8

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL?

MOST OF THE PLAYERS headed out of Los Angeles Sunday night, driving east into the desert toward Palm Springs. The Bob Hope—now known as the Hope Chrysler Classic—was the tour’s third February stop. That meant a week of perfect weather, easy golf courses, and four days of playing with amateurs.

Life is never perfect.

Except at the four majors and the Players Championship, tour players take part in a Pro-Am every week. Most weeks, the Pro-Am is on Wednesday. Fifty-six players, selected by the sponsor, play in fivesomes, each joining four amateurs for 18 holes. Everyone who is asked must play in the Pro-Am. Each amateur antes up anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000, depending on the event, to play. The average Wednesday Pro-Am costs $3,500 to play in, and at that price, sponsors expect the likes of Greg Norman, John Daly, Fred Couples, Nick Price, and anyone else they ask for to show up and play.

The pros look at the Pro-Am as part of the job. Some even enjoy themselves and, as tour staffers point out to rookies at the mandatory seminar they attend the week after Q-School, Pro-Ams can be an excellent place to make business contacts that can be quite beneficial.

Some players actually enjoy Pro-Ams. Paul Goydos found during his rookie year that he was more relaxed playing with amateurs than with pros. “They think everything you do is great,” he said. “It’s an ego boost.”

At Pebble Beach that year, Goydos arrived on the first day, looked on the board to see who his amateur partner was, and saw the name Donald Trump listed next to his. “Must be another Donald Trump,” he said.

It wasn’t. When Goydos asked why he, Paul Goydos, tour rookie, would be paired with His Trumpness, he was told, “This way it will be Donald Trump’s group. If we put him with a big name, then he would be shoved into the background.”

Trump doesn’t like background. And he isn’t a bad player. He even made a hole in one during the tournament and later told friends that 5,000 people had seen the shot. Goydos figured it was somewhere between 50 and 500, but he didn’t mind. “It was fun,” he said. “He seemed like a pretty good guy.”

Trump even talked to Goydos about doing some kind of sponsorship deal with him but never followed up. A year later, Goydos got a new partner, Jack Olsen, the chairman of the board of Hertz. The two hit it off, and Goydos ended up with a $50,000 deal to wear a Hertz hat and carry a Hertz bag for the rest of the year. All that and a free rental car every week. Trump talked, Olsen produced.

Of course the Hertz hat and bag would cause Goydos some discomfort later in the year after O.J. Simpson’s arrest. At the Western Open, one spectator jokingly asked Goydos if he knew where the murder weapon might be. Before Goydos could answer—or not answer—his caddy, Ken McCluskey, turned around and said, “Sure, the knife is in the bag.” McCluskey was no longer Goydos’s caddy the next week or for the rest of the year. But Goydos missed him, so he forgave him and rehired him at the start of 1995.

Many of the pros become close friends with amateur partners and stay at their houses when they return to the tournament in future years. Tom Kite has written a thank-you note to every one of his amateur partners over the years. Older pros counsel younger pros always to be patient with their amateurs because stories about pros who act out or won’t talk to their partners never seem to die. What’s more, the money the amateurs ante up, ranging from $400,000 to $1 million, produces a huge chunk of each tournament’s revenues.

Several tournaments don’t limit the amateurs to Wednesday. Pebble Beach is the most famous of them, the Hope is next. Like his old road partner Crosby, Bob Hope wanted to invite his celebrity pals down to play when he put his name on what had been the Desert Classic in 1960. The Hope is one of two tournaments on tour played over five days (Las Vegas is the other), and the 384 amateurs are divided into three-man teams and paired with the 128 pros for the first four days. On Sunday—the fifth day—the field is cut to the low seventy pros and the amateurs go home. The tournament is played on four different golf courses (until Sunday), and the celebrities in the field are paired with the best-known pros.

The defending champion—Tom Kite in 1994—always plays the Saturday round on TV with Bob Hope, former President Gerald Ford, and a celeb to be named later. In 1994, for reasons no one ever quite understood, the designated fourth was singer Eddie Van Halen.

A lot of players won’t play both Pebble Beach and the Hope. It is just too much hit-and-giggle golf to bear. At Pebble, the golf courses are extremely difficult and set up with the pros in mind. At the Hope, they are relatively easy and wide open, and the rough is cut low to make life easier for the amateurs. Kite had been 35 under par in 1993, meaning he averaged 65 for five rounds. The seventy-two-hole cut was usually somewhere between five under and 10 under, and anyone who couldn’t break par didn’t need to even think about hanging around until Sunday.

