U.S. OPEN : He Does It His Way: in a Hurry

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. â€”  Guess who didn’t win the U.S. Open (again)? Greg Norman. The gods of golf still have it in for Greg.

Guess who did win the U.S. Open? Corey Pavin! The gutty little Bruin.

Let’s have a chorus of “Mighty Bruins, Sons of Westwood.� First the basketball Bruins win the Final Four. And then the Bruin golfer is the Final One.

It wasn’t easy. Shinnecock Hills is the Little Big Horn of golf. It should have smoke signals on the ridges.

Corey Pavin sneaked up on it. He didn’t pull its hat down over its ears or kick it in the shins. He just kind of lay in the deep rough and waited till it got complacent.

All eyes were on Norman all day Sunday. TV tracked him from the driving range to the first tee and faithfully recorded his every shot. You were surprised they didn’t catch him getting out of bed.

No one really noticed Corey. He started the day two over, which is not exactly the caboose of the field. But he was in a cast of characters that included U.S. Open winners, British Open winners, Masters winners, PGA winners.

Corey Pavin had never won any of the above. The knowledgeable golf experts predicted Shinnecock’s 7,000 yards--many of them into the kind of North Atlantic winds which used to sink more ships than the British Navy--would be a hair too long for Corey’s game.

Corey is not your basic grimstalker on a golf course anyway. He actually has this eager look of a guy who’s stumbling toward you in his eagerness to please. He actually hits a shot, then runs after it. Even his walk is such a jaunty, splayed-foot saunter, he reminds you of Charlie Chaplin with a golf club instead of a cane. He should have a dandelion in his buttonhole and pause to smell it from time to time.

I mean, you would never think to call Corey the “Shark� or the “Bear� or the “Hawk.� He hurries everywhere. You know how most golfers are: They are so deliberate, slow to act and contemplative you’d think what they were doing was brain surgery. Pavin acts as if he’s double-parked. He acts as if the game were merely a complicated relay race.

Take the shot that really won him the Open--a four-wood approach shot on No. 18.

Now, if you know golf, you know the registered giants of the game never have a wood shot for an approach to the green. That would be embarrassing. They have six-irons, wedges.

But Corey whipped that four-wood up to the 18th green without blushing--then ran after it like a guy chasing a bus or his hat in the wind.

It bounced short of the green and rolled to within five feet of the hole.

That’s the beauty of golf. As the late Lloyd Mangrum said when a fellow player complained that his unorthodox way to the hole, then one-putting it, was somehow unmanly: “Are we playing how or how many?�

Corey Pavin plays how many. He’s not one of your long-knockers. “All I heard all week,� grinned Pavin after his victory Sunday, “was ‘Corey, you’re away.’ � But, when they got to a green, it was usually Corey who said, “I believe it’s you.�

Corey looks like a bundle of nerves on the golf course. His practice swings are right out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. When he wins a hole--or a tournament--he jumps straight in the air like a guy stomping grapes.

Golfers never hurry. But Corey does. He always looks like he’s late for his own wedding.

But he has won 12 tournaments his way. He has been in a playoff for seven others (he won five of those). His reputation for gutty play is so well established that he was long ago fitted with the dubious laurel of “the best player never to have won a major.�

“A backhanded compliment,� Pavin said in the post-round interview Sunday. “A monkey I’m glad to have off my back.�

His four-wood to the 18th green will ricochet in story and song down the locker-room walls with other great Open shots--Watson’s chip-in at the 17th hole at Pebble in 1982, Palmer driving the green on a par-4 first at Cherry Hills in 1960, Irwin’s 45-foot birdie putt at Medinah in 1990, to name some.

It was a 208-yard shot to the green. A John Daly might use a four-iron for it. But it won the tournament. Corey plays Corey’s game. “I played the most intelligent golf I’ve ever played today,� he said. To win, not to awe the gallery. “I told my caddy when we started out, ‘My goal is to be even at the end of the day.’ �

That’s what he was--280. Par. It’ll win most Opens. Particularly at Shinnecock. (Raymond Floyd won with a 279 the last time it was played here.)

Corey dubbed his four-wood approach “the best shot I’ve ever hit under pressure.�

It was critical. But another shot was too. The shot Norman hit to 17. He needed a birdie on one of the two finishing holes to tie Pavin. But his tee shot on 17 drifted lazily right--and into a sand trap.

He now needed a two on the 18th hole to force a playoff.

Norman gets beaten by twos on the 18th, he doesn’t win by them. Sunday he got beaten by a four. Wood, that is, not shots.

Pavin should get it bronzed. So, it’ll go along with Bobby Jones’ Calamity Jane putter or Harry Vardon’s cleek. A part of golfing lore. The club that won the Open.