The Winning Continues or Casper : Golf: Continued competition still fun for Hall of Fame member.

The biggest victories of Billy Casper’s Hall of Fame golf career took place in another era, but he isn’t content to live in the past.

Still a serious competitor at age 60, which matches his remarkable total of tournament victories, Casper said, “You know what? I’m having more fun now than I ever have in my life.”

Casper, who lives in Bonita, went on to explain: “With the Senior PGA Tour (for men over 50) and spinoffs of the Senior Tour like the Super Seniors (for men over 60 who play within certain Senior tournaments), it’s really a ball for me right now.”

A glance at Casper’s calendar provides a good idea why he is enjoying himself.

He and his wife, Shirley, are in Rabat, Morocco, in northern Africa, where he is entered in the King Hassan II tournament, which he helped organize in 1971 and is being revived after a 10-year lapse. They will return on the morning of Nov. 25, just in time for the Inaugural Junior Achievement Billy Casper Golf Classic at Billy’s home club, the San Diego Country Club in Chula Vista.

“The tournament here is a fund-raiser for Junior Achievement,” Casper said. “We’re hoping to get 160 players at $300 apiece. We have commitments from Bruce Hurst and Andy Benes of the Padres and Mitch Voges, the national amateur champion, and I’ll probably hit a ball for everybody who comes through.

“Everybody will have an opportunity to know me. That’s the reason these things are so successful--the personal touch. I’ve run golf camps for kids all over the world, and I’ve had kids who came as students and came back as instructors.”

One young Casper, Bob, 31, has become a second-generation pro golfer, although he has yet to qualify for the PGA Tour.

“He’s plus three (rated at 69) at the club, so he has to give me a stroke,” Casper said. “He’s good, but so far he has played only on the mini-tours and the Asian tour. I don’t know what he’s going to to do.”

Four of the six boys in the family have caddied for Casper. Charles, 21, is his caddy now.

Obviously, Casper is a people person, and the most convincing evidence comes from a look at his big, happy family.

When Shirley Casper was told after bearing a girl and two boys that she could have no more children, she and Billy adopted three girls and three boys. After that, she had another girl and another boy.

And the love story doesn’t stop there. The Caspers have taken in five other youngsters for periods ranging from one to three years.

“Now we have 10 grandchildren,” Casper said. “We’ve never been lonesome.”

Nor has Casper ever felt lonesome on the golf circuit. His charisma has made him one of the sport’s most popular players ever since he joined the PGA Tour in 1955.

Consider Casper’s partial list of credits:

--Has won 51 tournaments on the regular PGA Tour, including the US Open in 1959 and 1966 and the Masters in 1970. Has won nine tournaments on the Senior PGA Tour, including the U.S. Senior Open in 1983, plus “20 or so” events in such foreign lands as Japan, France, Cuba, Italy, Brazil and Mexico.

--Has finished second in the PGA Tournament three times--in 1958, 1965 and 1971.

--Was chosen PGA player of the year in 1966 and 1970.

--Led the regular Tour in earnings twice, with $121,945 in 1966 and $205,168 in 1968. Was the first player to top $200,000. Overall, has earned $3,126,309 in official prize money, $1,691,583 on the regular Tour and $1,434,726 on the Senior Tour.

--Won the Vardon Trophy for the best scoring average five times.

--Led the Tour in victories five times, hitting his peak with six in 1968.

--Was named to the Ryder Cup team eight consecutive times, and served as non-playing captain in 1979.

--Was ranked the fifth greatest golfer of all time in a statistical compilation done in 1988 for the PGA by Al Barkow, formerly of Golf magazine.

-- Was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1978 and the PGA Hall of Fame in 1982.

One needs only to walk through the front door of the San Diego Country Club to grasp the magnitude of Casper’s accomplishments.

The restaurant adjacent to the lobby has been named the Billy Casper Grill. Casper’s trophies are housed in cases that divide the grill from the lobby. Photos and other displays--such as the card from his club-record round of 60, shot in 1988--adorn the walls. One framed grouping contains four of his six Sports Illustrated covers. Hanging in the most prominent place in the room is a painting of him with the traditional green jacket that goes with winning the Masters.

“It’s all pretty overwhelming,” Casper said.

That it is, and so are some of the stories he can tell about his experiences. For example, he trailed Arnold Palmer by seven shots in the U.S. Open with nine holes to play and wound up beating Palmer in a playoff. That was in 1966 at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

Casper recalled that as he and Palmer walked toward the 10th tee, he said to himself, “I’m going to try to finish second.”

But amazingly, Casper picked up a shot on 10 and another on 13, then two on 15 and two more on 16. Suddenly he was only one stroke down with two to play.

“Arnie finally panicked, and I tied him on 17,” Casper said. “It was unbelievable. I made up seven shots in eight holes.”

In the 18-hole playoff the next day, Palmer led Casper by two strokes at the turn, then again faded. Casper pulled even on 11 and went on to win big, 69-74.

“Arnie unraveled,” Casper said. “I’ve never seen him like that before or since.”

As remarkable as that feat was, Casper doesn’t rank it No. 1 in his book of memories.

