Schroeder Enjoys Playing on His Terms

The rust on the irons and woods John Schroeder totes in his bag isn’t visible to the naked eye, but it’s there. Fourteen years’ worth. Schroeder didn’t notice it himself until he reached the eighth hole of Saturday’s second round of the Toshiba Senior Classic.

He teed off in second place, five strokes under for the tournament, two strokes behind leader Jim Colbert.

Hovering over the ball, he suddenly became distracted.

That name way up there on the leader board. S-C-H-R-O-E-D-E-R. Very familiar was his first thought. Very strange was his second.

That noise in the distance behind him. People approaching. Lee Trevino, Jim Colbert and Bob Murphy approaching. Footsteps. Getting closer. Getting louder. Blades of grass screaming as they are trampled underfoot.

Can’t focus.

Can’t concentrate.

A par-three, 203-yard straight-away on a gently descending slope turned wild on him. Schroeder sliced his tee shot short and to the right. Then he chipped on, 15 feet past the pin. Then he three-putted.

Double bogey and a triple dose of cold reality.

Schroeder, idle from competitive golf between 1982 and 1996, suddenly remembered what he had missed while he was away--and what he hadn’t.

“It’s going to take some time, getting used to being in contention again,” Schroeder said after completing a second-day round of 71, even par, leaving him six strokes off the lead.

“You’re playing in a group with three great players behind you. You know Trevino, Murphy and Colbert are coming, with the big gallery and the hubbub, all the commotion.

“That shouldn’t be a problem for me, but I hadn’t been there [in contention] for 13, 14 years. It’s a lot different than playing a weekend round and relaxing with your friends. I have to learn, again, what it takes to win a golf tournament.”

Previous personal experience will only take Schroeder so far. In his 13 years on the PGA tour (1969-1982), Schroeder went one for career. His lone victory came in the 1973 U.S. Professional Match Play Championship. His best payday was the $27,000 check he took home for placing second at the 1979 Bay Hill Citrus Classic.

By 1982, Schroeder was “struggling, really struggling . . . I was playing very poorly, not making enough money to meet expenses.”

Right around that point, Schroeder decided that as a professional golfer, he made a hell of a businessman. He knew how to talk his way into the TV commentators booth and make a career of it. Schroeder proudly notes that since 1982, he has worked as a golf analyst for “all three networks”--NBC, ABC and ESPN--and will cover this year’s U.S. Open and Tournament Players Championship for NBC.

Schroeder knew a good investment when he saw one, too, so in 1977, he signed on with a floundering little golf club company named Cobra, several years before it became the first golf club company to manufacture oversized irons, before Greg Norman became part-owner and company spokesman, before Cobra merged with Titlist and sent its stock soaring higher than a John Daly fairway blast.

“I was very, very, very, very lucky,” Schroeder said, grinning broadly beneath his black and gray “King Cobra” baseball cap. Also very, very, very, very rich. So rich that it really doesn’t matter what he shoots this weekend or the weekend after that or any weekend hereafter.

“I guess you could say that,” Schroeder allowed. “But money really isn’t the issue. This is about having the opportunity to play and compete with some of the best players in the world again.

“It is nice not to have to worry about paying the mortgage now, but I don’t think that has affected the way I play. I still try as hard as I ever did. I still get as nervous as I ever did.”

At 50, Schroeder finds that he can hang on the same leader board with Trevino, Geiberger and Stockton. That’s something he couldn’t say at 35, and it gives him a genuine rush.

“I’m just happy to be here,” Schroeder said. “I’ve played six [Senior] tournaments so far and I can see that I can compete here. Now, I want to see if I can move my game to the next level.”

That would entail winning championships. As in more than one. Schroeder finished fourth at Ojai last week and enters today’s final round tied for third. Schroeder inspects the early returns and finds them promising.

His fourth-place check at Ojai, for instance, was good for $49,000. That’s nearly twice as much as he ever won at a PGA event.

“Counting what I do this week,” Schroeder said, “I will have already surpassed my best year on the PGA tour [$78,000, in 1979].”

Not that Schroeder’s counting. He could have stopped counting years ago.

But the chance to be interviewed as Tournament Champion, instead of serving as interviewer, can be a compelling, driving force. Enough, in fact, to drag a man back to the links, back to the fray, back to the grind, after 14 years of the good life.