British Open Principals Discover It’s Not Who Wins or Loses, It’s How You Play the Game

Funny how it works.

You fall hard enough to rattle golf sensibilities, to dent sports history, to bust a career. Yet seven months later, the world lines up to carry you on its shoulders.

Walking from the driving range to the first tee at Riviera, you mostly float, carried by touches and cheers from strangers who consider you a friend.

“You win this tournament this week, OK,” says one woman.

“Yes ma’am,” you say, laughing.

“How come your picture is not in this program?” whines one boy.

“Because I’m a hacker, a chopper,” you say, laughing again.

Funny how it works.

Where you fall, another man soars, taking what you dropped, winning where you lost.

Yet seven months later, making the same Riviera walk, this man walks alone.

“I’ve got a lot more pressure on me, that’s for sure,” the man says, unsmiling. “What can I do? I’ve got to live with it.”

The lovable loser is Jean Van de Velde, who blew a three-stroke lead on the final hole of last year’s memorable British Open.

The weighted winner, capturing that same major tournament in a playoff, is . . . who exactly?

Golf, that subtle messenger of life and how we view it, is using this weekend’s Nissan Open to make precisely that point.

Fans will line the Riviera fairways to cheer Jean Van de Velde.

Fans may not notice Paul Lawrie.

You know the loser, but not until just this minute did you remember the winner.

More than merely two golfers, they arrive here for their first meeting of the year as an example of the sporting public’s changing priorities.

Despite an incessant admiration for who wins, we increasingly care about how one plays the game.

Van de Velde will be forever known as the chap who, despite choking so badly in a British Open that his clubs turned blue, remained noble and even courageous.

Despite engineering the largest fourth-round comeback in PGA Tour history, Lawrie will be known for having that same British Open drop in his lap.

“Other than the birth of my children, it was the best day of my life,” Lawrie said of his 10-stroke comeback and playoff victory over Van de Velde and Justin Leonard last July in Carnoustie, Scotland.

And for the stumbling guy who needed only a double bogey on the 18th hole and still blew it with a series of mind-boggling, mindless shots?

“Are you crazy?” Van de Velde said. “It was also one of the best days of my life.”

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For someone making his first visit to Riviera on Tuesday, Van de Velde sure had plenty of pals.

“You have to open the camera!” he playfully shouted to one mom taking his picture.

“Bonjour!” he said to another group of fans.

“I don’t speak French,” one of them said.

“Well, then, good morning!” he said.

As he began walking up to the cliff-top first tee, his caddie offered to meet him on the fairway below.

“It is because you are lazy, no?” said the 33-year-old Frenchman.

Van de Velde laughed throughout his midday workout. His world laughed with him.

“You like me, I think, because I said that losing the British Open was not the end of the world,” he said. “It is, after all, still just golf.”

Lawrie was more serious, terse, perhaps even tense.

“Winning that tournament changed my life, in a lot of ways,” he said.

It was one of the sporting highlights of the summer, of many summers. Yet in the end, it had little to do with sports.

Van de Velde stepped on to the 18th tee at Carnoustie with a three-stroke lead that seemed so insurmountable his name was already engraved on the famed Claret Jug trophy.

But instead of playing it safe by tapping the ball down the fairway with irons, he continued to take the same sort of chances that had earned him that lead.

“If I had played it safe and triple-bogeyed the hole, I could not have lived with myself,” he said Tuesday. “I could not change what I had been doing.”

Using a driver, he hit into the rough. Going for the green, he bounced it off the back of the grandstand. Going for the green again, he put it into the water.

He finished the par-four hole with a seven, allowing Lawrie and Leonard to tie him, forever earning the nickname, “Claret Jughead.”

After Lawrie won the playoff, everyone expected Van de Velde’s disposition to fold like his golf game. Everyone was wrong.

He shrugged, made no excuses, did not blame his caddie or the weather or the boisterous fans.

“I told the truth,” he said Tuesday. “I said it was not the end of the world, that you make mistakes and you learn from them, and that it was only golf.”

Many were stunned by the maturity of those words. Not Lawrie.

“Jean had to react that way,” he said. “Otherwise, it could have destroyed him.”

In an era of fretting and finger-pointing, there is nothing sports fans love more than a good sport. In Van de Velde, they found one.

Shortly after his comments, he was deluged with encouraging letters. Fans cheered for him at every stop. He became golf’s clumsy but gallant pet, everyone trying to playfully grab him by the collar.

By the time his clubs arrived late for the PGA Championship outside Chicago, causing him to miss a practice round but brag about having a fun day of shopping, he had become somewhat of a folk hero.

And Lawrie, a 31-year-old Scot who should have been an equally inspirational story?

Several Riviera fans questioned Tuesday had no idea that he had even won.

“What happened was, all the world saw Jean’s collapse, but only the real golf fans stuck around to watch Paul win the playoff,” Darren Clarke said. “Both are great guys. But that’s just the way it went.”

So while Lawrie instantly became perhaps the most anonymous major champion since Lou Graham won the U.S. Open in 1975, Van de Velde became a hero.

He says he has been heckled only once, at the Ryder Cup. On one water-less hole, a fan yelled at him, “Be careful, there’s a creek up ahead.”

“Good thing there’s not!” Van de Velde shouted back.

Although neither man has won since that tournament, both have made most of the cuts and are improving in their first full exposure to the PGA Tour.

Lawrie said he has watched tapes of his victory several times, “hoping that I can get back those good feelings again.”

Van de Velde said that while he has not yet revisited his collapse, he has a tape, and he most certainly will watch it.

“As soon as I get time, I am going to sit down and see it,” he said.

He is asked, but why?

“Why not? Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe next time, I will play it safe,” he says. “There’s nothing on there that’s going to bite me, is there?”

Now that he mentions it, no. Of course not. It’s only golf. It’s only life.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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Nissan Open

Riviera Country Club is the site of the $3.1-million tournament:

* Defending champion: Ernie Els.

* Winner’s share: $558,000.

* TV schedule: Thursday and Friday: USA, 4-6 p.m. (delayed); Saturday: CBS, 1-3 p.m.; Sunday: CBS, 1-3:30 p.m.

* Tickets: Daily, $20; Available at all Ticketmaster outlets (213) 480-3232.

* THURSDAY’S TEE TIMES, PAGE 7