Just Call This Hole PGA Wet

I saw something Saturday at the Skins Game down here at PGA West I never expected to see in my lifetime. On one hole, the sixth, a 255-yard par-three over water, after John Daly had (barely) gotten on the green, three of the best golfers in the world (and one of them, perhaps, the best of all time) hit balls into the water.

Now, three members at your local club hitting the ball into the water one after another is hardly big news. But Jack Nicklaus, Payne Stewart and Curtis Strange hitting consecutive balls into the water? Off the tee? I could have kissed them. I don’t know about you, but if there’s water there, I always hit into it.

I half-expected to see one of them whiff after that. I don’t know when I’ve ever felt better at a golf tournament. Probably the day Fuzzy Zoeller four-putted 17 at Riviera.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-golfer. I just like these guys to occasionally find out what it’s like to play this game the way you and I do. It never occurs to them that the ball can go into the water. Ordinarily, they don’t even know water is there. They think every putt should go in. A two-putt makes them mad.

These guys don’t even know what it is to have a lost ball. I don’t think they have any idea what a hell-hole a round of golf can be. When three guys in a row hit it into the water, they know. They have now joined suffering humanity. I doubt that three premier golfers in a row ever before found water. It’s good for them.

One of the golfers in the field down here was already getting well acquainted with the suffering the great game can cause most of us.

He won back-to-back U.S. Opens. No one had done that since Ben Hogan in the ‘50s. Only five men had done it in the history of golf. Bobby Jones was one of them.

Curtis Strange won 15 other tournaments. He shot an 80 in the first round of the Masters once and then damn nearly won the tournament.

He was the leading money winner on tour three times. He has won $5,639,224 on tour, second on the all-time list.

No one played the game any better than Curtis Strange. He hit the most straight, crispest irons of anyone on the tour. A 15-foot putt was a tap-in for him.

He brimmed with confidence. He was the picture of health--20/20 or better vision, pulse rate and blood pressure low. He had the perfect build for golf, 5 feet 11, 170 pounds, not an ounce of fat on him. He had every shot in the bag. He had trouble shots, all right--but he didn’t need them. If you were looking for Curtis Strange, try the fairway. Or the green. He wasn’t long off the tee, but he made up for it by being straight.

He became the man to beat. Sponsors sent cars for him. He could make or break a tournament, depending on whether he showed up. He became The Next Hogan in all the golf magazines. The game’s superstar.

Then, it all unraveled. The music stopped, the parade broke up. The ball came off the stick sideways. The putts lipped out. He suddenly noticed there was water on the right. If you wanted to find Curtis Strange, try the rough. He didn’t make the winner’s stand anymore. He couldn’t even make the cut. He went from The New Hogan to old What’s His Name? His disappearance was meteoric, too.

What had happened? Well, the grip hadn’t changed. The swing hadn’t hurried. The vision hadn’t blurred. The temperature was normal, blood count steady. Whatever it was, it was nothing antibiotics could cure.

Whenever something happens to the golf swing, you check the mind. Outwitting a golf course calls for the total concentration of a watchmaker.

It looks like a game a somnambulist could play. But, Curtis Strange could tell you, it is as mentally draining as heart surgery. “It takes a lot of energy to play golf,” Curtis insists.

Energy was suddenly in short supply. Curtis found his mind wandering, his attention slipping. He was constantly fatigued. He felt disoriented on the golf course, like a guy who wakes up in the middle of a dream.

Inability to concentrate is as fatal to a golfer as to the captain of the Titanic. His game hits the iceberg. He needs a lifeboat.

Curtis Strange went from $1,147,644 and first on the money list two years in a row to $277,172 and 53rd on the money list in 1990. That hardly pays the road bills.

If golf was nonplussed, so was medicine. The symptoms could indicate inner-ear disorder. But they could be any one of a half-dozen disturbances of the equilibrium.

But it’s hard to hit a golf ball when you feel you--or the ground--are swaying. When you constantly feel as if you’ve been up for 48 hours. In the rain.

Curtis knew something was wrong when, not only did his concentration wander, so did his desire. He began to not care whether he won or lost.

This was never Curtis Strange’s style. No one ever caught him humming or whistling his way around the golf course. He came to beat you. He scowled whenever he didn’t make a three on a hole. Now, he was shrugging at fives.

It got so bad, Curtis receipted for an 81 in this year’s PGA and quietly withdrew to go home and give the doctors a shot at making par, finding the trouble.

He hadn’t won a tour tournament since his second Open at Rochester in ’89. This year, he missed six cuts and had a half-dozen other tournaments where he might as well have. He tied for 70th once, tied for 66th another time, tied for 54th, 50th, 48th, 42nd and 40th. One of the cuts he missed was the U.S. Open. Curtis was like a man playing out of a cloud.

Curtis Strange is playing in the Skins Game at PGA West’s Stadium course this week mainly because he is defending champion but also because he was one of the giants of the game.

All eyes were on the new Golden Gorilla, John Daly, who hits a golf ball the way Dempsey hit jaws or Nagurski hit lines. His shots get more hang time than a horse thief.

The Skins Game is a made-for-TV bastardization of the great game, which has more aspects of weekend foursome play at your local club than the regular medal play does. A best-ball wins the hole, but if one ties that best ball, all four do and the money carries over to the next hole. It has everything but automatic presses.

John Daly is the only one of the four contesting down here to make money the first day ($120,000).

The winds--35 m.p.h. and up--made the course look like a moor in Scotland. They moved the tee boxes up (80 yards in some cases) until the golfers were not only playing the members’ tees but almost the ladies’. And still the indignities persisted.

But even though he hit another ball in the water and found his putts veering in the gale-force winds, Curtis is finding his game is coming out of its, so to say, Strange interlude. “I feel I hit some good shots in some unreal conditions,” he says. “I think I’m being able to hit through this thing.”

The game hopes so.

Did John Daly’s hitting the ball 80 yards past him off the tee bother him? Curtis laughs. “It’s never the other guy’s game that bothers you--it’s your own.”

* SKINS GAME: John Daly’s first-day take includes $120,000 and two cars. C5