His Shangri La Is on a Golf Course

INDIAN WELLS — In an attic somewhere in this land there’s a portrait of the golfer John Cook, and his face is wrinkled and weathered and there are furrows in his brow and his eyes squint in a two-fairway gaze and he looks, oh, 50 years old or so and his face looks, as the fellow said, like two miles of bad road.

You’re all familiar with the Portrait of Dorian Grey story where the picture aged but not the real Dorian Grey.

Well, the John Cook that won the Bob Hope Chrysler Golf Classic here Sunday is a sunny-looking teenager, not a line in his face, clear skin. Looks as if he’s on his way to his high school prom. Or maybe he’s still an undergrad at Ohio State University, wondering which frat to join.

You think Dick Clark won’t age? He looks like a Medicare poster boy compared to John Cook.

It isn’t as if playing championship golf is all that easy. The bleeding might be internal, but standing over six-foot putts for a living can age a fellow.

John Cook is going to be 40 this year, but he still might get carded if he dropped into a neighborhood bar for a beer. He’s in his 18th year on the pro tour, but he looks as if he just got out of Q-school. Just got his pro card. This was the ninth tournament he has won on tour, and only the great ones go on to win in double figures.

It’s kind of a dirty trick. He should look the part. Guys with his background in the great game are supposed to look grizzled, worried, absent-minded. Cook just looks--well, young. He might have trouble persuading the guards he’s one of the pros one of these days. There are sons of contemporary golfers who look older.

You might think golf was such an easy game it produces no wear and tear on the body, the face, the psyche. But Cook has spent 17 years learning the hard way what an unforgiving game this can be. That’s why you’re sure there’s a portrait hidden away somewhere that shows the ravages of golf.

Shangri La it’s not either. Shangri La, you will remember, was the Tibetan paradise where no one ever aged, so long as you remained in its folds. The minute you came around the mountain pass out of it you became 100 years old. John apparently stayed safe and young.

Cook knows first-hand what a treacherous old strumpet this game can be. A little more than a year ago, he never wanted to look a nine-iron in the face again. Two decades of chasing the Holy Grail par had left him exhausted, burned out, even if he didn’t look it. The concentration, the travel, the necessity of blocking out every inch of a 7,000-yard hall of horrors with what Churchill said were implements ill-suited to the purpose had taken their toll.

John had flirted with immortality in his career. He was second in the British Open once (1991), only one shot behind the victor, Nick Faldo. He was second in a PGA once (1992) and fifth in a U.S. Open.

Golf is supposed to be fun, but it can be as much fun as coal mining when the putts don’t drop, the tee shots go left-to-right, the trap shots are bladed and you don’t get to play on Saturday and Sunday.

“People said, ‘Well, have fun,’ but a 75 is no fun,” Cook says. “I used to love this game. I couldn’t wait for Thursday to come--and even if I missed the cut, I thought, ‘Great! Now I got five days to get ready for next week’s tournament!’ But when the end of the day would be a 75, it got old.”

Even if he didn’t

When it became just another day at the lathe, a loss leader proposition, Cook even weighed picking up, marking WD on his card and putting his clubs in the attic.

Golf does that to you. Standard procedure in golf is to hit the wall sooner or later, and Cook was about to put the clubs in the attic and throw away the trophies when he went down to Florida to visit his mentor, Ken Venturi. Now, Venturi knows all about the blahs in golf. He went from begging for exemptions once (1964) to winning the U.S. Open, no less.

What transpired between Cook and Venturi is private and personal, Cook says, but Venturi apparently spent little time on swing flaws and concentrated on the mental approach to the game.

It didn’t show in his face, but the game was making Cook old. He came away from Venturi as young as he looked. “I had a head cleansing,” he grins.

Cook has always been capable of incandescent golf, of lighting up a course with the most brilliant iron play this side of a Johnny Miller in his prime.

He fired 66-69-67-62-63 at the desert golf courses this week. He made 20 birdies in the last two days. That’s not golf, that’s magic.

He found himself 24 under par but trailing Mark Calcavecchia by three shots as they teed it up head-to-head Sunday.

Calcavecchia needs lessons from Raymond Floyd on how to smuggle a lead into the clubhouse. No one ever caught Floyd when he had a three-shot lead.

“I stood on the fifth tee today with a five-shot lead,” Calcavecchia recalled ruefully. “I shot 32 under. When you can’t win shooting 32 under, what can you do?”

In the desert, that’s a nice start.

The tournament turned on the 17th hole. The contestants came up all even at 31 under. Calcavecchia, ever the aggressive player--he goes after a course like Dempsey--pulled a driver out on the 398-yard hole. He was sure he could hit it over the trees guarding the left side of the fairway.

He couldn’t. His drive hit a tree and ricocheted left, and then after hooking a three-iron, he was still 114 yards from the hole. Cook hit the safer, conservative three-wood, did not challenge the trees. Calcavecchia’s approach out of the rough would not stop on the green, bouncing through and past. Cook hit his approach within 12 feet of the hole. He two-putted for a par. Calcavecchia’s approach left him two putts and a bogey. That was it. They both birdied 18, but Calcavecchia finished up a buck short.

The victory may make John Cook years younger. If so, and if he has a big year this year, he may be the only player in history to arrive at the Open some year in a baby carriage.