Voges Blames His Health for Sub-Par Performance : Golf: U.S. Amateur titleholder was under the weather when he shot an opening-round 87, then missed cut in rain-plagued Memorial.

Golfers in the Los Angeles area face myriad problems.

For the public-course turf-gougers, the main problem is how to actually get onto a course. Do you stumble out of your house at 2 a.m. to stand in line at a starter’s window, hoping that a less-fanatical golfer won’t bother to show for his tee time? Or do you dial the county or city-course telephone reservation number, intent on getting a time for as much as a week in advance, until your fingernail turns black and falls off?

The private-course folks also face problems, such as: Does the red sweater match the red-and-purple slacks?

But for all area golfers, at least one problem leaps all social and financial bounds: They learn to play in only perfect weather conditions.

Last week, Mitch Voges of Simi Valley found himself standing on the majestic Muirfield Village Golf Course in Dublin, Ohio, at the start of the Memorial tournament, wrapped in so many layers of clothing that he resembled a cafe awning with feet.

Rain pounded the Dublin area and the wind swept it across the lush grass, depositing most of the water on the golf course but not an insignificant amount down the back of Voges’ neck.

The reigning U.S. Amateur champion promptly went out and shot an 87, which, for comparison purposes, is roughly equivalent to a national amateur boxing champion knocking himself out on the metal ring post while climbing through the ropes.

But, before anyone gets the idea that Voges, 42, is one of us, a guy who grips the club far too tightly and has never, ever swung a club the same way twice, let’s set the record straight. Voges had no business being on the Muirfield course last week. He should have been in bed. He spent two days with an umbrella over his head; it should have been an IV bag up there.

“The week before Muirfield I played in a tournament near Denver,” Voges said Tuesday. “The first day it was 36 degrees and raining. The second day it still rained, but it was warmer. It was 38 degrees. I found out I can’t play in that kind of weather. All the clothes and the mud and the rain. I’m not used to it.”

The discomfort, however, is not what sent Voges skidding toward his horrid round of 87--his worst round of golf, Voges said, since his feet stopped growing. What pushed him down that road was a cold or flu so severe he said his whole body was shaking throughout the round.

“I got sick in Denver, but the opportunity to play in the Memorial was one I couldn’t pass up,” said Voges, who became the third-oldest national amateur champion when he swept to victory last summer in Ooltewah, Tenn.

“I had a cold and a flu and a fever and then I got the shakes,” he said. “When you have the flu and a bad case of the shakes, golf is a pretty difficult game to play. And at Muirfield, you don’t have to be way off to make a bogey on every hole. You see ‘87’ and you figure I must have been in the woods all day long. But I wasn’t. I was just a little off the fairway all day and I three-putted a few times and I didn’t make any putts at all.”

On the first hole, a 540-yard par five, Voges hit a driver and a five-iron to the middle of the green. He then three-putted.

“And that was as good as it got,” he said.

The 87 left him a stunning 22 strokes behind first-round leader Nolan Henke. And so, with a pounding rain that was forecast to continue through the weekend, a nasty case of flu, a body temperature of 101-and-rising and about the same chance of winning the tournament as Bing Crosby, Voges did the logical thing:

He lurched out of his hotel room at noon the following day and teed off at 1:40 p.m. in the last group of the day. “I had taken a half a pack of cold pills,” Voges said. “Let’s just say I wasn’t feeling too well.”

And it rained even harder than it had Thursday. Play was halted as a two-hour monsoon swept eastward, leaving Voges huddled on the course and then inside the clubhouse early in his second round. But through six holes before the delay, he was even par.

After the rain abated, Voges birdied the seventh hole. Then the rain came again, forcing a second halt in play. Then darkness came.

When Saturday’s first light crept across the course, it found Voges standing in the 10th fairway, waiting to continue his round. And he birdied that hole. He finished with a round of one-under-par 71. The round had taken 20 hours.

“After what I did on Thursday, the average thing to do would be to find a hole and hide,” he said. “At that point, you withdraw from the tournament and go home. And three or four guys, guys who shot considerably better than I did, did withdraw. But I decided to stick it out. I had made a commitment to play and to play my best. Believe it or not, I was trying on Thursday. I really was. And I came back Friday and again on Saturday and tried my best.”

As hard as he tried, his combined total of 158 put him 13 shots above the 36-hole cut of one over par--and out of the tournament.

Voges, continuing his summer of exemptions as the U.S. Amateur champion, said he is feeling better this week and will play in the U.S. Open next week at Pebble Beach.

And in the last week of August, he will defend the prestigious amateur championship--at the Muirfield Village Golf Club.

A nightmare revisited?

“Not for me,” Voges said. “The last round of golf I played at Muirfield I shot a 71. That’s what I remember.”