After a Dull Year, Janzen Strikes a Match : Golf: He reaches final with Mediate. Palmer and Nicklaus advance in senior tour event.

Here’s a golf hangover: You win the U.S. Open and then spend the next year and a half trying to figure out what you did right.

For Lee Janzen, winning the 1993 U.S. Open at Baltusrol was so long ago, it feels as if it happened to someone else.

“I think next year will be my best year,” Janzen said. “I know it will be.”

It probably can’t be any worse than 1994. Sure, Janzen won the Buick Open in June and finished fourth at the Kemper the week before, but he also missed seven cuts and had only two other top-20 finishes.

All in all, not the kind of year a champion is supposed to have.

“I never found it difficult to come back after winning a major,” Jack Nicklaus said. “I mean, you can’t let your career end with that.”

Janzen doesn’t plan to. He and Rocco Mediate play Jeff Maggert and Jim McGovern in the PGA Tour final of the $2.1-million Diners Club matches today at the Nicklaus Resort Course at PGA West.

The way things are going now, Janzen feels he is playing his best golf of the year, a year he would just as soon forget.

He changed equipment twice, changed management firms, broke his finger playing pickup basketball, had hernia surgery and became a father. Other than that, nothing happened.

Certainly nothing much happened on the golf course.

“I had big expectations; I really didn’t put the effort out,” Janzen said. “I think I needed a vacation.”

Raymond Floyd, who has won the PGA Championship twice, the U.S. Open and the Masters, said he always came back from good years with no goals except to improve as a player.

“If you win a major championship, the next year will be a bad year if you forget what got you there,” he said.

So there’s some advice for Janzen, who has some for himself about what to do with 1994.

“In my mind, I started my year over in May,” he said.

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Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer birdied their way into the Senior PGA Tour final with a 4-and-3 victory over Jim Dent and Chi Chi Rodriguez.

It’s probably the best final of the day, with Floyd and Dave Eichelberger the opposition after a 3-and-2 victory over Gibby Gilbert and Larry Gilbert.

Palmer defined his role.

“I’m still giving Jack all the moral support I can muster,” he said.

Palmer also contributed two birdies. Nicklaus had four, including a curling 15-footer on No. 11 to go 2 up.

Tammie Green’s 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole enabled her and Kelly Robbins to defeat Laura Davies and Karen Lunn, 2 and 1, and reach the LPGA tour final against Dottie Mochrie and Julie Inkster.

Robbins won three holes on the back nine for the team and impressed Green.

“I know how to ride a horse,” she said. “I just put the whip to her.”

Mochrie and Inkster, who defeated Beth Daniel and Meg Mallon, 1 up, got the edge they needed on No. 12 when Mochrie rolled in a 25-footer for birdie. Inkster said she knew it was going in.

“Dottie started walking after 10 feet; I thought she was going to beat the ball there,” she said.

Janzen and Mediate’s 1-up victory over Fuzzy Zoeller and Curtis Strange puts them in the PGA Tour final against Maggert and McGovern, who defeated Bill Glasson and David Edwards on the 19th hole.