Drive, He Said : Boom! : From the Tee, Fred Couples Is Long and Straight. But Can the Fans’ Favorite Get a Grip on His Goals?

Freddie Couples, the matinee idol of golf, has just three-putted for bogey from the fringe off the 18th at Riviera, so . . . .

Boom!

Despite a blistering 67 in the penultimate round of the 1993 Los Angeles Open, Couples has lost a stroke that minutes before had seemed safer than a federally insured deposit. The coolest cucumber on the fairway still holds a share of the lead--he would lose it the next day to Tom Kite--but he isn’t happy. You might just say he’s teed off.

The condition is barely visible. It’s not as if he’s breaking brassies over his knee or howling curses to the breezes. His face isn’t racked with pain. No, that wouldn’t be Fred Couples, a.k.a. the carefree couch potato of professional sports; the phlegmatic enigma with the effortless swing and the effortless walk and the effortless style but no goals, no direction, no emotions and less internal drive than an electric cart on drained batteries; an athlete so laid back it’s a wonder he doesn’t tip over; a fellow who’s been known to explain--when he has the energy to finish a sentence--that he doesn’t pick up a ringing telephone because there’s probably someone on the other end.

But, as he tends to his post-round business on Riviera’s practice range . . .

Boom!

. . . the sound of self-flagellation is unmistakable. Here, the winner of this tournament in 1990 and 1992 and reigning PGA Player of the Year two years running can give slip to the expectations, the doubts, the disappointments, the worshipers, the glad-handers, the naysayers, the autograph seekers, the divorce lawyers and the missed putts--oh, those missed putts! Here, protected by the Maginot Line of a yellow rope, he can do what he has a knack for doing better than just about anyone else on the planet: shutting out the world, unsheathing golf’s sweetest swing, beating some balls and, in his own stoic way, beating back the frustrations of the most frustrating game ever conjured by evil Druids.

As he works down his bag from the woods through the long irons, the tensions and pressures of a stroke handed back on a less-than-silver putter in a year that has begun neither personally nor professionally on quite a par with the annus mirabilis that preceded it are audible . . .

Boom!

. . . in the whip and impact of every gracefully perfect swing. Unfocused? Unemotional? Directionless? Carefree? Hell, the way Couples is on attack, they can probably feel the reverb . . . .

Boom!

. . . out in Catalina.

“I will lay it on the line,” he would tell me several months later in the empty bar of a hotel in Oak Brook, Ill., after the second round of the Western Open, when I reminded him of that missed putt and the display that followed of a man possessed. “I think golf can really make you mental. It can really cause problems. Nobody sees it, but sometimes I go crazy inside. Other than that,” he says through a smile rather too cherubic for a 33-year-old professional athlete, “I think it’s pretty easy.”

Boom Boom. That’s what they call him. Because Frederick Stephen Couples hits it hard . On the strength of the image those syllables evoke, a star was born in a sport in need of a post-Jack Nicklaus personality. Enter Boom Boom. Reluctantly. He never sought heir-apparency. He doesn’t crave the title King of Swing. All he wants to do is play his game.

That Couples doesn’t care much for the nickname that attached itself to him in the early ‘80s not long after he left the University of Houston and turned pro is no surprise, but there’s not much he can do about it; it’s just there. It draws attention the way the long, crisp drives he boom booms down the fairway draw attention, and there’s not much he can do about them either. They are part of his game, and his game is both a reflection of his essence--relaxed and solitary--and its antithesis--powerful and public.

Now, as Couples prepares to join his 11 American teammates Sept. 24-26 at The Belfry in Sutton Coldfield, England, for the biennial Ryder Cup matches against their European counterparts, the attention of the golf universe, whether he likes it or not, will again be squarely on his broad, limber shoulders. The three-day event, made up of both two-man team competitions and individual clashes in match-play format, is unlike any other in professional golf. Officially instituted in 1927, it continues to recall the glorious past of sport for sport’s sake. There is no prize money at stake--only the pride that comes in competing for national honor. And the pressures, especially on the last day, are immense.

