Even Thin Man Can Fatten Up on This Tour

In boxing, they have a saying, “The legs are the first to go.” Dempsey stumbling around the ring after a deft Tunney, unable any longer to muster up the speed and agility of youth. Ali, unable to move out of the way of Larry Holmes’ bludgeons that would have whistled harmlessly over his head in his prime.

In baseball, it’s the eyes that go. You can’t time the curveball anymore or recognize the fast one in time to meet it with your home run stroke.

Basketball, it’s the lungs that go. You can’t get up and down the court in 24 seconds anymore without feeling as if you have a knife plunged in your chest.

Only in golf do you laugh at time. It’s a Fountain of Youth. Baseball has an old-timers’ game, a three-inning travesty of overweight, over-age, ex-athletes who can’t even hit batting-practice pitches anymore. No one takes it seriously.

Golf is a game that is hardest on the nerves, not the rest of the body. Oh, you can’t turn on the ball at age 55 the way you could at 25 or 35, but the golf swing is a series of compensations. The object is to hit the ball straight, not far. Otherwise, a young bull like John Daly would be winning every other week instead of every other year. That’s why the Senior PGA Tour, which comes to the Wilshire Country Club this week, is thriving.

When Al Geiberger was a young player, he was one of the best. He won 12 tournaments, including the PGA, and was second twice in the U.S. Open. He had the perfect temperament for the game: calm, unflappable, good-humored. A new Walter Hagen.

He was so thin as to be invisible sideways. Bob Goalby once said when Geiberger took out his two-iron you couldn’t tell which was which. “A two-iron with a hat on,” he described Al. Dave Marr once bumped into him at a sand trap and apologized, “Oh, excuse me, Allen, I thought you were a rake!”

But Al could play. In 1977, he shocked the golf world by shooting a 59 in the Danny Thomas tournament at Memphis, the first golfer in history to break 60 in a tour event. It was a feat to rank with any in history, Ruth’s 60 home runs, Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile.

But the money in the old days was hardly analogous to what it would become. Geiberger was eighth on the money list in 1963 with $34,126. Last year, eighth on the money list (Corey Pavin) earned $906,305.

So, a player in the Geiberger era could not look forward to a future of world cruises, baronial living, Cadillac in the garage, yacht in the harbor. He had to think of a post-career in which he would 1) get a club job; 2) give lessons; 3) open a driving range; 4) sell golf equipment; 5) open a bar; 6) run a golf shop; or 7) go to work for a living.

No one would even envision a senior tour. No one except the golfing public, that is. It took to the senior tour like flies to a cube of sugar. It hadn’t had enough of Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus from the days when the game had stars, not starters.

The fans knew something about their game that fans in other sports couldn’t imagine: that golf is a game in which you don’t begin to play your best until you’re 40. As Jimmy Connors pointed out, there’s no running in golf. And Hogan’s famous “muscle memory” is part cerebral. An important “muscle” in golf is the brain.

Now, a golfer who shoots the best round in the history of golf is entitled to adulation on that fact alone.

But Geiberger is a hero to another segment of the population for a victory far greater than any PGA, a performance in courage that makes his 59 look like a piece of cake by comparison.

At the end of his career, Geiberger had been so troubled by stomach problems and low sugar that a tournament doctor, John Perry, prescribed a diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to be carried around in his golf bag. That took care of one problem, but, then, he came down with an illness so catastrophic that he really needed to shoot a 49 to survive the cut.

An “ileostomy” is a surgical procedure in which the colon has to be removed and a life with a bag at your side mandated. Many people remove themselves from regular society when they are faced with it.

Geiberger simply went to his locker, collected his clubs--and tried to shoot some more 59s.

He didn’t succeed in that--although he shot a lot of low 60s--but he did succeed in becoming the poster boy for lot of people who thought you couldn’t do that in his condition. He wouldn’t have the stomach for it, so to say.

His sunny outlook came to his aid. “I remember I had been encouraged by the San Diego football player, Rolf Benirschke. He had the same operation a year before and he was already back placekicking for the Chargers when I got my operation. It was such a lift for me, I try to talk about my experience, hoping it will tell others not to quit. It’s important.”

No one ever saw Geiberger throw a club, or kick a ball-washer, or snarl at a spectator in his life. Once, at La Costa, he had a 20-foot putt to win the tournament and he putted--and bit off, maybe, nine feet of it. If Tommy Bolt had done it, the lava would have flown for hours. Geiberger merely threw his head back and laughed. And then sank the next putt.

Geiberger, 58, is one of the golfers on hand for the Ralphs Senior Classic at storied Wilshire this week. He’ll be the one smiling at missed five-footers.

He has made more money as a senior tourist--$3,101,060--than he did as a regular tour player--$1,256,548. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be a senior tour like this,” he admits.

But there is. His 59 on a course has been matched (Chip Beck did it in Las Vegas in 1991.) But the 59 he shot off the course in life may never be.