A Minority of One, Beck Believes Golf Is a Fair Game

Someone once said that Chip Beck was the Will Rogers of golf: “He never hit a shot he didn’t like.”

Now, if you don’t think this is a serious breach of golf etiquette, you don’t know golf.

The preferred reaction after you have hit a golf ball is, “Oh, no! Not over there!” Second is, “Anybody see where that *!&% thing went?” This is followed by five minutes of teeth-gnashing, club-throwing, putter-biting and language better suited to a parade ground than a country club.

What you don’t expect to see and hear from a touring pro who has just hit a shot that is headed for water, a bunker, a tree, an out-of-bounds stake or rough so thick they could hide a crouching lion is a beatific smile, a shrug or a “well, I just quit on it a little bit.”

That’s where the tour might be tempted to call Chip Beck in and see whether he’s really ready to play. I mean, they have a qualifying school that makes sure everybody can chip, putt, drive, score and not make noise eating soup. But they figure everybody already knows how to throw a tantrum.

You figure if Job played golf, he would be Chip Beck. Chip is a master of Christian forgiveness. He pardons the golf ball. He forgives the club, the course, the caddie and himself with admirable forbearance. He suffers with a smile.

Sometimes, this so puzzles his playing partners, they wonder if he quite understands the situation. When you snap a ball out of bounds on 18 in a tournament you are leading by two shots, protocol calls for you to empty your bag of clubs in the nearest pond and raise your eyes heavenward and snarl “Me, again! Huh, Lord?” Then you kick the ball-washer, down four Scotches in the lounge, sweep your hand over the real estate and snarl, “Call this a golf course? Who designed it--Groucho Marx? And what’d they do with the goats? Who’d they get to wax the greens? Didn’t there used to be grass on them?”

Then Chip Beck comes in. You’d think he has just shot 62. His brow is not furrowed, his chin is not bobbling. There are no tears in his eyes. He looks as if he had set the course record instead of double-bogeying 18 for an 80.

Beck is apologetic. He has let his game down, not vice versa. He has taken a perfectly lovely afternoon on a magnificent piece of real estate full of singing birds and sighing winds and managed to mess it up. “When I rip up a golf course, I feel like apologizing to the superintendent,” he confesses. “He has the course in such beautiful shape, it’s an insult not to birdie it.”

Walter Hagen was probably the last golfer to think and talk that way. Walter’s advice to posterity was to “smell the roses.” Beck does. Most players can restrain their enthusiasm for a course on which they have stumbled to an 81, but Chip Beck sees the Pacific Ocean as something other than a lateral hazard.

What made him that way? Well, suffering. Adversity fits a man. Beck did not roll out of bed with this gorgeous swing a la Sam Snead or Gene Littler. His swing came in parts that had to be fitted together, retooled and reassembled.

It took him 10 years and 285 tournaments before he finally won. Even Job would have gotten a job driving a truck.

Beck never complained. You always knew which one he was because he was the one smiling. “I was improving all the time, you see,” he explains. If you consider going from 194th on the money list to 110th, he was. It was a period when Chip likes to think he learned from his mistakes. He made enough of them.

“I gave myself to 1983,” he says modestly. He finished second seven times before he finally broke through at Los Angeles in 1988 to win his first championship.

His patience was legendary, but his game was like Chip himself--optimistic but realistic. He treated bad shots and good ones with equal equanimity. “My daddy was a dentist all his life. Do you know what patience and attention to detail that calls for?” he said. “I considered I was lucky to be playing golf. And what good does it do you to lose your temper?”

You get a pretty good fix on Beck when you know he was leading last year’s Players Championship at the halfway point when he suddenly shot an 81. Instead of first, he finished 47th.

This would have taken most players a lifetime to recover from but, the next week, Beck won at New Orleans, surviving a 74 to do so. His response was vintage Chip Beck: “It’s nice to know you can play so bad and still come back and win.”

Beck, who is one of the 30 elite golfers teeing it up in the Infiniti Tournament of Champions at Rancho La Costa, is probably the only player in history to feel he can learn something from an 81. “I probably learned more from that 81 than I ever learned from a 67,” he said.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm had nothing on our Chip. But, before you throw the philosophy aside, come with Beck to the Sunrise Country Club in Las Vegas in October 1991. No 81s here. This is a round for the ages--13 birdies and five pars for an incredible 59, only the second such score in golf history.

And Chip Beck? Well, he had a smile to go with the 59. But, it was the same smile he had shooting 81.

At least he didn’t have to apologize to the greens superintendent. On the other hand, what can you learn from a 59?