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Show by Jim Murray If only he could putt, for Peete's sake You can tell right away what's wrong with Calvin Peete's golf game. Even a driving range instructor could spot it. It's his left arm. He doesn't keep it straight. His left elbow flies. He's got a takeaway like a 10-handicapper. You see him swing and you reach for your wallet. The word goes around the clubhouse. "Hey, we got a dude with a flying elbow. It doesn't straighten in. See if he's got a game for Saturday. Give him two a side with two presses." It's a fatal flaw. Those of us who have it know all too well the results: a big, banana slice over two fairways into the hillside gor-se. gor-se. Or a smother hook that never gets off the ground as it slides out of bounds. The top shot into the water. That's the first thing they teach you in golf: keep your left arm straight. Everything else is secondary. If you don't do that, forget the rest of the game. Only, Calvin Peete can't. His left elbow has got a permanent bend built into it. It's as much a part of Calvin Peete as the color of his skin or the calm, contemplative attitude he got from a lifetime of knowing that life doesn't always deal you aces, that you got to learn how to play the deuces and treys, too, if you want to stay in the game. Calvin Peete never worried about his left elbow when he broke it falling out of a tree at the age of 12 in Florida. At the time, it didn't seem important. Calvin didn't think he was going to be needing it for much of anything, They told him you never can expect to play championship golf unless you take up the game about the time you start to walk. You should teethe on a 4-iron. Peete nodded. With a late start and a crooked left elbow and a childhood about as far removed from the country club atmosphere as you could imagine, Calvin Peete developed into probably the best player, tee to green, in the game today. It's a sports story to boggle the imagination. The statistics are astonishing. You look at them and you conclude you are dealing with a guy who was brought up at Winged Foot in the summer and Seminole in the winter. Or a black Ben Hogan. You are dealing with a guy who drives the ball in the fairway 85 percent of the time. Who hits greens 71 percent of the time. Who leads the tour in both those all-important categories. Who averages 70.7 strokes around, which is only l100th of a percentage point behind the leader, Raymond Floyd. Bobby Jones would gasp. Harry Vardon would hawk the tee trying to copy his grip. Only two players have won more money than the $262,658 Calvin Peete has won this year. This could make J.P. Morgan gasp, or John D. Rockefeller. He has won six tournaments in a year and a half. Most guys don't win that many in their lives. He has won twice as many tournaments tourna-ments this year as Tom Watson. You would half expect most players on the PGA tour to be looking for that tree to fall out anyway, uou was turtnest trom nis mina ana Calvin reasoned you didn't need a straight left arm for most of life's other activities. Calvin figured he was going to have to make money a lot harder ways than putting for it. The doctor who treated the arm was less cavalier about it. The elbow was broken in three places and the simple thing was to clean the wreckage and let Calvin do what he could with an arm that would be useful mainly for opening mail. He would never .have to cut steak with it. anyway. But the doctor demurred and put the pieces back together as best he could. "When I saw the diagram of the break on my cast and saw the surgery the doctor did, I knew I was lucky I would ever have any use from that arm again," Peete recalled the other day as he stood on a practice tee at Riviera Country Club on the eve of the PGA tournament. His doctor was a scratch handicapper with a scalpel. A lot of people thought a bent elbow was the least of his handicaps when Peete took up golf. In the first place, he wasn't blond. He didn't go to Brigham Young or Wake Forest. He not only hadn't been to college, he hadn't even finished high school. The bigots were ready when he took up the game. "You don't run in golf," they jeered. "You think." "You can't slam dunk a putt, Sonny." "This isn't baseball, you can't steal a birdie." "A par-5 isn't the long jump, fella." "You can't run a 63 around end." "You can't learn golf on a blacktop." Peete just listened and held his counsel. Something he does well. He kept his patience. patien-ce. He started the game at age 21, which is about the time most people are giving it up. ot or tnai doctor to paten tnem up. mi it gets better. The plain facts of the matter are that Calvin Peete would be to golf what Man o' War was to the race track if he could putt. Calvin, not Man o' War. Calvin, you see, putts like Man o' War. Or that fabled gorilla of Sam Snead's. Calvin putts like a guy playing customer golf with the boss present. He hits the ball so close to the hole, he couldn't three-putt if both his elbows were broken. But he lags seven-foot putts. Seven feet is three-putt range to Calvin. He misses more birdie putts than anyone on the tour. He putts like a guy who just stepped on a light socket or just put up his wife's fur coat on the match. For all the tour categories he leads in, he's off the board in putts per round, he knows what the white Ben Hogan felt like in his declining years. Golf isn't the only thing Peete thought he was never too old for. Education was another. His golf was good enough for the tour. So was his arithmetic. He used to sell jewelry for a living. Calvin could drive, chip and add, all right, but he was a little weak on the minor British poets, the principal parts of transitive verbs and the major exports of South American countries. So he went to high school in Detroit at the age of 39, got his diploma and became a full-fledged full-fledged member of the PGA, an organization he adorns by his presence. Believe me, when they say on the first tee at the PGA, "It's your honors Mr. Peete," it's not just the golf expression. They can mean it. (c) 1983, Los Angeles Times Dist. by Los Angeles Times Syndicate |