FORE-WARNED

Tiger Woods is accosted by a fan packing a concealed handgun.

David Duval cleans out his locker after the third round and threatens to quit because of abuse from the gallery.

Scott Hoch dives under the ropes and goes after a heckler who has gotten under his skin before security keeps the situation from getting really ugly.

Young Canadian Mike Weir is hounded in the final round of a U.S. major and ends up playing like a 15-handicapper with the yips.

Justin Leonard gets catcalls in a language he can’t even understand and Colin Montgomerie is berated in the king’s English. “Go home, Monty,” the cry rings out, and golf takes one more step across the chasm between the two Hogans--Ben and Hulk.

Golf galleries at PGA Tour events have grown like tech stocks in recent years. The Phoenix Open draws more than 400,000 in a week; the Greater Hartford Open nearly that many. Ten tour events are played on Tournament Players Club courses, layouts designed to accommodate huge galleries and keep crowds moving freely behind the 10-15 miles of ropes put up to separate players and fans.

Huge white corporate tents line fairways, bringing more and more fans with more money into the mix. The growth has made tour officials giddy and helped make players even wealthier. Tour purses have jumped from about $77 million in 1997 to $157

million in 2000. The game has attracted new followers and reached out to youngsters who used to prefer giving their buddies a wedgie to hitting a wedge.

More than ever, as the Tiger Woods phenomenon continues to define the game, crowds are more vibrant, vocal, supportive, involved. But, drawn more to the game’s celebrities than the sport itself, they are also less knowledgeable about its unique culture of conduct. They don’t all understand that a ringing cell phone or buzzing pager is as welcome during a player’s backswing as a bullhorn. And, like sports fans everywhere, they can sometimes be offensive, intrusive and a general pain in neck.

“The crowds are just growing and growing,” said Arvin Ginn, a PGA Tour tournament director. “And when you get more people, the chances are simply higher that someone in that crowd will cause a problem.”

Most involved with the game say many changes are for the better; some say for the worse. But virtually all agree that there is no place for the growing number of fans who cross the line from being simply vocal to vituperative.

“The game is what’s sacred,” said Nick Price, who has won three major titles. “I’m all for having a great time, enjoying yourself, having a few beers. But you can’t be allowed to get out of hand.

“It takes only three or four people to ruin it for everyone else. The etiquette of the game is at stake, and we need to nurture and protect it. Otherwise, golf isn’t going to be fun to go out and watch anymore.”

At Augusta National this week, don’t look for hecklers or shirtless drunks bellowing “You da man!” after 300-yard tee shots. The fans at Augusta know two things: how to act according to Augusta’s protocol, and that if they don’t, they’ll be out on Washington Road minus the badge that is one of the most coveted tickets in sports.

“All galleries could take a lesson from Augusta galleries,” said Ken Venturi, the former player and a CBS announcer at every Masters since 1972. “You don’t have to tell them what to do because they know. There are Pinkertons all over, and fans know they can be escorted off the property for improper behavior.”

The Masters, of course, is a world unto itself. Elsewhere in professional golf, things don’t always run so smoothly.

Brewing Up Trouble

Here’s a recipe that is adding spice to golf: Take a new breed of golf spectator--a sports fan more than a golf fan who is there to see a superstar such as Woods--pour in a beer or two for a festive atmosphere, then toss in a dash of nationalism to add some passion to the mix.

“If you’re going to go to watch a golf tournament, you’re supposed to have fun,” said nine-time tour winner Mark Calcavecchia. “I know the first thing I’m going to do, if I’m watching, is go get a beer. It’s like a hockey game, and that’s OK; it’s good for the game. The last thing we want is to have 10 marshals out there telling you to act like a zombie.”

But problems--which most acknowledge are the exception rather than the rule--can arise if you blend in one or more of the ingredients in the wrong proportions.

“One thing people have to understand is that golf is not the same as other sports, like baseball and football,” Price said. “At a basketball game, it’s tough for a single fan to be heard over the din. In golf, the fans can sometimes reach out and touch a player. One yell at the wrong time can really have a negative effect.

“Remember, the guys in other sports are playing for a salary. If they make a bad play, it’s not going to determine how much money they make. In golf, one bad shot can determine your whole year.”

Price was stunned by Weir’s experiences in last year’s PGA Championship at Medinah outside Chicago. Weir shared the third-round lead and was playing the final round with the crowd favorite, Woods.

“Mike was getting a lot of heckling from the crowd, people saying, ‘Get out of here! What are you even doing here?’ It probably cost him five or six shots.

“Without the heckling, he might have got on the Presidents Cup team with a good finish.”

