All These Skins Are Wrinkled

PALM DESERT —  There used to be a time in this country when old golfers, as well as old football players or fighters or other famous people, were put on a shelf and expected to live out their lives with their press clippings and memories of the night they fought the Bomber or won the Rose Bowl or shot a 30 on the back nine of the Masters.

Oh, if you were celebrated enough you could open a bar, or sell insurance, or become a greeter in a restaurant. If you were really famous, maybe they made a movie about you or named a football field after you. Otherwise, you were yesterday’s roses, a faded picture on the wall.

That’s all changing. Senioritis is becoming a way of life in the world of sports. Senior leagues, masters track meets, senior tours abound.

Golf was the first to break the mold. Initially, golfers were as discarded as any other has-been athletes. Oh, they could get a club job teaching old ladies how to putt and selling alpacas on commission, and they could rig up a paying round with a club president but golf was not a high income proposition.

The ability to play good golf probably persisted as it did in no other athletic enterprise. Still, it was not put to good use till, a few years ago, a New York television producer got the notion of putting something on called “The Legends Of Golf.”

America is a country which suffers acutely from lack of a royal family. So, it substitutes movie stars, pop musicians--and athletic heroes. They are our archdukes, crown princes, marquises, earls, miladies. We invest our dreams, our fantasies in them. Their success becomes our success, they fail, we fail. Hardly a kid grows up in this country without a hero of his very own. In later years, no one will ever achieve quite that stature in his mind.

Older is better. Tony Rice is good but he’s no George Gipp now, is he? If Joe DiMaggio walks in a roomful of people with Jose Canseco, whose autograph will they get? Will anybody ever write in a song, “Where did you go Jose Canseco?” If Bret Saberhagen arrives with Sandy Koufax, who will notice him? In the movie “Sunset Boulevard,” Gloria Swanson strikes the right note for every nostalgia buff in the seats when she draws herself up and sniffs “We had faces in my day! We didn’t need talk!”

We are given to ancestor-worship. Everybody knows Alexander Hamilton but who can name any of the last 10 Secretaries of the Treasury?

So, golf cashed in on this hunger for a better past. The Legends Of Golf gave rise to the senior tour which quickly eclipsed the modern ladies tour, the satellite tours and, in some cases, even the regular tour.

The senior tour gave rise to the gimmick tour. You had partner-golf, you had scramble-golf, you had alternate-shot golf, you had men’s and women’s golf.

The Skins Game which is contested down here at PGA West this weekend is the granddaddy of gimmickry. It is golf the way it is played at a thousand country clubs every weekend. Regular members never play that kind of antiseptic medal game favored by the tour week-in and week-out. It is a kind of audacious, wild-card kind of game with some of the refinements high-handicappers bring to their four-balls to keep them interesting.

Each hole is a tournament in itself. And each hole is a press bet, in a sense.

Here is the way it works: the format is match play. Four players. The winner of any one of the first six holes gets $15,000. If there is no winner--and if one ties, all tie--the money is carried over to the next hole. Holes six to 12 pay $25,000 apiece and 12 to 18 pay $35,000 each.

Since you have to win the hole to collect, this could conceivably mean four players could be playing the 18th (or 19th or 20th) hole for the whole $450,000. The record is $240,000 won on one hole.

Who do you get to play for this outrageous kind of money?

Do you want youthful, supple skill? If so, you go to the tour. You pick, like, players in the top 20 money-winners from last year. This could get you a foursome which might have a Ken Green, or a Chip Beck, Joey Sindelar, David Frost or Jeff Sluman in it.

Skins Game producer Don Ohlmeyer knows better than that. The Skins Game went for the peerage, not the proletariat. He picked the guys who were portraits in the clubhouse, not pictures in the paper. Jack Nicklaus has played in all of them (six). Arnold Palmer played in the first five, Gary Player in the first two. Lee Trevino has played in the last three.

Only 10 players have carved up the Skins Game prize money ($2,700,000) in the six years since its inception. Palmer was phased out in 1987 (age 58). Fuzzy Zoeller took over for Gary Player in ’85. Tom Watson was replaced by Lee Trevino in ’86. Raymond Floyd took Zoeller’s tee time last year and Curtis Strange was selected to represent the Young Turks contingent last year. Curtis repeats this year, but, of course, had to win U.S. Opens back-to-back to get the kind of recognizability this game requires.

The foursome represents 135 tour tournaments won, nine U.S. Opens, five British Opens, nine PGA championships and seven Masters. And the star system is alive and well. In 1986, the Skins outdrew every major championship in golf in TV ratings. Last year, it finished second only to the Masters.

The Skins Game is yet another demonstration we don’t warehouse our great champions any more, or just trot them out to be a float in a Thanksgiving Day parade. Jack Nicklaus made $113,284 as the leading money winner on the tour in his third year, 1964. He has made $490,000 playing in six rounds in this tournament.

Golf--and sports--has turned completely around since the days when to get old was to die out. As the old song goes, when your hair has turned to silver, they will love you just the same.