Her Major Must Have Been Golf

Ohio State University is famous for a number of things, but principally athletics.

The whole world knows what a Buckeye is--a giant football player who runs the 40 in 4.5 or a massive fullback who grinds out yardage four at a time. A hyper-excitable football coach who punches enemy defensive backs, or newspaper photographers or his own quarterbacks with equal degrees of skill and enthusiasm. A basketball player who becomes the most famous sixth man in pro basketball and Boston Celtic history.

But people seem to forget that OSU was famous for another kind of ball game, not one of touchdowns or three-pointers, not one of “three yards and a cloud of dust” but one of 300 yards and a nine-iron. Golf.

I mean, do Jack Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf, Ed Sneed and John Cook ring any bells? Is that an All-American lineup to match anything Woody Hayes ever took to the Rose Bowl? Would you like to draw any one of them in the home club Calcutta?

Well, the Buckeye tradition is alive and well on the links. This time, though, it’s not a guy who busts the ball out there 300 yards on the fly, it’s a golfer whose specialty is finesse.

Meg is not the name of a great golf pro. It’s not Ben or Arnie or Boom Boom or Greg or Fuzzy, it’s a name out of an 18th-Century romance novel.

But Margaret Mary Elizabeth Mallon--Meg to her friends--can do anything any of those others can do, albeit not from the back tees.

She has won tournaments, five of them, and she has won majors, two. In fact, her ratio of majors to tournaments won is better than Jack Nicklaus’ 20 out of 73 and almost as good as Andy North’s two out of three.

Some golfers try to hit the ball out of sight. And that’s exactly what they do. So far out, they can’t find it. Meg tries to hit it where the grass is short and the visibility good. If you’re looking for Meg, try the fairway. If she’s not there, try the green. Chances are she won’t be in the water, or the rough or the sand. And, probably, not away.

Meg is one of the stars at the 22nd Nabisco Dinah Shore LPGA tournament at Mission Hills this weekend. She is coming off a victory in her last tournament, at Tucson two weeks ago.

Meg Mallon is the cheerful type who doesn’t let double bogeys--on the infrequent occasions she makes them--get to her. Freckle-faced, sunny, she smiles a lot and even giggles. The women’s tour has club throwers, too, but Meg isn’t one of them.

She had one of the most incandescent years anyone ever had on any tour when she won four tournaments in 1991. One of them was the women’s national open and another was their PGA. She played 93 rounds with an average score of 71.37, third on the tour.

Meg didn’t win a tournament in 1992--but that’s the only thing she didn’t do. She had 14 top-10 finishes in 24 tournaments and she shot 22 rounds in the 60s. She wasn’t on the board in driving for distance, but she was 12th in driving accuracy and fifth in hitting the greens in regulation. She was ninth in birdies. She finished second three times and on one of those occasions lost in a playoff to Betsy King on the first hole.

She got a good break in her victory this year. She fell ill. She had bronchitis and an ear infection and a sinus infection and a fever of 101 when she teed it up at the Ping’s/Welch tournament in Tucson, feeling poor to terminal.

Now, it’s well known in golf circles that physical discomfort leads to premium performance.

“God deliver me from the guy who’s not feeling up to par,” Doug Sanders once said, “because he’ll generally break par every time.”

Meg agrees.

“I don’t know what it is,” she says. “Whether you’re so concerned about your health that you are relaxed or whether you’re just able to concentrate more.”

Whatever it is, the player with the sniffles or the headache or the ringing in the ears generally feels so bad that golf is secondary. Thus, victories. A fever of 101 frequently translates into a score 30 to 40 strokes less.

Unfortunately, perhaps, Meg is feeling fine this week. Temperature 98.6, sinus clear, ears pink and pulse steady, blood pressure perfect.

If she wins, of course, she will have a record of three majors in six victories. They may have to change her name from Meg to “Major” Mallon.

And Ohio State will have to dust off that wall with Archie Griffin, Hopalong Cassady and Woody Hayes, and John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas, and Nicklaus and Weiskopf on it. Meg will be the one smiling. And she’ll be the only one who arrived there as a walk-on--and left as a legend.