Food For Thought

This is Jesper Parnevik.

This is Jesper's brain. He can memorize a list of 140 things in just a few minutes. He understands quantum mechanics. He has read the Bible, as well as much of the Koran and the Talmud. He also once entered a golf tournament, then drove to the wrong city.

These are Jesper's eyes. Sometimes, on airplanes, he wears large, flashing, beeping sunglasses over them in an effort to unite the left side of his brain with the right. You really don't want to sit next to Jesper on a long flight.

This is Jesper's hat. When he plays golf, he flips up the brim, Gomer Pyle-style. He looks as if he's playing in a 132-mph wind or took a wrong turn at Churchill Downs. One day several years ago he wore his hat like that to get some sun, and putts started diving into holes. He has worn his hat that way ever since.

This is Jesper's nose. Whenever Jesper goes on the road, he brings scents that make him feel at home. He also brings his juicer, boxes of books, his meditation pillow, his hot plate, his rock and crystal collection, and posters, which he puts up on the walls. Sometimes it takes so much junk to make Jesper feel at home that he has to take two cabs.

This is Jesper's mouth. Once, for three months, he put nothing but fruit and volcanic sand into it. "Very cleansing," says Jesper. These are Jesper's teeth. He had all his fillings replaced with porcelain to cure his allergies. He claims it did. These are Jesper's chakras. We don't know what chakras are, but Jesper has them measured regularly.

And (gulp) these are Jesper's pants. They've got peg legs and look like something the Bee Gees would wear. Jesper says they're 1960s retro. They're so tight that when he wore them for the first time, in January, he couldn't even bend over to get his ball out of the hole. Even so, he has finished in the top five in four of his six PGA Tour starts this year and is currently fifth on the money list. He's still wearing the pants.

Whether it's because of the pants or the fillings or the ongoing effort to unite his brain, Jesper, 32, has been making more birdies lately than a badminton equipment company. He has been playing out of his mind. Of course, a lot of people on the Tour think Jesper is out of his mind. This is the guy who missed a playoff for a spot in the final round of last year's Sprint International because he had miscalculated the cut and headed out of town, easily his worst drive of the day. This is the guy who forgot to look at a scoreboard during the last seven holes of the 1994 British Open, thought he needed a birdie on 18 to tie when he needed only a par and instead made a bogey. This is the guy who once lost four plane tickets on one trip—left one in the hotel room, parked the second on his lunch tray during the flight, dropped the third in the crack between the computer and the airline agent's desk during a layover and can't remember what happened to the fourth.

The caddies call him Spaceman, but not because his head is a void. In fact, it's just the opposite. So much stuff is jammed in Jesper's cranium that there's no room left to remember which hotel he's registered at. On his bookshelf at home in South Palm Beach, Fla., are such titles as Advanced Chess, Understanding Your Dreams and Essays on the Apocalypse. He speaks three languages (English, Swedish and German), is something of a math wiz and has no idea where his car keys are.

Jesper's father is also like this. Bo Parnevik, the most famous comedian in Sweden, can put on a two-hour one-man show—doing uncanny impersonations of Ronald Reagan, Columbo and Liberace, and changing his makeup and costumes onstage—and yet he has walked out of his house with his pants on inside out. "It's hard to think of your father as a guy in a wig and makeup," Jesper says. Still, for a time, Jesper wanted to follow his dad into show business. Jesper won the lead in most of his school's plays and was in a rock band called Lotus (he played piano) that he was sure was going to be bigger than ABBA. But then he got into a sport that doesn't give a damn who your father is, and maybe for that very reason, he loved it.