It’s Not a Game of Appearances

Once upon a time, there was this marvelous golfer. His swing was as pure as new snow. Watching him hit a seven-iron was like watching DiMaggio bat or Nureyev dance. He had the most gorgeous middle irons since the young Johnny Miller. He had perfected the most difficult shot in golf--the straight-down-the-middle.

He looked good in slacks. His hair was a salt-and-pepper gray. He hit the straightest tee shots since Nicklaus or Hogan. He didn’t just blast his way around a golf course, he thought his way around it. He engineered a round like Hogan or Nelson. He hit the ball where he wanted, not where it wanted.

He won tournaments in clusters. In a day when even outstanding players struggled to win once every five years, he won every year, sometimes three and four times.

Golf couldn’t believe its good luck. The game had been starved for someone to lift it above the galling inconclusiveness of a different winner every week and he appeared to be it, right out of the game’s manger. He was to be the logical successor to the Hogans, Sneads, Palmers, Nicklauses, Watsons.

Then, he won two U.S. Opens in a row and the media hauled out the superlatives. They couldn’t make up their minds whether he reminded them of the young Jones or the mature Nelson. His game was, so to say, Byronic.

And then something happened to Curtis Northrup Strange. He disappeared. Went right off the screen, right off the leader boards.

You always knew where to find Curtis Strange. The middle of the fairway, the leader in the clubhouse. In a parade, on a dais.

All of a sudden, he was nowhere to be found. Sometimes he wasn’t even there on Saturdays and Sundays. He not only stopped winning, he stopped making cuts.

You could say “Welcome to golf, kid!” except that Curtis had been there for a while. Long enough to know putts don’t have to go in, drives can land in the street, approaches bounce into hip-high rough. He could see the trouble on the right, all right, and he knew the sand traps were in play.

It’s a familiar phenomenon in golf. Young star comes out of the chute, lights up every golf course he plays on. Then, he hits this wall of pain that’s out there for everyone who ever played the game. It happened to the young Gene Littler, Venturi, even Ben Hogan.

The great ones play their way through it. The others go back to cleaning clubs in Texarkana. It happened to Bill Rogers. He went from winning $315,411 and the British Open in 1981 to winning $34,746 by 1984, $5,482 by 1988 and no dollars at all in 1989 and 1990 even though he was still thirty something. He drove his career into deep rough. He went from being the Panther to the pussycat.

Will this happen to Curtis Strange? Curtis thinks not. Curtis is no starry-eyed youngster. He is a past master at keeping the wheels on in adversity. He once shot an opening round of 80 in the Masters but was leading by Sunday.

What happened to Curtis is symptomatic of what is happening in golf. To understand this Strange tale, you may have to go back to a prehistoric golf tournament sponsored by a Chicago industrial service magnate, George E. May.

May sponsored a tournament worth $100,000 in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. To understand what an enormous amount of money that was, you have to understand Ben Hogan got $3,500 for winning the U.S. Open in ’48 and was the leading money-winner with 10 victories that year and got $32,112. You get that for finishing 11th in one tournament today.

But, there was a catch to May’s tournament purse. You got $50,000 for winning--and $50,000 for doing 50 exhibitions for May’s customers.

This took you off the competitive trail for a long while. It ruined good players. Lew Worsham, who had been an Open winner before winning the May, was never a factor on the tour again. Neither was Bob Toski. And Julius Boros won it in 1955 and it took him three years to get his game back on track.

George May isn’t around to lure players off the competitive trail but others in the corporate world today take up the slack.

When you win back-to-back U.S. Opens, you are more than a celebrity--you are a commodity.

In the United States, on the tour, the player cannot accept appearance money. No matter how much the sponsor wants him, he must shoot his way into money.

No such restrictions apply abroad. You can go to Australia, as Curtis Strange did, and pick up money by the sackful. Even if you don’t break 80.

“The public has no idea how much money is out there, off the golf course,” Strange says. It has been estimated winning the Open is worth a million dollars--provided you are a household name. When you win two Opens in a row, you become a household name.

Did Curtis Strange leave his game in a wallaby pouch Down Under? Did he lose it showing yuppies how to get out of sand traps at Hilton Head or shooting 71s in Dunhill Cups?

Curtis Strange is not putting up gaudy numbers at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic this week. His eight-under-par score is no threat to leader Mark O’Meara’s 24 under. But he did make the cut. Barely.

A reporter approached Strange with a notebook. “What do you want to talk to me for?” demanded Curtis. “Get these guys shooting 63s.”

“Do you think you lost your competitive edge flying around the world to so-what, prepaid events and demos for account executives?” Strange was asked.

“There’s that possibility,” Strange acknowledged. “But there’s an upside to this. I got to take my whole family to Australia. I don’t get that kind of time with them in a whole year. And I don’t think foreign play has that effect. I have always factored in play abroad.”

Maybe he over-concentrated on majors? “There’s no question trying to win that third Open let some air out of me. But that was kind of pressure put on me by you (media) guys and the public.”

Had the competition rushed past him? “I think the depth of the competition out here has been over-exaggerated. It might not be possible to dominate the tour as easily as in Hogan’s era. But you can win consistently out here. I intend to.”

As far as Curtis is concerned, it has just been a Strange Interlude. Once he stops being Curtis Stranger on the tour, he will be the man to beat again. The one who everyone always expected him to be.