Lehman A True-Blue U.S. Guy

Already, Tom Lehman is showing the colors. When he arrived at the Spokane Country Club on a windy, Quaker-gray Monday morning, Lehman cut both the chill and the drab with a blue Ryder Cup pullover, the legend “USA” stitched across his shoulder blades.

Begging the question: which comes first, the uniform or the game face?

Lehman has been working on the latter since easing himself off the PGA Tour a couple weeks ago, though his stop at the Junior League of Spokane’s golf exhibition didn’t allow him to work on much of anything except saying “cheese.”

He did get around SCC in 2 under par, and he did get to tell a funny story on his wife, Melissa, who apparently is to golf what Donald Trump is to discretion.

“She plays golf about every two years,” reported Lehman, the 1996 Player of the Year and the closest thing to Everyman you’ll find on the Tour. “We played in a couples alternate-shot event about six months ago.

“On the first tee, I drove it 275 yards down the middle - a typical shot for me. She gets up for the second shot and shanks it 40 yards into the weeds - a typical shot for her. I recovered nicely and hit it about 8 feet from the hole, but putting is the worst part of her game and she knocked the 8-footer 20 feet by the hole. But I was grinding hard and I lined it up and managed to knock it in for a five.

“We’re walking to the next tee and I’m mumbling and grumbling and she said, ‘Tom, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Well, we made bogey.’ And she said, ‘It’s not my fault - you took three shots and I only took two.”’

This is just the kind of team spirit to be avoided in the Ryder Cup, where tensions are thick enough between the Europeans and Yanks without any intramural disputes.

Indeed, having evolved over the past decade from pastoral trifle into Jingomania, the Ryder now has more in common with World Cup soccer than golf.

And heaven help him, Tom Lehman loves it so even if he was on the losing side at Oak Hill in 1995.

As a Ryder rookie, he went 2-1 - strafing Seve Ballesteros 4 and 3 on Sunday even while his teammates were letting the Cup slip away again. And yet what Lehman remembers most is Tuesday.

Tuesday?

“When I got to the golf course, I was so nervous I could hardly play - and it was only a practice round,” Lehman recalled. “The crowds are so enthusiastic. It’s Tuesday morning and they’re screaming ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’ It’s like the Stanley Cup finals or something. Just the electricity, the atmosphere, it just charges you.”

You can just imagine it charging Tom Lehman like that, because even after $5.5 million of Tour earnings he still looks as if he’s come straight to the first tee from his shift at the hardware store. Put him in a foursome with Tiger Woods and Lehman will be all but invisible, but he’s a role model for the rest of us - a billboard for persistence, a guy who kept hitting it and hitting it until he finally holed it out.

He was a Tour scuffler for three years, a mini-tour scuffler after that and nearly the head pro at the University of Minnesota, except that athletic director Rick Bay wanted him to rent cross country skis in the pro shop. Then his game came together in the bushes and bloomed unchecked when he got back on the Tour in 1992. He cracked the top 10 at the U.S. Open that very year, and after some agonizing near-misses in the Masters and U.S. Open, he became British Open champion last year - to say nothing of the Tour’s top money winner and low shooter.

“I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who are shaking their heads and saying, ‘I used to kick that guy’s butt every week,”’ Lehman admitted. “It wasn’t that long ago.” By his 1996 standards, 1997 has been a disappointment - but only in that “it’s been so close to being a great year,” he said.

He hasn’t won a tournament this year, but he again was in a position to win the Open (he finished third). He’s 17th on the money list, but fourth among scoring leaders and third in the PGA’s all-around statistics.

“A couple putts here and there and I win the U.S. Open and the Mercedes championship,” he said. “It hasn’t been that far off.”

Then again, he wasn’t going to be Player of the Year again - not after Woods performed his Augustaectomy at the Masters. What he can be is one of the players of the year who bring back the Ryder Cup in two weeks.

He is ready for the gamesmanship - already he is among those decrying European captain Ballesteros’ cold-blooded replacement of injured Miguel Angel Martin. “It’s unfair,” said Lehman, “but it doesn’t surprise me, considering who’s the captain.”

And he is ready for the hostile reaction Spaniards are cooking up in Valderrama.

“You never get crowds here hysterically cheering against you,” he said. “You can either let that get to you or let it motivate you - and to me, those are fighting words. It really motivates me to hear somebody respond that way.”

He thinks the U.S. has enough similar thinkers - veterans like Fred Couples and Davis Love III, and steely new assassins like Woods and Justin Leonard.

“Somebody yells, ‘Miss it!”’ Lehman said, “and it’ll be, ‘I’ll miss it up your rear end.”’

That would be the blue material to go with the red and white. Tom Lehman is showing the colors, all right.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review