Golf: King Colbert back with different look

Richard Dunn

NEWPORT BEACH - Five years removed from winning the first Senior

PGA Tour ever played at Newport Beach Country Club, Jim Colbert these

days is sporting a new goatee and his natural head of hair, but the same

fiery attitude.

“I just wake up that way,” Colbert, who turns 60 on March 9, said

Monday when asked on the practice putting green how he maintains such a

strong desire to succeed on the golf course.

Colbert, a prostate cancer survivor, is known for his intensity and

self-assuredness. Some think he’s cocky, but Colbert refers to it as

confidence.

So what else can Colbert, a two-time Senior PGA Tour Player of the

Year and leading money winner (1995-96), accomplish as he edges toward

the Super Seniors (over 60)?

Simple.

“What I want is to be the best 59- 60-year-old player that’s ever

played,” Colbert said, matter-of-factly.

“I shot 62 (in the second round Saturday in the Mexico Senior Classic

at Las Vista in Puebla, Mexico). I almost shot my age. I’ll be 60 soon,

but I don’t feel 60. I’d like to be like Sam Snead. He was awfully good

at 59 and 60.”

Snead, one of the founders of the Senior Tour in 1980, became the oldest champion of an official PGA Tour event when he captured the 1965

Greater Greensboro Open at age 52 years, 10 months.

Colbert, who has won 19 Senior PGA Tour events, would like to win in

five different decades. He won PGA Tour titles in the 60s, 70s and 80s,

and Senior Tour championships in the 90s.

“It will be five decades I’ve won in when I win this year,” said

Colbert, who had the lead with two holes remaining in the final round

Sunday at the Mexico Senior Classic, but missed short putts on 17 and 18

as Mike McCullough won his first Senior Tour event.

“Gary Player’s going for (PGA victories) in six decades,” Colbert

added, referring to the South African legend who is not playing this

week’s Toshiba Senior Classic.

Monday, Colbert spent nearly four hours on the practice green, trying

to regain his putting stroke while preparing for his sixth Toshiba

Classic (he missed only the 1999 event).

“Yeah, I haven’t been putting well. I didn’t putt well even when I

shot 62,” said Colbert, who has worn a hairpiece in past years, but

arrived this week with his natural look.

“I’ll still wear my hat,” Colbert insisted, “but I don’t exactly need

it today.”

In 1996, the first year the Toshiba Senior Classic was played at

Newport Beach, Colbert lapped the field on the difficult par-4 hole No.

5, which ranked as the hardest hole on the golf course in 1996 and ’97.

Colbert made birdie on No. 5 in all three rounds in ‘96, the only

player to do so on a hole that plays uphill and upwind, requiring a mid-

to long-iron shot to an unfriendly green bordered by two bunkers. He also

won the Toshiba Classic by two strokes, the largest margin of victory in

event history.

Colbert, whose last Senior Tour victory came at the 1998 Transamerica,

was voted the 1998 Comeback Player of the Year, after recovering from

prostate cancer surgery in June 1997.

In addition to his back-to-back Player of the Year honors on the tour,

Colbert was the circuit’s Rookie of the Year in 1991.

Now, if he can just win in this new decade, perhaps Colbert will feel

a sense of completion. He came close in Mexico.

“I just missed too many short putts,” Colbert said. “I had about a

half-dozen that should have gone in. That was the difference.”

Colbert carries six different putters with him on the road. He used

two putters in Mexico, but broke out a different one Monday at Newport

Beach.

“I don’t change putters very often,” said Colbert, one of five former

Toshiba Classic champions to return in 2001 (all but ’97 winner Bob

Murphy, who has NBC television duties).