My, What A Strange Ending

A college golf coach is equal parts fidget and fuss, worry and anxiety. Watching one at a tournament is like studying the moves of a rookie father in a maternity ward. Only worse. Childbirth never takes 72 holes. Coaches play bump and run on the course, hiding behind foliage, disguising themselves as electric golf carts, stalking their players as furtively as the CIA. They fret a lot. That's their job—fretting. And handing out golf balls. Usually their sage advice can be distilled straight down to this: "Do better."

They were all at the NCAA golf championship in San Diego last weekend, squirming, exhorting, praying, wondering, hoping and giving with a lot of body English. They were easy to spot. Most had on straw hats, and they kept sticking money into the ballwasher and yelling about how the stupid machine would not give them any cigarettes.

The NCAA tournament is bigger than big and in some ways smaller than small, simply because college golf is mostly consigned to agate type. But for the participants the NCAA is four days of concentrated torture, where the coaches find themselves puffing on three cigarettes at once and the players stand in line when the driving range opens at 6 a.m. A total of 224 players from 79 schools showed up at Carlton Oaks Country Club in Santee, a San Diego suburb, each of them carrying a dream as the 15th club in his bag.

The college game deserves more notice. All but eight tournaments on the 1973 pro tour were won by former collegians. The colleges are golf's sandbox, an incubator where the players receive the finest equipment, instruction and competition. And even though Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus never graduated, anyone who knows the difference between a lateral and a parallel water hazard can tell you their former colleges are Wake Forest and Ohio State. Some big golf schools like Florida have 30 players on their squads.

The University of Houston is to college golf what UCLA is to basketball, with 12 NCAA titles and four seconds since 1956. But the Cougars' chances were slim last week, since defending champion Florida was minus only one player from 1973.

The Gators' best golfer was Gary Koch, a child prodigy who learned how to putt as a babe and so far has not grown up and forgotten. The other players call him "Drain" because that is what his ball usually does. He and teammates Phil Hancock and Andy Bean had paced Florida to victories in six of nine tournaments this season, although the team was beaten by Southern California in the Aztec Invitational held earlier over the same Carlton Oaks course. "We're going to have a different attitude this week," promised Florida Coach Buster Bishop.

For the first time in four years there was speculation about who would win the individual title, since in the previous tournaments the NCAA could have saved everyone a lot of scorekeeping by just mailing the trophy to Ben Crenshaw—although he did share it with Texas teammate Tom Kite in 1972. This year's roster of title candidates was as long as Sly Stone's wedding reception guest list and included Koch and Hancock, plus Southern Cal's Craig Stadler, the U.S. Amateur champion, of whom one coach said: "The reason he plays so well is that he's got short legs."

Curtis Strange, a freshman phenom at Wake Forest, also merited consideration. He is a friend of former Wake star Lanny Wadkins and like him started winning as soon as he traded in his pacifier for a putter. Using a driver Wadkins gave him, Strange had won four tournaments this year.

Wake Forest's team was so young that the players needed an accompanying adult in order to ride in a golf cart. The team had two freshmen, a pair of sophomores and a junior. Even so the Deacons had their usual wealth of talent, but the question was: Would they finally put it together for a win? Coach Jesse Haddock ("You spell it just like the fish") was burdened with snide comments because his teams had held third-round leads in several NCAAs but had never won, despite such aces as Wadkins, Eddie Pearce, Jim Simons, Leonard Thompson and Joe Inman Jr.

Joining Strange were soph Jay Haas, a nephew of Bob Goalby and the low amateur in the U.S. Open, and freshman Bob Byman, a former U.S. junior champion. Strange and Byman share a Buddy Worsham memorial scholarship, which was established by Arnold Palmer, a good friend of Haddock's.