Happy Mahaffey

Within days of celebrating his 50th birthday on May 9 and joining the Senior PGA Tour, John Mahaffey confided to a reporter, “I feel like I’ve just died and gone to heaven.”

But heaven, apparently, has its bunkers and high rough.

Expected by many observers to join the top ranks on the senior circuit almost from the day he joined, Mahaffey has instead struggled with his short game and rarely found himself among the leaders as his rookie season winds down to its final event, this weekend’s $1.1-million Pacific Bell Senior Classic at Wilshire Country Club.

The winner of the 1978 PGA Championship and runner-up in the 1975 U.S. Open has finished among the top 10 only twice in 22 senior tournaments, tying for second in the Utah Showdown at Park City in early August and tying for fifth in the Coldwell Banker Burnet Classic at Coon Rapids, Mich., a week later.

He is 49th on the money list.

Heaven on earth?

“You bet,” says Mahaffey, whose lack of consistency hasn’t kept him from enjoying his most lucrative year in a decade. “This is terrific. What a great second chance.”

He has earned $360,943--after winning all of $2,850 last year on the big tour.

“This year’s been productive in a lot of ways,” says Mahaffey, whose last several years on the tour were marred by a bitter courtroom battle with a former manager. “It’s given me an idea of what I really need to work on. . . .

“My short game is not what I’d like it to be. I think I’m second to Hale Irwin in [reaching] greens in regulation. So that part of my game has come back, and it gives me a lot of opportunities for birdies. But I haven’t putted well, and I think part of that is learning new golf courses. It’s all just part of a learning process.”

One thing he has learned is that he hasn’t lost his will to win.

“I set out this year, because I played so poorly about the last four or five years on the regular tour, to get competitive again and to really work to improve some things in my game,” he says. “And I feel like we’re on the right road.”

Mahaffey won 10 tournaments and nearly $3.9 million on the big tour. The 1970 NCAA champion from Houston lost to Lou Graham in a playoff at the ’75 U.S. Open and won the ’78 PGA in a playoff over Tom Watson and Jerry Pate after coming from seven strokes behind in the final round.

Battling alcoholism and injury, he never again reached those heights in a major tournament, but he had 105 top-10 finishes during a 28-year career.

His game declined in the ‘90s, however, as he began to suspect that his manager of 25 years, Richard Marshall, was cheating him. Mahaffey sued, and two years ago a Texas district judge ruled that Marshall was guilty of fraud, theft, embezzlement, gross negligence and breach of fiduciary duties, ordering him to pay Mahaffey $32.5 million in civil damages.

Mahaffey, not a big man at 5 feet 9 and 160 pounds, lost 35 pounds to stress during the process, and even with the judgment behind him last year as he played his final season on the regular tour, he made the cut only once in 21 tournaments.

Though the judgment is being appealed and Mahaffey has yet to see a dime of it--”Not even a penny,” he says emphatically, if not bitterly--he is trying to put behind him a nightmarish ordeal that he says he “wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

He does not want his health, his psyche, his family or his game to suffer any further damage.

“Clearly, there were outside circumstances that contributed to my playing poorly because you don’t go from being what I was to what I became overnight,” says Mahaffey, who lives in Houston with his third wife, Denise, and their young son and daughter. “Once that situation kind of cleared to a point where I could focus again on golf and not courtrooms, it got to where I could really try to get back to where I was competitive.

“And I’m damn near there, I really am. I’m still making some mistakes and I’m still shooting some rounds I shouldn’t shoot, but part of that is just getting that experience back again.”

After working for two months with a personal trainer last spring to prepare for the senior tour, Mahaffey says he may have overextended himself by playing in too many tournaments.

But that’s part of his grand plan. In an effort to learn the courses, he will continue to maintain a busy schedule through May, playing the tournaments that he missed this year before he turned 50.

“I know there are probably some guys who are going to walk off the regular tour thinking, ‘I’m just going to take this thing by storm,’ ” Mahaffey says, “but I never really went at it that way.

“There are some guys out here who can really play. And the golf courses are not what people think they are; they’re a lot longer. So I’m trying to be patient.”

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John Mahaffey at a Glance

How John Mahaffey has fared on the senior tour this season:

Tournaments: 21

Cuts made: 21

Victories: 0

Second place: 1

Third place: 0

Top 10: 2

Top 25: 10