Emotionally Spent Voges Coming Back for an Encore : U.S. Amateur Champion Returns to Defend Title With Outlook on Life Sound, if Not His Golf Game

A year ago, Mitch Voges was one of thousands of very good amateur golfers in the country, a 41-year-old former carpet salesman with a bad back and a lot of doubts about whether his game could hold up to any sort of pressure, and whether he’d ever get the chance to find out.

Well, he found out.

And because he did, in the past five months Voges has played in the Masters and the U.S. Open and the British Open and The Memorial tournament with Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson and Ian Woosnam of Wales and has been introduced over and over again as the reigning U.S. Amateur champion.

And earlier this month, Voges had to turn down an invitation from Vice President Dan Quayle to sit with him at the Republican Convention in Houston. Voges and Quayle had become friends during a round of golf at Bel-Air Country Club earlier this year.

Two days ago, Voges, of Simi Valley, headed for Muirfield Village Golf Course in Dublin, Ohio, the defending champion returning for another crack at the headlines and TV cameras in the 1992 U.S. Amateur that will begin Monday. He does so knowing that repeats are infrequent in this highly competitive championship--no one has done it since Jay Siegel in 1983--and also knowing that his own golf game came apart earlier in the summer with all the subtlety of Woody Allen’s family and that a yearlong world-class golfing adventure has left him with an emotional void big enough to drive a golf cart into.

But he is going. And he says he will fight like a cornered badger to win it again. But if he doesn’t, Voges wants everyone to know that he will not for a moment consider bungee-cord jumping off a bridge without the bungee cord. For while golf has brought him a year of excitement beyond his wildest dreams, Voges knows what this game is all about and he knows exactly where it ranks on the priority list of his life.

As Quayle might say, it’s just golfe.

Voges won the 1991 U.S. Amateur with a stunning, emotional romp in the five-day tournament, capping it on national television with a long, teary-eyed embrace with his son and caddy, Christian, on the 18th green. He immediately was deluged with requests for interviews and offers of speaking engagements, nearly all of which Voges accepted. In between, there was golf in the stratosphere for Voges. The Masters. The U.S. Open. The British Open.

He missed the 36-hole cut in all of them.

Then, at the California Amateur championship at Pebble Beach in July, the frustration of the long summer briefly overwhelmed him. He missed a putt, slammed the putter into his golf bag and bent the shaft. He was disqualified a hole later for playing with an “altered club.”

So if Voges talks of refusing to allow golf to consume him, of not allowing the game to rule his life, don’t think for a moment that the competitive torch that burns in his stomach has been extinguished. He just knows how and when to lower the flame.

“For me, it has always been a question of perspective,” said Voges, who played collegiate golf at Brigham Young alongside Johnny Miller and other future PGA players but refused to take that route after school.

“This summer reconfirmed for me that I made the right decision in my life not to make a career out of it, that golf is not the most important thing in my life. To be sure, I am disappointed when I don’t play well. But it is not a determining factor on how I feel about life. The guys I played with this summer, the top pros, it is a determining factor in their lives. The game consumes them every waking hour.”

The game only consumes Voges every playing hour. As the incident at Pebble Beach showed, this is not a guy hacking a golf ball around a meadow while exchanging bad jokes with his buddies.

And, with Voges holding the job as director of golf for Spanish Hills Country Club, scheduled to open early next year in Camarillo, golf is helping to make his life comfortable. But if he didn’t exactly shred the field in the biggest golf tournaments of his life this year, well, he played in them.

“Did I have a good summer?” Voges said. “The Masters? The U.S. Open? Playing in those tournaments with Nicklaus and Watson and so many other great players? Let’s put it this way: There is no way to put into words what this summer has meant to me and my family. To have done what I’ve done with my wife, daughter and son there all the time to share it with, well, nothing could be better than that.”

The scorecards show that Voges slipped during the most pressure-filled tournaments in golf. What they don’t show is that in most cases he didn’t lose it off the end of the Earth. He didn’t hit a dozen balls into the Pacific at Pebble Beach in the U.S. Open and he didn’t send a dozen hurtling wildly into the woods at Augusta National during the Masters. What he did was to make an unconscious swing change that eliminated the soft, left-to-right fade on the ball that has characterized his game for 25 years. In its place, for reasons then unknown to Voges, came a subtle draw, or hook, that left his ball on the left side of the fairway. In the rough.

“I developed a flaw in my swing and then I hit a few buckets of balls on the range and ingrained that flaw into my swing. I couldn’t get rid of it.

“And when you play out of the rough continuously in the Masters and the U.S. Open, where the conditions are supposed to be as harsh as they can make them, then you’re in trouble. That’s where I was. Trouble. In the U.S. Open, I hit the left rough 14 times, 14 holes that you automatically have no chance of parring. I was just a little off. I wasn’t hitting the ball off the course or into the woods. But in those tournaments, on those courses, you don’t have to be off a great deal.”

Even with the flawed swing and his golf balls hiding in thick, heavy grass, Voges tried. In the second round of The Memorial, he hammered his way to a one-under-par 71 at Muirfield. The same Muirfield where he will tee it up Monday in the U.S. Amateur.

“That’s what I remember,” he said. “The last time I was there, I shot a 71. That will help me this week.”

Two days of medal play open the tournament, with the top 36 golfers advancing to three days of brutal match play with two matches each day. It is the same format in which Voges excelled a year ago en route to his breathtaking victory. The long summer, however, has taken much from Voges.

“I’ve taken most of the last two weeks off to relax, hoping I’d get excited about golf again,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet. I’m hoping it happens on the first tee Monday.”

Perhaps it will.

Perhaps it won’t.

“You don’t get lucky in six straight matches,” Voges said. “You’ve got to be on, every day. But you know what, former U.S. Amateur champion sounds just as good to me as current U.S. Amateur champion. I won’t get caught up in looking at the scoreboard to determine whether I’m good or bad. That’s the attitude that drives Little League parents to make baseball miserable for their kids. My worth is not based on what I shoot on a golf course any particular day.

“My wife explained to me once that my value to her and our kids isn’t based (on) whether I play good or bad on a golf course. And that’s the truth.”