Tuesday is the most relaxed day of the week on tour. Most players arrive either Monday night or sometime Tuesday and usually show up at the course to play a practice round with friends sometime during the day.

Regardless of what happened last week, this is a new beginning. Everyone will start at zero Thursday morning and the guy who won on Sunday may be slamming his trunk on Friday night. There is also the possibility that someone who hasn’t played the weekend for months will end up holding an oversized check over his head on Sunday. Hope does spring on tour, if not eternally, certainly every Thursday morning.

Tuesday is also shootout day on tour. The shootouts have become a staple at most tournaments in recent years. It is a way to draw people to the golf course to see something resembling a competition on what is usually just a practice day.

Each week, ten players compete in the shootout for a purse of $15,000 put up by a sponsor, usually—but not always—Merrill Lynch. One player is eliminated on each hole, either by having the highest score or, in cases where there is a tie, by a shootout. For instance, if three of the ten players are tied for high score at bogey on the first hole, one of the players chooses a shot—a chip, a blast from a bunker, a long putt—and the player who finishes farthest from the hole is eliminated. This goes on until the winner is left standing with a $5,000 check on the ninth green.

Players are invited to play in the shootouts based on where they stand on the money list and their marquee value. Some players say no almost every time they are asked; others almost always say yes. The shootout field at the Hope was a pretty good one: Pavin, John Cook (local hero), 1984 Masters champion Craig Stadler, the effusive and popular Peter Jacobsen, Ryder Cupper Jim Gallagher Jr., up-and-coming youngster Bob Estes—the BPOTWHWAT… Y (best player on tour who hadn’t won a tournament… yet)—solid veterans Dan Forsman and John Huston, and two men who had won the U.S. Open: Scott Simpson and Curtis Strange.

Strange had not won a golf tournament on tour since 1989. He had finished ninety-ninth on the money list in 1992 and sixty-third in 1993. He had seriously considered an offer from ABC to become its top commentator at the end of 1992. He had gone from the world’s best player to the invisible man in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

“I’ll tell you how low I’ve been,” he said one night. “I’ve actually had people come up and congratulate me on the year I had in ’93. I’m sixty-third on the money list and they’re telling me, ’Great job.’ Are you kidding me?”

They weren’t kidding. Strange had been the best player in the game for the second half of the 1980s, a player who won seventeen times on tour and, after wearing the best-player-never-to-have-won-a-major label for three years, shed it emphatically in 1988 and 1989 when he became the first player to win back-to-back U.S. Opens since Ben Hogan. The cover of Sports Illustrated the week after his second victory had a picture of Strange over the caption “Move over, Mr. Hogan.” If Mr. Hogan was moved by the feat, Strange never heard about it.

A year later, Strange went into the final round of the Open two shots off the lead and shot 75 to finish tied for twenty-first. He drove away from the golf course that day feeling drained and empty. He won a grand total of $48,064 the rest of that year and didn’t come close to winning again for the next three years.

And yet, as he stood on the first tee waiting for the shootout to begin, he was easily the best-known player in the group. Strange has always been easy to pick out of a crowd even before his hair turned prematurely gray in his early thirties.

In many ways, the story of the courtship of Sarah and Curtis Strange is like most stories involving Strange. There is a part of the story where Curtis doesn’t behave very well. He eventually comes to his senses and manages to put things right because he is bright, charming, funny, and if you look hard enough, a person who cares deeply about the people in his life.

Sarah swears she knew she was going to marry him even before she met him. “I was walking into a Wake Forest basketball game one night and I looked across the court and there was this guy walking down to his seat,” she said. “It was as if bells went off in my head. I just knew he was the man I was going to marry.”

Sarah was a freshman at Salem College at the time. A few weeks later, at a Wake Forest mixer, she came across the young man she had spotted at the basketball game sitting in a corner of the room. She worked her way over to him, started talking to him, and…

“The rest was not history,” Strange says, picking up the story later. “I almost screwed it up.”

Curtis and Sarah dated for the rest of that school year. At the end of the spring semester Sarah asked Curtis if he would escort her that summer at her coming-out party. (This was 1974 and girls from New Bern, North Carolina, still made their debut back then.) Curtis said no. “I have to play golf,” he said.

