The Low Point Was Always One of the Highlights

It’s the oldest continuously played one-city tournament in the annals of golf. It’s now the “Nissan Open,” but to those of us oldsters, it is and always will be the “L.A. Open.” Its gaudy history helped take golf from the stepchild of sport to the place of eminence it occupies today.

Davis Love III isn’t here, but Tiger Woods is. So are Fred Couples, Nick Faldo, Peter Jacobsen and quite a few of the registered titans of the great game.

But it’s who isn’t here that strikes a melancholy chord of nostalgia with most of us long-term hackers. This was the citadel of some of the most memorable Hogan-Snead duels in the game’s history. It’s where Tommy Bolt went into his first furious volcanic eruptions.

And it’s where George Low used to hang out.

George Low, you ask with raised eyebrows? Who, pray tell, is George Low?

Well, George was as integral a part of tournament golf as a dogleg right in his time. A tournament could hardly be considered official without his presence. If he wasn’t at your tournament, it was a satellite.

He was built along the general lines of a Chicago Bear linebacker, he had the gruff exterior of a Balkan border guard and he tried not to say anything good about anybody--it destroyed his image. But actually he had a left ventricle full of fudge.

I always referred to him as golf’s all-time money winner. He managed to live on $50,000 a year without earning any of it. That was top money in his day, but George never had to agonize over any seven-foot putts to get it, he never had to go out at 6 o’clock on a Monday morning to qualify, he never got a buried lie in a trap or listened to a ball plop in the water. He lived on somebody else’s money, his host of the week. When George was around, you’d buy.

Oh, George knew golf, all right, knew it in all its perversity. His father had been a Scottish golf pro, first at Baltusrol in New Jersey where George was born, later at Carnoustie in the old country where Hogan won his British Open.

George had his moment in the sun. He could putt like a dream. He could two-putt Rhode Island. He liked to point out he was the pro who broke Byron Nelson’s 1945 string of 11 consecutive tour victories in 1945. It was complicated. Most things with George were. An amateur, Freddie Haas, actually won the tournament (Memphis), but as an amateur, he couldn’t collect. George was low pro (Nelson was third); so he got the money.

But George didn’t like working for a living. It was beneath him. If there were two ways to do a thing, George chose the way with the most larceny in it. He didn’t like the suspense of a regular golf tournament. If he played golf, he wanted a sucker to hustle so the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Someone called him “America’s Guest.” Which was all right with George. He never went anywhere without someone to foot the bills. The IRS didn’t even know George existed.

The most famous story about him concerns the time Frank Stranahan engaged him to drive his car from one tournament (Texas) to another (Florida), common practice of the pros in those days, who would fly to the next venue instead.

Only, Stranahan’s car never made it. When Stranahan wanted to know where the car was, George told him, “You lost it in a crap game. The other guy made the hard eight.”

George, who died in 1995, was never apologetic for his way of life. You took your chances when you teed it up with him. He didn’t like your crying about it.

He was no hero worshiper. But he did respect a few. Hogan, for instance. “Don’t play Hogan at nothin’,” he’d tell you. “Or you’ll wind up hitchhiking home.”

He was the master of the put-down. Once, a budding young tour tyro had trouble off the tee. “What am I doing wrong?” he asked George. “Playin’ golf,” George told him.

He categorized humanity several ways, “buried lies,” i.e., guys who didn’t pick up the check; “stand-up guys,” i.e., guys who did pick up the check, and “empty suits,” i.e., officials who wouldn’t give him VIP credentials. He was the first person I knew to describe those in authority as “suits.”

He would never admit it, but he loved golf. In all the years I knew him, I never saw him at night. If he couldn’t wear cleats, he didn’t go. He got free golf shoes. The only things he ever paid for were cigarettes and the Racing Form. His idol wasn’t a golfer, it was the jockey, Willie Shoemaker. “Putting a two-ounce ball into a four-inch hole is nothin’ compared to putting a 1,200-pound horse through a one-foot hole on the fence,” he once told me.

He went legit for a while. Ramada Inns, bless ‘em, gave him free rooms for a time. Then, the suits brought out a line of George Low putters. George got bored. “I’m a ‘withdrew,’ ” he finally said. “I don’t like knowing where I’m going to sleep that night.”

We were glad. I always said seeing George in the ranks of the “suits” was like seeing Jesse James becoming a conductor on a train. We were afraid somebody would be losing his car in a crap game.

We needn’t have worried. George was uncomfortable in the Establishment, in the company of all those “buried lies.”

George was a Jr. His father, the original George Low, was second in the U.S. Open once (in 1899). The total purse for that tournament was $650 distributed among the top eight players. George spent more than that for lunch.

It’s probably just as well George isn’t abroad on the clubhouse steps of Valencia for this week’s Nissan Open. He’d probably look out at that field with a curled lip. “Hogan’d have to give this bunch two shots a side,” he’d sneer.