A Textbook Victory, but It Sure Was Dull

The nice thing about an LPGA leaderboard is, they’re all fluent in English.

I’m serious. At the start of business in the final round of the Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament, seven of the 10 players under par for the course were foreign-born. Three of them were Swedes, one was Japanese and the rest were from scattered parts of the British Empire.

But the tournament was won by a golfer who came from an iron shot away.

Pat Hurst was the teaching pro from nearby La Quinta who just got sick of trying to cure duck hooks and bladed top shots and went back on the circuit when a group of members, led by former PGA winner Bob Rosburg, bankrolled her return to putting for a living.

It pays much better than lessons-by-the-hour at the La Quinta driving range. Hurst picked up $150,000 for her victory Sunday. She’d have to cure a lot of member slices to net that on the teaching tee.

It was really a ho-hum victory. Hurst won the thing wire-to-wire.

Now, Secretariat is supposed to win wire-to-wire. Michael Johnson. Carl Lewis. Maybe even Tiger Woods. But a Pat Hurst is supposed to ease into it.

But she came onto this track Thursday in what golfers call the “zone.” This is the kind of out-of-body experience where the swing remains grooved for 72 holes, the hole looks the size of a bathtub, you don’t see the water on the left, the sand in the middle or the deep grass on the right. Hurst ran down these fairways like an express train all week. Kind of “What out-of-bounds? What rough?” golf. It was just a complicated walk in the park for Hurst. Uneventful, monotonous, straight-ahead golf. The kind of golf she’d teach her pupils.

It was like a two-hit baseball game, a 6-1, 6-1 tennis match, a 15-round fight won by a boxing master. You kept hoping for Hurst to have to show her mettle with a shot behind a tree in the deep rough, a fairway trap or two, a miracle Arnold Palmer shot under two trees and around a dogleg.

Instead, it was simply a march--fairway to green and two putts. A Willie Pep fight. The course was clearly outpointed, overmatched. “I tried to be patient,” Hurst explained later in the press tent. Patience is a virtue. But it doesn’t sell papers. Or make the couch potatoes stop channel-surfing. They’re looking for golfers with one foot in the water.

A lot of us were hoping for impatient golf, something you could sink your teeth into. I mean, you want to see the Titanic make port? On time?

A lot of us were kind of rooting for Helen Alfredsson. Alfredsson, you see, plays a game with which we are more familiar. She talks to the ball, even as you and I.

Alfredsson is an oxymoron. An emotional Swede. She doesn’t play that dull, monotonous, right-down-the-middle game.

But, of course, where we keep up a line of chatter with the ball, she just instructs it sternly.

We play a game where we have nine “Not over theres!” per round, 10 “Anybody see where that wents?” and a dozen “Better hit another one, I believe that’s outs” a round. Alfredsson’s conversations run more to “Wind, where are you?” which she shouted to the elements coming up to No. 17 Sunday. She occasionally calls the ball something in Swedish that I don’t believe I could write even if I could translate it.

Sometimes, she sticks with basic Anglo-Saxon. “Damn you!” she has been known to scold a ball that disobeys her explicit verbal instructions, even as you and I.

Alas! Colloquial golf was no match for the no-frills, no-adventure, no-perils-of-Pauline golf played by Pat Hurst.

It’s a wonder she could stay awake. She yawned her way to a 71 and a one-shot victory over Britain’s Helen Dobson, and a two-shot victory over Alfredsson who could only bully her ball into a final-round 70.

It was textbook golf right down to the final five-foot putt that won the tournament. It was meticulous, trouble-free golf. The worst kind. Rated PG. Suitable for all ages. But bring a book.

She didn’t even need an interpreter in the press tent afterward.