Golf’s Heir Apparent Has Returned

CARLSBAD —  Golf is a democracy. That’s one of its principal difficulties. Like many democracies, it doesn’t seem to work. No one is in charge.

Boxing has a heavyweight champion. Football has a Heisman Trophy winner. Baseball had a player known as The Man. Everyone knows who rules tennis. Hollywood always had a person known as The Star.

Golf is the sports version of a car pool. Golf is ruled by committee. Golf is the sports equivalent of an Italian movie. You don’t know who are the heroes and who are the butlers. It’s anarchy out there.

You look at the field in the MONY Tournament of Champions and you think you’ve wandered into a crowd shot in a D.W. Griffith movie.

And then, all of a sudden, you stop short. It’s . . . Can it be? No, surely, he wouldn’t be here! He’s from another era. A recognizable face. A familiar silhouette. You want to tap him on the shoulder and inquire, “Don’t I know you? What in the world is a famous guy like you doing in a gang like this?”

He may have been the last of the kings of the hill. He came into the game, looking as if he had just arrived by raft down the Mississippi, the pro from Mark Twain.

He had this violent swing at the ball of a guy who’s killing a snake with a cane. He swung hard and it landed far away. His putts were as straight as five miles of railroad track and they never made the shot he couldn’t hit. He was the second coming of Hogan sent to save the game from runaway anonymity.

Golf had always gotten guys like this in the nick of time. Golf always had an emperor. First, there was Bobby Jones. Then Byron Nelson. Then there was Ben Hogan. Then Arnold Palmer. Then Jack Nicklaus. And after that there was . . .

Golf is a funny game. It needs somebody’s ball to play off. Even the most rudimentary foursome has its low handicapper.

So, Tom Watson was supposed to be that guy. And the crown fit. Tom Watson won 37 pro tournaments, including 5 British Opens, 2 Masters, 1 U.S. Open and nearly $5 million.

Then his game hit the wall. The king wasn’t dead but there was a contract out on him. The kids began to run right over him. The emperor had no clothes. The putts lipped out, the drives ran sideways, the approaches hit traps.

What had happened? The experts said, “Well, there are too many good players out there today.” But it wasn’t that everyone else was turning into Hogan, it was that Watson wasn’t.

“Burnout,” that all-purpose excuse, was trotted out as a possibility. But Watson was only 36, the age at which Hogan had just begun to take command of the game. Besides, how could Huck Finn burn out?

Was Tom Watson running around at night? Did he have a mysterious ailment he wouldn’t tell anybody about? How can a guy win five British Opens and then suddenly not be able to make a cut?

Mike Souchak used to say, when Hogan was in his prime, “Ben Hogan just knows something about hitting the golf ball that the rest of us don’t know.” Had the game gotten to the point where there were no secrets?

Watson sat in a press room down here the other day and sought to analyze the change in the game.

As usual, he had a simple answer: He was not putting well.

Golfers, to a man, are convinced that putting is the art of the devil. When things go wrong, it cannot be the skill portion of the game. It must be that, ugh! unmanly putting stroke, that faithless trollop that has left them.

This is fine--except that observers notice everyone’s putting stroke leaves him when the putts suddenly become 45 feet instead of 5 feet. Watchers thought the putts weren’t worse, just longer.

Then, at last year’s U.S. Open, the barefoot boy from Missouri suddenly showed up again. He chased the field clear to the 72nd hole before a seagoing putt that narrowly missed shifted him to second place.

In November, for the first time in three years, Watson won again--the richest tournament in golf history, the $5-million Nabisco in San Antonio.

Is Watson back? Is the monarchy restored? Are the peasants back in their place? Does golf have a man on horseback again? Or is the proletariat in permanent charge?

If Watson can’t regroup, the pro golf tour may become the biggest pool of anonymity this side of a Trappist monastery. They should play in cowls and keep score in Latin.

They used to call Miller Barber, Mr. X on the tour. Today, the tour is full of more X’s than a love letters.