Playing It Straight Not the Way to Go

You think golf isn’t a silly game? You think it isn’t as unfair as a Stalinist trial?

Look! What you’re supposed to do in this game is hit the ball straight down the middle off the tee on a par-four, then send your next shot into the middle of the green in birdie position.

What you’re not supposed to do is slide your tee shot into the right rough behind a tree, then slap your approach shot well short of the green in a slippery lie. Your play from there is to try to get near enough to the hole to make the next putt and hope the guy on the green misses his birdie.

Golf makes a mockery of form. So, Corey Pavin is your 1991 Bob Hope Classic champion. Mark O’Meara, who did everything right on the first playoff hole, is runner-up.

This is not a game, it’s a jinx. If you don’t believe it, ask Greg Norman. Greg Norman leads the world in standing on a green in regulation and watching somebody in the rough or a trap chipping in to beat him. It’s like losing a card game with four aces to a guy who draws to a busted flush--and makes it.

Ask Arnold Palmer. He once played an impeccable round at a PGA Championship in Columbus, Ohio, where his playing competitor, Bobby Nichols, disappeared off the tee into the trees on every hole--only to come out with shots that all but entwined themselves in the flag. Palmer, who never left the fairway, lost to Nichols, who never made it.

Ask Jack Renner. He was sitting in the scorers’ tent in Hawaii one year, his principal pursuer, Isao Aoki, was way out in the deep rough on the left of the 18th fairway and lying three. Guess who knocked in a seven-iron to win the hole.

So you knew Mark O’Meara was done for when he played the first playoff hole at the Hope Sunday the way the book says you should. He would have been better off if he sent the ball skittering into the right rough as his opponent, Pavin, did.

He should have loused up the hole. Pavin did. He was in the rough, with a tree in his line, and no real way to get on the green except by punching it up and hoping it would find a narrow opening. The shot didn’t make it. Fortunately. “It got stuck in the long grass,” Pavin said later. “I thought it was a bad break.”

It was the wildest kind of luck. O’Meara got the bad break. He was sitting on the green 15 feet from the hole.

Pavin, of course, chipped in. If you know golf, you know there was really no way he wouldn’t. O’Meara didn’t make the 15-footer. If you know golf, you know there was no way he could.

It happens all the time. It’s the most perverse game people play. It delights in punishing perfection, rewarding blunders.

O’Meara was still in a state of shock an hour later. “When you play 90 holes of golf and you make three bogeys and 32 birdies, you’re not very happy when you lose on the 91st hole.”

Particularly when you play that last hole exactly the way you’re supposed to.

You can tell right away Corey Pavin isn’t a golfer, never mind a tournament winner. He’s too nervous. He always looks as if someone just set a firecracker off behind him. He almost jumps when he hits the ball.

You know how golfers are. Masses of calm. Glacial in temperament. They all look as if they had a blood pressure in the low 100s and pulse rates about the same as sea creatures.

Not Corey Pavin. He plays like a guy looking over his shoulder to see if the cops are gaining. When he makes a putt, he tucks his legs under him and jumps straight up in the air in glee. His swing is not exactly jerky, but it’s not one of your slow, fluid, sweeping motions.

Some golfers play as if they’ve just been wakened from a sound sleep and are ready to go back, struggling to stay awake. Pavin behaves more like a guy who can’t sleep more than three hours a night and can’t stand still. He has to periodically calm himself down on the golf course or he’ll look like a guy being goosed.

But it works for him. This is his eighth tournament victory in six years. He may pioneer a new way to play the game--as if you’re in the throes of terminal St. Vitus Dance.

Mark O’Meara, on the other hand, is a mountain of placidity. He looks, for those of you old enough to remember, a little like a streetcar conductor. Like most golfers, he looks like a guy who would take his time to get dressed before leaving a hotel fire. His swing is unhurried, slow and as unemotional as a border guard.

On a golf course that was only a little more than a pool table--it should have had pockets instead of holes, rails instead of ropes--these two players rolled around this tournament in 29 under par this week. That’s not golf, that’s some kind of pinball game. Nintendo. You could have parred this track with a rake and a seven-iron.

They almost wrote the word bogey out of the language. You couldn’t make a bogey down here this week. You couldn’t make a bogey on these courses unless you had a heart attack off the tee. There were 1,007 birdies, 33 eagles and 2,243 pars shot this week. You had to shoot eight under just to make the cut. There were 161 rounds below par, and 126 rounds below 70. The Scotsmen who invented the game must be burning their kilts somewhere today.

But, at least, we now know how to judge the game. Look for the TV announcers to come on the air to report, “Mark O’Meara has no chance. He’s in jail. He’s in the middle of the fairway and he has an easy seven-iron to the green. Corey Pavin is in the right rough behind a tree and he has to invent a shot to even get close. He’s a cinch to win the hole and the tournament.”

No wonder none of us can master this cockamamie game. It’s not our fault. The whole game is an unplayable lie.