Jacklin Finds Competitive Edge Fun Again

Being a one-day circus of clinics, shootouts and celebrity rubbernecking, the Pro Classic at MeadowWood has no leader in the clubhouse.

Instead, Monday’s golfpourri had Tony Jacklin, the best over-50 player on the planet - until next Sunday, anyway.

By shooting 67 to win something called the Franklin Quest Championship in Park City, Utah, on Sunday, Jacklin became the Senior PGA Tour’s king for a week - and a bonus for the Pro Classic, although even in the instant information age it’s impossible to market Sunday’s hero in time for Monday’s shotgun start.

Not that another tin cup was going to goose Jacklin’s drawing power. But it did wonders for his exempt status and, in turn, for his spirits - even if he did three-putt the final hole.

“I hadn’t played that great this year,” said Jacklin. “Suddenly you find yourself in a position to win and inevitably you’re struggling to handle the situation.”

Odd. At age 51, he has been a champion on every continent. He won the British Open in 1969 when no Briton had done it in 18 years, and a year later was the first Brit in 50 years to capture the U.S. Open. And when the bad guys hadn’t won a Ryder Cup since the gutta divorced the percha, he captained Europe over the United States in 1985.

Yet Tony Jacklin considers the Senior Tour a place to learn - and to forget what drove him to stow his sticks when he turned 40.

“I was living in Britain and I was under a lot of pressure all the time,” he recalled. “Every time I showed up to play, people were expecting so dang much. The media was on my case all the time. I just stopped enjoying golf. I wasn’t playing it on my own terms. It was about the only thing I did when I got to 40 that made me unhappy, so I stopped doing it.

“The Senior Tour was there as an opportunity for a second chance. I’m not doing the Senior Tour for anything else but for me and I’m having the time of my life.”

Not surprising. Don’t imagine the London tabloids dish much dirt on the Franklin Quest Championship.

Still, if he never became the English Jack Nicklaus as his countrymen demanded, Jacklin - with the considerable help of friends like Nick Faldo and Seve Ballesteros - was the man who administered CPR to the Ryder Cup. And got under the skin of American golf in the process.

The United States hadn’t lost the Cup since 1957 when Jacklin was named captain of Team Europe in 1983. Two years later, the Yanks were drilled 16-1/2-11-1/2 - and then lost the 1987 rematch on American soil. Europe kept the Cup with a tie in ‘89, after which Jacklin turned the captaincy over to Bernard Gallacher.

“I made some changes in the way players were treated,” Jacklin said. “We started flying the Concorde instead of back-of-the-bus on economy and paying for our own laundry and turning up in scruffy - not scruffy, but cheap - outfits chosen by a committee that didn’t understand what was going on. I think if a player feels good, he’s going to play good if he’s got it in him. By and large, that was the bottom line - and all of a sudden, America was paying attention. They got their backsides kicked a couple of times.”

And their noses out of joint. Bad enough that they were losing to the foreign legion, but some American pros were miffed that Jacklin dared to predict it.

Suddenly, Tony Jacklin was a villain in the mold of Alexsander Belov or the Taiwanese Little League or anybody else who’s ever stomped on our proprietary piety.

“I read that (Lanny) Wadkins thought I was antagonistic,” Jacklin remembered. “People would ask me who I thought would win and I’d said, ‘Us.’ He considered that an insult when I was a guest in the country, which was nonsense. What am I going to say? I didn’t slag the American team. I didn’t say, ‘You guys can’t play.’ I knew how difficult it was going to be, but you have to instill confidence in your men.

“What concerns me now is that for the good of the matches, Europe needs to win again soon. Otherwise, people are going to treat it as the foregone conclusion we had before and not a competitive entity.”

And for Jacklin, golf is a waste of time without competition. It doesn’t have to be cutthroat - the clubby little Senior Tour is anything but that - but it does have to be competition.

“I still feel out there that unless I get everything right nearly all the time, somebody’s going to beat me,” Jacklin said. “And that’s great. That’s pushing yourself to the outer limits.

“I would not play golf if it wasn’t for the competition. I’m a professional. I want to try to perfect it if I can. If I wasn’t a pro golfer playing tournaments, I’d rather walk the dog than play golf for fun. That might sound crazy, but there’s a lot of guys who feel the same way. We do it to stretch ourselves, and we’re fortunate that we’ve been given this second opportunity to play again.”

And be the best at their craft, one week at a time.

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