This Job Isn’t All Fairways

Golf looks like such a wonderful way to make a living!

I mean, there’s no heavy lifting. You walk out on the tee, you just put your hand out behind you and someone hands you a ball, carries your clubs, reads you the breaks and high-fives you when you make good.

Hey, you’re out in the fresh air and sunshine. The grass is green, the birds are singing--in the trees and on the greens. The crowd is adoring. Your clothes are furnished by the manufacturer, the finest wools and cottons. Your clubs and golf balls are free, you stay in the best hotels. If you’re Arnold Palmer, you fly your own plane.

It isn’t as if you’re melting ore into steel, putting out oil well fires, walking high iron building skyscrapers in the wind, going down in a coal mine with a canary in your hat. You don’t risk your life chasing criminals down dark alleys.

You are an elite in an elite. Ninety percent of the men in the golf-playing world envy you. Even other athletes. There’ve been about two known instances of golfers wishing they could have been ballplayers or race drivers, but there’ve been hundreds of ballplayers who wish they had been golfers. Michael Jordan, for instance. Dozens of football players. You don’t end up with arthritis in both knees.

So, don’t shed any tears for a Tom Kite, right? He has had a bad year, you say?

Wait a minute! What’s a bad year?! He made $396,580 on the golf course. He has made more lifetime than anybody out there.

And he did it without hitting the ball 400 yards off the tee, knocking down flagsticks with his approaches, eagling par fours. Kite does not take the short route to the hole, he takes the safe route.

He crept up on golf. His college teammate, Ben Crenshaw, was supposed to be the one who was to be the next Ben Hogan. Kite was programmed to finish fourth. Or so the golf world thought. He played the game like a prudent investor.

But he made the putts and he made the cuts. He quietly became one of the world’s best, one of the ones to beat. He wasn’t big. But he was straight. He wore these big owly glasses and had this shock of orange-red hair.

He is the defending champion in the Infiniti Tournament of Champions down here at La Costa Resort and Spa this week.

But that was the last tournament he has won--12 months ago.

It’s not so much the Tom Kites have changed, the game has changed.

Hordes of young Tom Kites began showing up on tournament first tees. Thirty years ago, a Tom Kite--or a Lanny Wadkins or a Mark O’Meara--would have been a superstar. Now, they struggle to maintain an identity. The competition became smothering. You are fighting for your professional life out there. It has become like finding yourself with one deck of cards surrounded by riverboat gamblers.

Putting for a living never has been as desirable as it looked. Now, it has become nightmarish. The wear and tear on the nerves drove even a Hogan to the brink of burnout.

The pressure in tournament golf today is about what it would be at 50 fathoms on the floor of the Pacific. It’s hard to keep the nuts and bolts in place.

Given his game, a Tom Kite, or a Wadkins or an O’Meara, would probably have doubled his victory total--Lanny has 20, Kite 15 and O’Meara seven.

The Sneads, Hogans, Palmers, Nicklauses, Caspers used to win 80, 70, 60 and 50 tournaments lifetime. No one is likely to reach 40 in today’s game. Thirty may be out of reach.

Not too long ago, the commentator, Bob Drum, and your correspondent used to play a game. For betting purposes, in a golf tournament, you would be allowed to take “any Tom.” This would give you Tom Kite, Tom Watson, Tom Weiskopf. It was a good bet.

Not any more. Picking a winner of a golf tournament is like picking a number in a lottery.

“There are 50, 60 guys capable of winning a golf tournament today,” Tom Kite says. “In the ‘40s, there were maybe eight or nine. So if three of them fell by the wayside, you felt you had only five guys to beat.

“Bobby Jones once said all you had to do to win a golf tournament was have only one bad round. Today, you can’t have one bad hole. There are too many guys who won’t. You have to score lower and lower to win.”

So, if it’s a job where you don’t burn your hands on an open hearth furnace, or get coal dust in your lungs, there are still occupational hazards. You get scars where they don’t show. The hemorrhaging is internal. The gastric ulcer, the hand tremor over the $300,000 putt, the mental letdown when you know you have just hit a million dollars out of bounds. The discouragement when someone in that tournament will have 72 good holes.

“There comes a time when you realize it’s not a game, it’s a job,” Kite acknowledges.

That’s when you start to realize putts don’t have to fall, drives can find the rough, water can come into play.

“I’ve been playing this game for 35 years,” Kite says, “and I think everyone reaches the point where they think, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I suppose accountants reach it, and dentists and construction workers--but we’re not supposed to.”

Burnout is a word for tennists, pilots, surgeons, but golf, too, can be a tedium like watchmaking. Doing the same thing every day all your life with no room for error can be debilitating mentally.

You have to have won a tournament in the last 12 months to qualify for the Tournament of Champions. As few as 24 have played in it--because of multiple winners in the past. There were 35 eligible this year.

“There are--what?--13 new guys here this year?” asks Kite significantly. “There are only a few who have won two tournaments--and none who have won more than two.”

Golfers in the ‘40s used to win 13 tournaments a year. Byron Nelson won 18. He would have been a one-man Tournament of Champions.

“Some year, we may get 43 first-time winners here,” ruefully agrees Kite. “The game needs more multiple winners. But they’re going to be harder and harder to find.”

So, the golfer isn’t having any more fun out there than say, a forklift operator.

So, has the competition discouraged players to the extent where one bad hole can extinguish the drive to win and get them to playing not to win but just to get out of there? Is a triple bogey a technical knockout in today’s game?

Kite winces. “Depends on when you get it,” he says. “In an early round, you may overcome it. If you make a triple bogey on, say, a 13th hole of the final round, you know you have just had it.”

Kite’s point is, it’s not as easy as it looks out there. As the pundit, Dan Foster, would have it, it’s not windshielding Chryslers or chopping cane.

But never mind the trees and sun and birds and running brooks, that’s just a lathe out there. When you get into Sunday night and need all those six-foot putts to meet expenses or feed the family, you might as well be in the center of a downed submarine, gasping for air and trying not to scream--and wishing you had some nice non-pressure job manning a railroad crossing gate somewhere.