Fuzzy Approach to a Tough Game

Someone should tell Frank Urban Zoeller golf is as serious a business as the stock market, no-limit poker, the trade deficit and social security. You could lose the mortgage out there, your wife’s new fur coat, that new Cadillac, the condo in Florida. In extreme cases, you could even lose your touring card, your right to play golf at all.

Fuzzy Zoeller doesn’t quite face that dire prospect, but still he reminds you of the guy who blunders into Dracula’s castle and doesn’t notice the eyes move in the foyer portrait or the wolves howling.

You’re afraid he simply doesn’t understand the situation, doesn’t realize putts don’t have to go in and drives can end up on I-5, not a green.

Golf is not meant to be enjoyed. Fuzzy could take lessons from Craig Stadler. Craig knows precisely what he’s dealing with. He starts to scowl before he hits the ball. His lips curl in disdain as the ball leaves the putter. He knows it’s not going in.

Not Fuzzy. Fuzzy starts to whistle, not scowl. Fuzzy’s biggest problem is what song to hum over the seven-foot putts. What do you whistle as you go down in the sand trap?

Fuzzy doesn’t worry about his golf score; it’s the musical score he’s concerned with.

Most golfers aren’t that way. Nine out of 10 know the game for the charlatan it is. They know it hates it when they make birdies and gets downright apoplectic at an eagle. They know how it manages to skew even their best shots and kick them out of bounds or into the water. They know it’ll give them buried lies, tree stymies, unplayable lies. Some players fight back by cheating, but they’re known in the clubhouse as “unplayable liars.”

On the tour, most make do by trashing the ball-washer, throwing clubs, chewing out marshals, stiff-arming autograph seekers and shaking their fists at the sky and saying “Me again, huh, God?!” They’re sure Divine Providence has it in for them.

You worry about Fuzzy. None of this seems to affect him. He wanders around here like a guy looking for flowers to pick, songs to hum. He doesn’t seem to realize this is for $1.2 million and is the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, not some member-guest in Cucamonga. He wastes less time over a shot than a guy playing in front of a tornado. You can’t tell by looking at him whether he’s shooting lights-out or let-me-outta-here! He makes Mother Teresa look cranky.

If anyone should understand the vagaries of golf, it’s Fuzzy. He finished second in--get this!-- five tournaments last year. If he had made an average of only two shots a round in those tournaments, he would have had an incandescent year. As it was, he won the most money--$1,016,804--anyone ever won in a year without winning a tournament.

He was fifth on the money list. He lost one tournament by one shot and he was in a tie for another but lost the playoff. He led the British Open after three rounds and finished third behind Nick Price and Jasper Parnevik.

A case could be made Fuzzy is playing the best golf on the tour right now. He has won two majors--the U.S. Open and the Masters--and as a ball-striker he puts you in mind of the great ones of the past such as Julius Boros or Cary Middlecoff.

The third hole at Indian Ridge is a daunting 609 yards, one of the few holes on tour that long. When the Scots invented the game, they pretty much topped out at 500 yards for the par five.

Indian Ridge is a newcomer to the Hope rotation of courses this year, and Fuzzy had never laid eyes on it before Friday afternoon. The third hole looked as if it required two changes of trains to get to. Only seven birdies had been recorded the day before. But Fuzzy, typically, didn’t storm it with a scowl and a 360-degree takeaway on his swing. He romanced it. He smoothed it in front of the green with a three-wood, then hit a heady wedge below the hole about 20 feet.

You will learn about Frank U. that he usually has an uphill putt left after his approach. Fuzzy doesn’t like sidehill putts that have to find the hole by Braille.

Fuzzy slammed that putt home, then strolled to a 66, which kept him in the hunt in a tournament in which the other leaders are as anonymous as the CIA. It was vintage Zoeller. Fuzzy is almost the only hope of the Old Guard in a tournament otherwise given over to guys named Harry Taylor, David Duval, Paul Stankowski and other unlisted numbers of the tour.

Fuzzy, who won his big tournaments on tracks such as Winged Foot, Augusta, Pebble Beach and Heritage and played solid golf at such places as Turnberry and St. Andrews, would probably prefer sterner tests of golf, but Fuzzy plays the hand dealt him.

He started Saturday six shots in arrears, playing one of the least forgiving of the Hope venues, Bermuda Dunes.

The Fuzz whistled, waggled, sauntered and sang his way around the course. He didn’t play it, he serenaded it. He did everything but bring flowers.

But the course wasn’t having any. Flint-hearted Bermuda Dunes begrudged him every shot, trapped him, roughed him, gave him no breaks at all. He made up no ground on the upstarts. A contemporary, Curtis Strange, passed him on the inside, throwing a little 63 at the sullen real estate of Bermuda Dunes, but, otherwise, the tour whozits were still in charge.

Still, no clubs flew, no ball-washers were kicked. Fuzzy shot a placid and respectable two-under-par 70 and went looking for the 19th hole and a drink. Fuzzy just kind of ran in place for a day.

Fuzzy has shot 70 before. He has also shot 63. He treats them both the same. With a song in his heart. With studied nonchalance.

Fuzzy has seven shots to make up to catch Kenny Perry, five to catch Strange. It’s possible, not probable. Either way, like Snow White’s dwarfs, he whistles while he works.

Golf better hope he never finds out what a sadistic son of a wicked witch the game is. Fuzzy thinks he’s having fun. Other pros play a round as if they’re going to the electric chair.

He has made $4,785,065 his way, 21st all-time. You’d think more of them would take up whistling.