Hombres Cannot Keep Up

The subject for today: What does golf have in common with a bullfight or a flamenco dance on a table top by someone with castanets and a comb in their hair?

Answer: It is often best performed by people with Spanish surnames or Latino backgrounds.

Question No. 2: Who is--or was--the best of these modern-day conquistadors of the links?

Seve Ballesteros, you think? Hah! A Masters or two. Three British Opens, a Swiss Open here and there. But no record whatsoever in the heartland--Texas in the summer, Florida in the spring, California in the winter. Places where the competition is the fiercest and the greens the swiftest. Besides, what’s he won over here--four tournaments?

You fancy Roberto De Vicenzo, the golfing gaucho from the Pampas? Uh-uh. He won only one tournament in this country.

Chi Chi Rodriguez? Well, Cheech could play. Cheech came out of Puerto Rico and hit the ball farther than anyone weighing 110 pounds ever had before. He won his share of tourneys, eight of them, on the PGA tour.

But, no. The greatest of these players we have in mind is definitely a mainland Norteamericano, one of those super Mexican-Americans who seem born to play the game and do it with ease.

Lee Trevino? You’re getting warm. The Merry Mex has won 27 tournaments, to say nothing of two British Opens to go with his two U.S. Opens and two PGAs, not to mention a lot of high-stake games that never got in the record book.

Robert Gamez? Well, the kid has been on the tour less than a year and already has won twice. Only a budding Jack Nicklaus does that.

These are all candidates, to be sure. But give me the player with the Spanish surname who can do things on the golf course that these guys never dreamed of.

Let me ask you this: You think Seve or Trevino could go out and shoot 64 with morning sickness? You think Robert Gamez could make a two on the 18th hole if he were pregnant?

Some players complain of coming back to try to play golf after a touch of the flu or a migraine. How about coming back after a miscarriage?

Ladies and gentlemen--a little “Virgin of the Maccarena” music, professor!--I give you the greatest player of all these candidates! Adios muchachos! It’s not a senor, it’s a senora. It’s Miz Nancy Lopez, no less!

No one in that Spanish armada ever played the game any better. Forget Jose Marie Olazabal. Skip the Dutra brothers.

No one, Spanish-surnamed or as Anglo-Saxon as Harry Vardon, ever hit a golf ball with any more authority and precision than Nancy Lopez. Men might have hit it farther, but not straighter.

No one has meant more to her sport. Arnold Palmer is generally credited with making men’s golf major league again. He put the sport on network television.

Nancy Lopez did the same for women’s. When she came out on tour, Babe Didrikson was long gone. Mickey Wright was going. Patty Berg was just a picture on the wall.

The game needed a star--and Nancy Lopez was it. She won 42 tournaments with a smile on her lips--and usually a baby in a pram in the gallery.

Warm, friendly, given to giggling a lot, she gave her sport an image P.R. types only dreamed about. You couldn’t have invented a more nearly perfect heroine.

No one ever saw Nancy Lopez in a foul mood, mad, uncooperative. She was as sunny as Sonora in the summer, as cheerful as a sunrise.

And could she play! She was winning state tournaments when she was 12 in New Mexico. She was the first girl ever to play in the Crosby and she won nine tournaments her first full year as a pro.

Great artists, and she was one, are usually as temperamental as opera stars. Lopez was always as polite as a guy selling brushes. She never hid in the shower after a bad round, never threw her clubs into a creek or into the trunk of her car as she sped out of town in a cloud of curses after losing a playoff.

It boggles the mind to think what Nancy Lopez could have won had she gone at golf with the singleness of purpose most other stars bring to it.

Chi Chi Rodriguez once said of Jack Nicklaus, “He became a legend in his spare time.” But as author Bob Drum said of Lopez, “She had to win tournaments while the kids were taking a nap.”

She posted her 42 tournament victories between maternity leaves. After one win, someone asked her what her chief goal in golf was. Nancy answered “To have a boy next time.” (She has two girls, Ashley, 6, and Erin, 4.)

She has earned almost $3 million on the golf tour, but you get the impression she would be just as happy--and just as cheerful--working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.

She is, so far as I know, the only mother in any golf hall of fame. Golf probably needs her more than she does it.

Once, when a journalist asked Tommy Bolt if he didn’t think Arnold Palmer had done a lot for golf, Terrible Tommy retorted, “Don’t you think golf has done a lot for Arnold Palmer?”

In Lopez’s case, it’s not so clear-cut. When she showed up for the MBS LPGA tournament being played this weekend at Los Coyotes Country Club in Buena Park, the sponsors were weak with relief. Patty Sheehan, the most recent winner on the tour (Seattle, last week) had served notice that she was not going to play. So had Beth Daniel, the season’s leading money winner. But when Lopez said she would be there, it didn’t matter.

Still, some said Lopez had lost her desire. She was coming off a month-long layoff. She had not won in a year. She had even missed a cut this year, in the Dinah Shore.

So, Nancy went out and shot 69-70 the first two rounds, moving solidly into the hunt. She’s still the best golfer ever whose name ended in a Z. Or who had to burp the baby on the way to the first tee.