Weir shot 80. Even a 75, which was six shots worse than any of his first three rounds, would have meant a difference of about $130,000 in his paycheck that week.

At Hartford, Conn., two years ago, Hoch began the fourth round in a three-way tie for the lead, bogeyed the final two holes for a 71 and finished tied for seventh. After the round, a well-oiled heckler picked up where he had left off during play and again called Hoch a choker, among other things.

Hoch ducked under the ropes, scooted into the gallery around the 18th green and started to put a chokehold on the spectator before a tournament volunteer broke it up.

“There was some pretty mean-spirited stuff said during the round [to Hoch and playing partner Larry Mize],” Hoch said. “Then when I go to the putting green afterward, he says some things to me in front of my family and kids that you don’t say to other people in normal conversation, very personal things. There was some security there, but they weren’t doing anything, so I took it upon myself to do something.”

The fan screamed that he was going to sue--and was never heard from again.

“Inevitably, it’s a young guy trying to impress other people or trying to get a laugh,” Hoch said. “And that’s usually what the alcohol brings out in people.”

Beer has been a common thread at the problem-plagued Phoenix Open, where the crowd of 20,000 or so around the 16th tee has become the tour’s flash point for boisterous fans. They roundly cheer good shots, boo bad ones and occasionally refine bad taste to an art form.

Casey Martin, who rides a cart because a rare circulatory disorder in his withered right leg makes walking 18 holes almost impossible, hit a tee shot short of the 16th green this year. A fan shouted, “Walk it off, Casey.”

The TPC of Scottsdale, site of the Phoenix Open, was also where Woods was accosted last year. The spectator, inebriated, was wrestled to the ground by security officials, who then discovered he was carrying a gun.

Woods did not play Phoenix this year, when Duval had his episode. Duval was so bothered by fans going over the line that he was ready to quit after play Saturday, but tour officials persuaded him to return for the final round.

It’s enough to make some players want to toss their clubs into a bunker and storm off the course, and wouldn’t that set the crowd on 16 into a tizzy?

Phil Mickelson minced no words about how to deal with abusive fans.

“Kick ‘em out,” he said. “Very simple.”

Steve Matteucci, tournament director at Phoenix, agrees . . . to a degree.

“We probably had 125,000 people on Saturday, and only a handful got out of line,” he said. “We ejected a couple each day over the weekend.

“But enforcing a policy is tough. If someone in the middle of a crowd shouts something, you’ve got to be careful to identify the right person. If one guy is in the middle of a group of rowdy fans, do you just toss him out? Or his whole group? Clearly, when people say things that are vulgar, mean-spirited or personal to a player, that crosses the line.”

Defining that line can be difficult. Some players enjoy the rowdy fan behavior, even encourage it. Gabriel Hjertstedt turned to the gallery at 16 and demanded that fans cheer at full volume--while he was addressing and hitting the ball. John Daly has done the same thing. Getting crowds to back off and be silent after that isn’t always easy.

“Crowds are a reflection of societal changes and that seems to be the nature of where this is headed,” Matteucci said. “Combine that with the PGA Tour trying to attract more younger people who haven’t been exposed to the game, you’re going to complicate the composition of the gallery.”

Phoenix has restricted beer sales around No. 16 as part of a program to reduce heckling, besides using video campaigns on shuttle buses with lessons on etiquette. Like many tour events, it uses 600-700 marshals and, like every tour event, an unspecified number of uniformed and plainclothes officers and other security personnel. (Riviera uses about 250 uniformed and non-uniformed security personnel for the Nissan Open, besides marshals.) But it remains a party atmosphere, a community event rather than simply a golf tournament.

It isn’t alone. The 17th hole at the Greater Greensboro Open was the early Animal House on tour, and the 17th green at the Buick Open in Grand Blanc, Mich., also has a segment closer to WWF than PGA.

“Greensboro was a little ahead of its time,” said 1995 U.S. Open winner Corey Pavin. “There was a lot of drinking going on, fans betting on who would get closer to the pin, then letting the players really know about it. It needed to be toned down.”

Restricted beer sales there have done that.

“You’ve got some fans in all sports shouting really abusive things at athletes that they’d never say one on one,” Pavin added. “They’re mostly removed from the players. But in golf, they’re right there. The thing is, if a fan went up behind a football player and said some of the things some golfers have heard, he’d get his lights punched out.”

Few emerged unscathed from last year’s Ryder Cup at Brookline, Mass. U.S. players were blasted for the wild celebration after Leonard’s critical putt Sunday against Jose Maria Olazabal, and European players were criticized for whining about that celebration. But U.S. fans’ nationalistic fervor almost turned an international competition into an international incident.