And off he went. He played amateur tournaments around the country all summer, putting in the time and the work that was vital if he wanted to be a pro. He never called; he never wrote. Sarah went home to New Bern and had no trouble finding another escort for her debut. But she missed Curtis and was saddened by the apparent end of the relationship. He missed her too, and he knew he had, as he put it, “messed up big time.” But there didn’t seem to be anything to be done. The boat had sailed and he had stood on shore and watched.

It was David Thore, another member of the golf team, who told him to quit being a jerk and persuaded him to call Sarah again at the end of the summer. “At first I told him, no way, I blew it, it’s over,” Curtis said. “But he kept bugging me, telling me I was crazy if I didn’t call her. Finally I told him I would call her but only if he and his girlfriend would go along with us the first night.”

Thore agreed. Strange made the call. Sarah wasn’t sure. She had been hurt by Curtis and there was this other guy back in New Bern… But there was also the memory of that feeling she had that first night at the basketball game. Okay, she finally decided, one last chance. Curtis got it right this time, and they were married in the summer of 1976, shortly after Curtis had dropped out of Wake Forest following his junior year to turn pro.

“I proposed on the phone from the British Open,” he said. “I figured it was safer from 4,000 miles away. I was less likely to choke.”

Sarah Strange spent the first night of her marriage in the Watergate Hotel, the second in Arnold Palmer’s guest room because Curtis played in an exhibition that afternoon with Palmer. After that, her honeymoon consisted of one golf tournament after another, from Europe to Indonesia to Japan—with a brief stopover in Moscow. She was nineteen, she was in love; if this was what her husband wanted, it was what she wanted. She had known she was marrying a golfer, a star golfer at that, so this was part of the deal.

Only she hadn’t realized just what was at stake. She hadn’t quite understood the depth of her new husband’s intensity about his work. “It all came clear to me in Tokyo one night,” she said. “You see this alarm clock hit the wall traveling very fast…”

Curtis was the son of a golfer, Tom Strange, who had met his mother, Elizabeth Ball, while he was in the coast guard. She had heard from a friend that he was a scratch player and invited him to play with her brother and father, who were also excellent players. Tom Strange and the Ball family became good friends—on and off the golf course.

Shortly after they were married in 1953, he turned pro. Allan and Curtis were born in January 1955, Allan arriving four minutes before Curtis. Both boys began playing with cut-down clubs when they were five. By the time they were seven, they had created their own par-five putting course that wound through the living room and dining room. At nine, they both started going to the golf course with their father. It was Curtis who stayed, though, Curtis who loved leaving the house with his dad at 7 o’clock in the morning and coming home with him at 10 o’clock at night.

He worked around the golf course, picking up balls, cleaning clubs, running golf carts, anything his father wanted. And when he wasn’t working he hit balls. Hundreds and hundreds of balls. Then hundreds more. There was no better feeling than to look at his hands and see the blisters and cuts that came from working on the range for hours and hours. To this day, he can’t sleep at night if he hasn’t spent time on the range during the day.

Allan had talent too, but he never wanted to spend the time on the range or at the golf course the way Curtis did. He was a good baseball player who might have been a great baseball player if he hadn’t hurt his back in high school. Curtis played baseball too, but gave it up at twelve when he had to choose between a Little League game or playing in the Virginia State junior championship.

A year later, Curtis almost won the Norfolk City Amateur Championship. That was one of the few times his father saw him play in a tournament. Most of the time, it was his mother who drove him to tournaments because his father had to work. But when Curtis shot 30 on the front nine during the second round of the Norfolk City, someone called the pro shop and told Tom Strange he better get over to see his kid because he was doing something special. Curtis looked up on the back nine and saw his father out there watching. He didn’t win the tournament, but he remembers the look on his dad’s face that day when he shot 65 and led all the grownups after two rounds.

Curtis was a star by then, but didn’t really know it. His parents never made a big deal of his ability. His father just told him to keep working, whether he was playing well or playing poorly. “Hard work may not pay off today or even tomorrow,” he would say, “but it will pay off somewhere down the road.”

