Playing It Safe is Fine -- if Your Name Isn’t Phil

Phil is back now, and what a relief. We had lost him for a couple of years, while he was out leaping tall buildings at a single bound.

But then he hit that sponsors’ tent with his drive on the last hole of the U.S. Open, and all was well again in our world, which is inhabited by guys who can’t break 90 without a mulligan or an eraser.

We watched in horror the last several years as Phil started to lay up, pitch out from behind trees, use irons on the tee. We even heard rumors that he was working out, lifting weights, riding an exercise bike.

Say it ain’t so, John Daly!

Phil isn’t Phil without that slightly lumpy body. Fans call him Lefty. Some of the other golfers call him Hefty. We don’t want Phil wearing a cape and coming out of a phone booth. Our Phil stumbles on the way out of the Porta Potty.

Phil needs to leave that sculptured, cut look to our other hero, Tiger. More and more these days, Tiger looks as if he’s ready to finish 18, then go run the anchor leg on the U.S. 400-meter Olympic relay team. Tiger is a defensive back masquerading as a golfer.

That’s fine. That’s Tiger. We expect that. Tiger probably thinks that golf is a sport, but he is such a specimen that everybody is afraid to tell him the truth. It’s a wonderful game, Tiger, but Kobe or Dwyane Wade wouldn’t be caught dead in one of Ian Poulter’s pink outfits.

The thing about Tiger is, he is tough to relate to: Let me see here. We hit our six-iron about 218, same as Tiger, but he fades his a little more. We need to talk. Sure.

It isn’t that Phil doesn’t hit his six-iron 218 too. But in the good old days, he’d do that when he had only 180 left. And he’d do it by cutting it around a 300-foot redwood and over the corner of the hot dog stand next to the convent. Then he’d chip back to within inches.

Relate to Phil? How can you not relate to a guy who had the U.S. Open won until he hit a tent? Hey, Phil, wanna hear about the freeway sign we hit? The Ford Explorer?

A few years ago, Phil won his first major, the Masters. We were fine with that. Got the monkey off his back. All the sportswriters too. But then he won the PGA, and another Masters, and he was taking dangerous clubs out of his bag and talking about playing percentages. We were mortified.

It got so bad that those golf announcers who always sound as if they’re with a priest in the confessional started gush-whispering about how Phil was on the verge of being mentioned in the same breath as Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones and Byron Nelson.

Holy Tommy Bolt!

One of the experts on the Golf Channel, in a tone usually reserved for discussions of Iraq troop movements, said that, had it been Nicklaus on 18, “Jack would have pitched out.” Well, of course! That’s why he’s Jack Nicklaus. Phil tried to hammer it through a tree trunk. That’s why he’s Phil.

And that’s why we are so happy he is back.

Golf is less bland when Phil is around. While the other guys talk about birdies and bogeys, Phil can talk about his lie in the garbage bag.

We need him walking up the fairway with that silly grin on his face that tells us he’s having a good time, no matter what, and that he knows what a great gig this is, getting paid $20 million a year to hit golf balls.

We need him because, as great as Tiger is, he is a bit serious. And the other marquee guys, Retief Goosen, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh, are about as much fun as eggplant.

We need Phil to be there, late on Sunday afternoons on our TV screens, standing 165 yards away with a gap wedge in his hand and a 100-year-old oak in his way so we can lean forward on our couches and yell at him that trees are 90% air.

We need his game to be occasionally flawed, because ours always is. We need Superman Tiger, but we need roll-the-dice Phil more.

We could even tolerate a couple of safe seven-irons down the stretch of a future U.S. Open, if it meant Phil would win.

But in return, we need him to promise that, most of the time, he will reject the unplayable lie and hit the shot from behind the chicken coop, and that when the carry over the lake is 240, he’ll at least ponder a five-iron.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.