THE SKINS GAME : Four to Tee Off on a Wet Course That Jack Built

MURRIETA, Calif. —  Television viewers who tune in to the Skins Game today are going to be in for a surprise if they expect more of what they saw last year.

If you don’t watch it on TV, there is no other way of watching it. There is no public ticket sale unless you show up prepared to purchase a $150,000-lot. Lot owners, club members and sponsor guests will form the small gallery.

The Desert Highlands course, where the skins were won and lost the last two years, was carved out of the Arizona desert. There was no rough, just fairway and cactus.

Bear Creek, where Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Fuzzy Zoeller will play nine holes today--if the creek doesn’t run over--is a wooded glen where the holes meander leisurely through a stand of native oak.

Friday, it was so wet that a pro-amateur round was postponed. The course looked like a Louisiana bayou. The only thing missing was the Spanish moss hanging from the trees.

“We’ll definitely play tomorrow, rain or shine,” said Don Ohlmeyer, whose communications company bought the time from NBC to display the Skins Game (Channel 4, 12:30 p.m. today, and either before or after an NFL game Sunday.)

Normally, there are four natural streams and three lakes on the Bear Creek course, but Friday, there were a hundred lakes as puddled fairways and watery greens forced pro-am participants indoors.

The way the pros will play it, the course is 7,024 yards.

“It’s a golf course that I feel you could shoot a pretty good score on, provided you play some good golf and you get the weather conditions in your favor,” Nicklaus said of the course he designed. “But, if you’ll pardon the pun, it can be a bear when the wind is blowing like it was today.”

Nine skins will be at stake today when the four superstars play the front nine. A skin is the amount of money at stake on each hole. Skin games are played everywhere golf is played, but the amounts differ. For instance, a skin at Brookside or Rio Hondo doesn’t figure to be the same as one at Bel-Air or Riviera.

Even the big-bucks games at Riviera are not likely to match the ones at stake here--$15,000 each for the first six holes, $25,000 for the middle six and $35,000 for the final six. It’s a two-tie, all-tie situation in which skins accumulate until one of the golfers wins a hole outright.

Last year, there were only two winners--Watson, who won all the skins on the first day for $120,000, and Nicklaus, who won an eight-hole carry-over, worth $240,000, with a 14-foot putt on the 18th hole.

Palmer and Gary Player, the other two players a year ago, were skinned. They didn’t collect a dime.

The only difference between today’s Skins Game and the ones that hackers play is that Nicklaus, Palmer, Watson and Zoeller aren’t playing for their own money. The $450,000 is being provided by sponsors lined up by Ohlmeyer.

If there is anyone taking a true-to-life gamble today it is Ohlmeyer, who has that 2 1/2-hour slot to fill on TV. Another rainy day might make it extremely difficult.

Nicklaus also has a personal stake. He had hoped that the Skins Game would showcase his multimillion-dollar Bear Creek real estate development to nationwide TV viewers.

If they believe in omens, a huge rainbow crossed the course late Friday afternoon, one end--where the legendary pot of gold is supposed to be--flooding the 18th green.