That was the way Tom Strange had always lived, working hard to provide a living for his family after making the decision to become a club pro rather than trying the tour. In the 1950s, the life of a touring pro was anything but glamorous; making a living was tough and it meant long stretches away from your family. Older players who knew Tom Strange, including Arnold Palmer, told Curtis later that his dad had the game and the temperament to make it on tour if he had decided to try it.

Tom Strange stayed home. And worked. He didn’t play a lot with Curtis because kids weren’t supposed to play with adults, they were supposed to play with other kids. But when Curtis came in one day in tears because he had figured out that he hadn’t figured out the game, that he didn’t know everything there was to know about the golf swing, Tom dropped what he was doing and spent the afternoon working with him, first on the range, then on the golf course. By the end of the day Curtis figured he had it figured out again. At least for a little while.

By the time Curtis was fourteen he was winning junior tournaments all over Virginia and entering tournaments against adults. His father had saved enough money to buy the golf club where he had been working since Allan and Curtis had been in the second grade and was in the process of making the deal. But that spring, he got sick. Mononucleosis, the boys were told. It lasted a long time, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. Tom Strange had always been a smoker, two or three packs a day, so the coughing and hacking the boys were hearing was nothing new.

But then they began to hear other sounds. Their mother talking in a whisper on the phone, then hanging up and sitting quietly with tears welling up in her eyes. They figured it out—“around corners, overhearing whispered conversations, seeing Mom upset all the time.” Tom Strange had lung cancer. Curtis was told later that he got it from licking golf balls that had fertilizer on them, but he can’t remember ever seeing his father lick a golf ball.

The summer of 1969 is mostly a blur to Strange. Men were landing on the moon, Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne were going for a drive on Chappaquiddick Island, and thousands were driving to Woodstock. Curtis Strange was watching his father die. One day the two boys were taken to their father’s hospital room. He was in an oxygen tent a lot of the time by then. He told them he was very sick. Cancer. They knew what that meant, but they didn’t really know. They knew it was bad enough that after he told them he broke down, couldn’t talk anymore, and told them to get out of the room.

Tom Strange came home shortly after that. They stopped the cobalt treatments and he went out and played a few rounds of golf. A few weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Curtis had just finished playing his third round at the state open, a tournament his dad had won several times, when someone came up to him and told him there was an emergency phone call from home. He went home that night. All he remembers about the next few days is hearing the word “gentleman” over and over again.

Years later, during a practice round at the PGA, Jay Haas, Curtis’s closest friend since college, asked Arnold Palmer what he remembered about Tom Strange. “He was a gentleman,” Palmer answered, “and he was a damn fine player too.” He pointed at Curtis, who was then thirty-seven, a year younger than his father had been when he died, and said, “This one, at his best, is exactly like him.”

To Curtis Strange, that may have been the highest praise he ever received.

The numbness began to wear off the next summer when he found himself playing in tournaments, but didn’t have Dad to go home and talk to when they were over. He won the state junior on the same course where he had been playing the state open on the day his dad died. By then he was able to smile, knowing how proud his father would have been.

If he had ended up working for a Wall Street brokerage the way Allan did, maybe his father’s memory wouldn’t have burned quite so brightly through all the years. But being in golf, it seemed as if his father was always there. To this day, he hears about his father, and to this day, when he does something he knows would make his father proud, he thinks of him.

That’s why, when he won his first U.S. Open in 1988, he talked about his father and how much he had wanted to win for him and he broke down and cried and showed the world a side of himself it had never seen. He had first thought about dedicating a victory to his father during the last round of the Masters in 1985, when he had led the tournament, only to let it slip away on the back nine at Augusta.

“It was never anything I actually thought about or planned,” he said. “Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always knew that if I ever won a major I was going to want to talk about my dad. But I never thought about what I was going to say or how I was going to say it. When the time came, it just came out of me. I guess it was always in there someplace.”

Somewhere inside Strange there was always a need to live up to what his dad had been. He wanted to be a great player and a gentleman too, and neither one was very easy. Maybe there was some anger because his father wasn’t there to see him as he climbed the golf ladder, although he insists that it was his father who was cheated more than anybody.

But there was no question about the anger. No one could put on a game face on the golf course like Strange. He always has taken golf personally because it has always been so important to him. “I’ve heard guys say they wouldn’t want golf to be that important to them,” he said. “Well, it is that important to me and I’m not going to sit here and BS you and tell you it’s not. It’s my livelihood but it’s also my passion.”