In 1989, Couples collapsed under those pressures over the final two holes of his head-to-head match at The Belfry against Irish journeyman Christy O’Connor; indeed, European captain Tony Jacklin predicted that Couples would choke, and that the Europeans would retain the trophy, which they did. Two years later, though, a revitalized and refocused Couples led the American charge at Kiawah Island, S.C., to recapture the prize in a dramatically tight contest.

So, which Fred Couples will be returning to The Belfry? The miracle season of 1992 has given way to what he himself describes realistically as a “just so-so” 1993. Will it be the Couples of expected brilliance or just the Couples of brilliant, though still unfulfilled, expectations?

For the better part of a decade, Couples has been perched tantalizingly on the fringe of golfing genius. That he had the talent was a gimme, but lots of guys have talent, and talent alone, at the game’s highest level, isn’t nearly enough; nor is one shining year. Hence the question persists: Does Couples have the character, the confidence, the dedication and the heart that are necessary to sustain an extended charge into the pantheon where Hagen, Sarazen, Jones, Nelson, Hogan, Snead, Palmer and, of course, the Almighty Nicklaus dwell?

For years, Couples’ game seemed dogged by the metaphysical yip of those implications, and his line of defense has been, at times, both protective and glib: He’s happy to play well and finish third; he’s happy just to be out with the guys; he’ll be happy to get ‘em next time; he’s happier lolling on the couch watching TV than he is practicing. But when he openly wept (“I couldn’t stop,” he admits. “I took it really hard”) after his bogey on the final hole of that 1989 Cup match, it was obvious that there was more to Fred Couples than glibness. Maybe he wasn’t so cool after all.

Ah, the mystery of golf. It can really make you mental.

Leave it to Raymond Floyd, the Old Man River of the PGA Tour and captain of that 1989 American team, to put the questions in perspective. One of the game’s fiercest competitors, Floyd saw in Couples a golfer who needed focus, who needed to learn that the game was more than making great shots, it was putting up great scores. And he decided to help him.

Floyd’s first step was to console Couples: “I told him I know you hurt badly right now, but believe me, this experience will make you a better player.” Then he turned Couples into his personal reclamation project, the way Arnold Palmer had refocused Floyd himself nearly 25 years before. He would help the younger golfer learn to think his way through a round, learn where to attack and where to play safely. Couples listened, and it changed him. “I realized how important golf was to me,” says Couples as unpretentiously as he might describe a tap-in for par. “From then on, I really thought that if I put a little more into it, maybe not waste so much time, I can improve.”

Now, says the mentor, “If Fred didn’t want it, he wouldn’t have achieved it. Period. It’s no accident he’s done what he’s done.”

Which was to engineer--at last--the dominating run everyone had expected of him. Between the 1991 U.S. Open and the 1992 Masters, Couples proved there was more to his essence, and his game, than a world of ability with no internal compass for guidance. Over 24 tournaments, he was nothing short of dazzling, stringing together 19 top-six finishes, including five victories, one the Masters, his long-awaited first major. With $1.3 million in official earnings, he topped the PGA money list last year and, for the second year in a row, posted the tour’s best scoring average and highest overall ranking.

He was in what athletes call the zone--that unexplainable convergence of skill, luck, temperament and nature. Even the laws of gravity bent to accommodate Couples’ charge when his ball stayed up on the bank above Rae’s Creek at the 12th hole on the final Sunday of the Masters. Every other shot that had landed there ultimately chose to slip and drown.

Easy?

“It was a piece of cake,” Couples says, smiling shyly. “I really looked forward to going to play. I was never nervous. I felt like I could hit every shot. When you’re playing that good, you don’t think about a thing.” You’ve done your thinking beforehand, off the course. On it, you just grip it and rip it and the ball does your will. The game becomes Zen; you become the game.

