Man Of Iron

Wadkins had money riding on his golf swing before he even knew it. The son of a truck driver and a schoolteacher in Richmond, Lanny was so good by the time he was 14 that one of the members at the club where his father spent four years as an assistant pro took him as his partner for his outings. The member, a used-car dealer, would make small wagers and never tell Lanny. When Wadkins turned 15, the guy gave him a '55 Ford.

The line on Wadkins is that if pro golfers played for their own money instead of Shearson Lehman's or Buick's or AT&T's, they would be renaming subdivisions after him. If pro golfers competed head-to-head and eyeball-to-eyeball instead of four days against the field, Wadkins would have his own line of appliances. If pro golfers putted to a hole nine inches wide, they would be pushing him for Congress. Tee to green, few are better than Wadkins. But pro golfers don't work that way, and so Wadkins remains a kind of cult figure, the Fellini of golf, underappreciated and underacknowledged except by the purists and the players themselves.

"If I had to pick one partner for a match?" says Watson. "It'd be hard not to pick Lanny or Nicklaus."

"Of all the players I've seen," says Weiskopf, "I'd say nobody hit it consistently closer to the hole, time after time after time, no matter what the club, than Lanny and Johnny Miller."

"If Lanny Wadkins had the kind of streak Tom Watson used to have with his putter," says Wadkins's business manager, former U.S. amateur champ Vinny Giles, "there's no telling how many times he'd have won."

Despite an ungainly putting stroke, Wadkins has won 20 times on the PGA Tour (11th most among players who started their career after World War II), is fifth on the alltime money-winning list with $5,178,411, and was PGA player of the year in 1985. But nobody talks about that. Most people want to know why he hasn't won everything. One time Wadkins asked his friend Ben Hogan if he saw anything about his game that Hogan could help him with. Hogan paused a second and then said, "Well, the only thing I can see is you should be winning a whole lot more."

And he might win more if they would just put the leader in his group on Sundays. Nobody this side of Ray Floyd can stare you down like Wadkins. It's the reason no sane Ryder Cup captain would leave him off the U.S. team. When the Americans and Europeans pair off in September, it will be Wadkins's seventh Ryder Cup competition, only one short of Billy Casper's record. In fact, Wadkins, who has a 15-9-1 career record in Ryder match play, may have hit the most famous American shot in the history of the event. It was his 72-yard wedge to within the leather that saved a win for the Yanks in 1983. In '89 Wadkins dusted the best player in the world, Nick Faldo, on the last day to help the U.S. save face and a tie, although as the defending champions, the Europeans retained the trophy. This year, he figures the Americans will bring the cup back, no problem. "Oh, yeah," he says, "I think we'll win. We have a veteran team, and they have some unproven youngsters."

The depth of Wadkins's cockiness has always been exceeded by the depth of his talent. This was the kid who set out to play pro golf without a sponsor. This was the kid who finished ahead of Watson, John Mahaffey, David Graham, Steve Melnyk, Leonard Thompson and Forrest Fezler at the 1971 Tour School. This was the kid who insisted he could break Bob Murphy's rookie earnings record of $105,595 his first full year on the Tour and did it ($116,616 in 1972).

Wadkins looked like a Jack Nicklaus starter kit back then. Nicklaus won everything as an amateur. So did Wadkins, including the Western, Southern, Eastern and U.S. amateur titles. Nicklaus won in his first full year on the Tour. So did Wadkins. Nicklaus was second on the money list his second year, first the next. Wadkins was 10th, then fifth.

Wadkins was an absolute perfectionist about everything from his shots to his shirts. The man did his own ironing (still does), home and away. Sometimes, he would iron his pants in the morning, go down to the coffee shop for breakfast, go back upstairs and iron them again, and go out to play. When he would vacuum the rugs at home, he would do it as if he were painting a room, backing up in order to leave no footprints. If a footprint drove him crazy, you can imagine what a double bogey did to him.