Simply the Champ : Lehman Defends Only Major Title in Typical Understated Style

The passenger list on the flight from Manchester, England, to Chicago the Monday morning after last year’s British Open could have played to about, oh, 25 under par. It included Fred Couples, Ben Crenshaw, Brad Faxon, D.A. Weibring, Jim Gallagher Jr., Dave Marr and one other person.

This guy wore shorts, a golf shirt, and tennis shoes with no socks and he was carrying a metal box with a handle. He could have been a vacuum cleaner salesman carrying his samples.

The ordinary-looking guy was Tom Lehman, and in that silver suitcase was the extraordinary British Open championship trophy.

As far as symbolism goes, it’s your basic Lehman. It fits him to a tee.

And just who is this Lehman?

“I just am who I am, and I try to be who I am,” he said.

Fair enough. Here’s what he is: a quiet, unassuming, broad-shouldered, 38-year-old Minnesotan who is as inviting as an easy chair and as controversial as oatmeal. He’s the type of guy who has 10 pairs of pants in his closet and nine of them are brown. Thomas Edward Lehman, this is your life.

He not only won the British Open last year, but he did it by shooting a withering 64 on Saturday at Royal Lytham, then played with local favorite Nick Faldo and held the lead when many English fans wished aloud for him to stumble into a bunker and simply disappear.

This is also Tom Lehman. Besides his recurring role as one of the best players swinging a golf club right now, Lehman presents the biggest contrast in golf not involving Payne Stewart’s clothes.

If you want white-collar style and starch, Lehman is not your guy. It’s simply not the way he was brought up, not after his rumpled experience. He wasn’t recruited by any college, so he walked on to the golf team at the University of Minnesota. He had stints as a club pro, two visits to qualifying school, played in Asia and South Africa and made stops on the mini-tours and the Nike Tour.

“You name it, I played it,” Lehman said.

But if you want results, Lehman’s your man. In 1991, he led the Nike Tour money list, which earned him his PGA Tour card in 1992. Since then, Lehman has made more than $5 million, won four tournaments, earned a reputation as a steely competitor and managed to established himself as a major factor in, well, the major tournaments.

This week at Royal Troon, Lehman is the defending champion in the oldest major tournament of them all, the 126th Open championship.

Now, under normal circumstances, that would be seem to be a lot of pressure under which to operate. But Lehman doesn’t necessarily feel that way . . . not after what he has gone through on his way up the global golfing ladder and what has happened at the last three U.S. Opens.

Lehman either led or was tied for the 54-hole lead all three times and didn’t win any of them. That streak included a third-place finish at Congressional last month when he uncharacteristically took himself out of it by bogeying at the 16th and 17th holes from the middle of the fairway, going for the pins.

Lehman was equally aggressive and just as unlucky on the last hole of the 1996 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills. He hit driver and the ball took a bad bounce into a bunker. He made bogey and finished second.

Pressure may be losing a major title, but so is wondering if you’re going to make enough money in a $5,000 mini-tour event to get you to the next town to try again. As recently as 1990, Lehman considered quitting it all and taking a $29,000 job as the Minnesota golf coach. He didn’t, mainly because the school wanted him to sell snow skis from the pro shop in the winter and Lehman preferred to spend that time playing golf someplace warm.

In any event, Lehman said he will be ready to play in his role as defending champion, regardless of whatever burden is heaped on him.

“Because you’re the defending champion doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the favorite or there’s anything given to you,” he said. “It’s like any other tournament. You happen to have won it last year, but you’ve got to go out and prove yourself again this year.

“As far as feeling pressure being defending champion, I don’t feel any. Expectations . . . you know, I expect to play well.”

That’s precisely the way Lehman played last year on the hardened, sun-baked course at Lytham and St. Annes. After Lehman’s 64 on Saturday, the lowest score at Lytham in a British Open, his lead was six shots over Faldo. And everyone remembered the last time someone held a six-shot lead over Faldo on the last day of a major. It was at the Masters three months earlier, when Greg Norman was six shots clear of Faldo and wound up in a total collapse.

After his round Saturday, Lehman was reminded of Norman’s collapse. Lehman responded in his normal straight-ahead manner.

“You mean could lightning strike twice?” he said.

Possibly, but not this time. Faldo missed a six-foot putt for birdie on the first hole, Lehman made par and that set the tone for the day. Faldo didn’t cash in enough chances and Lehman kept making pars.

Faldo missed another six-footer at No. 5 and a three-footer at No. 6, where Lehman avoided disaster. He hooked his drive into a bush, but chopped out and wound up knocking in a three-footer to save par. When Faldo missed another six-foot putt for birdie at No. 7, it seemed fairly clear that Lehman needed only to hold on and finish without incident to win.

And so he did. Lehman closed with a 73 and won by two shots over Ernie Els and Mark McCumber. Faldo was fourth, three shots behind. The British Open trophy, the Claret Jug, went home with him to Scottsdale, Ariz. It has been there for a year now, on a table, with Lehman’s medal from the Presidents Cup hanging on it. Lehman has to return the trophy now, which might actually be wise after what happened to it recently.

Lehman hosted a charity event in Minneapolis, and the Claret Jug was the centerpiece on his table. Afterward, Lehman nearly forgot the trophy, but a friend picked it up and returned it to Lehman’s wife, Melissa, who passed it off to Alissa Herron, who works for Jim Lehman, his brother and agent.

At 2 a.m., Lehman was awakened in his hotel room by a call from a policeman who said they had someone in custody who had stolen the British Open trophy.

“He goes, ‘Yes, the suspect was seen out drinking in the bars in Minneapolis with a bunch of friends drinking beer out of this Claret Jug trophy of yours and we think that someone reported that it’s stolen,’ ” Lehman said.

“ ‘Does this suspect have blond hair, big dimples, likes to laugh and is named Alissa Herron?’ ”

The policeman said yes. Lehman said she worked for his brother and it was all OK.

Lehman said the story had a happy ending on all counts. Herron didn’t go to jail, the charity event raised $840,000 for flood relief and children’s cancer research and the Claret Jug was safe and sound, although a little damp.

“So it all ended up that the TV crews showed up and all the policeman had their pictures taken with the Claret Jug at two in the morning in these bars in downtown Minneapolis,” Lehman said. “So that’s my story.”

It’s quite a story, all right. In fact, it makes you wonder what Lehman might do for an encore if he’s somehow good enough and lucky enough to win again. Lightning can’t strike twice, can it?

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Lehman in Majors

How Tom Lehman has fared in the Grand Slam tournaments:

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Year Masters Tournament U.S. Open British Open PGA Championship 1986 DNP Cut DNP DNP 1987 DNP Cut DNP DNP 1990 DNP Cut DNP DNP 1992 DNP Tie 6 DNP DNP 1993 Tie 3 Tie 19 Tie 59 Cut 1994 2nd Tie 33 Tie 24 Tie 39 1995 40th 3rd DNP Cut 1996 Tie 18 Tie 2 1st Tie 14 1997 Tie 12 3rd -- --

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DNP: Did Not Play