Reducing the Payne of Golf

The four classifications of Homo nervus wreckus --golfer, in lay terms--and their respective greens privileges:

Beginner, or hack, or most of the free world: Chews up course.

Scratch handicap: Coexists with course.

Professional: Defeats course.

Famous professional: Designs course.

It is the height of golfing’s evolutionary scale--and quite a gig, for those who haven’t noticed. Golfer wins a major or two, golfer gets an endorsement or two, golfer gets old, golfer gets bored, golfer gets the urge to shake loose a quick $800,000 . . . so golfer signs on as “design consultant” for the new Signature Golf Course being cut into the neighborhood wildlife habitat.

For the privileged few, golf has become the first truly interactive game. You don’t like this course, build your own. Hate water hazards? Eliminate the water hazards. Can’t stand the rough? Widen the fairways to 40 yards, 50 yards, whatever your heart desires.

No other sport offers this option. Suppose baseball did. Bert Blyleven Field would measure 500 feet down the foul lines, 650 to the power alleys. Lee Stevens Stadium would have elevated tees at home plate--easier to hit from. Luis Polonia Park would replace the warning track with a man-made lake. Any ball hit over Luis’ head would be automatically out of play.

Payne Stewart, for instance, dislikes flat, lengthy golf courses with what he calls “cookie-cutter holes.” So the new public course he’s designing in Fullerton will be relatively short (6,700 yards), hilly (rolling up and over East Coyote Hills) and as unorthodox as the glowing knickers ensembles he wears on PGA Tour stops.

Specifically, Stewart dislikes the courses at PGA West, where the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic is held. Especially the Pete Dye-designed course, regarded as one of the most demanding ever constructed.

“I don’t know how amateurs can go out and play PGA West and really enjoy it,” Stewart sniffs. “I guess the appeal is ‘Yeah, it’s the golf course the pros say is too hard to play,’ (but) it’s ridiculous.

“There’s a bunker on the 16th hole, to the left of the green. I could put you in and you can’t get out of it. You can stand there all day and you can’t hit it hard enough and high enough to hit it over the bank. It’s probably 30 feet up. Now, how are you supposed to play that shot?”

One such amateur, an unfortunate Tip O’Neill, gave up. After taking a few hopeless whacks, Tip decided he’d had enough, reached down and flung the ball onto the green.

That’s the problem with too many designer courses, Stewart says. Too good for their own good. An invigorating challenge for the pro who built it, perhaps, but a wasted afternoon for the local stiff who plunks down $125 for the displeasure of shooting about the same.

“They come back and say, ‘Wow, I broke 100!’ ” Stewart says. “Well, that’s great. But did you have fun? Or was it just a stressful experience?”

Stewart frowns.

“It’s easy to make a golf course difficult,” he says. “All you got to do is grow the rough, narrow the fairways and make the greens hard and fast. You can take any golf course and do that to it, if that’s what you want to do.

“Narrow the fairways to about 28 yards, grow the rough up so if you hit it you got to chop it out, and just make the greens like this”--he raps a fist on a wooden table top--”and have them break so fast that you’re scared, and, boom, it’s done. There’s no secret to it.”

Stewart promises a course that will be user-friendly. Construction on the par-70 East Coyote Hills Golf Course, just north of Cal State Fullerton, will begin this spring, with the opening scheduled for late 1994 or early 1995. Stewart wanted it to be ready sooner, but as he says, designing his first course has been a learning experience.

So far, he has learned a lot about the California gnatcatcher.

“It’s a little bird,” Stewart says. “I didn’t know what it was three years ago, but I know now.”

The California gnatcatcher makes its home on the land Unocal has wanted to develop since 1990. It is about to be declared a threatened species and environmentalists fought to protect its habitat before a compromise could be struck last year. About a third of the original habitat will be disturbed by the development, so Unocal had to agree to re-vegetate 65 adjacent acres, thus rearranging the gnatcatcher’s living conditions.

“We had to change one hole,” Stewart says. “It’s taken awhile. But all good things take awhile.”

Some things are out of a course designer’s hands. Cart paths, for example. Stewart the player rested his heel on one while hitting a ball over the weekend at Torrey Pines and was served a two-stroke penalty. Stewart the course designer would like to ban their existence, but . . .

“They’re a necessary evil,” he says. Then, joking, he adds: “But they won’t be in play if I have a say so.”

Next to the six-figure consulting fee, that’s the beauty of assembling your own golf course. You always have a say so. Or, at least control of the spelling.

Stewart doesn’t mind putting a little Payne into his new course. But pain? Stewart suspects that the weekend golfers of north Orange County don’t have any time for it.