L.A. OPEN : Open Matchup: a Puncher Against a Classic Boxer

The thing you have to like about Corey Pavin is, he plays the game of golf as if he had a plane to catch. As if he were double-parked and left the motor running. Guys move slower leaving hotel fires.

It’s refreshing. You know how the rest of the field usually plays. Like guys going to the electric chair. A state funeral moves faster. They have the expression on their faces of a guy undergoing an appendectomy.

Pavin always has this little half-grin on his face. He looks as if he likes what he’s doing. That he’s glad there’s no heavy lifting or shoveling to do. He hits a shot and then goes running after it holding onto his hat like a guy chasing a bus. When he sinks a long putt, he doesn’t just blow on his fingernails and give it a ho-hum stare. He usually jumps straight up in the air like a kid who just got a pony for Christmas.

It is not an attitude calculated to win widespread acceptance. With $50 million at stake, the PGA Tour is entitled to all the solemnity of a Bank of England board meeting. And no one ever laughed there.

Golfers keep a pretty stiff upper lip, too. The atmosphere is about what it was in the trenches before an offensive in World War II--except nobody ever got killed by a four-foot putt. Corey is one of the few on tour who seems to keep that in mind.

Pavin, whose college was UCLA, is the prototypical “gutty little Bruin,” a term coined by the late great USC track Coach Dean Cromwell to describe his undermanned crosstown athletic rivals. Pavin is gutty, little and a Bruin. His career is a tribute to determination, persistence, consistency and a total undiscourageability. God didn’t make him a golfer, he did.

He is, for instance, 122nd (out of 133) in driving distance on the tour. He hears “You’re away!” a lot on the fairway. But not very often on the greens. No one ever mixed him up with John Daly off the tee. But no one ever has to look for his ball, either.

Corey Pavin’s matchup in the Nissan L.A. Open this week is the classic boxer vs. puncher. Fred Couples is used to kayoing a golf course. Punching its lights out with these incredibly long tee shots. Bringing it to its knees bleeding and cut, on the ropes. Pavin has to out-jab it. Keep it off balance, distract it, confuse it, dazzle it. Make it fight your fight. Decision it.

Riviera has lately turned from Hogan’s Alley to Couples’ Corner. Fred has won the L.A. Open twice at Riviera and, after two rounds Friday, seemed in position to put it down for the count again. He plays this course the way Tyson played Spinks--with haymakers to the button.

Riviera is a course that responds best to brute strength. You have to be long, straight. A little arrogance couldn’t hurt. Corey Pavin has to creep up on it. Pick its pockets, so to speak.

He does this better than anybody, too. He should work Times Square.

But Corey Pavin was climbing into the ring with Fred Couples at the L.A. Open Saturday. Couples’ nickname is “Boom Boom,” to give you an idea. Corey’s would be more like “Click!”

Corey Pavin had just shot one of the incandescent rounds of the tournament on Friday--a 64 in the face of ferocious wind conditions that made even a par round an achievement.

It is an axiom of golf that a super round is seldom followed by a duplicate. A “zone,” an out-of-body state of being in golf, seldom lasts 36 holes.

If you were betting, you had to make Couples an out price. His opening 67s were well within his capabilities. They were like Joe Louis knockouts, highly duplicatable. Corey’s round looked singular.

But when Saturday’s round started, the course began to take Freddy’s best punches and come fighting back. He failed for the first time in three days to birdie or eagle the first hole. The course was no pushover for the first nine holes.

Meanwhile, the gutty little Bruin held the course at bay. Par golf moved his lead from three strokes to five strokes by the turn as Couples stumbled to two bogeys.

On the back nine, though, Couples’ heavier punches began to take effect. He birdied 10 from point-blank range, he birdied 12 after a mammoth drive, he birdied 13, then 16, then 17, a par five he hit green-high in two. If it was a real fight, they would have stopped it.

It got to Corey. He unaccountably bogeyed 14. Then he birdied 15.

But on 18, he played Pavin golf. By then one shot behind--he had lost his five-shot lead to Couples’ relentless back nine--he had to hit his third shot on the par four out of rough you could hide a lion in and he left himself a curling 18-foot putt.

When he made that, he signaled that his cold round was over. It was a Pavin par. It set up a shootout for the ages today.

Pavin golf has been extraordinarily successful. Sunny, speedy golf has paid off. He is usually hitting first off the fairway. He was 20 to 30 yards behind Couples all day. But hitting first doesn’t discourage Corey Pavin. Hardly anything does. He scurries after his ball--and then usually hits it inside everybody on the green. If he doesn’t, he’s still a better putter than any long hitter.

If you needed proof, you had only to check his resume. Corey Pavin is 16th on the all-time money list, he has won 10 tournaments in an era when to win a dozen makes you a megastar. He is probably that familiar cliche of the first tee--the “best player never to win a major.” Tom Kite was the last guy to fit that dubious description--till he won the 1992 U.S. Open.

Corey Pavin was the tour’s leading money winner in 1991, with $979,430. He was fifth the following year.

He is formidable competition. “We all know he is a tiger,” Couples admitted after overtaking him on the back nine. “He keeps coming back.”

In horse racing, when a horse gets passed in the backstretch, he is usually beat. But golf is not horse racing--its annals are full of guys who came back.

Couples expects a tough last round. “I enjoy watching Corey play,” he admitted. “He’s such a shotmaker. He fades the ball, he draws the ball, he does whatever is necessary. You know he’s always in a pleasant frame of mind.”

It should be a classic windup--Dempsey vs. Tunney, Ali vs. Foreman. Have Fred Couples’ power punches taken all the fight out of the course? Or will Pavin’s infighting and ring generalship bring it to its knees?

Either way, you’ll see Corey Pavin scurrying along like a puppy chasing a ball today while Fred Couples will try to get Riviera to run up the white flag by long range.

No matter what happens, you won’t be able to tell by looking at Corey Pavin. He always looks as if he just heard he won the lottery.

His strategy for today’s final round? Play fast. Nobody in the history of golf ever made $5 million as fast from tee to green. If he loses, he’ll be the one grinning, “Boy! Freddy played good, didn’t he?” as he runs out the door.