Time Stands Still in Weekend at Ojai

See if this makes you smile the way it made me smile.

They played a professional golf tournament here this weekend, for a fat payday. Charlie Sifford tried his luck. After two rounds, though, Charlie withdrew. The electric carts weren’t permitted to leave the cart paths, and Charlie’s legs began to bother him from all that tromping back and forth from his ball to his cart.

So, Charlie played only 36 holes.

And on nine of them, he scored threes.

This June, Charlie Sifford will turn 70 years old.

It is a magical history tour, this PGA Senior Tour, a wonderful little world in which Arnold Palmer can be middle-aged, and Jack Nicklaus can revert from a bear into a cub and where every water hazard transforms into some facsimile of a fountain of youth.

Old guys playing golf? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe that is all that this PGA Senior Tour is. A sandbox for grown-ups who still act and feel like kids. A pasture for workers too skilled to be put out into one.

So what if it is? That’s what’s so good about it. That’s what makes it something of a Neverland of sport, where no one ever ages. “Golf has always been a game to me,” Palmer said. “Today, the younger players consider it a business.”

Here in Ojai, 70 miles north of Hollywood, it is nothing new to turn back the hands of time.

The movie “Lost Horizon” was filmed nearby. Katharine Hepburn also played golf against Babe Didriksen here for “Pat and Mike.” And Jack Nicholson’s 1940s private detective from the “Chinatown” sequel brought his clubs to the Ojai Valley Inn & Country Club for the golf scenes.

I can hardly claim that golf as played today is a Shangri-La, some sort of perfect world.

In Nicholson’s “The Two Jakes,” it was not very subtly suggested that, at the country club named in the film, a player of the Jewish persuasion might not necessarily be welcome.

Today, while golf is a game accessible to players of all faiths, sexes and colors, there are still certain places that are behind the times in all three areas. Yet, recently we saw a 16-year-old black golfer, Tiger Woods, compete in the Los Angeles Open to nothing but large crowds and great applause.

After playing a round here with Sifford, who is Woods’ senior by 54 years but also is black, Arnold Palmer said: “I’ve played with Charlie all my life. There weren’t a lot of black golfers, but there weren’t a lot of (Poles), either.”

Excluding, Arnold meant, himself.

One thing you do have to say for golf, it has a way of keeping people forever young.

For example, Art Wall turns 70 later this year. But in Saturday’s play at the GTE West Senior Classic, Art shot 70.

Joe Jimenez, who turns 66 in a few months, shot a 68.

Chi Chi Rodriguez, 56, shot a 62.

That’s right, 62.

Golf is the one game where a guy can grow old and still show off. Even in tournament conditions, these players excel.

Billy Maxwell had three deuces on Sunday’s card, six in three days. His 63rd birthday is approaching.

Ken Still put up a 66. Jimmy Powell shot a 67. So did Arnie, who broke 70 twice in three days.

Doug Ford didn’t have a round worse than 76 in the tournament. Not too shabby for a fellow who turns 70 in August.

I, too, will probably shoot 76 at Doug Ford’s age. And then I’ll play the back nine.

First place in the tournament Sunday came down to a physically fit Australian, Bruce Crampton, and a wiry, wily little Puerto Rican, Rodriguez, who between them have won 39 tournaments on the Senior Tour.

That’s right, 39.

When it was over, Crampton was the winner and Rodriguez grinned like one, wading into a crowd of autograph-hunting children chanting: “Chi Chi! Chi Chi!”

Chi Chi still feels younger than springtime. Everything makes him smile. Asked after giving a radio interview here in Spanish what he had said, Rodriguez’s reply was: “I don’t know.”

He was particularly tickled that on another coast Sunday, Raymond Floyd, 49, was the winner of an event on the regular PGA Tour.

“All right!” Chi Chi said. “Maybe he won’t come out now.”

Oh, Floyd’s “coming out,” all right. He turns 50 in a few months, which qualifies him to join the Senior Tour.

That’s the world of golf, where no one really ages.

Tiger Woods turns eligible, by the way, in the year 2026.