He’s Singhing in the Ohio Rain

DUBLIN, Ohio — I love to watch Vijay Singh play golf. He doesn’t stride a course, he saunters. Talk about smelling the flowers along the way. He does.

You get the feeling he’s the only guy out there who could play the game in a tuxedo. And not look out of place. You’d think he was on his way to a full-dress ball.

He’s so loose, he jangles. He seems to be made up of double-jointed parts. His swing is a kind of light ripple, not that hair-in-the-eyes lunge of, say, Arnold Palmer. But the ball goes just as far.

He kind of romances the golf course. Soothes it. His personality is the same whether he makes a double bogey or an eagle. He greets them with the same half-grin and sunny disposition. He’s as cheerful as a summer’s day. You’d swear he was playing a $2 Nassau with the guys from the garage instead of a near-major tournament for a third of a million dollars.

He won the Leaky Roof Open here Monday, to the intense relief of a dozen Memorial Tournament sponsors, half a hundred journalists and 78 golfers. You needed 14 clubs, a jar of VapoRub and enough rain gear to survive in the North Atlantic to compete. The Cough Drop Invitational.

Singh is as elegant as an archduke but, of Indian ancestry, he is from Fiji, a tiny dot in the South Pacific where you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to come across a guy who might be a leader in the clubhouse.

But it was Singh’s utter unflappability that made him excel at this nerve-racking game, in which the bleeding is all internal. Palmer played power golf, Jack Nicklaus, precise golf. The adjective you would apply to Singh’s game is “serene.” He’d make a great poker player. You’d never know what cards he was holding. Every tournament he had won before Monday--three of them--was in a playoff, and that tells you something of Vijay’s inner resources.

His game is, like he, steady and unspectacular. How he learned it out there in the trade winds is not immediately apparent. Golfers come from Latrobe, Pa.; Scioto, the hills of West Virginia--in a pinch, from Scotland--not from equatorial grass-skirt atolls such as Fiji.

Singh has the perfect temperament for this maddening game. In fact, he’s so relaxed, he sometimes seems to have nodded off out there. He walks slow, talks slow, as if he’s playing in a dream. But he plays like a dream. He’s as emotionless as a faro dealer. Or a border guard.

But he’s the hardest worker on the tour. Hogan used to practice till his hands bled. And Vijay stops just short of that. He wears gloves.

“For me, the tournament day goes from dawn till dark,” he says. “Other guys, when they finish a round, they go back to the motel, watch television or go shopping. I go to the driving range.”

It has paid off. Singh has earned $3,424,279 in his career. He made $342,000 in winning the Memorial here Monday. One more first and he can buy his own island.

He really won the tournament on the 11th hole, where he resumed play after Sunday’s rainout. He flew a three-wood to within a foot and a half on the par-five hole and calmly sank the putt for an eagle three.

That opened a two-shot gap between him and Scott Hoch, a lead Hoch was unable to close.

In fact, Singh had a three-shot lead as he started 17, then promptly bogeyed it.

“I get too relaxed when I get a three-shot lead,” he said later, grinning.

If he got any more relaxed, he’d have to leave a wake-up call on each shot. A loose-limbed 6 feet 2, Vijay also plays in eyeglasses--he’s nearsighted--which adds to his professorial appearance.

Golf is as mysterious to most Fijians as igloo-building, but Singh’s dad was an airplane technician who somehow acquired the taste for the great game and indoctrinated his son.

The son got good enough to acquire a sponsor, and promptly won the Nigerian Open.

“When I called home, my wife and my mother cried,” he recalls.

John Wayne would get the part if they had made the Vijay Singh Story. Vijay wins the shootouts too.

This was only a 54-hole tournament here, thanks to storms that would daunt a North Sea trawler. If they release it as a documentary, it should be “Victory At Sea.”

Vijay means “victory” in Hindi, we’re told, but it’s not likely Tiger Woods’ gallery will attach itself to him at this year’s U.S. or British Opens.

But that won’t bother Vijay Singh. Nothing bothers Vijay Singh.