But the gods of golf have their ways of getting even, and there’s no fairway straight enough or green smooth enough or will fierce enough to countervail their intentions over 18 holes, or the course of a lifetime; the challenge is to play through. Every golfer understands that one bad swing, one bad thought, one argument too many with your spouse and you can suddenly come uncoupled. The door to the zone mysteriously closes, and the question that all top athletes must confront is: Can I ride it out and will it back?

A sigh from Couples would seem appropriate here, but there is none. Facts are facts, and Couples no longer makes excuses. He knows that hot streaks come, but mostly go. Johnny Miller had one in the early ‘70s and never returned to form. Tom Watson has fought through his cold spells, as has Greg Norman, finally breaking through at the British Open this year. If Couples knows the facts, he also knows his capabilities. “I think I have the game where each tournament I go to I still think I can win,” he says straightforwardly. But he’s a realist, too. “I’m not at a stretch where every single time I play I think it’s easy.”

Much has changed. Like his well-publicized divorce, and the legal tumult that has come since. And then there are the doubts that arrive when a hot streak inevitably cools, and putts aren’t falling and drives aren’t fading the way they’re supposed to, and the game suddenly isn’t so easy anymore.

“I need to practice. I need to hit the ball. I need to putt. I need to do all of those things, and, really, right now I’m not doing any of those.” Instead, he’s talking to lawyers, and moving to Dallas, and trying to chart a new course for his life. “It’s been exhausting,” he says. And it shows. “I’m not hitting the ball as good as I’d like. It just doesn’t feel that good.”

Couples has won only one tournament, the Honda Classic in Ft. Lauderdale last March, since the culmination of his marvelous streak, and he has dropped out of the Top 10 in earnings for the first time since 1989. Still, he’s in contention most weeks, certainly not bad; but not bad isn’t good enough when your game is marked for greatness.

But then greatness, says Watson, this year’s Ryder Cup captain, comes from excavating “that mad dog attitude where you can get through any sort of adversity and still make it happen.”

Can Couples will it back?

“It’s not gonna happen just ‘cause I want it to,” he says, but he knows what he has to do: refocus, and concentrate, and shut everything else out. He also knows himself, or at least what he wants others to know about him. “I can’t go out and hit balls until my hands bleed. I tend to wait and let it come to me instead of going to get it.” He might as well wait for Godot. And he knows that, too.

“Fred,” says Jim Nantz, the CBS-TV golf announcer who’s been Couples confidant since they roomed together in college, “is magnificent at putting on this coat of armor of nonchalance where he acts like there’s not a distraction in the world, not a worry in the world, that he’s got everything under control. I think it’s all a facade.”

“HE FOUND A NICHE,” REcalls Violet Couples, Fred’s mother. “He made a home away from home.” Couples grew up in the house his grandfather built in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle, but his niche was the golf course at Jefferson Park. He didn’t find it until his parents--father Tom worked for the city’s recreation department, his mother was the office manager for an aeromechanics union--moved to a larger house in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Fred was 9 and felt displaced by the move, but in true Fred fashion kept it to himself.

“He wasn’t the sort to volunteer his emotions,” his mother says, “but when we came up here, there was no one for Fred to play with. He was unhappy.”

Fred’s brother Tom was 19 then and a pitcher on the Seattle University baseball team. His catcher was an avid golfer. When they played at Jefferson, Fred tagged along to caddie. “I just loved it from the start,” he says. For a loner, the game’s appeal was immediate. “I could go out by myself at 6 in the morning or 8 at night. I didn’t need to round up my best friends.”

He would ride his bike to the course and hack around all day, then work at the driving range at night. “We always knew where to find him,” Violet recalls. A natural athlete, he got good enough fast enough that it became all he wanted to do. He loved the feel of outplaying--and outhitting--his contemporaries. “I’d swing so hard,” he says, “I’d like screw myself into the ground.” His body was so loose that he could bring the club back farther than anyone else, and his temperament was so easy that when he wasn’t screwing himself into the ground, he was developing a swing marked by the smoothness of its rhythm. Soon, he was taking on the older guys--and beating them.

