Morgan Smokes ‘Em for Playoff Victory

Walter Morgan smoked his first cigar when he was a teenager and he didn’t swing a golf club until he was 25.

That’s the wrong order, isn’t it?

Maybe, but who’s going to second-guess a two-time Vietnam veteran, a former U.S. Army sergeant who can swing a golf club and smoke a cigar like he can?

On the occasion of Sunday’s last round of the FHP Health Care Classic, Morgan did both well. He lit up the rolling fairways and terraced greens of the Ojai Valley Inn with a closing 66, a birdie in a playoff, then lit up a victory cigar.

“If I didn’t have any confidence, I wouldn’t be out here on the tour,” Morgan said. “I knew from the beginning I was gonna win. It just took a little longer.”

It took 19 holes for Morgan to beat Gary Player, including a one-hole playoff when Morgan rolled in an eight-footer for birdie and Player missed when he hit a seven-footer only six feet.

Morgan, a 54-year-old Georgia transplant who lives in New Bern, N.C., won for the second time since joining the Senior PGA Tour in 1991. He also won the GTE Northwest Classic last September.

His victory was worth $120,000 and a year’s exemption, not to mention a fresh boost to his self-confidence, which isn’t exactly flagging to begin with.

“They got to play to beat me,” Morgan said. “I’m not gonna back down. I’m not afraid. You got to play 18 holes and let the best man win.”

This time it was Morgan. Three strokes ahead of Player through nine holes, Morgan found himself even with Player through 17, then put pressure on him with a birdie on the 18th.

Morgan had missed the green on the par-five with his approach, but chipped to four feet and made it. That meant Player had to birdie to force a playoff, which he managed by two-putting from 20 feet.

Morgan completed 54 holes in 11-under par 199 with rounds of 62-71-66. Player began the last day with a one-shot lead and wound up catching Morgan at 199 after rounds of 64-67-68. What Player could not do was to coax that last birdie putt into the hole.

Player made $70,400, but he was happy with neither the result nor the format.

“I feel terrible,” he said. “You go all that way in the tournament and they count it on one hole. I will go to my grave against sudden-death playoffs.”

Player, who is 4-2 in sudden- death playoffs on the Senior PGA Tour, suggested a more equitable method to break ties is a four-hole playoff like the British Open uses or an 18-hole system employed in the U.S. Open.

“It’s like you have a dead heat in the Kentucky Derby, so you send the two horses back to the gate and decide it with a 50-yard dash,” Player said.

As it was, Morgan beat everybody to the finish. Jack Kiefer was third after a 69 put him two shots out of the playoff at nine-under par 201.

Dave Stockton and John Schroeder tied for fourth at 202.

Morgan’s margin of victory was established when he chipped to eight feet above the hole on No. 18 in the playoff. Player, who was short of the green with his second shot, left his third shot seven feet above the hole.

With his teeth tightly clenching his cigar, Morgan knocked the downhill putt straight into the hole for a birdie.

“When it got halfway there, I knew I made it,” he said.

Player did, too. He called it a “marvelous putt.”

As for Player’s putt, he read it to the left and it broke right, the ball stopping about a foot short.

“I didn’t hit the putt that well at all,” Player said.

Morgan’s golf career has been more like an uphill putt. He learned to play when he was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu when he borrowed a seven-iron from a club pro and started hitting golf balls.

The first time he ever played, he shot 79. Morgan was 39 when he tried to get his PGA Tour card in 1980, but he failed by one shot. He became a club pro in Texas instead and waited until he could join the seniors.

Now, he’s a two-time winner, which means he can afford a few more boxes of cigars.