Floyd at 49: Still Steady as He Flows

Golfers call it “the zone.” It is a state of suspended animation where you turn the controls of your game over to some mysterious instrument panel.

You are barely conscious as you go through the motions and you keep making pars and birdies and eagles. You are a robot. Every move is on instinct, programmed by years and years of practice, tournament play, shots that suddenly flash in your personal computer put there by a lifetime of shot-after-shot storage of data.

Ben Hogan called it “muscle memory” but it is more esoteric than that. It is the athletic version of the twilight zone.

Every great athlete has it. There are nights when every shot goes right into the basket. There are nights for batters when the curveball seems to come up to the plate in slow motion. Badly hurt fighters get off the floor and turn the tables on their tormentors but have no recollection of how they did it.

No one in golf finds that zone better than Raymond Floyd. Raymond on the trail of first money in a tournament is one of the scariest sights his opponents can see. He gets this look in his eyes. It’s as if he’s looking at something only a circling eagle or a red-tailed hawk can see.

It is almost as if the hole got two inches bigger, or the fairways 10 yards wider and the rough disappeared, a study in concentration only a Hogan or a Nicklaus could match. It is as if the golf course was up a tree and Raymond was about to put a net over it. When Raymond gets in that mode, the other guys are playing for second money.

He can play under any circumstances but when he got a lead in a tournament, he was harder to get by than Sunday traffic. If Ray Floyd had a lead going into the final round, they should have stopped it on a TKO. He won his Masters by eight shots in 1976.

“Raymond is in outer space again,” sighed runner-up Ben Crenshaw that year.

It was to get in on this indefatigable knowledge of how to win that Dave Stockton picked Raymond Floyd to play on his Ryder Cup team this fall. The golf world kind of gulped. Raymond is 49, within months of the senior tour.

But Dave had lots of guys who knew how to play. He needed someone who knew how to win. Floyd wrote the book on that.

Golf, you would have to say, is not a team sport. In fact, it may be the most individual sport known. You’re on your own out there. No coaches. No team managers. No team, usually. No referees, umpires, back judges. You call your own offsides. You blow the whistle on yourself.

In other sports, you may pretend to catch a ball you really trapped, you may hold the belt buckle of an opponent, you try to get away with a double-dribble. Golf relies on the integrity of its gamesmen. You may not ask a playing partner anything but what time it is. Ask for the line or the distance, it’s two shots. There are no designated putters.

You are as on your own as the pioneers. Except once every two years in a Ryder Cup and at a tournament like the Shark Shootout at Sherwood Country Club this week.

A Ryder Cup does have a captain. He doesn’t show you how to hold a club, but he does try to figure out a way to show you how to hold a lead.

So, when Captain Stockton chose Floyd as an at-large member of his 1991 Ryder Cup team, he knew exactly what he was doing.

He knew that if the European team had any edge, it was experience. Those guys couldn’t hit the ball any farther than our guys and not necessarily any straighter. But they knew how to keep the wheels on. They knew how to smuggle a two-stroke lead into the clubhouse. They certainly knew that, in match play, a catastrophic shot doesn’t mean you lose the farm, just a hole.

If there’s one thing Ray Floyd also knew, it was how to keep the wheels on, how to get a win safely into the hangar. Raymond was as undiscourageable as a guy selling insurance.

Captain Stockton had a young player whose performance was pivotal--Fred Couples. No one hits a ball any farther than Freddy Couples. His nickname on the tour is Boom-Boom because when he hits the ball solidly, it goes supersonic.

But the trick with Boom Boom is to keep this talent in line. Don’t let him deviate, don’t let him get down on himself. You keep reminding him how well he plays this game.

Golf, more than any other, is a game of confidence. If you think you can’t do it, you’re right. No one ever hit a golf ball successfully with a self-doubt.

Captain Stockton knew the pairing of the old pro and the young boomer would be a match made in golf heaven because he had seen it work. That was last year, the second year of the Great Shark Shootout tournament at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, a tournament named in honor of Greg Norman for the benefit of the Ronald McDonald Children’s charities.

It was the greatest pairing since Clark Gable and Rhett Butler. In the alternate-shot phase of the tournament last year, Floyd-Couples shot a 57. They had a six-shot lead going into the final round. The outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Stockton knew that Fred Couples was one of the taut band of Americans who had blown the 1989 Ryder Cup to what appeared to be an inferior bunch of strikers of the ball. Fred had the misfortune to hit a semi-shank into the crowd on No. 18, the last hole of the last round, and his mis-hit lost his match to a weekend player from Ireland.

Nobody shanks a ball on 18 with Ray Floyd looking over his shoulder and, in the Ryder Cup this year, Fred Couples played rounds of impeccable, steady, often brilliant golf. The pairing was crucial to our Ryder Cup victory. Lots of our guys hit balls into the water or the crowds, but this time Fred Couples wasn’t one of them.

They used to say, if you could put Ben Hogan’s head on Sam Snead’s shoulders, Sam might never lose. But the Floyd contribution was not cerebral, it was psychological.

“It wasn’t as if I pick his clubs for him or read the greens,” Raymond said. “Freddy does those things very well himself. I don’t give him the yardage or tell him, ‘OK, Fred, hit it over that tree out there 300 yards.’ Fred can do that for himself. It’s more an attitude, a sense of partnership. A sharing of experience.”

Whatever it is, there will be more of it at Sherwood this week. For the golf world, it’s a historic mating--like Ruth-Gehrig, Burns & Allen, Veloz and Yolanda, Montana and Rice. Couples may have 30 yards on Raymond off the tee but, as someone once said, the most important distance in golf is not the 300 yards off the tee but the six inches between the ears.