It’s a Major Event on a Minor Scale

Of the four golf majors, I guess you’d have to say the PGA is the ugly one, the one with buck teeth and glasses, maybe warts.

It doesn’t have to be that way and didn’t used to be. In fact, the PGA used to be the only professional tournament that was match play, the original form of the game where you sought to beat an opponent, not par.

It furnished some great lore: Gene Sarazen versus Walter Hagen in the final. Byron Nelson versus Sam Snead. Ben Hogan versus Porky Oliver.

Then it fell on some hard times. The finals began to pit some of the nobodies of the game.

Chandler Harper played Henry Williams Jr., whoever they were. Felice Torza met Walter Burkemo. Chick Harbert played Walter Burkemo. There was a Palmer in there, but it wasn’t Arnold.

It became apparent that players who immersed themselves in medal play 51 weeks a year neglected the arts and mysteries of match play--psyching an opponent, for example. Sarazen used to concede five-foot putts early in a match, then turn his back and remain silent on the last holes while his opponent struggled to reconstruct his rusty putting stroke. Sarazen played his game like a riverboat gambler with a small straight. Good, clean fun.

But along came television and out went match play. TV was not about to make do with Felice Torza versus Walter Burkemo. If they got a Palmer in a final, it better be the one with the Army.

Besides, they didn’t want to go on the air for the final holes on Sunday and find out one player had already closed out the match, 7 and 6--seven holes up with only six to play.

So, match play went the way of the buggy whip, a charming bit of nostalgia. The PGA sighed and went to medal play.

But the guy in charge then, Ed Carter, began scheduling the tournament on commercial real estate courses, not particularly challenging. The courses were what the fight game calls “tomato cans,” i.e., palookas who put up only token resistance.

The PGA became indistinguishable from your weekly Buick Invitational, Walt Disney World-Oldsmobile Classic, Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic.

It got embarrassing. So the PGA stepped in and put it on real tests of golf--Winged Foot, Riviera, Oakmont, Pebble Beach.

The PGA today is actually a better test of golf than the Masters. But it has trouble shaking its tin-can image. The Masters is the glamour golf for America. All that forsythia, I guess.

But the PGA does something for golf this week that hasn’t been done in 52 years. It moves a major into the Pacific Northwest. This is only the third time in history one has made its way there. The PGA was in Portland, Ore., in 1946. Hogan won it. The ’44 PGA was in Spokane, Wash., but nobody noticed. There was a war on.

Now the PGA moves to Sahalee, 20 miles north of Seattle, a course so heavily wooded Big Foot may be found lurking among the firs.

You know all you need to about the philosophical difference between the PGA and the U.S. Open when I tell you the PGA removed dozens of trees from Sahalee this week to lessen the difficulty, whereas the U.S. Open, when it was held at Inverness in 1979 actually trucked in a tree between rounds and planted it to make it impossible for the players to take a shortcut to the hole.

Still, the remaining trees at Sahalee are high and majestic, and the PGA is a major. A golfer is measured by majors the way a gunfighter is measured by the notches on his revolver, a movie star by his Oscars, a race driver by his Indy 500s.

And if Mark O’Meara wins at Sahalee this week, he will become only the second player in history to win three majors in a year. Ben Hogan did it in 1953. (Bobby Jones won the “Grand Slam” of golf in 1930, four majors. Except in those benighted times, the majors were the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British amateurs.)

If Davis Love wins it, he will be the first to win consecutive PGAs since it went to stroke play.

If Tiger Woods wins, it will immediately become the year’s most important tournament, Page 1 in your hearts and the lead on the 11 o’clock news.

It ain’t the Masters. But it ain’t chopped liver. You play for the rent money at the Greater Milwaukee Open. You play for the history books at the PGA. Davis Love said it best: “One major is worth 10 regular tournaments.”

So, every editor and golf fan in the country hopes Tiger Woods can keep it between the trees at Sahalee this week.

If he can, all of a sudden, the PGA is going to start looking like Sharon Stone. It’ll be those three other majors who’ll be wallflowers, in need of face lifts.