Augusta Has a Field Day

There was a time when Steve Pate was an accident waiting to happen. Usually, he didn’t have to wait very long.

He once bruised his hip in a traffic accident when he was on his way to a Ryder Cup banquet.

One time a few years ago, Pate was driving back from the Phoenix Open and his car rear-ended a slow-moving truck on the freeway. Pate fractured his right wrist and broke a bone in his right hand.

A few months later, he tripped on a boat dock at Lake Powell and cracked a bone in his other wrist.

Pate sensed a trend. He thought he maybe needed to change his luck after that one, so he decided to stick closer to home. That worked for a couple of days, until the morning he was riding his bike on his driveway and got broadsided by a deer.

Now when you start getting smacked by deer in your driveway, you pretty much know you just bottomed out.

Actually, there are a few ways you can go when this is your kind of luck. You can laugh, you can cry, you can buy stock in pharmaceutical companies or you can simply do nothing.

Pate decided the do-nothing approach was the best bet. After all, he wasn’t going to be playing any golf for a while because his right wrist, his left wrist and his right hand needed to heal. The deer, by the way, recovered swiftly.

Pate devoted himself to eating. It didn’t take him long to become quite good at it, so good in fact that he got fat. He also mellowed out, which was fortunate because Pate was in serious danger of exploding. Pate was well known for having the personality of dynamite, which is the way a person earns the nickname “Volcano.”

He said that after being in a serious traffic accident, bad shots aren’t that big a deal any more.

Now at Augusta National, there are many places where accidents can occur and for someone like Pate, they must be calling to him, whispering his name in the warm Georgia air.

It would happen like this: Pate hits his golf ball and it travels sideways onto Bobby Jones Expressway, where it rolls under the tires of an 18-wheeler headed for Atlanta, at which time Pate whirlybirds his club and sends it over the pump house at No. 11, then flips off the crowd and stomps off the course.

But it didn’t happen like that Saturday.

For one day and 18 holes, Pate had the greatest streak of good fortune of any player in the history of the Masters.

Beginning at the seventh hole and continuing until the 14th hole, Pate made seven birdies in a row. He rolled a seven at Augusta National.

No one else has ever done that here. Not Bobby Jones. Not Ben Hogan. Not Byron Nelson. Not Sam Snead. Not Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo or Tiger Woods.

But Pate did.

That’s Steve Pate, the 37-year-old former UCLA star from Agoura Hills, the slightly rumpled, accident-prone, reformed volcano. Pate started the day 10 shots behind Jose Maria Olazabal and ended it two shots back.

Pate’s third-round 65 puts him in a third-place tie with Davis Love III, two shots behind Olazabal and one behind Greg Norman.

Seven consecutive birdies will do that for you. How Pate did it is another story, which he wishes he could tell, but admitted he didn’t have a clue how it happened.

“I made seven a row,” Pate said. “I don’t know why.”

We’ll have to try to piece it together, but at least the facts are clear. The whole thing was sort of a blur. As Pate said, golf balls were diving into holes left and right.

Pate started it off by making an eight-foot birdie putt on No. 7, then a 20-footer on No. 8. He followed that up with an 18-inch birdie putt on No. 9, a 50-footer on No. 10, a 20-footer on No. 11, a one-footer on No. 12 and a seven-footer on No. 13.

After Pate’s kick-in birdie on the 12th, he took a little walk behind the green, as if he were trying to clear his head. Pate said he wasn’t. He was trying to get behind some bushes and tuck his shirt-tail back in.

He got a standing ovation from the gallery in the grandstand at the 13th green after his seventh consecutive birdie, and Pate took his cap off to answer the cheers.

Lee Westwood, his playing partner, fanned Pate with a towel, and explained he had to do it because Pate clearly had caught fire.

The streak ended on No. 14 when his approach shot was a little long and the ball stopped in the fringe at the back of the green. He even bogeyed the 17th hole, but Pate accepted that little problem with calm.

He did not shout, he did not throw a club, he did not burst into flames. Pate is feeling good. He is also feeling lucky, even though he lost a basketball game to his stepmother Friday night at their rented house.

They played on an eight-foot goal in the driveway. Pate said he dunked only once. He didn’t want to get hurt.