“I’ve got five tournaments that I can’t distinguish among,” Casper said. “Of course, winning the playoff from Palmer was one. There was my first victory, in 1956, and winning the Open for the first time, in ’59. I was out three months in ’63 with a torn muscle in my left hand, and I won my first tournament back by shooting a 64 the last day. The fifth one was the Masters I won in a playoff with Gene Littler (of Rancho Santa Fe).”

Speaking of final-round 64s, Casper shot two in a row in the San Diego Open. In 1965, he tied Wes Ellis for first place, only to lose in a playoff, and a year later he won the tournament by four strokes. He also finished second in 1959.

In the 1970 Masters, Casper led Littler, now one of his closest friends, by seven shots with eight holes to play. He blew four of the seven on the next four holes, but unlike Palmer four years earlier, he righted himself and won by four--69-73.

“There was one memorable shot in that playoff at Augusta National,” Casper said. “On the second hole, I hit the worst hook I ever saw, and I was in trouble. The ball hit a tree and bounced down into a hazard full of grass. A half-inch in back of the ball was a log about an inch in diameter.

“The only shot I had was with a 9-iron. Somehow, I had to get the club between the ball and the piece of wood and hit it high enough to go over some pine trees. It went about 160 yards, and when Littler chilly-dipped into a sand trap, I actually picked up a shot. In my mind, that was the greatest shot I ever hit in my life.”

On the reverse side of the coin was Casper’s near-miss against Nicklaus in the 1971 PGA in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

“I thought I had it won,” Casper said. “I was playing several groups ahead of Nicklaus, and I birdied the last three holes to go ahead, but he finished birdie-par to beat me. That was probably my toughest defeat.”

Casper was born in San Diego, but his family moved to Silver City, N.M., shortly afterward, and it was there that he took up golf.

“I was 4 1/2 when I started playing on cow pastures in New Mexico,” he said. “I started caddying at 11, and I grew up caddying.

“I was also a great baseball fan, and when we moved back here, I used to see the old (minor league) Padres play at Lane Field at the foot of Broadway. I thought I was going to be a professional baseball player. That was my main love. I was a first baseman at Chula Vista High--good but not great. By my junior year, I had become a very good golfer, so I finally chose golf.”

Casper enrolled at Notre Dame, but left during his second semester “because I couldn’t hack the weather.” Then he spent four years in the Navy, and shortly after his discharge in 1955, he won both the county open and amateur titles.

“That was when I joined the Tour,” Casper said. “Paul Runyan (PGA champion in 1934) saw me win the county open, and he made a statement, ‘I wonder what he’s going on the Tour for.’ Later, he said, ‘How wrong I was.’ I was on the Tour only a year before I won my first tournament.”

Casper generated publicity in the early ‘60s when he went on a diet that included such entrees as bear, moose, elk, rabbit, caribou and buffalo.

“I found out I was allergic to certain foods,” he said. “These included fowl and pork, so I felt I had to branch out into wild game. I lost 40 pounds, down to 165.

“At that weight, I felt my stamina wasn’t that good, so I went up to 180.”

As positive a thinker as he has always been, Casper almost gave up golf in 1980, when he was 49 and hadn’t won a tournament in five years. He and his family had moved to Mapleton, Utah, where they lived on a farm until returning to San Diego in 1987, and he had gone into a direct-sales business, marketing food supplements, vitamins and minerals.

“I had some ailments and I tried to play with them,” he said. “I altered my swing, so I got so far out of tune that I went from winning $100,000 in a season to literally nothing.

“We felt self-sufficient on the farm. I was completely away from golf. But then the Senior Tour came in, and on the advice of a friend, I went back home to work with Phil Rodgers (a fellow San Diego pro) for two months. He changed both my backswing and my grip.”

What that didn’t do for Casper’s confidence, hypnosis did.

“I took hypnosis because I knew I had a psychological problem,” Casper said. “It was embarrassing, because I had become a menace to the galleries. I hit some balls in Palm Springs that were three blocks from the golf course.”

When Casper became eligible for his first senior tournament--he turned 50 on June 24, 1981--he was ready for a new start. He teed off two days later in the Marlboro Classic, and finished seventh.

“The boom of the Senior Tour has been incredible,” Casper said. “It started in 1980 with two tournaments and a total purse of $250,000. Now it has 42 tournaments worth $22 million.

“We have two pro-ams each week, and they’ve been the backbone of the tour. When I was on the regular tour, the pros played the pro-ams and then went on their way. We mix with the amateurs and attend the social functions. That means a lot to these people, and it has also meant a lot to our tour.”

It has meant so much, in fact, that major business firms are waiting in line to sponsor tournaments.

“We’ve got a dozen corporations that we don’t have dates for,” Casper said.

Casper last won a tournament in 1989, and his 1991 earnings are a modest $71,032 with one event left--in Maui next month.

As he put it, “My game hasn’t been, to coin a phrase, up to par.”

Nevertheless, he isn’t cutting back on his schedule. He averages 25 to 30 senior tournaments a year plus two regular tour events, the Masters and the Doral Open.

“It has been fantastic,” he said. “I’ve played in 35 countries, with kings and presidents, high military leaders and governmental officials. I have friends all over the world.

“When I started playing as a 4 1/2-year-old kid, I couldn’t have imagined this in my wildest dreams.”