Montgomerie was the lightning rod for fan abuse all three days of the event, where 40,000 fans were crammed into the Country Club daily. Spectators called him “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Tuna” after his resemblance to the screen character and New York Jet Coach Bill Parcells. They shouted at him to go home to England. Other European players, particularly Olazabal, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Jarmo Sandelin, weren’t spared.

“I was disgusted with some of the name-calling and heckling,” Payne Stewart told the Boston Globe said after the Ryder Cup.

“All I can say to Colin is, ‘I’m sorry for our fans. . . . ‘ Some of our fans, they’re a little bit over the top. I don’t know how many of them have been to golf events before.”

Stewart had several fans ejected.

“I wasn’t going to let the fans be out of control and influence one of his shots because of the heckling,” Stewart said.

No one knows exactly what to expect at the next Ryder Cup, in 2001 at the Belfry in England. Most hope the incidents at the Country Club, and those repeated at the World Golf Championships event at Valderrama in Spain six weeks later, will remain the exception in international matches.

Leonard had ignited the Ryder Cup celebration of players and supporters with his putt on 17. It didn’t clinch the Cup for the U.S., since Olazabal still had a chance to tie the hole, but Olazabal, after the jubilation subsided, missed his putt. Fans at Valderrama remembered.

“I don’t speak Spanish, so I don’t know what they were yelling at me,” Leonard said. “But let’s just say it didn’t sound very complimentary.”

Two years earlier at Valderrama, in the ’97 Ryder Cup, Leonard and Jeff Maggert set the fans off when they decided to call their match against Nick Faldo and Lee Westwood on the 16th green because of darkness. That upset Faldo and Westwood, who were two up at the time, but really upset fans.

“It’s the only time I’ve been booed by 2,000 people,” Leonard said.

“In that kind of international competition, golf fans get their only chance to root for a team, like other sports fans. I don’t know what you can do when they go over the line. Running into the crowd and strangling someone probably isn’t the best solution.”

In its events, the PGA Tour tries to help with crowd control. It established a security force three years ago to work with every tour event. Two of the security staff of seven appear at tournament sites a couple of months in advance to work out the best ways to deal with thousands of people who will be scurrying from one hole to the next to get a glimpse of Tiger or Sergio or Duval or any the tour’s other young stars.

“We needed to go to a more formal program [to deal with the growing galleries] and started the security staff three years ago,” said Joe Corliss, the tour’s director of security. “There’s just an evolution of golf crowds, with a lot of people coming to tournaments who know nothing about golf but want to see the golfers.”

What Now?

What’s in store for galleries in the 2000s? Is Phoenix rising as the prototypal golf crowd? Will Augusta continue to set an example for the future or become more a vestige of a bygone era? That, of course, depends on who’s answering.

Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, is concerned that golf may be changing for the worse.

“With the overwhelming commercialization of sports, it’s hard to call sports anything other than part of the entertainment industry,” he said. “Fans are now saying, ‘I’m not a casual observer; I’m a critical part of it. . . .’ We can expect people to say, ‘Wait a minute, I paid for this. Don’t tell me I have to shut up.’

“Taunting is a new concept in sports. Basketball teams give things to fans to wave during the opponents’ free throws. We are changing the nature of the person who will succeed in the game. Those who can benefit from crowd reaction are going to have an edge. I think that’s a pity because I don’t think the game of golf was designed to deal with an unruly crowd.

“Appealing to a mob element is the worst thing that sports can do, and you’re seeing an inkling of that in golf. It’s great to look at golf as what sports still could be--sportsmanship, dignity--and we should be really remorseful at seeing that slide away. It’s only a matter of time before golf gets its own Dennis Rodman.”

Jim Nantz, the CBS commentator, is considerably more optimistic. He believes that even in last year’s Ryder Cup competition, there is hope that civility and decorum will remain golf’s driving forces.

“There have always been a few unruly spots on the tour,” Nantz said, “but week in and week out, I don’t see it getting out of control. . . .

“I do think the days of what happened at the ’99 Ryder Cup are over, and the reason is Payne Stewart,” he said. Stewart, who died in a plane accident in October, conceded a birdie putt in his match against Montgomerie that gave Montgomerie the victory, though the U.S. had already clinched the Cup.

“That moment of sportsmanship he displayed in his match with Colin Montgomerie was such a magnanimous gesture,” Nantz said. “Golf is the only sport where fans root for everyone, except in international competitions like the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup. I think that’s going to be cleaned up, and that’s Payne’s legacy.”