Golf: Classic tool

Richard Dunn

NEWPORT BEACH - There’s quite a difference between Doug Tewell this

year at the Toshiba Senior Classic and Doug Tewell last year here as a

Senior PGA Tour rookie.

On the bubble in 2000, Tewell was the tournament’s first alternate and

never got a chance to tee it up in the Toshiba Classic at Newport Beach

Country Club.

Tewell, however, played nearby Big Canyon Country Club a few times

with his good friend, Roland Osgood, and other Big Canyon members.

Little did anyone know it would turn Tewell’s golf game around.

After waiting for one of his fellow tour members to get sick or pull

up lame to create an opening in the field, Tewell instead seemed to

discover a stroke at Big Canyon that would lead to three Senior PGA Tour

titles, including the Senior PGA Championship.

“(Amateurs in the group) were all commenting on how well I was playing

(at Big Canyon), then I won the Senior Tour Championship. I guess it was

all that warming up to get in the (Toshiba Classic),” said Tewell

(pronounced: tool), who is staying at the Osgood house while in town for

this week’s $1.4 million Toshiba Classic.

Tewell, who enjoyed the most lucrative and successful year of his

professional golf career in 2000, would also have to be a serious

contender to win the Toshiba Classic, considering his track record

playing in the rain and mud.

“I won the LA Open in 1986 in the mud,” Tewell said of perhaps his

greatest of four PGA Tour triumphs. “I can play on a rain-soaked golf

course. I won my first tournament on the PGA Tour (in 1980) at Hilton

Head (S.C.) in the rain and won the (rain-shortened) Senior PGA Tour

Championship last year in the rain. Maybe I’m a good mudder. You know, a

race horse that can run in the rain is called a good mudder.”

After Toshiba Classic officials gave a sponsors exemption last year to

Butch Baird, Tewell didn’t take it personally. “That’s OK, they did what

they wanted to do,” he said.

Tewell, who lives in Baton Rouge, La., didn’t commit until a week ago

to play in the Toshiba Classic. But he’s no stranger to Newport Beach,

having played in the old Crosby Southern Pro-Am at Irvine Coast Country

Club (now Newport Beach), where he met Ray Haas and still maintains a

friendship with the former Newport resident.

“I had one of my worst rounds ever here,” said Tewell, who also met

Osgood at the former Crosby Clambake, a 23-year-old mini-tour event that

was started in 1975 for the pros who didn’t make the cut at the Crosby

National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach (now the AT&T;).

Last year, after the Toshiba Classic, Tewell caught fire, finishing

second in Mexico, then after taking a week off, won the Senior PGA

Championship at the PGA National Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

Tewell also won the SBC Senior Classic and Novell Utah Showdown and

ended eighth on the Senior Tour money list at over $1.4 million.

Tom Kite, Lanny Wadkins and Tom Watson were the Senior Tour rookies

last year who were expected to make the biggest impact, but Tewell walked

away with tour Rookie of the Year honors.

Tewell’s victory in the Senior PGA Championship was his first title

since the 1987 Pensacola Open.

Tewell, a speech communications major at Oklahoma State who has worked

as an on-course commentator for The Golf Channel, broke into golf as a

caddie for his father in Stillwater, Okla., then later earned a

basketball scholarship to Oklahoma State under Coach Henry Iba.