Par Saver, Life Saver : Golf Has Helped Mike McCune Get Straight at the Age of 30

Mike McCune crawled out of a hotel bed in Monterey on the biggest day of his athletic career and looked at his Mission College golf bag with its scribbled inscription, “Peak in May.”

He rubbed his sleepy eyes.

Make that peek in dismay.

Overnight, the clubs had changed, oxidized, practically metamorphosed.

What little chrome that remained on his well-worn clubheads and shafts had dulled considerably.

“The set was so old that the clubs rusted in the salt air,” McCune said.

Rusty, like their owner. Tattered and worn around the edges, like their owner.

“I had to wipe ‘em down before I played,” he said.

Otherwise, the clubs were serviceable, like their owner, who wiped out the field with those same battered weapons.

In May, McCune, 30, won the state junior college individual championship in Monterey. Only two years earlier, he had pulled out the clubs for the first time in eight years.

Not long before that, he had picked himself up, dusted himself off and started everything anew.

Revival time.

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Better to burn out than fade away?

From 1981 to 1991, there were plenty of highs for McCune, which meant there were as many lows. It was a decade of decadence.

“He went all the way to the edge, and just before he fell over, he turned it around,” said Terry Bommer, McCune’s coach at Mission.

McCune’s driver’s license photo is more than a snapshot, it’s a time capsule. In the photo, McCune is sporting rock ‘n’ roll hair, enough to make Jon Bon Jovi envious. He is wearing an earring made from a rattlesnake’s tail. Sometimes, he wore as many as three earrings in his left earlobe and still has scars to prove it.

McCune was into the Native American look. He wore feathers and tomahawk earrings, and received gifts of an Indian theme for Christmas.

“He decided that if he was a rocker, he had to have a cause,” said his brother, Gavin.

Smoking dope was McCune’s primary pastime, and then some.

“That was no hobby, that was a career,” Gavin said.

Despite the wild lifestyle, McCune is well-preserved. He doesn’t look 30, and nobody in the state tournament inquired about his age, though all were several years his junior.

“My drug abuse put me in what I call a decade of stasis,” he said, laughing. “I was metabolically preserved.”

Maybe so, but McCune lived recklessly. He hung out at the hard-rock Hollywood nightclubs like the Whiskey and Roxy. He played bass in a band that had no name and commensurate direction.

“We were a bunch of posers,” he said. “We didn’t go anywhere, we didn’t have a name. We were just a bunch of guys who smoked pot.”

He fired up for the first time on July 4, 1981, a day known for combustion. When McCune talks of “wasted” time, the term can definitely be interpreted two ways.

One night, he and a friend, both wired on cocaine, climbed to the top of a transmitter tower near Malibu. The pair first had to climb a barbed-wire fence before scaling the 200-foot-tall structure. Crazy, he said.

“We could see all three valleys from there,” McCune said.

The view in the mirror, though, remained grim. He worked at a variety of low-paying jobs, and his self-esteem matched his hourly wage. He installed air conditioners, worked in a warehouse and was a gas-station attendant.

Dead ends, every one. Deader than some of McCune’s synapses. Some guys are a little slow on the uptake, however.

One day two years ago, while sitting at home stewing in his own juices, McCune underwent a spiritual change and became a Christian.

God and golf usually aren’t mentioned in the same sentence, unless there are a few expletives sprinkled in between. For McCune, the world’s most-frustrating game was the perfect complement to his newfound religious beliefs.

“Golf is part of my recovery, part of my direction, part of my regimen,” he said.

His religious awakening happened almost by accident, in April of 1991. McCune had quit another job and was attempting to get his life in order. He was broke, felt miserable, and started reading the Bible.

“After about two or three days of smoking heavily and drinking tequila, I took a look at myself,” he said. “I began to think, ‘What would happen if the world ended?’

“I didn’t want to be remembered for lying on a couch in a drugged-out, vaporized state.”

Desperately needing something to occupy his mind, McCune took a walk through the garage of the home he shared with a drug-dealing friend. McCune spotted his golf bag in the cobwebs.

“I went looking for something to do and I found my clubs,” McCune said. “I said, ‘Thank you, Lord.’ That’s the answer.

“The only things I never sold were my golf clubs. I sold tools, I sold other stuff, but for some reason, I never sold my sticks.”

The sport stuck with him. McCune killed time by hitting punch shots into a pillow in his bedroom.

“I didn’t have any money and I didn’t have a job, so I needed something to pass the time,” he said.

McCune was determined to turn his life around and golf was therapeutic. He got his Ted Nugent hairdo trimmed. He went out to Wilson Golf Course in Griffith Park with Gavin and shot 73.

It was his first round since 1983.

“He was really, really excited about golf at that time,” Gavin said. “It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from a cocoon.”

