He Closed His Case on Opens

One of the saddest stories of sports lore is that Ernie Banks, as great a hitter as he was, never played in a World Series. Neither did Rod Carew.

Great as they were, neither John Brodie nor Sonny Jurgensen ever appeared in a Super Bowl. Neither Red Grange nor Tom Harmon ever made a Rose Bowl.

Jockeys aren’t considered jockeys till they win a Kentucky Derby. They write poems about ones who do.

Great drivers go to great lengths to win an Indianapolis 500. Eddie Sachs died trying. So did half a hundred others.

It’s always been cited as one of history’s injustices that Sam Snead never won a U.S. Open. He teed it up in almost 40 trying.

To be at the top in your profession, you have to attain its greatest achievement. Every mountain climber wants to get to the summit at Everest. Every governor wants to be President.

You measure a golfer basically not by how many tournaments he has won but how many Opens--as in U.S. or British. Certainly by how many “majors” he has put away. Davis Love III, who has won six times on the regular tour, said he would give them all back for one major. Jack Nicklaus won 71 tournaments. Twenty of them were majors and he can hardly remember the others. Then, there’s Bruce Lietzke . . .

Bruce Lietzke is as good a striker of the ball as there is on tour today. He has 12 tournament victories--and anyone who is in double figures on the tour today is a star, a master of his craft.

Lietzke has done about everything else he could do on tour, so you would think he would want to add that star to his crown, a major. A glow to his name.

Last year, Lietzke was 16th on the money list with $703,805 won. And that was in only 18 tournaments. There are 44. He was the tour leader in driving (distance plus accuracy). He was eighth in scoring average and 17th in greens hit in regulation. He has won almost $5 million. In short, Bruce Lietzke can play. He would be a superstar with one little addition to his resume. How about a U.S. Open?

Lietzke won’t even play in one. Hasn’t since the early ‘80s. Even though he’s usually eligible.

Some guys break their backs--and their clubs--trying to qualify for an Open. Lietzke simply says, “Be my guest.” He leaves a spot open for someone who wants it more--and that includes 99% of the players playing today. Imagine Ernie Banks taking himself out of a World Series. Picture Laffit Pincay spurning a mount in the Kentucky Derby.

There have been tennis players who didn’t want to play Wimbledon--strangely enough, Andre Agassi, was one of them--but they did. It’s like a channel swimmer skipping the English channel, but Bruce Lietzke shrugs it off as “just a business decision.”

“Where,” he asks, “are most U.S. Opens played? I’ll tell you. In the Northeast. I don’t play well in the Northeast. I don’t play well on lightning-fast greens.”

Nobody does.

If Bruce Lietzke were a marginal player, his shunning of America’s most prestigious tournament--and maybe the world’s--would be more understandable. But if Bruce Lietzke were a baseball player, he’d be a .300 hitter. A comparable football player would be All-American. At least, all-conference.

Good players have talked themselves out of summit conferences in their games before. Lee Trevino objected to the elitism of the Masters--but he also felt it was a shade too long to get his left-to-right game over the brow of the fairway hills.

He later admitted he was wrong. If he had won the Masters’ green coat--even if he had to change his shoes in the parking lot to avoid the snobbery--he would have been one of five men in the game’s history to have won a U.S. Open, British Open, Masters and PGA.

The only one of those that Lietzke regularly tees it up in is the PGA. He considers the greens puttable.

“The greens are firm there, not glassy,” he contends.

He does play in the Masters on occasion but not with any great enthusiasm. He has played in three British Opens. But not in a decade.

One of the puzzling particulars in Lietzke’s stance is that he has won two Canadian Opens in Oakville, Ontario, which is about as far northeast as you can get without a lobster boat.

It is Lietzke’s loss. It is also golf’s.

Lietzke has long been the envy of the tour for his ability to take off for long periods of time--and come back and shoot as if he had never been gone. One of the other reasons he skips the Open now is, it conflicts with his son’s Little League baseball.

He doesn’t pass on the Open because of the pressure, he insists.

“It’s the greens,” he says. “I played in U.S. Opens and I have learned it’s waste motion--and emotion. My game is just not suited to those greens.”

In point of fact, putting on any greens has been Lietzke’s lament. In a game in which he is in the top five in several tour categories, he is 79th in putting. Before he was 40, he went to the quasi-copout of the elongated putter favored by the over-50 players. In some locker rooms this is considered throwing in the towel, yielding to the mocking gods of the putting surface.

It is also a perverse fact that the U.S. Open is not often thought of as a putter’s paradise. It is most often won by the player who keeps the ball straight. No one ever accused Ben Hogan or Jack Nicklaus or Bobby Jones of one-putting their way to the Hall of Fame. They won Opens with 13 other clubs.

Lietzke is down here this week at La Costa as one of the 30 certifiably best players on the tour. The Tournament of Champions is for winners only. And Lietzke has played in nine of them. If you accept Davis Love’s ratio that one major is worth six other tournaments, Lietzke should have won two by now. But you can’t win if you don’t sit in on the deal.

So, sing no sad songs for Lietzke. He’s not Snead or Banks or Carew or a guy who hit the wall on the 200th lap.

He didn’t bump the pot. He said, in effect, “I’m out.”

Says Bruce, “I don’t need ‘U.S. Open Winner’ on my tombstone. So, I won’t have ‘U.S. Open Winner’ on my tombstone.”

Neither will Sam Snead. The difference is, Sam feels snakebit. Bruce feels like yawning. Maybe he could have told Sam all those years ago: “Those greens are too fast. Skip it.”