Golf: 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.