Croquet on the Green

The dedicated Sunday golfer is a testament to hope. He falls over backward on the tee because Gary Player does. He cuts his ball nearly in half, trying to make it back up on the green just like Arnold Palmer. He crouches like Jack Nicklaus and peers curiously into the cup--looking for goodness knows what. When he smothers a drive, it is a "controlled hook," and when he shanks an approach, he is "opening up the green." He talks cunningly of "snakes" and "beaches" and "froghair,"* and he coyly buys hole-in-one insurance to pay for the party he is sure to host tomorrow or the day after.

Last week, in California's $35,000 Bing Crosby tournament, Oregon's Bob Duden, 42, gave golfers something new to discuss. A little-known pro who has never won a major tournament, Duden uses a bent-shafted pendulum putter that he swings between his legs like a croquet mallet, in the same manner once espoused by a Mickey Finn comic strip character and hopeless duffer named Duffy. But for Duden the croquet stroke works fine. At the Monterey Peninsula Country Club, he birdied five of the last six holes for a third-round 67 that suddenly shot him into the lead over a field that included Palmer, Player, Nicklaus and 152 others.

In the next day's final round at Pebble Beach, Duden got a chance to demonstrate his putter before a nationwide TV audience. Right up until the final hole, his awkward but accurate style kept him in red hot contention. On the 18th hole, he needed a 25-footer for a total of 285 that, as it turned out, would have tied him with Billy Casper for the $5,300 top prize. But then his touch left him. He missed the 25-footer, blew his second putt, finally settled for seventh money of $1,400, behind Casper and five other players. Even then he did better than Arnold Palmer, who wound up shooting a 293, was later disqualified for playing a provisional ball illegally in the third round.

Would Duden's odd-shaped putter start a new fad? Golfers will buy anything--and Duden claims to have peddled 1,800 copies (at $15 apiece) through pro shops in the past three years. "Putting between your legs is good--it allows you to view the ball and its intended line of roll with both eyes," says a Philadelphia clubmaker. But there is one problem. "It also gets other golfers laughing, and that's embarrassing. It puts more pressure on the putter--and he's got enough already."

* Translations: curving putts, sand traps, and the grass where the fairway meets the green.

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