Lawrence Taylor - Another Nine?

Lawrence Taylor acts as if he owns Ashif Jiwa, but he knows the truth: He needs Ashif Jiwa more than Ashif Jiwa needs him. Jiwa is Taylor's business adviser, confidante--and golf partner. If LT's golf jones is not satisfied after 18 holes, he can count on Jiwa to go another nine with him. And if the itch, not just for golf, but for gambling on golf, is still there, another nine after that. Then a final double-or-nothing, get-in-before-dark nine. They play almost daily. With Jiwa and LT, it's a 24/7 thing.

"Three-thirty this morning, the phone rings," Jiwa says, eating a hamburger in the grill room of the Miami Beach Golf Club. Taylor rolls his eyes. He knows where Jiwa is going with this. "I pick up the phone," Jiwa goes on, "and LT says, 'You awake?' Big crisis. I'd gotten a cellphone for his girlfriend, but it's no good. It's not pink." LT looks out the window. He can't get out of the room and onto the course fast enough.

Jiwa understands this. He is a partner in a company that manages $900 million for a variety of athletes, actors and musicians. He keeps his client list a secret, but suffice it to say that Michael Jordan has been known to fill out LT's foursome on occasion. Jiwa also knows he shouldn't have to take middle-of-the-night calls about pink cellphones. Still, he does.

Taylor is 47 now, with jewelry not just dangling from an ear like in the bad days but also around his wrists, neck and two fingers. He's still huge and his lower legs are still spindly, but now he has the girth of a prosperous man, which he is. He could sign jerseys for good coin 200 days a year if he wanted to, which he doesn't. His endearing and enduring popularity is rooted not just in the highlight films that celebrate his manic play but also in his candor--the way he has always talked about his high times and on-all-fours life. He sacked his last quarterback in 1993 and swears he snorted his last line of cocaine in 1999--his dark days chasing drugs and hookers, wrecking cars, drug arrests and stints in rehab are documented in two autobiographies. In one story he shows up for a New York Giants team meeting in handcuffs placed on him not by cops but by a date who then lost the key. In golf, only his pal John Daly has a similar wild-man standing, and when they play pro-ams together, people come out in droves to watch LT come within 30 yards of Long John off the tee.

Taylor lives way inland, where the Miami suburbs meet the Everglades, in a modern development on a golf course, far from the South Beach nightclubs. The blandness of the surrounding suburban sprawl helps keep Taylor straight. And of course there is the golf. Recently he had a forced week off from the game after hurting his back when he fell off a chair. "The days were like 48 hours," he says. LT needs action, same as forever.

Action is not hard to find on this day at Miami Beach Golf Club. LT has one match against Jiwa; one against Johnny LaPonzina, a South Florida golf course operator and a scratch golfer; one against Mike Donald, a former PGA Tour player; plus three team matches: he and Jiwa against the other two, he and LaPonzina against the other two, he and Donald against the other two. There are many side bets.

LaPonzina, who manages the Miami Beach course, among others, has a policy of not gambling with his clientele, but if he didn't make an exception for Taylor, he'd lose a golf partner. Taylor and LaPonzina have a standard game of $50 for each of the front and back nine, plus another $50 for the overall 18--a Nassau, in the language of golf betting. Taylor and Donald play for the same stakes. Taylor and Jiwa play a $200 Nassau. When Jordan's in the game, the stakes are somewhat higher. O.K., way higher.

As a point of pride the basketball legend refuses to accept shots from the football legend, even though that's how golfers of different skill levels arrange fair matches. But Jordan is not in denial. At his 40th birthday party, Jordan, who can break 80, told the crowd on hand, "I got to admit it. I can't beat him. Now." That was three years ago. He still won't take shots from Taylor, he'll play all day, he doesn't cheat, and he pays up in the parking lot--LT's ideal golf opponent.

It was in 1999, the year Taylor was inducted into the Hall of Fame, that he traded one addiction for another. While shooting the Oliver Stone football movie Any Given Sunday, in which he played (brilliantly) an aging player trying to hang on, Taylor had a daily golf game with Dennis Quaid, who played the role of the quarterback in the film. His game was improving, and golf started to feed him. "Once you get to the point where you know where your ball is going," he says, "you can't get enough of it." Almost simultaneously he was able to take control of his golf ball, and his life. Now he knows what Tiger Woods knows, what all obsessive golfers know: You can always get better. Golf ends only when you quit, or when you die. And for LT, so does staying straight.

In the new millennium Taylor has taken the time and energy he used to put into scoring crack, plus the competitiveness and compulsiveness that made him the most feared defensive player of his era, and funneled it all into his golf game. He uses a 10-finger baseball grip you won't see on the PGA Tour. His extra-thick grips are worn out from holding the club too tightly. His stance, severely bent over the ball, brings to mind Charles Barkley, who is nobody's idea of a golfing role model. His backswing is a short blur. He has never taken a lesson.

But his golf is excellent and not just because he kills it off the tee. PGA Tour vet Donald can't shoot much higher than 72 on a calm day at Miami Beach, and he gives LT only four shots per round and their matches are close to even. Taylor plays irons off the tee when it's prudent, hits the ball high downwind and low into it, and putts with two gloves on (to combat sweaty hands) and with reasonable touch. During the round at Miami Beach, he plays a 500-yard par-5 in a cross breeze with a nutted driver that goes 275 yards, a clipped hybrid two-iron that finishes hole high and a lagged downhill putt from 40 feet that leaves him a gimme birdie. Three Tour shots, all in a row.

"The key to golf is making a repeating swing," Taylor says. There's more golf wisdom in those nine words than in the typical half-hour of mumbo jumbo that comes out of certain star golf instructors. Of course, playing a couple hundred holes a week helps.