Mortgaging Her Future for Game

Golf, it has been said, is not a game, it’s a sentence. Punishment for our sins. You robbed a kiddie bank? Go play the 18th at Riviera--in the wind. Stole a candy bar? Par the 10th at Bel Air.

I mean, is putting for a living your idea of the good life? Are 12-foot, two-break snakes across a slick green good for the heart, do you think? How about hitting out of wet sand? Calm the nerves, does it?

Like to have the Pacific Ocean as a lateral water hazard when you already lie 3 and need the money and can’t pay your motel bill if you miss the cut? Like to be playing with people who throw clubs when they only make par?

Oh, yeah, you’re out in a lovely spit of land, in the sunshine, palm trees, mountain views. Trouble is, you have to birdie it. You think bougainvillea looks pretty to the guy whose ball lands in it? Get real.

Golf is tough enough for the weekend player who might lose a $2 Nassau and all the presses. How about the guy--or gal--who needs a 2 on 18 for the rent money? Who doesn’t eat or, worse yet, has to go back to cleaning clubs or driving a truck or waiting on tables if the putts don’t fall?

Maybe Michelle Estill didn’t know when she was well off. I mean, there she was at age 21 in her native Phoenix working for a mortgage company. Made a comfortable living in a booming real estate market. Plenty of time for hobbies, no planes to catch, no reservations to make. No “must” putts to sink.

Some people like to aggravate themselves. Trouble was, Estill was more than bored. She was in the foreclosure department. This is the part of the business that puts people on the streets when they don’t come up with the rent on time. Scrooge in a skirt, sort of.

It’s not basically known whether Estill took up golf to atone for her life--or whether she just wanted to get out of the office and away from the ringing phones. She was 21 and had been only a weekend golfer up to that time--her father, a scratch player, took her out for 18 holes now and then.

She was hardly hooked on the game but she turned first to Arizona State University, where she majored in business and real estate--and played basketball and went out for the golf team.

Now, 21 is a late start in major league golf. Most players don’t really get to make the decision themselves. Daddy usually sticks a golf club in their hands at age 5 and says, “See that stick with the flag on it? Try to hit it. And keep your left arm straight.” Almost no one takes up the game in their 20s. No one who makes a mark in it, that is. Larry Nelson. Calvin Peete. Most players have been playing for 15 years by age 21. They know the game for the rogue it is.

Estill didn’t really have a clue. She excelled almost at once. In her second year, she finished runner-up in the NCAA championship.

Being the second-best college player in the country is pretty heady stuff for a player who wasn’t born near the first tee, and it was followed up by Estill going all the way to the semifinals in a national Publinks two years running.

Easy game, huh? Estill must have wondered how long this had been going on. A walk in the park. Sure beat serving eviction notices.

She finished second-best at the LPGA’s qualifying school and, once launched on the tour in 1991, she not only won a tournament, she won $171,475 and finished second (to Brandie Burton) as rookie of the year. She finished second in the Centel Classic her second year.

Then, golf fought back. As only golf can.

Estill hit that invisible wall almost all golfers hit after precocious starts. Her best finish in 1993 was a tie for 27th in one tournament. She earned only $21,428. “You can’t live out here on $20,000 a year,” she acknowledged the other day as she sat in an interview room at the Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament at Mission Hills. “I missed a lot of putts! Shoot! I missed a lot of cuts!”

Everyone finds out sooner or later that golf is a vampire under that smooth exterior. It’s Count Dracula under that tuxedo and cape.

Still, Estill had no intention of going back to writing up loans and answering phones. She clawed her way back to good golf. For one thing, she treated the game with far more respect. She was dealing with no palooka. She won $155,667 in 1994. Her best finish was a second. She went from 124th on the money list to 34th.

Next to downhill lies and 12-foot putts to make the cut, the other major aggravation of the golf business is getting to it. If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-the-Sara-Lee-Classic syndrome. Anyone-remember-which-Holiday-Inn-we’re-in? type of life.

Estill even likes that. Running for planes, standing in car rental lines, checking tee times--all of it beats hearing “The check is in the mail for the mortgage.” Says she: “I like everything about the tour.” Even when a tough day at the office is an 82 and a missed cut and no pay that week.

Estill came to the Dinah Shore this week as part of the year’s biggest blue-ribbon field. All the international fixtures of women’s golf were on hand.

Wind and rain almost turned the course into the Everglades for Round 1. Everything but crocodiles. The scores soared. Twenty-three players couldn’t break 80.

Estill wasn’t one of them. She fired a nice steady par 72 through the weather and rough. She played heady, steady golf.

When she added a 72 in the head winds of Friday, there were only three golfers ahead of her. She was paired with the elite of the game in the next-to-last foursome Saturday.

The gremlins of golf grabbed Estill on the seventh hole. A deceptive little par-four, it found her ball plugging alongside a sand trap. If it stayed plugged, she gets a free drop. But it hopped out. She had to play it by Braille--and prayer.

Double-bogey. Two over par on the front nine.

Out on the course, Nancy Lopez was turning back into Nancy Lopez. Estill struggled to retrieve her score. She came up to 18 needing a birdie to fire her third consecutive 72. She pulled a six-iron, had to chip on and missed the putt. A six on that par-five brought her in at 74 and a total of 218, or seven shots behind Tammie Green, five behind Lopez and four behind Laura Davies.

But she had spotted them years of experience. Lopez was winning the New Mexico Amateur at age 12 and playing in the Crosby at 16. Tammie Green has been playing since she wore Mary Janes.

For Estill, vaulting over the likes of Laura Davies, Nancy Lopez and Tammie Green in the final round today is not impossible, merely improbable.

Even if she can’t, does she feel she made a proper career choice? “Even when I hit in the water,” smiles Estill. The only real estate she cares about these days has holes and tee markers on it.