He was good enough to win a scholarship to Golf U., the University of Houston. Most of college, for Couples, was either playing golf or practicing it, unless there was a big sporting event on TV--”That was his favorite hobby,” says Nantz, “watching sports. It still is”--or a quick intramural basketball game at the gym.

John Horne, another Couples roommate and now assistant pro at the Plainview Country Club near Lubbock, invokes an image of Couples on the hardwood that matches the one on the fairway. “He wasn’t exactly Mr. Hustle, but he played pretty good defense until his man blew by him. On the offensive end, he’d sit out about 30 feet and just bomb ‘em in all day.” Give Couples a hole to aim at, and chances are he’ll find the range.

But it was Couples’ power and finesse on the golf course that truly awed Horne. “He could hit it farther than anyone,” he remembers, “and he was already a great lag putter. He could do anything with a golf ball. He liked to hit it from the 150-yard marker with a 3-wood as hard as he could, slicing it about 60 or 70 yards onto the green.” Think of Cecil Fielder being able to blast a shot toward the center-field wall, and then, for fun, make it curl just inside the right-field foul pole.

Couples met Deborah Morgan at a football game at the Astrodome in 1979, his junior year. She, too, was an athlete, a fine tennis player. Blond and ebullient, she was drawn to the limelight as he tried to shy away from it; she’s actually been called the anti-Fred.

The following summer, he went to visit her in Long Beach. On a lark, Couples decided to enter the Queen Mary Open, where he was told that if he turned pro, he could. So he did, like that, tying for sixth and earning his first paycheck, $3,000. Instead of finishing college, he enrolled in the PGA’s tour school and began playing the tour in 1981. In 1984, he won the Tournament Players Championship, and expectations began to mount.

But that’s all they did. Couples won only twice more until his streak began after the 1991 U.S. Open. “For a long time,” he says, “I never faded out of the picture, but I never won tournaments that I thought I could. And when I didn’t, it wasn’t like the end of the world. Sometimes, that attitude’s not good.” Floyd made sure he understood that. Then Watson shored up the edges that were still frayed. Just before the 1991 U.S. Open, Couples asked Watson for advice, and Watson invited him to his home in Kansas City for a week. They only played golf once. But they talked. And talked.

Watson: “The only thing I said to Fred was that he’s a choker. That was the word. There was nothing wrong with his swing, but he kept choking on the golf course.”

Couples: “I don’t think I’m a real quitter, but when I look back at some of the things I used to do, I just cringe.” Like? “Not paying attention. Flat giving up.” Choking.

And Watson called him on it. Joe La Cava, Couples’ caddie since 1989, noticed the difference in Fred’s attitude immediately. “He picks up on things quickly.” And his confidence surged. “These guys helped him by telling him that he was a great player, not that he could be one.”

But as things came together on the golf course, they were beginning to come apart at home. The yips had slipped into his 11-year marriage.

“We didn’t do much together,” Couples says quietly. “I don’t think our interests were really ever the same. It took me a long time to figure it out.” While he played golf, she played polo, and, he says--no sarcasm intended--”I’m not a polo-type person.” It was an expensive habit, sure, but between his official tour earnings, the $50,000 he commands for an exhibition and the $5.5 million he earns annually in endorsements (fourth among golfers, behind only Palmer, Nicklaus and Norman), money wasn’t the object.

What Couples says he couldn’t afford, emotionally, was Deborah’s not being there for him. He talks about this the way he talks about his game; facts are facts. She began to show up less and less at tournaments, and it bothered him. And if she wasn’t going to support him on the tour, he at least wanted them to have children. She demurred.

The end was swift. Though she filed for divorce, he left her, in July of last year, the weekend of the British Open. She had been playing polo, and he’d asked her not to come to England, but she flew in anyway. He played terribly, missed the cut and just wanted to go home. That night, while he stewed in his hotel room, she partied at a nearby pub frequented by the golf crowd.

