Here’s Hope for Duffers to Be Stars

If you’re a baseball fan, you can’t run out to center field with Andy Van Slyke and play the Dodgers. You can’t bat behind Jose Canseco.

If you’re a tennis fan, you can’t go out to center court at Wimbledon with Boris Becker and inquire, “Do you want the ad or deuce court?”

You can’t climb into the ring with George Foreman and say, “We’ll take care of this Holyfield, George, trust me.”

If you’re a football fan, you can’t block for Eric Dickerson or run a pattern for Joe Montana.

A basketball fan is not apt to get a pass in to Magic Johnson at the top of the key.

But, if you’re a golfer--”Hey! Arnie and I were partners last week on a best-ball at PGA West.” Or, “On the 14th hole, Curtis turned to me and said ‘Looks like it breaks left about a ball. What do you think?’ ”

It’s heady stuff. Baseball has its fantasy camps, but it’s not the same thing. Golf is a fantasy come true. It’s Walter Mitty stuff, a Woody Allen movie.

It doesn’t happen in any other sport. There used to be a cartoon years ago drawn by H.T. Webster called “Dreams of Glory.” In it, a boy would be sitting beside a stream, daydreaming of being a great hero, a conqueror, a star, a virtuoso.

Some guys dream of playing Carnegie Hall. Some guys even imagine they’re Napoleon.

But a golfer would think he had died and gone to heaven if he was coming up 18 with, say, Raymond Floyd, and he had just hit a crackling drive and he could turn to Raymond and say coolly, “I believe it’s you, Raymond.”

Or maybe he’d like to be standing in the middle of the fairway on the approach to a trapped green and Hale Irwin would sidle over to him and ask, “What do you think, pro, a five-iron?” He’d spit on his hands, throw grass up in the air, squint at the sky and say, “No, Hale, you better take a four--there’s a quartering wind.”

Or Lee Trevino will clap his hands and start to jerk a seven-iron out of the bag and our golfer will frown and say, “Never get there with that, Lee. Better hit a five here. I hit a little knock-down wedge myself yesterday and barely made the fringe.”

Other guys might want to be President of the United States, general of the army. Keep in mind Dwight D. Eisenhower was both of those things and there were times when all he wanted to be in this world was one-up going to 18.

Remember, too, when we are talking of these dreamers, we are not talking about dirty-faced kids peering through a knothole, we’re talking about CEOs, captains of industry, senators, Congressmen.

Sometimes, they are even great athletes in other sports. If you think Lawrence Taylor was glad to win the Super Bowl, get a picture of him if his team wins the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic amateur division here this week. Golfers at the Hope dream of sinking these incredibly long putts.

You might not be able to play dual piano with Horowitz or sing Carmen with Pavarotti. But at the Hope, you’re Tom Kite’s partner.

The format traces back to Bing Crosby. Bing was a megastar in his own right, a giant of movies, radio, TV and concerts. He gave the world a new word, crooner. He made or broke songwriters with his renditions of their songs. He was an industrial conglomerate.

The suspicion always lingered that he would rather have been Ben Hogan.

Bing was a scratch player in his prime who once teed it up in the British Amateur and even tried, on occasion, for our own U.S. Open. He was club champion at Lakeside. He and Bob Hope did more to popularize golf than Jones, Hagen, Snead and Sarazen put together.

Like all golfers, Bing hankered to match shots with his idols. So he conceived the pro-am formula, which is a standard part of golf today. He and a group of pals set up a tournament at Rancho Santa Fe where he would post the prize money (it wasn’t much in that Depression year) and he would get to tee it up (at full handicap) with Sam Snead.

That first tournament was all but washed out--it used to rain in Southern California in those days. It was shortened to 18 holes. Snead won it. But golf was never the same again.

Crosby moved to the Bay Area after the war and took his tournament with him. It resumed amid the lordly pines and windblown mist of the Monterey Peninsula.

He never intended it to be anything but a ribald, raucous get-together for a lot of guys and their nine-irons. It was a 54-hole event, not even official. But the amateur field grew. The well-heeled from all over the country wanted in. They could pay for the privilege. So Bing let them.

Charity was the big winner. The tournament got away from its good-old-boys and sing-along origins. Bing still called it a “clambake,” but it was big business.

The Palm Springs tournament was a kind of nondescript event in those days, aimed mainly at promoting the desert as a resort attraction for the whole country.

The sponsors approached the one man in the country who occupied a position of the same esteem and affection as Crosby. Bob Hope had the one attribute all great comedians had to have--he was loved. He was America’s wisecracker, pricker of pomposity, a purveyor of humor poked at himself. You spoke his name and you smiled. He and Crosby were 1 and 1A in entertainment. Their “Road” pictures were blockbusters.

The Hope name and magnetism attracted not only the best pros, but the golfing maniacs from board rooms all over America. Presidents of the United States were in the Hope field. Ratings soared. Part of that was because people in hip-high snow liked to see palm trees waving on the TV screen. But it was a unique sporting event, too. The elite of golf showed up. Arnold Palmer has won here.

The format calls for amateur teams of three to play for four days, each day with a different pro. Touring pros are not exactly agog over spending four days with guys with loops in their backswings and spasms in their putting strokes, but the tournament has raised $21 million for charity since its inception, and $14 million went to Eisenhower Medical Center and millions to other desert citadels of mercy.

Every golf tournament worth its name has a pro-am today. Golf as a philanthropy thrives. But they are mostly the one-day kind.

The Hope is a piece of Americana we may not quite see the likes of again. Movie stars, Presidents, Super Bowl players, World Series heroes--and corporate America--are abroad on its fairways and greens. A man who can push a button or sign a paper that will affect the lives of 50,000 of his fellow citizens may be found sitting in a lounge after his round, hair askew, visor tossed back, putter still gripped in one hand as he dreamily tells his associates, “I helped Arnie five shots today. I don’t know what he would have done without me.”

James Thurber would understand perfectly. Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. No blindfolds, please.