His passion was evident whenever he played. His temper was a part of his persona growing up, all through college, and then on tour. He jokes today that Deane Beman always found him before he finished a round to tell him he was being fined for cursing. The parabolic microphone became his mortal enemy. When tournaments began to expand TV coverage to Thursdays and Fridays, Strange’s fine budget went up. One tour official remembers receiving a call from Strange after a first-round tirade to complain about a fine. “You mean to tell me I can’t get away with ‘goddammit’ on Thursdays anymore?” he asked.

Strange isn’t proud of his temper. He was a good basketball player in high school, but he also led the team in technical fouls. He constantly tells his two sons, now twelve and nine, that Dad isn’t always the best role model in the world. He was chagrined and embarrassed when Palmer dressed him down publicly ten years ago after a female walking scorer at Bay Hill complained about his profanity throughout the round. There have been incidents with cameramen and photographers and days when he stalked away from the media and autograph seekers.

He has worked very hard to get better. Once, he told Palmer that he was sick and tired of people sending him twenty requests for autographs in one envelope. “I just sign one and send the rest back,” he said. “What do you do?”

“I sign them all,” Palmer said. “Those are the people who keep us in business out here.”

Now Strange signs them all. He still can’t understand adults who ask for autographs, and he goes crazy when people ask his children for autographs—“Kids, are you kidding? That’s sick,” he says—but he always signs for kids. He has actually become a media favorite in recent years because he is blunt and funny and totally incapable of handing out pabulum.

During the last two years he has enjoyed golf more than at any time in his life. Some will tell you it is because he has accepted mediocrity, that the hunger to be the best is gone. Maybe some of the anger is gone. But the desire to do the work, hit the balls on the range, and compete is still there. Only now, perhaps for the first time in his life, he appreciates how lucky he is to be able to practice his passion day in and day out.

That appreciation was hard-won. In 1992 Curtis felt so sick that Sarah worried that something was seriously wrong with him. She could deal with the struggles he was having on the golf course, but not with him feeling weak and helpless all the time. The doctors had run tests for everything. They had suggested he might be fighting depression or that he might be allergic to something that didn’t show up in allergy tests. They thought it might be stress or just exhaustion.

There were lots of questions, very few answers. A trip to the Mayo Clinic turned up nothing. Sarah’s sister-in-law had told her that Allan talked often about being almost the same age his father had been when he died. Curtis never talked like that, but maybe he had the same thoughts and fears and this mysterious malady was their manifestation.

The doctors finally decided it was some kind of virus that had gone undiagnosed. Slowly, Curtis began to feel better. Then came the offer from ABC. The network was looking for someone to be its lead golf analyst. Dave Marr had been fired a couple of years earlier, and Steve Melnyk hadn’t really worked out. Strange had been a nonfactor on tour in both 1991 and 1992; maybe he would be willing to make the move.

He was tempted. The money was excellent and he suspected he would be good at the job. He had always been comfortable in front of a camera, and although he knew he couldn’t say everything he was thinking, his straightforward style would probably work well. It had certainly worked for Johnny Miller on NBC.

But deep down, even though the ABC people pointed out that he could play all he wanted to on the weeks they weren’t on air, he knew that taking the job would mean conceding that he was finished as a player. For one thing, if he committed to being on the road for ABC for fifteen weeks, he wasn’t going to want to be away from home for another twenty to play in tournaments. He would probably end up playing at most half as much as in the past and that meant he would be a part-time golfer.

Was he ready to do that? He was about to turn thirty-eight, hardly an age where a golfer is through, but the fact was he hadn’t won since the 1989 Open and hadn’t been playing very well even before he started to feel sick.

It was Palmer who answered his question. Late one night, at an exhibition in Mexico, Strange pounded on Plamer’s door. He needed to talk. Strange had gone to Wake Forest on an Arnold Palmer golf scholarship, and Palmer has tried, since then, to look out for him. Often, that has meant lecturing and cajoling him in a way no one else can. Palmer is the same age Tom Strange would be, and all three of his children are girls. It may be a stretch to call him a father figure, but there is no question that, when Palmer talks, Strange listens.

He sat up that night with Curtis and told him he thought he was crazy if he took the ABC offer. “If you do it, then you have to accept the fact that you aren’t a player anymore,” Palmer told him. “You’re a commentator and a spectator and that’s it. If you’re ready for that, fine, do it. But I don’t think you are.”

