Rolling in Green for a Good Cause

G et your T-shirts. Step right up and get your golf hats and visors. Get ‘em while they last. Get your golf towels.

Get your $330 cashmere sweaters.

Get outta here!

Anyone who thinks $330 is a bit much for a sweater would have felt very uncomfortable at last weekend’s Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities golf tournament at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks.

Luckily, very few such lowlifes were allowed in.

Those few were called employees. Or sports writers.

The very ordinary-looking $330 sweaters hung limply at the back of the tent. They were the same shade of off-white as the background color of American currency. Surely a coincidence.

Were any sold?

No, a saleswoman said, “but we have had several inquiries.”

Inquiries? About a sweater?

What would you ask?

How many sleeves? Is financing available?

When would escrow close?

The sweater was symbolic of the country club, which cost $300 million to build and costs $150,000 to join and claims to have a waiting list of more than 2,500 people--several hundred just from the San Fernando Valley--for the 300 available spots. Among those already installed as members are George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Wayne Gretzky, O.J. Simpson, Japanese home run hero Sudaharu Oh and Tom Selleck.

The sweater was also symbolic of the tournament, which is by strict design an event for the wealthy, though with a socially redeeming bottom line.

Want to watch Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman and some of the other top names in the game play a few rounds of golf?

It would have cost you $200. Pretty steep for a golf tournament, which generally carries an admission price of $10 or $12.

Heck, for just another $130, you could buy a sweater.

And even if you were a golf fanatic and stumbled upon an extra $200 in the weeks before the tournament, you’d probably still have been out of luck, because the tournament organizers halted ticket sales at 5,000. Tickets have sold out in both years of the tournament.

“Well, it sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn’t anymore,” said Joyce Greiner, 48, who traveled from Rancho Mirage to watch the event. “Where else can you see this many of the real great golfers, and get so close to them because there aren’t big crowds?

“And $200, well, you can’t even buy a dress for that money anymore.”

Of course not.

Those who got in, you may have guessed, were unlikely to discuss bowling averages or changing their own engine oil.

There were, for example, a lot of beepers. Several hundred by a very unscientific count. If everyone present were somehow paged at exactly the same moment, the conjoined thunder-beep might have shattered the windows of Sherwood’s $25-million colonial clubhouse.

Is it rich people, or is it Memorex?

David Myner, 56, of Simi Valley attended the tournament for the second year. Many of his friends, he said, were also there.

“I spend $200 on a lot less important things than this,” said Myner, an avid golfer who said he plays at least twice a week and has attended the last nine Los Angeles Open tournaments at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades.

“When you really love golf and you get a chance to see these guys at a place like this, you have to grab it. I don’t make enough money that $200 isn’t a lot of money. It is. But so what? It won’t kill me.”

It would, however, have caused a serious wound to Bob Wright, 39, of Reseda. He would have loved to have been among the spectators padding about in leather sneakers on Sherwood’s carpetlike grass. Instead, he watched on TV, padding about in his living room on his even more carpetlike carpet.

“I wanted to go last year, but really couldn’t even think about doing it,” said Wright, an electrician’s apprentice who plays frequently at the less-than-posh Van Nuys Golf Course. “I mean, $200 is pretty ridiculous.

“I’m single, and I think if I had the money I might have thought about blowing it on a ticket when they were available during the summer. But I didn’t even have that kind of money then.”

There is no plan to change any part of the tournament, according to tournament host Greg Norman. The 54-hole tournament will return to Sherwood next year, and the ticket policy remains.

“It is all going very well,” said Norman, the Australian who topped the PGA Tour’s money list in 1990 with $1,165,477 in earnings. “The players are happy, the fans are happy and the sponsors are happy.

“And all of it couldn’t be for a better cause.”

And that’s the reason the tournament, with all its overflowing opulence, will--and should--continue.

Beneath all the glistening chandeliers and inside all the $330 sweaters and underneath all the face lifts and hair weaves is this:

The event has raised more than $2 million for several charities, the largest being the 130 Ronald McDonald Houses, homes where the families of cancer-stricken children can reside while the young patients fight for their lives in nearby cancer hospitals.

And still, too often, the homes where families say a last goodby, where the hearts of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters are forever broken.

For cushioning that wrench, hail to the rich people.

For a change.