According to several players, things got raucous, and Deborah was carried from the establishment back to her husband. Couples was incensed. “I basically told her, I’m going back to California and never want to see you again.” He flew to their home in Palm Springs. She flew to their home in Palm Beach.

In October, she sued for divorce, asking the circuit court judge in West Palm Beach for $168,000 a month to make it through the polo season, which the judge reduced to $52,000, or $624,000 annually, enough to have placed her 22nd on last year’s money list. Deborah has publicly talked of reconciliation--”I believe I was destined to be with him, and I wish I still were,” she told the tabloid TV show “Hard Copy”--but that won’t happen.

Couples met Tawnya Dodd, the lissome mother of an 11-year-old boy, at the Bob Hope Classic in Palm Springs, six months before his marriage broke up. “He’s very much in love,” says Nantz. “He has a certain part of his life that he wasn’t happy with behind him.”

“I’ve got someone,” says Couples, “I think can support me.”

And he needs that support. “It’s been a tough year,” says Paul Marchand, head pro at the Houston Country Club. “I don’t know how he does what he does under the circumstances. It’s been a huge burden under these circumstances, getting your emotions in shape to compete. It takes a lot of strength, but he won’t admit it.”

IT IS AN OPPRESSIVELY sticky Fourth of July weekend not far from Chicago, and Couples is striding easily down the elevated eighth tee of the Cog Hill Golf & Country Club’s No. 4 Course, called Dubsdread, the site of the Western Open. As his partners in the threesome head to the right, Couples hones his radar toward the left, where he has hooked an iron--he usually fades his drives the other way--into thick rough behind a willow 120 or so yards from the pin. He scuffs his next shot maybe 30 feet, as bad a shot as you’ll ever see on the PGA Tour, then delicately plants his third, an 8-iron from a hopelessly deep lie, 12 feet from the pin. One dead-eyed putt later, he saves par. With Couples’ trademark ability for scrambling out of trouble, this is interesting, but routine. Yet, for his packed gallery, just his presence borders on epiphany.

Couples is clearly the player of the people. They love his slow, graceful swing and the kind of casually self-deprecating grin that men envy and women swoon over. They love how relaxed he seems; whether he’s made eagle or double-bogey, is in love or going through a divorce, he navigates a golf course as comfortably as a stroll through fields he’s wandered all his life. Of the major faces on the tour, John Daly may hit it longer, Nick Faldo may be steadier, Floyd tougher, Watson smarter, Kite richer and Norman more colorful, but it’s Couples whom golf’s paying customers come out not only to see but to embrace.

His name sells tickets, the way the announcement that Nolan Ryan is pitching tonight does. Greg McLaughlin, former tournament director at the L.A. Open, estimates that in Los Angeles, Couples is responsible for an additional 30,000 paying customers, or about 20% of the gate. “He’s certainly the most popular player in this era. He has the biggest crowds and the most vocal crowds. There’s always screaming in a Couples gallery.”

It is the supreme irony of Couples’ life that the game that brought him the fame and attention he so shuns also provides him with his safest haven. “It’s very peaceful for me to go play golf,” he says, “whether I’m getting divorced or I’ve got a broken finger or my parents are sick, or whatever. When I’m out there, I’m not gonna say I have the strongest will in the world, but I can push a lot of the bad things aside.”

His fans love this attitude, from the nuns in the Franciscan convent bordering Cog Hill’s 14th, who quietly root for him because he was educated by the Christian Brothers in Seattle, to the middle-aged duffer of a Hollywood executive, who carefully follows Couples’ every round at Riviera, trying to parse his swing as if he were analyzing a script. Wherever Couples goes, he is so mobbed for autographs and handshakes and pats on the back when he walks off the final hole that he looks like a child who’s lost his mother. “I get tense,” he admits. “I kind of lose it a lot of the times because I’ve got nowhere to go. I’m not used to it.” His mother says he’s claustrophobic.

