A Little Trampling by Pavin

SPRINGFIELD, N.J. —  Every time I look at Corey Pavin, I think Charlie Chaplin has taken up the game. Or this is a scene from an old movie he made about the game.

The same jaunty, splay-footed walk, the same shy smile, thin mustache. You figure the Keystone Kops will arrive any minute to chase him off the golf course. He should play in a threadbare double-breasted suit with the pants too long and the coat held together by a safety pin. His shoes look too big for him, as if he got them off a circus clown. He should twirl his nine-iron like a cane and wear a derby hat, which he should tip from the back.

Like Chaplin, he walks through the most calamitous events oblivious to them. The eternal optimist, he just serenely duck-walks through them. He has the outlook of a guy who is sure the next card he turns over will be an ace, the next shot a birdie, the next round a 63.

It’s kind of heartwarming watching him bring a bully of a course to its knees. It would make a great Hal Roach two-reeler.

The public loves him. He’s like no other golfer out there. When he wins, he doesn’t just throw his ball--or his hat--into the crowd. He tucks his legs underneath him like a kid jumping on a bed at home. He leaps for joy. He hurries after his shots like a guy chasing a moving bus. He’s almost never still. He’s as emotional as Bette Davis in her prime. You don’t need a card to tell what he shot, you can read it in his face.

You know how most golfers are--grave, deliberate, stoic, as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders. They frown a lot, slow everything down. They treat the game as if it were the Geneva Convention. They are the most meticulous of athletes. They pick at a green like a housewife picking lint off a dining room table.

Corey treats some shots as if he were double-parked. He goes down a fairway like a guy running for office. He plays in this big plantation hat with this half smile on his face, as if he just heard the funniest joke. Chaplin in the Klondike was never funnier.

He’s not big--5 feet 9 and 140 pounds. But neither was Ben Hogan.

He has all the shots. He may be as good a shot-maker as there is out there. He can get down in two from a bird’s nest. He’s inventive and bold. As Ken Venturi once observed: “If he gets within 90 yards of a green, a two from there is a foregone conclusion.”

He has won 10 tournaments, and that puts him among golf’s elite. Few players today get into double digits in victories.

Still, Corey Pavin vs. Baltusrol is like Chaplin against the mean old rich guy. It reminds you of the scene in “City Lights” where Chaplin is struggling across an over-waxed dance floor. He keeps sliding and slipping, dancing in the air but, miraculously, never falling. Chaplin is always some place he shouldn’t be, and Corey Pavin at brutish, heartless Baltusrol manages to look as if he’s always within one stroke of disaster.

Baltusrol almost seems too haughty for Corey. It’s almost as if it might momentarily summon the butler to have him thrown out, as if he had wandered into these marble halls by mistake.

Baltusrol is old money, mainline, Wall Street, upper crust, Republican to the core. Jack Nicklaus wins here. Guys with Roman numerals after their names. Yale men.

Just the kind of foil Chaplin used to like to drive crazy.

Maybe Corey can do it to this top-hatted aristocrat of golf this week. Hit it with a snowball.

There used to be these scenes in a Chaplin movie where Chaplin kept running into this rich guy touring nightclubs every night and the guy, roaring drunk, would fall into Chaplin’s arms, proclaim him his best friend, take him home with him, wine him and dine and put him up in silk sheets for the night with a tearful good night.

Then, the next morning, he would wake up sober and be outraged to find this little tramp in his house and have him indignantly thrown out. The next night, drunk again, he would embrace Chaplin again, take him home. Whereupon he would wake up the following morning and have him thrown out again.

Baltusrol treated Corey Pavin like that in the opening round Thursday, alternately greeting him like a long lost relative, then kicking him down again.

He started out this lordly, imperious track with a disheartening bogey. Then he made a birdie on No. 3. Then, he made bogeys on Nos. 5 and 6. Then, he birdied Nos. 9 and 10. You wouldn’t have been surprised to have him stop and scream at the course: “Make up your mind, will you?”

Then, he birdied the 630-yard 17th and the 542-yard 18th to finish at two-under-par 68. He had Baltusrol eating out of his hand.

It was Chaplinesque. Baltusrol kept trying to show him the door and kept tripping over his cane.

It was sure-fire box office, the mean old course and lovable little Pavin scrambling out of its reach. Vintage Chaplin.

Corey laughs. He doesn’t take the slapstick approach. Baltusrol isn’t high-hatting him. He brought the bogeys on himself with Open jitters, he admits.

“I was out of sync,” he says. “Then I made that 50-footer (a putt) on 9 and it relaxed me.”

He lost his awe of Baltusrol, realized it was merely a fat old party in a tuxedo who had his weaknesses.

Baltusrol is supposed to respond only to a bludgeoning from the registered home run hitters of the game. Pavin demurs.

“I was, like, 174th in driving distance on the tour last year,” he says, grinning. “For me to get on No. 17 in two would take a hurricane, six or seven bounces off a cart path and two drivers. But I birdied 17 and 18. Go figure.”

Chaplin would understand perfectly. Chaplin movies always had a happy ending. Virtue and the little man always triumphed over the sons of riches. It played in Peoria. Corey Pavin winning the Open would, too.