Riviera Enjoys a Nostalgic Week

There are as many ways to view a golf tournament as there are players who play it. You can root for Fred Couples or John Daly, as most people do. Or you can root for an unknown.

Me, I root for the underdog. I root for the course. I’ve got nothing against these guys, but I pull for the one who has the most to regain.

I like champs who get off the floor, guys who hit with a two-strike count, take the ball on fourth and long.

When you go to a fight, you don’t root for the ring. At a basketball game, you don’t pull for the court. At a football game, you don’t cheer for the gridiron.

Golf is different. The real estate is in play.

Riviera was a grand dame of the game, a dowager empress. Hogan made it famous, and its corridors between the eucalyptus groves became hallowed ground, a shrine of golf. It achieved this grandeur with the immaculateness of its challenge. No water holes had to be piped in to artificialize its difficulty. The first time Bobby Jones played these storied acres, he shot a 73 and, as he came off the course, someone wanted to know what he thought of it. “Riviera?” said Jones, startled. “Well, it’s a fine course. But tell me--where do the members play?”

But that was historic Riviera. That was Riviera before titanium shafts, space-age metal woods, four-irons you could hit 240 yards.

The onslaught of modern technology--and the proliferation of young guys who played the game with no respect for tradition--seemed to dim Riviera’s luster. You could almost hear them wondering what all the shouting was about.

It was depressing for hard-liners. It was like hearing Babe Ruth couldn’t hit the slider, Dempsey couldn’t punch with Tyson.

They had the PGA Championship at Riviera last year and you had to cover your eyes. It was defenseless against what Tommy Bolt used to call “these flippy-wristed little college kids” on tour today. With no respect for history, they took advantage of the fact the greens at Riviera were like down mattresses. You could throw the ball at the pin and wherever it hit, it stuck.

The mayhem was total. It was golf’s version of Little Big Horn. Two guys shot 63s. Four shot 64s. Five shot 65s. Only three people failed to break 70 at least once in four rounds. The winner had all four rounds in the 60s. So did the runner-up and two other players.

It was embarrassing. Riviera as a bandbox ballpark. Riviera came into focus as an aging dowager queen, down on her luck, fingers sticking out of her gloves, frayed gown and tacky, out-of-date furniture, holes in the carpet and a glass menagerie of gewgaws. Depending on the kindness of strangers.

Well, the old girl is not exactly doing a disco, running around in high heels, net stockings and winking at sailors, but she’s far from getting ready to retire.

They didn’t send her out defenseless for the Nissan Open this year. They armed her. They did something they have almost always been afraid to do--or were barred by the PGA tour officials from doing--they grew rough. Wiry, matted, barbed-wire stuff. They narrowed the fairways by putting this rough stuff over everything but 24-yard strips in the middle. You had to be straight at Riviera again. The greens were not their old punitive lightning-fast selves. Hogan still wouldn’t recognize them. But they weren’t slow boats to China either. They weren’t 12 on the stimpmeter. But you couldn’t just charge the hole.

All of a sudden it was 1948 again. No one was going to shoot the 267 Steve Elkington shot to win the PGA in August. A Pacific storm swept across Riviera early in the week and a gelid wind followed it.

“They could hold a U.S. Open here!” Elkington marveled. I got a clue for you, Steve. They already did. Fourteen years before you were born.

The first thing that happens when you have a worthy foe is, you get a recognizable leaderboard. Par is respectable. At the PGA last August, eight under par led after one round; 11 under par led after two rounds; a record 16 under par led after three; and Elkington finished 17 under. They were kicking Riviera and puling its hat down over its ears.

This week, four under par led after one round; six under led after two. And after three, the field has managed to reduce this by one--to seven under par.

Most of the field went the other way.

--Robert Wrenn, who led at six under Friday, finished Saturday one under.

--Fred Couples barely held his own, three under at start, three under at finish.

--Scott Simpson, five under at the No. 1 hole, was still five under walking off 18.

--Elkington, who started out five under, ended up three under.

--U.S. Open champion Corey Pavin, who won at 16 under here last year, was even par after three rounds.

“Riviera’s back!” proclaimed Tom Lehman as he struggled to get from two under to five under.

Still, the tournament was led at the close of play Saturday by an upstart. Neal Lancaster has won only one tournament on the pro tour--sort of. He led after 36 holes of the Byron Nelson Classic in 1994 and, when weather canceled the last two rounds, was declared the winner. He has been deemed the winner of the “Half-Nelson” in the golf guide. “I suppose I better root for this big storm to come in tonight,” he quipped as he came in the press room.

Lancaster was as surprised as anyone to find himself in this exalted position on Hogan’s Alley. He was ready to pack it in as early as the back nine on Thursday. “I wrote the week off after I shot 73. You don’t win out here opening with 73. You don’t even make cuts.”

Well, at Riviera this week, you do. You vault into the lead from there. The guys who were six shots ahead of you that night are four to six shots behind you on Saturday night.

Lancaster is hardly a poster boy for the power of positive thinking. “I really just gassed it out there,” was his evaluation of his tournament-leading round of 65, the first and only one at Riviera this week.

“My wedge game’s been really bad,” he offered. “It got so bad I broke my 60-degree wedge on a tree out there.”

Most golfers find excuses for what they did wrong. Neal Lancaster finds excuses for what he did right. Did his 40-foot putt go in on 18 because he read the breaks? “I actually made a bad swing with my six-iron out to be there,” he says. On another hole, he made a scrambling par, he explained, when “I got a lucky free drop there.” He added, “The par-fives have been killing me all year.”

You get the feeling Neal Lancaster will win only if he plays poorly enough to disappoint himself--which is not hard for him to do. He explains that he learned to play studying magazines. “Not the print, the pictures,” he said.

If he wins, he won’t put anybody in mind of Hogan. Least of all himself. But he can probably credit the fact that Riviera became Riviera again. A Los Angeles heirloom, it is to sports lore what the Coliseum is to football, Dodger Stadium to baseball. It’s nice to see it back. The old girl still has lots of fire left. She’s not ready to go to the Leisure World of golf. Riviera Redux.