“He doesn’t have a runaway ego,” says Nantz. “He still doesn’t think he’s any big deal.”

The truth is, Couples is actually humbled by his poetic combination of power and grace, and the raw talent he has to work with. “Sometimes,” says baseball great George Brett, a Couples neighbor when they lived in Palm Springs, “he looks like he’s almost embarrassed by how good he is.”

Imagine! A jock ablush in the glow of his own capabilities? In this lifetime? “He doesn’t have an attitude,” assures Watson. “He’s Fuzzy Zoeller without the chatter. He’s such a natural.”

Maybe golf’s answer to “The Natural,” except that Roy Hobbs, in Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel, boasted his aim out loud--to be the best there ever was. Couples would sooner cut off his tongue than give voice to such a sentiment. But this he will say about his game: “I want to get to another level.”

“He’s still maturing as a player,” says college friend Marchand. “His challenge is really to stay true to himself and not fall prey to the distractions, of which there are so many at that level.”

There are two kinds of golfers: those who obsess on mechanics, like Faldo, and those, like Couples, who play by feel. Couples’ swing is one of the game’s true natural resources. “When I’m playing at my best,” he says, “my swing is great rhythm, the same with a wedge as with a driver. It’s the same timing and tempo. I never try to rush.”

A self-taught player, Couples never took formal lessons, but he’s worked steadily since 1986 with Dick Harmon, head pro at Houston’s River Oaks Country Club, and four to five times a year with Marchand, with intermittent tuneups on the road. “We’re not reinventing the wheel with Fred,” Marchand says. “But we know what his tendencies are and the checkpoints we have to go through with him.

“Fred has such flexibility and tremendous natural gifts that he borderlines on being too long and too slow. By temperament, he’s very relaxed. Almost everybody’s the opposite. I’d like to see him be more compact,” in effect, lowering one of the Booms. “But this is only a small adjustment.”

The swing, however, is just part of the game, and if you ask Couples to imagine he’s watching a video of himself, he doesn’t dwell on what he does well but what he has to improve on. “I would say, man, this guy from tee to green is great, but when he gets around the green, he just doesn’t get the ball up and down.” Which is where he’s failing this year. “I’m a great bunker player. I’m great on ridiculous shots, but little chip shots . . . .” His voice simply trails off.

If, as Marchand says, most of the adjustments made to a game at Couples’ level are small, the change Couples himself made in his putting, atrocious since last fall, has been anything but; he went from his classic grip to cross-handed to help square his shoulders over the ball. “I just felt kind of like I’d run out of good strokes,” Couples says unabashedly, “and I was starting to get a little bit edgy. Maybe a little impatience and boredom came into it. I said, ‘Screw this. I ain’t gonna wait another week.’ ”

Yet, golf at its highest levels takes patience. And the goals at that level need to be precise.

“He will have to be among the top money-winners,” says Floyd, “continue to win golf events and toss in his major every other year. He’s proven that he knows how to do it. The next step is up to him. Does he want it badly enough? Maybe he doesn’t. And you know what? You have to respect him if he doesn’t want it because that’s a very tough role.”

And a tough road. “That saying,” says Couples, “I’ve got a long way to go. I have to continue what I’m doing.” And?

“And really want it.”

Which, Couples has come to appreciate, is the proper--indeed the only--response to the needs of the game. But not necessarily the needs of Fred Couples.

His perfect world probably would be an empty golf course tucked away where no one else could find it. It would be challenging enough to keep his mind focused and crafty enough to evoke his most imaginative and competitive best. Its traps would be filled with soft sand, not creeping doubts or lapses of concentration or the excess weight of others’ wishful thinking. The hopes of adoring galleries and the off-the-course demands that any game imposes on its idols would be clearly marked: out of bounds. There would be no strokes given back on the final hole. No strokes given back in the Ryder Cup. No strokes given back ever. And nobody other than Fred Couples would really need to know.