Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993 TAG: 9301210031
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TUCSON, ARIZ. LENGTH: Medium
STRANGE TRIES TO PUT THE DRIVE BACK IN HIS GOLF GAME
Fear is the key.Although fear and its attendant, anger, generally are considered negative emotions, both are prime ingredients in the rise to the peak of professional golf: fear of failure and self-directed anger at mistakes.
When they are missing from the emotional fuel that powers the drive to the top, the mixture is incomplete and the drive sputters and fails.
For Curtis Strange, now attempting a comeback - the start of a second career - fear has returned.
"I'm scared to death," Strange said before opening his comeback attempt this week in the Northern Telecom Open.
"And that's good. I have a lot of anxiety about the way I'm going to play, and I haven't felt that way in a long time."
The spur of fear and anger over failure hasn't been there since 1990. And in its absence, Strange crashed from the peak of world golf.
He won consecutive U.S. Opens in 1988-89, a feat last achieved by Ben Hogan in 1950-51. He was the leading money-winner three times in a four-year span. He was player of the year in 1988 and the ace of the '89 American Ryder Cup team.
Last year Strange played only 17 times and was 99th on the money list. He did not win.
The big thing was that he really didn't care.
"Last year, when I played badly, it didn't hurt. That's not a good feeling," Strange said.
The fire was out, and he knew it.
Strange, a movie-star handsome man of 38 whose hair has turned more noticeably gray during the two-year lapse into the golfing doldrums, was never one of the game's great stylists.
He wasn't overly long off the tee, and others are better around the green. But he had a consuming desire, a competitive, almost combative drive to be the best that invoked memories of the younger Arnold Palmer, the young Tom Watson.
When that drive left him - and he candidly admitted it did - he had nothing left on which he could rely.
The game became a chore and burden. It bottomed out almost a year ago when he withdrew from the Colonial tournament in Fort Worth, one of his favorites.
"I just couldn't get on the plane," he said.
It was a classic case of burnout, a letdown of proportions rarely seen in golf or any other game. It came in the aftermath of the 1990 U.S. Open.
"I was consumed with the Open," Strange said. The winner of consecutive American national championships, he went into the Open at Medinah with the chance to become the only man since Willie Anderson in 1905 to win the title three times in a row.
All thought, effort, practice and planning was aimed at that goal.
He came close. After three rounds, he was two strokes off the lead, but a last-round 75 sent him reeling back into the pack.
He hasn't been the same since.
"I never knew it would hit me like it did," Strange said.
He was confused, puzzled and frustrated, conditions compounded by a lingering, still-undiagnosed ailment that produced dizziness, disorientation and extreme fatigue.
Two years later, Strange seriously considered giving up the game, and thought long and hard about an offer from one of the major television networks.
Not much later, those competitive fires began to flicker again.
"I don't know why it's come back. But it has. I have an urgency to get it back together," he said.
The illness no longer bothers him. He has gone on an exercise program, running 5 miles a day. He's working and practicing more than he has in a long time.
He has no idea, however, whether the return of desire will be accompanied by the return of his game.
"I don't think it will take all that long to find out if I have the guts to make a shot that I used to, that little cut, a little chip, that 5-foot putt that was so easy before.
"Will I be able to do that again?" he asked. "I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever get back to where I was."
But he's going to try.
"I decided I didn't want to be a spectator."
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