Allan said the same thing. So did Sarah, although deep down, she wouldn’t have minded seeing him stop playing because that would have meant more time for her and the boys. But if quitting meant he was going to be unhappy and unfulfilled, that was the last thing she wanted.

Strange finally said no. He held a telephone press conference with the nation’s golf writers to tell them that rumors of his retirement had been greatly exaggerated. He felt better and he still wanted to play.

Once that decision was made, he felt as if he had been given a new lease on his golf life. It wasn’t as if his game magically came back or even that he thought he was twenty-two again. There were still times on the road when he felt lousy in the morning and wondered if he would make it through his round. And, for the first six months of the year, he wasn’t exactly tearing up the tour.

But a lot of the old feeling had come back. For one thing, he wasn’t sleeping well. That was a good sign. From the very beginning of his career, Strange had been a restless sleeper. He would lie awake in bed, replaying every shot he had hit that day, questioning himself, wondering how he could do better the next day.

Sarah thought at first it was the tension of trying to break through, to reach a point where they weren’t staying in $22-a-night motel rooms because that was all they could afford. In 1980, he finished third on the money list and still didn’t sleep well. He went through a major swing change that year, convinced he had to hit the ball straighter with more consistency even if it meant giving up distance if he wanted to take the next step from good player to great player.

Sarah didn’t really understand. He was playing well, improving all the time, why make a change now? Because, he told her, good isn’t good enough. He needed more.

He got it. By 1985, he was the leading money winner on tour. That was the year of the Lost Masters, the year he came back after shooting 80 the first day to shoot back-to-back 65s to lead the tournament. Then he put a ball in the water at 13 and sank another one at 15 and lost to Bernhard Langer. “The worst shot I hit all day wasn’t the one into the creek at thirteen, it was the one out of the creek,” he said. “I still could have made par there and I didn’t. The shot at fifteen, I swear to this day, I hit the ball just the way I wanted to. I still don’t know how it ended up in the water.”

Sarah was home because their second son had been born a week earlier. On the phone that night, he kept saying, “When will I have a chance like this again?” When he got home the next day he walked in through the garage, collapsed in her arms, and cried. For an hour, they both cried about it without saying a word. So close. So painful.

That was why winning the Open at Brookline in 1988 had been so important. Leading Nick Faldo by one shot, Strange three-putted 17, then had to get up and down from a bunker at 18 just to stay even with him and create a playoff. “If I had lost that one that day, I’m not sure I ever would have come back,” he said. “I’m not sure I could have taken another disappointment as devastating as that Masters was.”

He won the playoff the next day, playing near-perfect golf. Then he collapsed in Sarah’s arms again, only this time it was joy and relief and all those thoughts about his father. The next year at Oak Hill was almost like a bonus. It was Tom Kite’s tournament to win until he triple-bogeyed the fifth hole on Sunday. Two holes ahead, Strange heard word drifting along the ropes that Kite had made triple. He asked someone from the USGA to check and find out if that was true. Moments later, the word came back: Yes, Kite had tripled. Suddenly, he was tied for the lead. “The game was on,” Strange said. “I remember when I was in high school, whenever we were in a close game, I wanted the ball. I wanted to take the last shot.

“There are a lot of guys who don’t want to take the last shot. Sometimes, the most talented players you’ll ever see don’t want the ball. Michael Jordan always wanted it. I think I’m that way. I’ve always been someone who, when I get in the hunt, I usually know what to do. I may not have had as many chances to win as some guys, but when I’ve had chances, I’ve usually played pretty well.”

He was absolute steel down the stretch at Oak Hill that day, making one key putt after another to win. He was the King of Golf after that. And then, almost overnight, he was gone. Once he shot that 75 on the last day of the Open at Medinah in 1990, all the anger, all the desire, all the need to work and win and compete disappeared.

“When he won in 1988, there was never a time when we sat back and said, ‘Wow, we climbed the mountain, look where we are,’ ” Sarah said. “It was work and more work and more pressure. He traveled more and he did more and he never seemed to have the chance to stop and take it all in. He worked all his life to get to the top and then when he got there, I’m not sure he liked it up there very much.”

