The Confidence Man

Things were not going at all well for Ray Floyd. At the finish of the 16th hole, his game seemed to be coming apart. The five-stroke lead he had held at the start of the day was down to one. He had bogeyed the 15th by missing an 8-ft. putt, and now he faced a 35-ft. downhill curler that could easily be the first of three putts. The hole, he said, "looked two miles away." Among the 12,000 onlopkers was South Africa's Gary Player, Floyd's playing partner and closest competitor, ready to take advantage of any slip. Floyd did not clutch. He calmly arranged his pudgy form over the ball and stroked it into the cup for a birdie. Admiringly, Player walked toward him and extended a congratulatory hand. The gesture was Player's tacit admission that, two holes away from the finish, Floyd had as much as won the 1969 Professional Golfers' Association title.

It was ironic that Floyd had cinched matters with a putt, since putting had been his biggest hangup through all four rounds at the National Cash Register golf course at Dayton. He took a total of 121 strokes on the greens--six more than Player, five more than Bert Greene, who finished third, and eleven more than fourth place Jimmy Wright. Floyd really won the P.G.A. with his booming, if sometimes errant drives, and with his beautifully wrought iron play. He hit 59 greens in par, compared with Player's 53. There was another ingredient in Floyd's winning eight-under-par score of 276: self-assurance. "I feel superb," he said midway through the tournament. "I just don't see how I can shoot over par." After the match, he admitted: "Confidence is the key to my game. I would have no business being out there if I were not good."

The Other Shoe. Gary Player, who has a reputation for being equally sure of himself, lost much of his aplomb at the P.G.A. He was the target of third-round harassment by an ad hoc civil rights group that felt the Dayton Chamber of Commerce might better have applied its energies to the city's ghetto problems than to sponsoring the P.G.A. tournament.

At one point, a program was tossed at Player's feet as he was about to drive. When he walked to the tenth tee, someone threw a cup of Coke and ice in his face. Player turned to his tormentor and asked, "What have I done to you, sir?" A small group of dissidents rushed the tenth green as Player and Jack Nicklaus were preparing to putt. The interlopers were quickly hustled off. "The man who threw the Coke called me a racist," Player later complained. "Just because you're from South Africa, it doesn't mean you're a racist." After the tournament, Player admitted that all through the final round he had been nervously waiting for more trouble. "It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop." It never did. An increased force of police and security guards was finally able to restore tranquility to the greens.

The disturbances on the National Cash Register links demonstrated that society's noisiest problems have caught up with the sedate world of professional golf. The final round of the National Airlines Open in Miami last March was marred by demonstrations of striking airline mechanics--National's very own. Like the group at Dayton, they timed their brief appearance for maximum coverage by network TV and the press. In April, rednecks at the Greater Greensboro (N.C.) Open repeatedly shouted, "Miss it, nigger!" at Charlie Sifford, one of the tour's black regulars.

Playing Safe. Nothing seems able to distract Ray Floyd from his winning ways. Representing the Lake Havasu Country Club in Arizona, he won the Greater Jacksonville Open in March. In July, he finished four strokes ahead of the pack in the American Golf Classic, lowering the tournament record by 7 strokes at Akron's forbidding Firestone Country Club course. "I played so well, it scared me," he says. So far this season, he has played well enough to win $109,470 in competition.

That is a large prize for someone whose tournament regime is somewhat less than rigorous. "I get to the course about an hour before a match," says Floyd. "I like to hit for about 30 minutes, putt for ten and then relax. I try to get at least six hours' sleep." There were times earlier in Floyd's continuing career as a bachelor golfer when six hours was about the total for the week. It was not the girl chasing that wore him out, he insists, "it was the girl catching." His longstanding fondness for Scotch resulted in some memorable mornings after. "I'd go out there and shoot a 66 and feel so bad it was unbelievable," he recalls. During the 1966 U.S. Open in San Francisco, he found a topless go-go joint he liked so much that he bought into it. "I never trained, never was serious, never worked on my game," he says. He admits that he is no more conscientious today.

Then what caused the sudden turnabout in Floyd's fortunes? "All of a sudden I just felt it," he says. His style is strictly "power school," and has not changed an iota this year. "I can hit long when I want to," he explains. "I like to go for the flag. I've never played safe in my life." Never? Well, in the last round of the P.G.A., he began babying the ball to protect his lead and wound up with a mediocre 74. "I've never played with that big a lead before," Floyd apologizes. "But I know one thing. I'll never try to play it safe again. It's not my style."

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