Ironically, McCune’s first trip to the wild side occurred at his final golf competition during his senior year at Taft High in 1981. The Toreadors had won the City Section team title and advanced to the state tournament at Bakersfield. McCune and his teammates bought some beer, played cards until the wee hours and lost the next day to rival El Camino Real.

“They didn’t party and we did,” he said.

McCune didn’t exactly learn a lesson during the trip.

“From that point, I became a gradual user, then went on from there,” he said. “I guess it was my frustration over my lack of accomplishments in life. I don’t know.”

There was upheaval in his personal life, without question. Gavin, who is 15 months older than Mike, was badly burned in a natural-gas explosion at the family home at age 14. Richard McCune, their 63-year-old father, started suffering the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease eight years ago and now lives at a Veterans Administration hospital in Texas. He does not recognize the members of his family.

School was a problem. Mike underachieved at Taft, finishing with a grade-point average of 1.80. His college GPA is 3.2.

“I was a stupid idiot,” said McCune, a sophomore at Mission.

Once he dried out, McCune said his mind started firing on all cylinders. College sounded like an intriguing possibility.

He recalled that a former teammate at Taft once recommended the golf program at Mission College. . . . His friend had mentioned Mission eight years earlier.

“When I sobered up, I started to remember lots of things,” he said, laughing. “Some of it, I didn’t want to remember.”

Some of what followed, he does.

That McCune won the state championship came as a surprise, even to himself. He struggled through much of the regular season, playing in the sixth spot on a six-man team and averaging around 79. In the Southern California championships at Victorville, however, McCune endured a windstorm and qualified for the state tournament as the sixth and final individual entry.

When the afternoon round of the state tournament began at Monterey Peninsula Country Club, winds were gusting to 45 m.p.h.

“I saw the wind blowing and thought, ‘Good, this is just what the doctor ordered,’ ” McCune said.

Most of the field flatlined.

A first-round 73 in the morning at Rancho Canada Country Club, located a few miles inland, left McCune atop the individual heap with 18 holes to play. Somehow, despite terrible conditions, he endured.

A flawless, technically perfect day, it wasn’t. McCune hit only 14 of 36 greens in regulation, which means he spent most of his time with a wedge in hand.

“I did some serious putting, serious chipping,” he said. “I got up and down from the iceplant, up and down from the trees. . . .”

In golf, these are called recovery shots. If anybody knows recovery, it’s McCune.

The scrambling started on the first hole of the morning round, when he pulled an eight-iron into the trees. His ball dropped into a creek fronting the green, but hit a rock and bounced safely into the rough. It might have been disaster, but he was able to salvage a bogey.

“I had this feeling of destiny right then,” he said.

Later on, destiny’s compass got all fouled up.

In the afternoon round, McCune mistakenly hit an approach shot toward the wrong green. His playing partners informed him a moment later: We’re going that-a-way.

McCune was still 60 yards from the proper putting surface. So he pulled out a sand wedge, pitched to within 15 feet and dropped the putt to save par. At that split second, folks started to realize that McCune could do no wrong.

“It was the wildest thing,” he said. “I made the putt and just started laughing. One of the guys in the group said, ‘You’re gonna win, aren’t you?’ ”

He sure was. McCune four-putted from three feet on another hole. Didn’t matter. He finished with a 78-- survived may be a better term--to win by one shot.

When it was announced that McCune had won, he was transformed.

His confidence skyrocketed. He knew he belonged, and it was obvious, Bommer said.

Quite a difference from the player who, two years earlier, couldn’t handle the pressure of being installed as the team’s No. 1 man. Bommer was forced to move McCune to the sixth spot, where he played for two years.

“His personality changed at that instant when they handed him the medal,” Bommer said. “That evening at dinner, you could see it in his eyes. He was ready to attack the world.”

Not bad for a guy without a matched set of clubs, who is still playing with borrowed irons. To be sure, McCune is still attempting to put all the pieces together.

After taking a vow of sobriety in 1991, McCune was allowed to move in with his mother in Woodland Hills, where he still resides.

He works part-time at a pizza parlor and hopes to make enough money to enroll at a four-year university. Of course, he wants to play this fall at the NCAA level, where he has two years of eligibility remaining, and one day would like to turn pro.

He continues to work vigorously at developing his game, spending two hours a day banging balls around the athletic fields at Pierce College. There’s little choice--he doesn’t earn enough to play as often as he’d like.

In fact, McCune probably would be delivering pizzas instead of making them, but his old Dodge is too temperamental.

“It doesn’t work half the time and doesn’t look too hot,” he said. “It kind of matches my golf clubs, so it’s fitting. It kind of matches me too, I guess.”

The difference is that he is no longer satisfied with the meager status quo. He might be getting a late start, but ambivalence finally has been bowled over by ambition.

He has wiped away the rust, started over.

“I still feel like a kid,” he said. “I feel like I’m picking up where I left off.”