Yancey, 56, Dies; Won 7 on Tour : Golf: Long-time manic-depressive suffers a heart attack while practicing for senior tournament.

Bert Yancey, who battled demons far worse than the ones that denied him a major championship of golf over a 30-year career, collapsed and died of a heart attack while practicing Friday for a Senior PGA Tour event at Park City, Utah.

He was 56.

Yancey, preparing for the first round of the $500,000 Senior PGA Franklin Quest Championship at the Park Meadow Golf Course, twice left the practice range complaining of chest and arm pains.

After a check of his blood pressure, Yancey said he felt better and returned to the driving range. He hit five or six more balls, complained of more pain, returned to a first-aid tent and collapsed.

He was taken by ambulance to the Park City Family Health and Emergency Center. Paramedics performed CPR en route, but Yancey was pronounced dead at 10:55 a.m., a hospital spokeswoman said.

Yancey, a seven-time PGA event winner from 1966 to 1972, joined the senior tour in 1988 in what turned out to be the final comeback in the career of a man long tormented by manic depression.

His condition at last controlled with medication and psychotherapy, Yancey used the senior tour as a vehicle to speak out about the disease that had made much of his life a living hell.

“More people are getting diagnosed for it because more of them are asking for help,” Yancey said in a recent interview. “The stigma has to be eliminated. It’s OK to go for help; it’s OK to go to a hospital; it’s OK to take medicine.”

Yancey, a Chipley, Fla., native, who grew up in Tallahassee, was found to be manic-depressive in 1975 and lithium was prescribed for him after 14 frightening years on a mental roller coaster.

He suffered his first episode as a third-year cadet at West Point in 1961, spending nine months in a Valley Forge, Pa., mental hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. Mental illness was not diagnosed at the time and Yancey was released after undergoing a series of electro-shock treatments.

A man of wide emotional swings and considerable intellect, Yancey joined the PGA full time in 1964. He won the Azalea, Memphis and Portland opens in 1966, the Greater Dallas Open in 1967, the Atlantic Classic in 1969, the Bing Crosby National Pro Am in 1970 and the 1972 American Golf Classic.

He earned $690,337 on the PGA Tour and another $404,625 on the senior circuit but never won a major tournament.

The pursuit obsessed him.

Twice, he finished third at the Masters and the U.S. Open; he once tied for third at the British Open.

Yancey led the 1968 U.S. Open by six shots but shot a 76 on the final day and finished third.

Tom Weiskopf once told the Washington Post that he had watched Yancey fall apart on that fateful day at the Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y.

“He had the most discouraged look I’ve ever seen on anyone,” Weiskopf recalled of Yancey’s collapse. “Defeated. Even before he was finished. Right after that, as I look back, the personality change began.”

Dave Stockton, one of the leaders Friday in the Franklin Quest, told the Associated Press that Yancey had such an obsession with winning the Masters that he used to construct detailed papier-mache models of the greens.

“It’s incredible that he played out here as long and as good as he did,” Stockton said.

Yancey hit bottom in 1974, when he arrived in Japan for a series of golf exhibitions and proclaimed himself “a messiah” who was going to rid the Japanese of communism.

Yancey then tried to jump out of a window, failing only, as he recalled, “because I couldn’t get the latch open.”

He spent the next three months in a Philadelphia mental hospital. Months later, and only two weeks before his illness was diagnosed, Yancey climbed up a painter’s ladder at a New York airport.

“I actually felt Howard Hughes was getting in touch with me to dispense money for cancer,” Yancey said in a 1981 interview. “I climbed a ladder at LaGuardia and started shouting that cancer was going to be cured.”

After his problem was diagnosed, Yancey was put on lithium. But, in 1977, he experienced another of what he called his “manic highs,” and was arrested in South Carolina for indecent exposure and resisting arrest.

This time, Yancey was taken away in a straitjacket and spent 30 days in a state mental hospital. He was chained to his bed for four days.

“I spent three of the most unbelievable weeks of my life in that ward,” Yancey said in a 1978 Washington Post interview. “I had human feces all over the wall of the cell. And it was a cell, it wasn’t a room. Bugs, roaches, flies, just crawling all over and I was tied down.”

Yancey retired from the tour in 1976 after missing the cut in all 26 tournaments he entered. In ensuing years, there would be more dark periods and aborted golf comebacks.

Yancey said he at last got his mental health under control in 1984 when he started taking the drug Tegretol.

In a 1992 interview, Yancey conceded that his battle would always continue.

“Control is not a cure,” he said. “I don’t expect to ever exist without medication, without psychotherapy, without friends who will tell me, ‘You’re getting off the wall.’ ”

Yancey is survived by his wife, Cheryl, three sons, two daughters and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete, a PGA spokeswoman said.

“It’s a real tragedy,” golfer Tommy Aaron said. “He’d had a tough time all his life dealing with his mental illness. He had a great career on the regular tour, but he never played out here (on the senior tour) to that level.”