Somehow, Furyk Stays in the Loop

The first look you get at Jim Furyk’s golf swing, you figure he’s in the wrong line of work. You can tell right away he’ll never make it with that loop at the ball. You really don’t know whether to laugh at him or cry for him.

What’s it like? Well, he comes into the ball in increments, segments. Kind of like the Tour de France. He also has this massive detour at the top of the swing. Kind of like going from Philadelphia to New York by the way of Pittsburgh. L.A. to San Francisco through Tucson.

The club does a figure-eight at the top of the swing till you’re not sure whether he’s really aiming at the ball or suddenly spotted a snake two feet in front of it. I have seen more form on guys fighting off a swarm of bees. The club slaloms into the ball.

Every hustler in the country sees that swing and is reaching for his wallet and pleading with Jim to let him give him two a side with automatic presses. They figure a few rounds with this guy with the renegade swing and they’ve got a new Cadillac in the garage.

You know how golf is. As formful as the House of Lords. There’s only one right way to attack the ball, the custodians of the great game sniff, and that’s right at it with this fluid, one-piece swing.

Furyk’s swing is in more pieces than a large pizza. It whirls around his head like a helicopter. How it finds the ball you’re never quite sure.

It’s like our swing, fellow hackers! Gyrates around the sky till we come down and put this little cut on the ball or top it straight down the middle like a double-play ball or a bunt to the pitcher.

You keep waiting for Jim Furyk to do that. Sooner or later, that swing is going to spin out of control and take him with it. We know. We’ve been there, right?

So, let me ask you this: How come this guy whose swing is part W.C. Fields and part guy beating a carpet in a high wind won $1,619,480 on the tour last year, fourth on the money list and only a few hundred thou less than the great Tiger Woods?

He did that without winning a tournament, a record amount for a non-winner. He won thousands more than guys whose swings you would want to copy, he did it with some of the most imaginative shot-making this side of Seve Ballesteros.

He was second three times, in the top 10 13 times. He tied for fifth in the U.S. Open, was fourth at the British Open and tied for sixth at the PGA. He beat Nick Faldo in the Ryder Cup and went down to Argentina and won their Open in December. He has won two tournaments on the PGA Tour.

Yet, there isn’t a pro in the land who doesn’t want to grab hold of him the minute he sees that deranged swipe at the ball and say “Come out on the range, kid, and let’s see what we can do about that backswing of yours--if you could call it that.”

Every pro, that is, but one. Jim’s father, Mike, is a golf pro, and when Jim was starting out on the links, his father took one look at the swing and got white. Then, he got the scorecard and wisely kept his mouth shut.

Some years ago, I played in a Black Economics Union tournament with Jim Brown, the football player, and Bill Russell, the basketball star. Someone said to Jim Brown, “Jim, now that the word is out you love to play golf, how do you guard against being victimized on the first tee by some hustler?” And Brown answered, “I watch the way the guy swings at the ball.” Russell shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I watch where the ball lands.”

So, with Jim Furyk, forget the 12-handicap swirl. Watch where the ball lands. Usually three feet from the hole.

It was Lloyd Mangrum who gave the definitive retort. His playing partner complained one day, “Lloydie, I never see you from tee to green, you’re always in the rough. Then, you step on the green and one-putt it. It’s not fair.” And Lloyd smiled sweetly and said, “Are we playing ‘how’ or ‘how many?’ ”

Jim Furyk plays “how many” golf.

He is one of the players to watch here at the $2.3-million Bob Hope Chrysler Classic this week. He still makes spectators gulp when he goes into his contortionist take-away, but that doesn’t bother him.

“I’m stubborn, I’m not going to change,” he tells you. “I play by feel. Rhythm and tempo are more important to the golf swing than technique. It doesn’t matter how you arrive at the ball. It’s where the ball arrives.”

He says he was unaware of his unorthodoxy until outside cads like me called attention to it.

“It’s not a ‘connect-the-dots’ game,” he says. “You get there with what you’ve got. [Ben] Crenshaw was a ‘feel’ player, [Tom] Kite was mechanical. But it worked for them. The idea is to make a low score, not look pretty doing it. No one ever won a tournament just because he had a pretty swing.”

Not if Jim Furyk was around to keep him honest. Also annoyed. Jim’s swing, which is right out of the pages of “don’ts” in the liturgy of golf, helped him to a so-so round of 71 in the opening of the Hope. But it was against the hardest of the four courses the tournament is being played on. And there are still 72 holes to play.

If he vaults into a lead, look for a whole bunch of guys to junk that one-piece swing and go down to the driving range to see if they can build in a few kinks. And if you’ve already got ‘em, leave ‘em alone.