School Out on 10th Hole for Sluman

The Los Angeles Open at Riviera, which has been won by the likes of Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Lloyd Mangrum and Tom Watson, has now been won by--a little fanfare, professor--Ted Schulz?

Well, to be fair, the Los Angeles Open at Riviera also has been won by the likes of Tom Purtzer, Pat Fitzsimons, Doug Tewell and T.C. Chen.

Not your basic Hall of Famers.

It came as no surprise to Ted Schulz that he was going to win Sunday. It came as no surprise to students of recent golf history. The game has become a lottery, a crapshoot. What you do at the start of a tournament today is stick a pin in the entry list. Or throw the names in a hat and choose one blindfolded.

First, you throw out the recognizable names. Guys who have won 20 or more tournaments. Guys whose names are on balls or clubs. Guys who get slacks contracts. Guys who won Opens, majors. Guys you might know .

We probably shouldn’t have been too taken aback by Ted Schulz. After all, he was amateur champion of Kentucky once. He had won a tournament--the Southern Open in 1989. That put him one-up on Purtzer, Fitzsimons and Chen. They had never won before. Fitzsimons and Chen never won again.

The two most overrated things in golf are distance off the tee and the “teach” in putting. Golfers, to a player, are positive that, if a playing partner has a putt on the same line as theirs, they will find out how to put theirs in the hole.

Jeff Sluman might have lost the tournament Sunday because he believed that. Jeff had the bad luck to have a birdie putt on 18 on the same line as his playing partner, Bruce Lietzke.

Lietzke had a short putt that he hit straight, and it slid a foot past the hole on the right side. Sluman studied the action. It’s called “going to school.” It’s more like going down the drain.

Sluman concluded the putt had to break slightly left.

It broke left, all right--about a foot past the hole.

If Sluman makes that five-foot putt, he gets into a playoff with Schulz.

That’s the kind of a game golf is. Irrational, eccentric, contrary. Malicious. If it were human, they would put it in a rubber room. Or prison for life. It would start to grow hair on its face and howl at the moon every midnight.

If Jeff Sluman hadn’t had a blueprint putt to follow, he might have made up his own mind about his putt--and made it.

Ted Schulz won the tournament because he played the most underrated part of the game--par golf. He parred the last seven holes and let the other guys go for miracles. He got outdriven on every hole by his playing partners, Fred Couples and Rocco Mediate. He didn’t care. He played safe golf. Jeff Sluman made four bogeys to go with his five birdies. Schulz made only one bogey.

The lesson was clear--when you get a lead at Riviera, par will keep you there.

You expect to lose at Riviera on the long 18th hole, which has the soul of a serial killer. Or maybe on the sinister 15th hole, which comes into play like something off a pirate ship with a tattoo, a scar on its face and a knife in its teeth.

You don’t expect to lose it on the raffish 10th hole. This is usually the cutup in the family of great holes at Riviera. The 10th plays it for laughs. It should have a seltzer bottle and a rubber bladder.

It’s a par four, but it’s only 306 yards long. That’s just a medium drive for these guys.

Only, the 10th dares you to drive it. It has a green just wider than a hair ribbon and is banked on two sides by traps. You hit the ball to the left here and try to feather your next shot up the peninsula green. Go into one of those greenside traps and you can go back and forth in them for an hour.

Jeff Sluman hit his second shot into one of these traps. That may be where he lost the tournament. He played as careful a trap shot as he could, but he still had a 10-foot putt on a green so slippery it was just this side of ice. He missed that putt. It was the shot that put him in Schulz’s sights. Schulz had just played this hole properly--from the opening in the fairway to the green, where even a miserably short lag putt left him with an uphill shot at a par. He made it and caught Sluman on the next hole.

It was another victory for God, country and the good life. Golfers in this country used to be hard-drinking, chain-smoking heathens who took up golf because the pool halls weren’t open on Sundays. They were profane, cynical and they would bet on anything. The golf course was just a complicated crap game. They never went to church on Sundays. Or any other day. God wasn’t their caddy, some guy with a record for petty larceny was.

Golfers today should play in halos. There are no atheists in sand traps. Ted Schulz is only one in the long line of modern golfers who spent the night before the final round in prayer, not a bar.

He knew he was going to win, he said. “God has a plan for all of us,” he explained.

It’s commendable, admirable and--apparently--successful. But if Bruce Lietzke had hit his approach on the other side of the 18th green or if he had whispered to Sluman, “I pushed it,” as he trailed after his missed putt on No. 18, the tournament finale Sunday might have become an extra-hole test of faith Ted hadn’t counted on.

Bruce Lietzke was trying to make his putt Sunday. But back in the less-devout days on the course, Walter Hagen was perfectly capable of skewing a putt rather than give his playing companion the correct line. The moral of the story? Don’t get a teach, get a birdie.