Lightweight Sluman a Golf Heavyweight

When a shot goes into the deep rough, the first thing a caddie has to find is the ball. Not Jeff Sluman’s caddie. The first thing he has to find is Jeff Sluman.

Sluman is the only guy on the golf tour who, when he goes down in a sand trap, tends to disappear. Golfers like to screw themselves into the sand to test its density, but if Jeff Sluman does it, you might need a rope to pull him out.

Golf is not basketball. Size is not an issue. But Jeff Sluman overdoes it.

He’s barely taller than his one-iron. If you saw him on a tee, you’d expect him to hand you a club and give you the yardage. If you saw him on a green, you’d want to mark him. If the police found him on a golf course, they’d want to bring him down to the station house, sit him on the desk and give him a lollipop while they try to find his mother. If he had a baseball cap, he’d wear it backward.

He’s 35 going on 12, judging by his looks, which appear to be off a can of baby food. He has more trouble with security guards than he does with par threes over water.

But, if this were boxing, they’d dust off that cliche “pound-for-pound, the best there is” to describe Sluman. In a way, he’s golf’s equivalent of a Sugar Ray Robinson or Wee Willie Keeler.

Inch-for-inch or pound-for-pound, Jeff Sluman may be the best golfer out there in this week’s Nissan Los Angeles Open. He’s the only guy in the field who could shoot 70 by day and sleep in a bureau drawer by night.

He has won only one tournament--but what a tournament. The PGA, no less. That’s a major Arnold Palmer never won. Neither did Tom Watson.

It’s the tournament to win.

First of all, it gives you a 10-year exemption on the tour. You can tee it up wherever and whenever you want. No qualifying school, no Monday qualifying, no pleading for sponsors’ exemptions. Just show up and reach behind you for a ball. You get in the Masters or U.S. Open for five years. In other words, you get to sit in and call for cards in the highest-limit game of all. And your check’s good.

At 5 feet 7, 135 pounds, Sluman was the first guy since Jerry Barber who, when he got the PGA trophy, could have taken a bath in it.

When you watch Sluman play, the mystery is not how such a little guy could win, but why he hasn’t won more. He led the tour in birdies last year with 417. He was 14th in money won ($729,027), 12th in scoring average and seventh in putting (1.746 putts per hole).

And, even more important, if Tom Kite had not shot a 72 in the wind and cold of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach last year, Jeff Sluman would be the only golfer to count the PGA and the Open as his only tournament victories.

He finished second at the AT&T; last year, fourth at the Masters and second to Nick Faldo in the World Match Play. He was within a couple of shots of a year that would have gone directly to a Hall of Fame trophy room.

Jeff Sluman wasn’t born with a nine-iron in his hands. He didn’t grow up where the sun shone and the course was open 360 days a year. He grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where you can play four months a year, unless you don’t mind shoveling snow first.

He doesn’t feel deprived. “I think it’s an advantage,” he insists. “I see a lot of these kids brought up in the sun belt and they’re burned out.”

Sluman wasn’t burned out. But he frequently had to be thawed out. He managed to wrangle a scholarship to Tennessee Tech, but when he got there, they dropped golf. He drifted to Florida State, where he found being able to play in December took seven shots off his game.

He won the state amateur in New York, where there were a lot of four-month players. “Then, I went to the National Juniors--I had never even heard of the National Juniors--and they liked to kill me. Everybody was shooting 65.”

Pretty soon, so was Jeff Sluman. He had the usual trouble with qualifying school. “I missed at Q school five or six times,” he says. “Sometimes, when I got my card, I lost it for poor play.”

He never got any older-looking, but his game did. Mature enough so that he startled the game with a six-under-par final round to win the 1988 PGA by three strokes.

He is one of the golfers to watch at the L.A. Open this week, despite an 80 in the pro-am Wednesday. “I was trying experimental shots,” he explains.

He was in position to win this tournament two years ago when a thoughtless bogey on No. 10 the final day made him finish a shot behind the winner, Ted Schulz.

Would he be better if he were bigger? He doesn’t believe so. “Claude Harmon once told me, ‘The ball doesn’t know how big you are.’ ”

Neither does the game. The reality of golf is, it’s not such a good idea to tower too far above that 1.68-inch diameter ball. After all, Hogan was 5-7 1/2. There are no slam dunks in golf.

Sluman was seriously in the hunt in eight tournaments last year. He was in the money in 26 of 30.

But, if he wins, you will have no trouble identifying him on the victor’s stand. He will be the one standing on a box. “When I got second at the World Match Play last year, I said how glad I was to be in the interview room with Ian Woosnam because it was the only time in years I didn’t have to lower a microphone,” he says.

If he does win here, he just hopes no one comes up to him holding the trophy and says: “How nice. Did your Daddy win that?”