Green Hears Footsteps Close Behind : Golf: She has a two-shot lead at the Dinah Shore tournament, but Lopez and Davies are poised to pounce.

What is the definition of mixed feelings in golf?

Try this one. You have the lead going into the last day of the Nabisco Dinah Shore, the first major championship of the year, but when you look in your rearview mirror, Nancy Lopez and Laura Davies are smiling and waving their resumes at you.

This is what is happening today to Tammie Green, pride of Somerset, Ohio, who has to warm up her gentle Midwest twang that bends like a dogleg and somehow try to drown out two of the more prominent names in golf.

Green sounded as if she doesn’t think her two-shot lead is all that secure.

“I’m not going to trust any of those people behind me,” she said. “Especially Ms. Lopez.”

Credit Green for having nice instincts. After all, Lopez has won $4.1 million in prize money, 47 tournaments, three of them majors, and seems to have this funny feeling that it could happen again.

Lopez didn’t do anything to convince herself otherwise Saturday at Mission Hills, where she posted a 68, the best score of the day, and picked up two shots on Green.

On successive days, Lopez has lowered her score and has put herself in position to win her first event in nearly two years.

Lopez can thank her putting stroke, the one that husband Ray Knight is so obsessed with every time he puts on the tape of her 1981 Dinah Shore victory and wakes her up at 2 a.m. to watch her stroke again and again.

But Lopez isn’t tired of watching that old tape, and for a good reason.

“All those putts keep going in,” she said.

Davies’ major championships number two, which is one more than Green. But Davies, three behind Green, has much more going for her than just major titles, and that’s probably due to her ability to knock the dimples off a golf ball.

After she concluded her two-under 70, Davies thought she recognized the correct path to follow to victory today.

“Birdies are the only things that are going to win this one,” she said.

In that case, Green had better get a lot of them.

She had two birdies on the back nine Saturday and might have added a few more, but missed four birdie putts from distances of 10 feet to 20 feet. Her 54-hole score of 211 is five under par.

Green said she feels confident, but she knows she can’t sit back and shoot par without getting chased down by somebody like Lopez or Davies or maybe Susie Redman or Nancy Bowen, who are only four shots behind.

But for conversational purposes, Green settled on Lopez and Davies.

“I know they can shoot a low round,” Green said. “I know I’ll be a little nervous. That’s normal. I’m going to feed off that. If I wasn’t nervous, there would be something wrong.”

Lopez felt like there was something wrong with the way she felt about golf when she was with her family at home in Georgia early this year. She felt guilty for not practicing.

She made a deal with Knight to start practicing more if he would stop picking on her to practice more. Clear? Anyway, it’s working out pretty well.

Lopez began the day one over par, but she birdied the eighth with a 15-footer and the 10th with a 10-footer. She hit a wedge to 10 feet on No. 13 and rolled in the birdie putt, then birdied the 15th with a 10-footer and No. 15 when she hit a six-iron to four feet and made it.

By then, most everyone on the course knew something was up. All they had to do was listen. Davies heard the fans cheering the group ahead of her and knew it was for Lopez.

“You can tell a Nancy roar from a somebody-else roar,” Davies said. “I think she will be tough tomorrow.”

Lopez hopes so, but at least she is in familiar circumstances, in the hunt for a title and feeling pretty darned good about it.

“You hit some good shots and the feeling of years past come back,” Lopez said. “To be in contention, it felt good to me. I wasn’t afraid of it. Some are. That’s why some players don’t always win when we think they should.”

Green said she knows what Lopez was talking about.

“She’s a true champion,” she said. “She’s been in this situation many times. I feel confident in this situation as well. That’s what it’s all about, that’s the position you try to get in.”