He Jumped to the Head of the Class

It ain’t over until the short man swings.

WOO.

That was what was left of the identification on the caddie’s coveralls, until someone not otherwise preoccupied by the chaos on the outskirt of Augusta National’s 18th green pressed back the adhesive flap. There. WOOSNAM, it now read, identifying the cabbage-patch golfer who was about to take the Masters championship.

Ian Woosnam, the littlest Master, stood a few steps up ahead, trying to catch a glimpse of the green, stranded a fair way from the fairway. Up! jumped Li’l Woosie. Up! he hopped again, a human pogo stick. But he couldn’t see. Too many hills. Too many heads. His 5-foot-4 1/2 carriage strained. He looked like Tim Conway’s “Dorf” character, like a man constructed from the knees up.

What had been anybody’s Masters was about to become this tiny body’s Masters. Of the many men who had reached this moment-of-truth par-four Sunday with at least some reasonable hope of winning were Lanny Wadkins, who birdied the 18th hole; Ben Crenshaw, who parred it; Jose Maria Olazabal, who bogeyed it, and Tom Watson, who butchered it, double-bogeying away the weirdest back nine of his life.

And that was not to forget Ventura-born, Santa Barbara-prepped, UCLA-educated Steve Pate, who, along with millions of other Americans, watched the climax of the 55th Masters on television, with the one notable exception being that Pate actually had a chance to win this crazy thing. Pate still had nearly two hours to kill after he completed play before he would know who won.

“My work is done,” Pate said. “It would be a unique thing for golf if they let me go out there and play defense .”

Obvious jokes about the defensive abilities of UCLA athletes aside, sitting in a chair almost worked. Everybody else was out there scrambling, trying not to gag, spraying shots from side to side as though Gerald Ford was giving a clinic. On the 18th hole alone, Olazabal’s ball had not one but two sandy landings, Watson pushed into a pile of pine cones and leaves and Woosnam hooked into a barren walkway behind the spectators who were watching him hit.

Not five minutes before, it appeared this Masters was headed for a WOW of a finish--Woosnam-Olazabal-Watson--with a playoff involving three golfers from as wildly different backgrounds as the one in 1987 that involved Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros and winner Larry Mize. With the pacesetters linked at 11 under par, there was no way of telling who, if anybody, would not melt in the muggy Augusta heat, the 25-year-old Spaniard, the 33-year-old Welshman or the 41-year-old American.

WOO, that’s who.

His ball as big a crowd favorite as himself, Woosnam had to wave gallery gawkers along, like a bobby in Piccadilly Circus directing traffic. The eight-iron in his hand was his baton. He hopped once more to peer over the mound that obscured his view, then popped the ball onto the fringe of No. 18.

Olazabal already had dropped a stroke. Watson was about to drop two. The tournament belonged to Woosnam if he could tiddlywink the ball into the cup with two more shots.

Fingering the clubhead like a billiards player chalking a cue, Woosnam used a putter from the fringe and tapped the ball onto the kidney-shaped green within eight feet of the hole. The distance that remained took him three strides to walk off--a taller man could have covered it in two--and made Woosnam’s pulse race, but he rolled it into the hole.

Whew.

“My word, what a relief,” the Welshman said. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather proud of me-self.”

He should be. Literally up a creek at the 13th hole and looking like Huckleberry Finn pondering whether to pull up his cuffs and wade into it, Woosnam was a comical little character all day, giggling from spectators’ comments while stepping away from important shots, impatiently enduring endless waits due to slow play up ahead, raising his club to the crowd like a scepter, bunny-hopping on the 18th like a jackrabbit trying to locate his hole. He turned the whole day into an “I Love Woosie” episode.

A far more sympathetic figure was Watson, who in his wildest dreams never saw himself scoring two double-bogeys and two eagles on the Masters’ final nine. Or Olazabal, who won’t soon forget the quadruple-bogey he took on a par-three Friday. Or Wadkins, who still can’t believe he missed a gimme putt Friday at the Masters by backhanding the thing.

After Pate checked in Sunday with his bogey-free 65, he shrugged and said: “I’ve pretty much written off any chance that I could win the golf tournament. I’d be shocked if I did.”

The way everything turned out, it’s something of a shock that he didn’t. Because that is the kind of Masters this was, wild and woolly and Woosie’s, the kind of golf tournament where even the people watching TV saw the final hole a whole lot better than the winner did.