It’s an Open and Shut Case

INDIAN WELLS — Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this--it bears repeating--but about 6 o’clock last June 18 a terrible thing happened to golfer Steve Jones. No, he didn’t get mugged, run his car off a bridge or lose a fortune in the stock market.

He did something worse than that. He won the U.S. Open.

Now, you may think on the face of it that winning a “major” and $350,000 is no bad thing. But if you do, you don’t know golf.

Winning a U.S. Open is the next best thing to shooting yourself in the foot, having your mother-in-law move in, being marooned on a desert island with Al Gore. You’d be better off contracting cholera, eating bad mushrooms, swimming in shark-infested waters with a nosebleed. You name it.

What it is, basically, is career suicide. Guys win the U.S. Open, then disappear like Judge Crater. Jimmy Hoffa.

One minute you’re a golden young golfer with the whole world ahead of you--fame, riches, adulation. The next minute you’re standing there without a clue, unable to make a cut without struggling, wondering what happened to your short game, throwing your clubs in the nearest pond.

You’ve turned into a rabbit--a “rabbit” being what they used to call the kids who hung around the fringes of the game, showing up on the first tee Monday mornings to try to qualify for that week’s tournament or wangle a sponsor’s exemption.

You look down the roster of recent Open champions and you wonder why a guy coming up to the 18th green leading an Open doesn’t decide to hit his next one in the water or out on the expressway. Why he doesn’t opt to miss a putt deliberately so he shouldn’t find himself winning the Open. It should be a golfer’s worst nightmare.

It didn’t used to be this way. Winning the Open used to be the best thing that could happen to a young player. Or an old player.

Not now. Take any recent winner. Curtis Strange really defied the fates. He won not one but two U.S. Opens. Back-to-back. He hasn’t won anything since. And that was in 1989. He had won 17 tournaments up to that time.

Payne Stewart won the 1991 Open. He had won seven tournaments up to that time. He has won only one since--the Houston Open in 1995, when Scott Hoch came apart on the back nine and all but handed the event gift-wrapped to Payne.

Tom Kite had won 16 tournaments when he won his U.S. Open in 1992. He won two of the early season tournaments, the Bob Hope and the Los Angeles, the next year--and then disappeared off the screen. Ernie Els was supposed to take over the game when he won the Open in ’94. He’s only won once on tour since.

Corey Pavin had put a dozen tournaments in his bag when he won the 1995 U.S. Open. He has won only one since.

What’s happened? Well, basically, it’s the old story: Corporate America turns you from a lean, mean predator of the fairways into a contented old sheep dining on the fat of the land. Corporate outings, club contracts, appearance money on the Asian tour, all the blandishments of success.

You can’t keep a competitive edge in a tournament where you’ve been prepaid. Where you can shrug off a bad shot, a bad lie, a bad break. You get $350,000 and your name in lights and, all of a sudden, you’re just a weekend player trying to get your putts inside the leather.

In the old days, a guy won an Open and didn’t do a blackout. The only guy who got bad luck out of it was Ben Hogan when he won his first Open and, seven months later, got hit by a bus. But he recovered to win three more Opens and scores of other tournaments. Of course, Hogan didn’t get $350,000 and all the paid appearances he could handle. Hogan got $2,000 for winning the Open--and an exemption for the next year. Corporate outings were a thing of the future.

Steve Jones hasn’t won since his Open victory last June. And before that, he had spent the best part of three years recovering from a hand accident.

Will he disappear as quickly as he appeared? His Open win was only his third on tour.

Well, he shot out of the box at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic here this week with a scorching 64. That’s not exactly defanging the Open jinx, but it’s a start. I checked with Steve to see if he was falling into the Open’s web.

“Well, I played in Taiwan and Japan,” he says. “It’s hard to turn down that kind of money. I played in the Sun City in South Africa. That’s a million dollars to the winner and only 12 players. That’s hard to turn down.

“You do get eligible for lots of things--the Grand Slam of Golf, the Skins games.

“But I think the worst things are the other demands on your time--the broadcasts, the invites, the autographs. But, you know something--I’ve been saved there. By Tiger Woods! I think he absorbed a lot of the attention ordinarily paid to an Open winner.”

Winning an Open doesn’t mean you should sell your clubs and get a day job.

“But you have to learn to say no,” Jones said.

But, with all that money dangling in the green, saying no is a double eagle. Hard to do once and impossible to keep doing. The shortest word in the English language--next to “I”--is the hardest to say.

The day may come when someone asks, “Did you win the Open?” and the player will answer, “Naw, I got a good break. I missed the cut!”