It wasn’t until years later, on a winter night before Christmas in 1993, that Sarah expressed that view to Curtis. When she did, it brought him up short. The notion that he didn’t like being the best player in the world had never occurred to him. But when he thought about it and looked back at what had happened, he wondered if it might not be true.

“I was never comfortable with being a public figure,” he said. “I can’t be Arnold, I just can’t. After I won at Brookline, everything changed. Everywhere I went, I was recognized, I mean everywhere. Instead of being an occasional thing, it became a constant thing. I began to rebel against it. Sometimes I wouldn’t sign autographs just because I didn’t want to. Maybe I was wrong, but that was the way I felt. And after I lost at Medinah, it was as if I had been flushed clean. I was totally empty.”

“Medinah,” said Sarah, “is when it was over. That’s when he stopped grinding and grinding.”

And when he did, he wasn’t the same player. And then he got sick and then he decided not to quit and then in the summer of 1993, it started to come back. He had gone back to grinding, back to all the hours on the range, the sitting up at night going through the round shot by shot, the room service most nights on the road. He could see improvement but it wasn’t as if he woke up one morning and started putting back-to-back 65s on the board.

There was a good last round at the 1993 Open. Then there was a seventh place at the Western. A week later, home at Kingsmill for the Anheuser-Busch Classic, he looked up on Sunday with nine holes to go and found himself one shot out of the lead. It had been so long it was almost a shock. But he hung in. He birdied the 14th hole and walked to the 15th tee thinking he was tied for the lead. Then he heard a huge roar from down in the trees where the green is and he knew something had happened and he probably wasn’t in the lead anymore.

He was right. Jim Gallagher Jr. had rolled in an eagle putt. He followed that with a birdie at 16, and no one in the field, including Strange, had answers for that. Strange finished third, three shots behind Gallagher, but the feeling he had being back in the hunt energized him. “I didn’t back off when I had the chance,” he said. “I handled the pressure. I was a little surprised by that.”

A week later, he was fifth at New England, then came a sixth at Memphis. Four weeks, four top-ten finishes. That was a roll for anyone who wasn’t named Nick Price or Greg Norman. Home for a week before the PGA, Strange picked up a newspaper and saw a story speculating about who Tom Watson might pick for the last two spots on the Ryder Cup team. Lanny Wadkins, Raymond Floyd, Fuzzy Zoeller, and John Daly were all mentioned. So was Curtis Strange.

And why not? Watson had said repeatedly he wanted to pick two players who were playing well. On that list no one was playing better than he was. But he had been gone for so long, would Watson really take him seriously?

Yes. The night before the PGA began in Toledo, Watson called him in his hotel room. He wanted him to know he was considering him for the team and he asked for an honest analysis of his game and of the other players he was thinking about. They talked for an hour. Strange told him he was playing well but wished he was putting better. Did he want to be on the team? Damn right he did.

Maybe he wanted to be on the team too much. He knew that Sarah had always enjoyed Ryder Cup and he had always enjoyed the team aspect of the competition. If he played well in the PGA, Watson would almost have to pick him, especially since Wadkins and Floyd, who had been the two likely choices all summer, hadn’t been playing well.

But he missed the cut. “I was thinking about making the team,” he said later. “You can’t do that. You have to let those things happen. I had come from nowhere to [being] in contention in four weeks just by going out and playing. When I started to think about it, to really want it, I didn’t perform.”

There was still a chance, though, because Floyd had missed the cut too. Strange was flying to Japan on Sunday night to play in a tournament there. Watson had told him to call him in his hotel room that night to find out if he was on the team. Changing planes at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, he found a phone and called Watson. He was surprised at how nervous he was.

“You’re out,” said Watson, never one to mince words.

“I understand,” Strange said. “If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

He hung up with an empty feeling in his stomach. He was glad Watson hadn’t done any beating around the bush or fed him any lines about how tough a decision it had been. He called Sarah and told her. It was a downer but, as Sarah pointed out, “A month ago you wouldn’t even have been making that phone call. You’ve come a long way.”

They both knew that was true. The three years of constant struggle seemed to be over. But then, two weeks later, Sarah began to feel tired, very tired, while taking her morning walk. She took a nap and woke up feeling worse. It was time to drive her car pool, so she got in the car to pick up the kids. On the way back, she saw a youngster in front of her, knew she had to stop, but couldn’t. Her body wouldn’t do what her mind was telling it to do. She just missed the child.

