Swingin’ in the Rain for a Victory

It is 9 a.m. Tom Pernice Jr. is in the right rough on the third hole at Riviera. He is getting ready to swing. Somebody belches. It is a guy holding a lit cigar and drinking a 24-ounce can of beer.

Now that’s devotion to golf. It’s the kind of dedication that’s absolutely guaranteed to bring you the greatest joy you can possibly experience on a Saturday morning standing in the soaking rain. Either that, or a massive headache by lunchtime.

As the guy in Pernice’s gallery reminds us, it’s easy to be a golf fan, but only as long as you ignore a few small annoyances, such as stepping in mud, getting poked in the eye with an umbrella, keeping your cigar lit or being turned away from the warmth of the clubhouse because you don’t have the right badge.

But being a player in rainy conditions is not easy at all.

After a few hours in the cold drizzle, your hands feel as if you’ve been cutting meat since yesterday. At least your caddie holds your umbrella, or else you would have to stick it down the back of your pants before you swing.

If it’s hard playing the game, take it a step further. How hard is it to win?

If it were so easy, the same guy would do it every week, which is what Tiger Woods came close to doing the last two years.

But Tiger is clearly the exception. There are bunches of good players whose careers showcase some fairly significant victory lapses.

In the early ‘90s, Nick Price was the dominant player in golf. He won 14 times in four years, including two PGA Championships and one British Open. He won five times in 1994--and didn’t win again for three years.

Tom Watson won 32 times in eight years, then won once in the next 11.

Curtis Strange won the U.S. Open back-to-back and hasn’t won since.

Woods won 17 times the last two years and hasn’t won in two months.

Yeah, no matter who you are, it’s really hard to win.

That is what makes the last round of the Nissan Open so compelling. In fact, it’s safe to expect two things today: rain and a good winner.

You know what a good winner is. It is someone who has paid the price to get there, who knows what it feels like to lose, who appreciates winning and makes everybody else feel better because of it. Someone like Kirk Triplett, last year’s winner.

Davis Love III, the leader by three shots, won at Pebble Beach three weeks ago and lost in a playoff at Torrey Pines two weeks ago. But before that, Love went 2 1/2 years without winning.

He was 0 for 49 tournaments. In any other sport, you get too many 0-for-49s and you’re selling insurance pretty soon. But golf is different, because, with the possible exception of Woods, success is measured differently.

In golf, you win twice in 25 tournaments and they name a shoe after you.

In Love’s case, his 2 1/2 years of misery was eased somewhat by the fact that he managed to bank more than $5 million in that span.

But that’s not the point. What separates the top players in the game from the other guys is not how much money they make, it’s how many victories they have.

Besides, there’s a lot of competition. There are 144 players in the field this week. And only one is going to win.

For the first time in a while, Corey Pavin has a chance to be that guy. In a three-year stretch in the mid-1990s, Pavin was a threat every time he teed it up. He won four times, including the 1995 U.S. Open, but he also was second five times and had 24 top 10s from 1994-96.

Since then, Pavin has not been a factor. He has gone through four coaches, a couple of sponsors and one mustache.

But there he is, tied for second at soggy Riviera, the same track where he won the Nissan Open in consecutive years. The only other player to do that was Ben Hogan.

As for Hogan, he had his own period of non-winning. Hogan, of course, is one of the greatest players in history, but he was also a late bloomer and didn’t win his first major--the 1946 PGA Championship--until he was 34.

Everyone was saying that Riviera played long because of the rain, but Pavin shot a 67, the best round of the day. No one hits it any shorter than Pavin, but Saturday, no one had fewer putts. Pavin needed only 22, which was a number that astounded playing partner Woods.

Afterward, Pavin didn’t seem too surprised about his play, only relieved that he had felt comfortable on a golf course for the first time in about five years. He remembered the last time clearly.

It was May 1996. The Colonial in Fort Worth.

And how can Pavin recall that one?

It’s the last time he won.