Sport: Playing for The History Books

Searching for context, a golfer and a basketball team found something better than winning last week. Curtis Strange and the Los Angeles Lakers were each playing for history; their opponents, Nick Faldo and the Detroit Pistons, were seeking only national championships. The results were rather wonderful.

Almost at the moment that Strange was getting up and down out of a sand trap, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was doing much the same thing under a basket, to extend both ordeals an extra day. "I don't object to a longer season," ! Abdul-Jabbar says reasonably. "But I don't think we should be competing with Wimbledon."

Strange's fitful par at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass., forced an 18- hole play-off for the U.S. Open title. Because it involved the British Open champion Faldo, thoughts of Brookline's previous nationals were unavoidable. In 1963 Arnold Palmer held the British title when he lost a play-off to Julius Boros. So did Englishman Ted Ray in 1913, when he bowed to the Boston amateur Francis Ouimet. This was America's historic breakthrough in golf.

At great occasions lately, the rest of the world has broken back. By any objective measurement, Britain's Sandy Lyle, the current Masters champion, is the most accomplished player of the moment. In some order, he is followed by the Australian Greg Norman, the Spaniard Seve Ballesteros and perhaps the Americans Lanny Wadkins and Strange. A winner of $3 million and no major titles, Strange was the signature U.S. golfer of the '80s.

He went to Wake Forest, Palmer's school, though Strange ceased to be a pup out of Palmer when he was snooty one time to a volunteer scorekeeper. Golf's great king slammed the young individualist publicly, along with all his modern kind, for "discourteous and ungentlemanly behavior and thoughtlessness that is despicable to me." Manners aside, Strange indicated odd priorities for such a talented man. He customarily skipped the British Open because of its proximity to his own little tournament for a brewery.

A source of some hilarity over the past few years of dour golfing clones is the fact that Strange actually does have an identical twin brother, who presumably smiles all the time. At the Masters in 1985, Curtis had a near collision with history, blowing his chance by hitting a creek at 13 and a pond at 15. Nobody cried, not even Strange, though he did last week. He beat Faldo in the play-off by four strokes but really by something extra that the Englishman well understood. Recalling his own day of glory at the British Open in Scotland, Faldo said gracefully, "That was my dream as a kid. This must have been Curtis'."

Choked by thoughts of his deceased father, Strange could scarcely say what it meant to win the U.S. Open. Just beating Faldo head to head couldn't be it. He hadn't cried when he won the Houston, the Hartford or the Honda. "It means what every little boy dreams about," he said finally, "when he plays golf all by himself late in the afternoon, and he puts down three or four balls. One is Snead, one is Hogan, one is Nicklaus and maybe one is Strange." And he is entered in the British Open in two weeks.