He’s Got the Whole Tour in His Hands

LA QUINTA —  When young John Cook decided to come out on the golf tour, the game could hardly wait. Sponsors drooled.

Handsome, blond, slim, he was as photogenic as a Hawaiian sunset. He had this great, gorgeous looping swing. He could putt an acorn into a shot glass. He had steady habits, he loved the game. Golf couldn’t believe its good luck.

Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf, no less, went to work recruiting him to play at their alma mater, Ohio State, although he had grown up in Southern California. He led the school to the NCAA championship, as they knew he would.

He won the U.S. Amateur. He was a finalist another time. He won the World Junior. If he had a flaw in his game, no one found it.

He won a tournament--the Crosby--before he had been a pro for a year. He won the Canadian Open. He was way up on the money list. Hall of Fame, here I come.

Then something happened to Cook’s tour to the top. He became erratic. The club seemed loose in his hands. The once crisp irons wobbled. The tee shots dived and sank. The scores soared.

“Tournament nerves,” the wise guys said. The kid found out the game wasn’t all birdies and pars. The ball didn’t have to go into the hole.

John Cook thought it was something else. His hand felt funny, as if there were a bag of loose marbles in there.

The doctors reassured him. A little tendinitis, they told him. Whatever was wrong wasn’t in the hand. Just hit through it, they advised.

John did. For seven years. He tried to keep up with the tour one-handed. Golf is tough enough with two.

He played just brilliantly enough on occasions to cast doubt on his insistence that he was spotting the field one whole hand.

“It’s all in his head,” they whispered. “The doctors said so.”

So, the conclusion was, the game was just too tough for another fancy young college boy shot-maker. You need more than blond hair and purple slacks and a nice left-to-right fade to keep up in this game. Well of course you do. You need a right hand, too. Even Mike Tyson needs that.

John Cook really didn’t have one. But he had a tough job convincing the tour when he won $333,184 in 1987. How can you do that with your left hand?

John Cook did. He led the tour in aspirin. He soaked his hand in the shower. He squeezed rubber balls. If it was all in his head, how come his knuckles swelled up?

He finally began to notice that his right hand would bubble up like a saucepan of water on a hot stove.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hey! Cysts don’t move! They stay in one place and get hard,’ ” he said.

John’s right hand got so he could play “Lady of Spain” with it. It wasn’t a hand, it was castanets. Unfortunately, you couldn’t play golf with it.

The X-rays kept revealing nothing. His golf game was the only thing fractured. Maybe it was the grip. Maybe it was the guy.

The facts of the matter were, John Cook had all but shattered his hand hitting a ball off a tree root in the Inverrary tournament during his third year on tour in 1982. He was trying to play golf with a hand that he could hardly eat with.

The human hand wasn’t hinged to beat down on hard ground--or tree roots--with an iron club on a steel shaft. It can be like punching a concrete wall.

Cook finally took the problem to Dr. Steven O’Connell at the Eisenhower Medical Center, the facility that is, ironically, the major beneficiary of the annual Hope Chrysler Classic.

It was discovered the bone fragments were in John Cook’s hand, not his head, after all. The reconstructive surgery was delicate. The doctor made no promises.

“What he did say was that it would not be worse than it had been,” Cook says.

Even that was good enough for him. But it turned out to be a great deal better. First, though, Cook had to take almost an entire year off the tour. “It was great,” he says. “My kids had a father, my wife had a husband, I had a home life. But it also made me appreciate how lucky we were to have the tour to make our living. Everyone should have an opportunity to step back and see where he is.”

Fortunately for Cook, the tour recognizes the wear and tear that high stakes golf imposes on the system. Ordinarily, if a player has a year in which he wins no money--actually John ended up 172nd on the money list in ‘89--or not enough money, he is off the tour. But in the case of a medical emergency, he keeps his place in line.

So, the Cook didn’t crumble.

“I wondered how effective the surgery would be with the bone chips gone and the healing process over,” Cook says. “So I entered the Kapalua tournament, hoping only that I could break 80. I actually broke par. Then I went to the Royal Melbourne and was actually in the hunt.”

Punching with both hands, John Cook was able to put Indian Wells on the ropes in the Hope Classic’s opening round Wednesday. He was finally able to mount a two-fisted attack.

You might say he landed a series of right hands to the tournament’s jaw when he followed up his opening-round 65 with a second-round 68, which kept him in a tie for the lead and put him solidly into the category of the fighter of whom they used to say, “He can hurt you with either hand--but kill you with both.”