GOLF : 81ST CALIFORNIA AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP : Brazen Berganio Gives No Strokes on Course : Attitude: Sylmar 23-year-old combines loud, arrogant style with often-brilliant, aggressive play.

In the game of golf, players have forever been kind to one other. Ever hear of a locker room-clearing brawl on the PGA Tour?

The gentleness and compassion is so profound that it is not uncommon for a player, upon winning a tournament, to spend the better portion of the evening and part of the next day heaping praise on the guy who finished second, portraying him as a victim of enormously bad luck and quite likely the most talented golfer in history.

This is where Dave Berganio Jr. jumps off the traditional golf train.

Berganio, of Sylmar, hopes the guy playing against him has the worst day of his life. He hopes the guy triple-bogeys the first 17 holes and then is disqualified on the 18th.

This, of course, is unless the guy trips over the tee marker on the first hole and wrenches his back. That would be ideal.

“Casey seems like a nice guy,” Berganio said Wednesday after ousting former California Amateur champion Casey Boyns from the 81st playing of the prestigious tournament.

“Does it bother me to beat him? Hell, no. You know what they say about nice guys. They finish second. And he did.”

Berganio, 23, has been able to back up his brash, arrogant style on the golf course with sometimes-brilliant play. Last year he won the Pacific Amateur championship--annihilating the field with a record-breaking 64 on the final day--and the U.S. Public Links championship.

In advancing to today’s quarterfinals of the state amateur, he sent first Brian Wear and then Boyns home in match-play victories.

In the first match, he struggled before defeating Wear, moving 1-up by winning the 16th hole and, instead of taking the normal route and protecting the lead, ripped a three-wood from 260 yards into a stiff wind on the devilish 18th hole at Pebble Beach, a decision that smelled of poor judgment.

The ball landed 15 feet from the pin.

Wear, utterly demoralized by the breathtaking display of skill and courage, picked his ball up off the green and conceded the match to Berganio.

It was a knockout.

“I could have played safe and won it, but it was time to show that kid who I was,” Berganio said.

The kid is a year younger than Berganio.

Then, against Boyns, a tournament veteran from nearby Pacific Grove who had a gallery of 25 friends and relatives with him, Berganio really began to snarl.

When Boyns hit his drive on the 11th hole far off the fairway and then asked an official for a free drop when the ball came to rest against a pile of dirt--he did not get the free drop--Berganio had this observation: “He shouldn’t have hit it over there.”

Earlier in that match, when Berganio ripped one of his few errant shots of the day far off into the Pacific, a friend of Boyns’, a nattily clad man in a wool suit and a shirt and tie, suggested to the match official where Berganio should have to play his next shot from.

Berganio sized up the scene quickly and had this to say to the man: “Just who the . . . are you, bozo?”

The man retreated.

That’s what they all do, Berganio said.

“When I get two or three holes up on a guy, I can just bury him,” he said. “They all quit. The country club boys don’t have any (guts).”

Ah, the country club boys. Berganio is quick to point out that he is not one of them.

Raised in tough neighborhoods in Pacoima and Sylmar, Berganio’s friends were much more likely to burglarize a golf shop than play on the course.

“My friends, all of them, ended up in trouble,” he said. “Prison. Drugs. Dead. I could easily have gone that way. But it was just my mother and us kids, and I saw the tough life she had lived and I didn’t want to make it any rougher for her.”

Introduced to golf by a local priest, Berganio found an escape from the streets.

So please excuse him, he asks, if he doesn’t particularly care to hug all of the golfers in the world.

“They’ve all had it so easy, they don’t know how to deal with trouble,” he said. “When things go wrong, they whine. They look around for someone to help them, to make it all better.

“When things go wrong for me, I get mad as hell. And I grind it out. A lot of guys out here give up. They quit. If I had quit, I’d be on the streets right now.”

And so this week, amid the splendor of the Monterey Peninsula, the pounding surf and pristine beaches and the frolicking seals and sea otters, Berganio has been about as soothing as an oil spill.

Often, a wayward shot is followed loudly and quickly by an eyebrow-raising outburst, an expletive or the sound of a Berganio seven-iron clanging sharply against a metal sprinkler head.

On the 16th hole of his match against Boyns, he missed a two-foot putt that would have ended the match. His ensuing shout of “C’MON!” was so loud and piercing that an older woman in the Boyns’ gallery flinched and dropped a hat she was holding.

“He can be weird,” said Tim Dodd of Yorba Linda, a member of the San Diego State golf team who watched part of the Berganio-Boyns match. “He swears all the time and screams at people and screams at himself. I played with him in the Pacific Coast Amateur championship last year and the officials had to keep telling him to stop or they’d disqualify him.

“And that was during his round of 64! He was swearing at himself and shooting a 64! I couldn’t believe it.”

Berganio, the records show, finished a whopping 17 strokes ahead of Dodd in that tournament.

“I play to win,” he said. “That is who I am.”

And his chances of winning this tournament?

“If I play my game, no one beats me,” he said. “At least not anyone in this tournament.”