told you how to bat.’ ”

The partnership lasted one more tenuous tournament, the 1988 Dinah Shore. There, Ray got his flip sheet confused and was giving Nancy yardage readings for the first and second holes when she was playing Nos. 9 and 10.

By the end of that tournament, Nancy had a new caddie.

“It didn’t work,” Ray says with a shrug. “I’m too competitive. We realized in a hurry that I needed to go in a different direction.

“It was one of those things where people said she fired me. That was never the case. I told her during the second round at the Dinah Shore that I wouldn’t carry ‘em again, no matter what.

“Besides, how can you get fired when you’re not getting paid?”

Today, Nancy and Ray are happily married because Ray, happily, observes from the other side of the rope. They still discuss strategy; Ray did some research recently and found that Nancy had missed at least 70 five-foot putts this year. Four weeks ago, Nancy changed putters, tossing away an old friend that had been with her for more than 20 years.

Thursday, Nancy shot a 69 with that new putter.

“It’s fun to be around her out here,” says Ray, who took a one-week leave from his ESPN broadcasting duties to check out Los Coyotes. “I love to watch her play golf. I get the same feeling like when I played--probably more so because here, I can’t control what happens. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

And that’s the way Nancy and Ray would like to keep it.