The Victory Was No Small Feat for Pavin

LA QUINTA —  They are never going to call Corey Pavin “Walrus.” Or “Bear.” Or “Shark.” He is not built for it. “Parakeet,” maybe, or “Hamster.” Perhaps he will go down in golf lore as “Guppy” Pavin. You definitely have to scale down the possibilities when you are trying to nickname someone who is the approximate size of an Augusta National ball washer.

Bob Hope’s gag writers undoubtedly will come up with something by January 1988, when the defending champion of Hope’s Chrysler Classic, all 5 feet 9 inches and 135 pounds of him, returns. “I wanna tell ya,” old ski nose will say. “I made a big mistake the other day. Yeah. I thought I hit my ball right at the pin. Turned out it was Corey Pavin.”

You felt concern for the stick man from UCLA when he was about to play Sunday’s final round at PGA West, the man-eating plant of golf courses. The bunker at the 16th hole alone might have him for brunch. One deep trap and the only thing visible of Pavin might be a visor. One strong breeze and poof--”Flying Nun II.” I wanna tell ya, Corey Pavin was so skinny, when Bernhard Langer wanted to know which way the wind was blowing, he didn’t throw a blade of grass in the air. He threw Pavin.

Talk about miniature golf.

Bigger not always being better, though, as golfers from Ben Hogan to Chi Chi Rodriguez have preached, Pavin made the biggest hit of his pro career Sunday, winning this 90-hole adventure with his third straight bogey-free round. A steady hand. A steely nerve. These are the things that got him there. Corey Pavin might not have far to go when he bends over to pick up his ball, but damned if that ball isn’t usually in a cup.

No wonder, when the tournament was over, he was thinking about even bigger things.

“I really feel that I have the ability to win a lot of golf tournaments, and I’m not going to hide that fact,” Pavin said, with a fat $162,000 check in his pocket. “I feel like I’m a good player. I don’t feel like I’m a great player or anything right now. But I feel like I can win any tournament. I feel like I can win majors.

“I learned a very good lesson last year at the Masters, I played well (the year before) at the U.S. Open, and now I feel that I can win major championships. I think you get to a point where you are capable of doing anything under pressure, and that’s where I want to be.”

For example, when you line up an 18-foot putt, with the whole tournament on the line, with five days of play coming down to one shot, with a man like Langer standing nearby, ready to accompany you into a playoff, and with thousands of people close enough to count every bead of sweat, and with a green as slick as Jerry Lewis’ hair, the major golfers make the putt. The minor ones miss the putt, then push their playoff tee shot into the weeds, then take the runnerup money and run.

Pavin could not have looked more at ease. While waiting for Langer to get around to stroking his own 30-footer on the final hole, sometime before sundown--”Bernhard isn’t exactly the fastest player on the tour,” Pavin said later--the coolest customer on the green was Pavin, who was twirling his putter like a baton. Considering his curly black hair, mustache and general stature, he looked like Charlie Chaplin, complete with cane.

At another time, another place, Pavin might not have been so relaxed. Like back in 1983, when he failed to get his PGA tour card on his first try, which convinced him to try his luck overseas instead, which in turn introduced him to Langer on a weekend when Pavin won the German Open. He took tournaments in South Africa and France that year, too, but they were not majors, which has left him itching to win one ever since.

At a time last April when the Masters, the major major, was anybody’s to win, Pavin plopped one into the water on the 16th hole and never recovered. His finish, tied for 11th place, did not leave him depressed--”I’m not going to go home and beat myself on the head and wallow in it. I’m not an idiot,” Pavin said--so much as it left him angry and more determined.

“That was the first time in a major that I really felt I had a chance to win it,” he said Sunday. “But that was before I hit one right into Horrible Land. Well, I’ve had a year to think about it and I know something now. I know that this time, if the same situation should come up again, I just flat won’t do it. I won’t hit it in the water. I just won’t.”

Nothing can scare him, now that he has conquered La Quinta. PGA West must stand for Pretty G---- Awesome. The only place with 18 tougher holes is Mars. Oh, what a coarse course. Superman would be a 16-handicapper here. In some places, as Pavin said, a shot has to “carry over chasms.” There are sand traps so large, Midwestern college students could spend spring break here instead of Fort Lauderdale.

And long. Boy, is this course long. You could get penalized for slow play while using an electric cart. The fairways aren’t measured by yardage; they’re measured by mileage. “I don’t know if it’s the toughest course in the country, but from the very back tees, it probably is,” Pavin said. “We didn’t play the back tees this week because they’re ridiculous. They’ve got par-3s that are 260 yards. Silly.”

A course this long should have looked as imposing to him as the Las Posas club in Camarillo did when Corey was 6 years old and tagged along with his older brothers. He was small then and he is small now. But big courses and big-hitter rivals have never intimidated Pavin. “Nah, never,” he said. “Size doesn’t mean anything.”

You mean other guys his size can do just what he has done?

“Well,” Pavin said, “they’d better practice.”

I wanna tell ya.