Lord OF THE Links : Mike Austin, 82, Has Achieved Legendary Status as a Long Hitter, Instructor, Hustler and Adventurer

Life jumped up and snapped a big chunk out of Mike Austin in 1989, and, if you’ll excuse the rock-hard sound of this, it was about time. Until the stroke that nearly killed him three years ago, the pro golfer and all-around wild and crazy guy had beaten life senseless in a ridiculously one-sided battle, a seven-decade adrenaline festival that included:

-- Hustling mobsters on Florida golf courses. (“In 1933 I beat a guy out of ($6,000) and his enforcer pointed a .38 at me and told me he was going to shoot my hands off if I didn’t leave, so I thought it best to depart.”)

-- Crashing a booze-laden military cargo plane into a crocodile-infested lake in Nigeria during World War II. (“I made the biggest scotch and water in the damn world.”)

-- Singing baritone in a performance of “La Traviata” and hitting the nightclubs of then-sparkling Hollywood with Errol Flynn and other big-screen legends. (“Let’s just leave that stuff alone.”)

And other stuff. Lots of other stuff. Like playing Jesus Christ in a movie role in 1947, and in 1974, at the age of 64 , sending a golf ball a head-shaking 515 yards off the tee during the U.S. Senior Open in Las Vegas, a blast still recognized by the PGA as the longest drive during a sanctioned tournament.

Occasionally, life tried to get a bit back from the swaggering, handsome Austin. On a golf course in 1954, Austin was struck in the right eye by an errant drive, a blow so severe that the eye came partially out of the socket and the vision in it was lost for more than a year. “But I still had the other one,” the Woodland Hills resident said with a grin.

Within two years of the eyeball-out-of-the-socket trick, Austin was golfing and living the same man-overboard life that seemed to be his destiny. The eye injury? No big deal. “From then on, it focused a little lower than the other eye,” he said. “So when I’d line up putts, they all seemed like they were on the side of a hill.”

Putting, however, was not where Austin found his place. It was on the tee that the eyes doing the bulk of the bulging were those of onlookers.

Raised near his father’s golf course on the tiny English isle of Guernsey in the Channel just north of France, Michael Hoke Austin began whacking golf balls just after walking. A brief move by his family to London ended in 1915, when Austin was 4, as German zeppelins began regular bombing missions over the city. To Scotland the Austins went, and several years later to the United States. Florida, where the golfing began in earnest. And then to Georgia.

The result today is a glowing-eyed man of 82 with half the strength of a mule--the stroke took the other half--a still-hard body of 210 pounds on a 6-foot-1 frame and an accent that darts back and forth between a rolling- rrrrr Scottish brogue and a slick Georgian drawl, an odd accent that lights up each of the roughly 38,000 wonderful stories he tells of a life lived on the edge.

He probably would tell even more stories, but he’s too busy. Despite the stroke that left the right side of his body partially paralyzed, Austin teaches his golf swing five days a week at the Studio City Golf and Tennis Club.

A pro since 1928, he has not spent a lifetime teaching his swing to a pack of slow-moving, uncoordinated beginners. His client list over the decades has included Seve Ballesteros, Gary Player and dozens more of the world’s top players. Tom Kite also was taught by Austin, although Austin said Kite never gave him credit, and, well, insinuated that he would like to someday fly a Kite, perhaps over the Grand Canyon.

In its prime--which lasted about 60 years--Austin’s swing was a frightening power stroke, a lightning swing of strength and fury yet executed with astonishing ease, a stroke he taught to a young bull named Mike Dunaway several years ago. Dunaway is recognized as one of the longest hitters in the world, the winner of the 1990 World Super Long Drive Contest and numerous other such contests. Dunaway routinely hammers golf balls 350 yards off the tee.

“Mike Austin’s methods of teaching are 20 years ahead of any current teaching,” Dunaway said. “Nobody knows more about the golf swing than him. There’s never been anyone with the intelligence level and background that Mike has to address the golf swing.

“They broke the mold when they made him. When he was 80, he could still hit the ball out of sight. He’s just an amazing person. There’s no one else like him.”

Another who marvels at Austin’s teaching ability is Blake Edmonds, a pro who has played the past year and a half on the Golden State Tour, a player whose swing abandoned him so thoroughly little more than a year ago that he put his clubs away, vowing not to play competitive golf again.

“And then I found Mike Austin,” Edmonds said.

In four months, Austin had Edmonds striking the ball like he never had before.

“I had always heard of him. Everyone who plays serious golf knows of Mike Austin,” Edmonds said. “He has me hitting it 30 or 40 yards longer off the tee, with control I never knew before. I was ready to quit. He turned my game around.”