That was it. She went straight to the hospital. The doctors ran all sorts of tests. She didn’t have “any of the bad stuff.” That was the good news. The bad news was they couldn’t figure out exactly what she did have. This was 1992 all over again only now Sarah was the one with the mystery ailment.

Curtis, baffled and scared, offered to stay home for as long as she was feeling sick. She didn’t want that. He was playing well, he should be out playing. He went to play at Disney in early October, and by the time he came home she was completely exhausted. Back to the doctors. They had been doing blood work for weeks. Some kind of virus had gotten into her and the result, they thought, was something called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Curtis knew what it was as soon as the doctor said it because it had been brought up to him a year earlier. He knew that couldn’t be Sarah’s problem, though, because Sarah was the most energetic, upbeat person he knew.

“That’s exactly the kind of person this usually hits,” the doctor said.

The scariest part was that there was no cure and no way of knowing if it would get better, get worse, stay the same. Curtis sat the boys down and explained to them that Mom wasn’t feeling well and that it was up to all three of them to take care of her. He drew up charts with work assignments for everyone. Dishes were broken on a daily basis, but there was no questioning the effort. Sarah would lie in bed, hear the crash, and know the dishes were being done. “We were down to plastic after a few weeks,” she said.

Sarah had good days and bad days. Some days she couldn’t even get out of bed. On others, she would make it to the bottom of the steps to see the boys off to school. When Curtis was home he brought her lunch in bed every day, drove the boys’ car pools, and even did some cooking. In a sense, Sarah loved what she was seeing. He was bonding with the boys in new ways, and she felt closer to him than she ever had.

He didn’t want to travel, but she kept pushing him out the door. They worked out a plan with her parents and her sister so that someone would come up and stay whenever he had to go away. “I felt so guilty,” Sarah said. “I couldn’t do anything. I knew Curtis needed to play and if he had stayed home because of me I would have felt awful.”

She told him that, so he played. He went to Australia in late November and won a tournament, his first victory anywhere in the world since 1989. That qualified him for an elite, big-money, made-for-TV tournament in Jamaica two weeks later. He didn’t want to go. Sarah pushed him out the door again. He finished fifth.

Curtis was torn. Finally, he was playing good golf again, but he hated the idea of Sarah sitting at home feeling so lousy while he was out playing. She felt well enough to make the trip to the Phoenix Open in January at the start of the ’94 tour, but was completely exhausted by the time she got home. Curtis shot 64 on the last day there to tie for eighth. He was starting to get hot. But Sarah felt so rotten he knew he had to go home. He stayed for two weeks. When Sarah felt better, he decided to play in the Hope.

He arrived in the desert not knowing what was going to happen next. He told a few close friends what was going on so that if he disappeared suddenly, they would know why. He couldn’t stand seeing Sarah sick and he felt helpless and angry watching her suffer. Some days she was better. Other days weren’t as good. He knew that if he stopped playing or starting playing poorly again, she would blame herself and that was the last thing he wanted.

So he did what he was most comfortable doing: he went back to his routine. Hours and hours on the range, trying to get back that feeling he had when he was a kid, pounding balls until dark. Then it was back to the hotel for room service and a phone call home. Every night he would say the same thing: “Are you okay?” And she would say, “I’m fine.” He knew she wasn’t all that fine but at least she wasn’t any worse.

“She’s taken care of me for twenty years,” he said one night. “If I take care of her for the next twenty years, that’s fine with me. Except I know she’ll hate every minute of it.”

He lasted five holes in the shootout that day at the Hope, trading barbs with master of ceremonies Gary McCord and the others, showing the crowd a Curtis Strange they didn’t think existed. McCord, the ex-player turned very funny TV announcer, makes the shootouts work with a steady stream of cracks and one-liners that sets a loose tone for the afternoon.

Strange should have been out on the first hole but survived; should have been out on the second but survived; then became the first player to make a birdie on the third.

“Is this some kind of a round of golf or what?” said McCord, who had pronounced Strange dead on the first two holes only to see him squirm free.

“Least I’m playing,” Strange shot back, a reference to McCord’s relatively brief career.

It was a joke, a throwaway one-liner that got a good laugh from the crowd. But if he had thought about it for a moment, Strange would have realized that his playing was, in fact, a very big deal.