GOLF / THOMAS BONK : This Year, Azinger Can Think Good Thoughts at Skins Game

About a year ago, Paul Azinger played the Skins Game in such a blur, he couldn’t even remember what the Bighorn Golf Club course looked like. Azinger was terribly distracted.

He was going to have a biopsy two days later.

Azinger, who had been so enthusiastic about playing in his first Skins Game, was shut out. He won no skins, no money. And the next Tuesday, when the biopsy was performed on his aching right shoulder, doctors found a lymphoma.

Right then, Azinger started thinking about something other than golf. He started thinking about cancer.

After seven months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Azinger came back and played in four tournaments this year, even defending his PGA Championship. He didn’t make the cut, but he did in two other tournaments.

He didn’t really expect to play that well anyway, he said, adding that he mostly wanted to see how far he had come in his rehabilitation.

Now, Azinger believes his rehabilitation is complete. He is coming back Nov. 26-27 to try the Skins Game again, but he will be different this time. He will be healthy.

“I feel good,” he said. “I just need to be patient. . . . I need to be patient on the first hole and not feel like I have to hit it 300 yards and not feel like I have to knock the flag out of the hole.

“Patience is just a hole-by-hole attitude for me. I played with Nick Price the other day and he told me when he came back from his thumb injury he found the key for him was to be patient early on. He could see the impatience in me.”

It’s not hard to understand Azinger’s eagerness to play again, mainly because he can put the health issue farther behind him at the same time.

Azinger said that 1994 was, well, an interesting year.

“Obviously, my No. 1 priority was to get well again,” he said. “Golf was about as far down the priority list as it will ever go in my life, I would think. I really couldn’t have cared less about the game of golf. I was sick.”

Azinger’s interest in golf began returning toward the end of his treatments.

“When you’re on the front half of seven months of chemotherapy and radiation, it feels like a lifetime,” he said. “Of course, hanging over your head that whole process is the fear of what cancer is capable of doing to you.

“So it was a tough time, but I think once I got all that behind me, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. But the front side seemed like forever.”

Payne Stewart is the three-time defending champion of the Skins Game at Bighorn in Palm Desert. It also features Fred Couples and Tom Watson.

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Money talk: One thing is certain, golfers endorse products because it’s so lucrative.

According to Golf Digest, some of the top players are getting a lot richer.

For endorsing its equipment, Greg Norman was allowed to buy 12% of Cobra Golf, for $1.2 million, in 1991 and his investment has grown more than tenfold.

Chi Chi Rodriguez’s endorsement deal with Callaway gave him 75,000 shares in 1992. After two stock splits, Rodriguez’s stock has soared to more than $10 million, almost double his career earnings on both the regular and senior tours combined.

Fred Couples’ deal with Ashworth gave him stock worth $5 million.

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Shark watch: Raymond Floyd and Steve Elkington are back to defend their team title--and to see if they can win $300,000 again--in the $1.1-million Franklin Funds Shark Shootout Friday through Sunday at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks.

The other teams are Norman and Price, Arnold Palmer and Peter Jacobsen, Curtis Strange and Mark O’Meara, Couples and Brad Faxon, Fuzzy Zoeller and David Frost, Ben Crenshaw and Mark Calcavecchia, Hale Irwin and Bruce Lietzke, Chip Beck and Jeff Maggert, and Lanny Wadkins and Andrew Magee.

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Special events: A couple of Jack Nicklaus Productions made-for-TV events are coming up in December.

The twice-washed-out Wendy’s Three Tour Challenge has moved to the desert and will be held Dec. 6 at the Nicklaus course at PGA West, tape-delayed for television showing Dec. 17-18. The event features Norman, Couples and Azinger from the PGA Tour, Nicklaus, Dave Stockton and Raymond Floyd from the Senior PGA Tour and Nancy Lopez, Patty Sheehan and Laura Davies from the LPGA tour.

Nicklaus, Palmer, Strange, Zoeller, Irwin, Phil Mickelson and others will make up a field of 16 two-player teams in the inaugural $2.1-million Diners Club matches Dec. 8-11 on the Nicklaus Course at PGA West. It will be televised live.

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Now that’s shocking: Couples, after making his first hole in one, at the Kapalua International: “It was almost as shocking as watching George Foreman win.”

Golf notes

Tom Lasorda, Vin Scully, Mike Scioscia, Don Newcombe, Lou Johnson, Steve Garvey, Ann Drysdale and Reggie Smith are expected to play at Riviera Country Club in a charity golf tournament Monday to benefit the Roy and Roxie Campanella Physical Therapy Scholarship Foundation. Details: (818) 986-3134. . . . Johnny Bench, Peter Falk, Elgin Baylor, Al Downing, Paul Michael Glaser and Michael Tucker are expected to play in the Oneil Hadnott Celebrity golf classic Nov. 21 at Riviera. The event benefits the Oneil Hadnott Minority Financial Aid Program at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica. Details: (310) 829-7391 Ext. 512. . . . The seventh Frank Sinatra Celebrity tournament will be held Feb. 24-25 at Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort in Palm Desert. Details: 1-800 FS-STARS.

Bill Kincannon of Santa Barbara has been elected president of the Southern California Golf Assn. Kincannon is a member at La Cumbre Country Club and Santa Ana Country Club. . . . Longtime PGA member and businessman John Jachym of Rancho Santa Fe has been elected to honorary lifetime membership of the PGA of America. Other honorary lifetime members are former President Gerald Ford, Gary Player, Bob Hope, golf trick-shot artist Dennis Walters and former PGA legal counsel Lloyd Lambert. . . . Nick Price has committed to playing in the $2.7-million Johnnie Walker World Championship in Jamaica, Dec. 15-18.

Final statistics show that Price won the player-of-the-year award by 128 points over runner-up Mark McCumber and that Greg Norman won the Vardon Trophy for the lowest scoring average over second-place Price, 68.81 to 69.39.