Austin also has loaded the golf market with dozens of inventions over the years, the most well-known being a mechanical swing-trainer called the Flammer--from the Latin flamma, to enlighten--a device that straps to the chest and teaches the muscles the perfect, according to Austin, golf swing. Someone is listening. He has sold more than 500,000 of the devices and they are used by many PGA stars in practice. The veteran Player warms up with one before tournaments and was shown in a photograph wearing the gadget just before teeing off in last year’s British Open.

Later this year, Austin said, he will produce an innovative set of golf clubs that incorporate the latest materials in a unique aerodynamic design.

And another project currently under way will bring golfers aboard a luxury cruise ship with Austin and four Austin-trained golf pros for several days of instruction, broken up only by playing golf on some of the finest courses in the world.

The golf exhibitions, instructions and on-course gambling of decades past, combined with the marketing of his inventions and other projects, have made Austin famous. Most of the PGA players and all of the PGA Seniors Tour players know of his exploits.

Bruce Crampton, eighth on the PGA’s all-time earnings list with more than $4 million, called Austin a legend. “Everybody knows Mike,” Crampton said. “There isn’t a golfer alive at the pro level who doesn’t know this guy. I used to stop practicing on the range when Mike showed up, just to stand there and watch him. The things he could do with a golf ball . . . it was pure entertainment. He is one of a kind.”

Austin has turned his unique approach to golf into cash. Lots of cash. “From the start, I knew I wouldn’t make much money strictly as a pro golfer,” said Austin, who won several small PGA tournaments in California and Nevada but never scored on the main PGA circuit.

“When I started, you could win a tournament and take home $400. It hardly covered the expenses. There were a lot of great, poor golfers in the country. So I took my golfing skills and went another way with them.”

One way led to Florida in the winters preceding the Depression. There, in Jacksonville and Ft. Lauderdale and Hollywood and St. Petersburg, Austin stalked his prey: men with huge amounts of money and slow, looping backswings.

“A lot of the crime-syndicate bosses of the day also wintered in those areas,” Austin said, “and I kept finding myself matched against them. For lots of money. I’d find the pro at the club, tell him I’d give him 10% of my winnings if he’d get me a match. The first year, in 1929, I blasted everyone. Won $10,000 or a little more, which was a small fortune.

“And then I got out of there. In a hurry.”

Subsequent years found Austin at the same clubs, hustling money in outlandish feats. Trick shots.

He hit golf balls off the crystal of a wristwatch without breaking the glass.

“That brought in a lot of money,” he said.

And he hit golf balls more than 200 yards with one arm. “That brought in even more money,” he said.

It was from another bet that he won--carding a par-four while hitting the golf ball with a heavily-taped Coca-Cola bottle, a feat documented by a writer from a Florida magazine called Golden Tee who witnessed the oddity in 1933--that Austin nearly lost his career, not to mention a place to keep his wedding ring. The man who had made the $6,000 wager against the Coca-Cola bottle feat was, according to Austin, one of the aforementioned crime-syndicate types, who decided after Austin had done it that, well, he wasn’t going to pay.

“So his guy with the gun in the locker room tells me he’s gonna’ blast my hands off,” Austin said. “I figured I needed those hands. I left.”

In later years, he played occasionally in PGA tournaments, including the 1964 British Open at St. Andrews. As with most anything he has done, a story accompanies that tournament. He shot two rounds of 73, was told he was way off the 36-hole cut mark, packed his bag and caught the next flight from London to Seattle, a nonstop flight over the North Pole.

When he arrived in Seattle, he walked past a television set in the airport and heard a sports announcer recapping the British Open. Five Americans, the man said, had made the cut.

Guess who was one of them? “There was nothing I could do, was there?” Austin said.

After that began the era of the Austin Golf Academy and his devotion to teaching his powerful swing. In clinics, he donned a tight-fitting body stocking with a human skeleton painted on it, bringing his knowledge of human anatomy and its complicated function during the golf swing into vivid focus.

And in a life full of big bangs, 1974 brought the biggest bang yet for Austin.

The scene was the Winterwood Golf Course in Las Vegas during the U.S. Seniors Open. He had, he recalled, been cranking the ball unusual distances off the tee, even for such a noted blaster, in practice all week. And on the fifth hole at Winterwood, a wide, 450-yard, par four, his playing partner, Chandler Harper, encouraged Austin to let it all out and see just how far he could hit a ball.

Austin’s ball screeched off the tee, rode a 35 m.p.h. tail wind and landed within a few yards of the green. When it finally stopped, tournament officials wearing a deer-in-the-headlights look marked the spot and measured it. The tape showed the ball resting 65 yards beyond the center of the green, a 515-yard smoker that put Austin in the PGA record book and in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Of course, this was Michael Hoke Austin. So there must be a tag line. “I got it back to the green and three-putted the damn thing for a bogey,” he said.

Austin eased his still-strong body, now with an aching right leg and a numb right arm, into a big chair in his living room, a room crammed to the ceiling with mementos of a lifetime of golf on the edge.

And then he smiled and said, “But it was one hell of a drive, now, wasn’t it?”