FORT WORTH, Texas -- He is in a match he admits he can't win, which may be a first for Lanny Wadkins. He is 41 years old. The end of his PGA Tour career is three-up with three to play -- dormie, the golfing term is.
Wadkins is running out of holes. Not even the man considered by his peers as the best match-play golfer in spikes can win this one.
But if age is going to beat him, it had better make some birdies. Literally and figuratively, Wadkins hasn't stopped firing at the pins.
"The only thing that bothered me when I got to be 40 was the sense of urgency," Wadkins said. "It was the first time I ever realized my career would not last forever."
Wadkins' 20th season on the PGA Tour may become his best. In 12 events before this weekend's Southwestern Bell Colonial, he has one victory, four top-three finishes and seven top-10 finishes. The victory at the United Hawaiian Open, his 20th, moved Wadkins into third place on the career victories list among the regularly active PGA Tour members. Only Tom Watson (32) and Raymond Floyd (21) are ahead.
It is no coincidence that Wadkins is second on the money list this season with $558,072. It is a Ryder Cup year. He is first in qualifying points (525.199), making him a shoo-in for the U.S. team. In September, the United States will attempt to bring back the Cup from Europe, which has held it since 1985.
It will be Wadkins' seventh Ryder Cup appearance. Only three other Americans -- Billy Casper, Gene Littler and Sam Snead -- have played in as many.
In the 1985 Ryder Cup match at The Belfry in England, the partisan crowd booed the U.S. players as they were introduced on the first tee.
"It bothered me," Peter Jacobsen said. "When they booed Lanny, he looked up and said, 'I love it.' He proceeded to knock it down the middle and beat the pants off the guy he played."
In 1989, captain Floyd chose Wadkins with a wild-card pick. On the final day, Floyd placed him in the next-to-last match, the position reserved for those who cannot and will not choke. Wadkins, at the end of his poorest season in eight years, defeated Nick Faldo, one-up.
The point Wadkins earned -- and the one scored by fellow Wake Forest All-America Curtis Strange against Ian Woosnam in the final -- secured a comeback tie against the Europeans. In a recent television interview, Wadkins interrupted commentator Ben Wright to correct a misconception that the U.S. team lost.
"Come on, Ben," Wadkins said. "You don't have a very good memory. We didn't lose. As a matter of fact, Curtis and I dusted their two heroes."
In the 1983 Ryder Cup, Wadkins needed to win the par-five 18th at PGA National in Florida to salvage a tie with Jose-Maria Canizares of Spain and a victory for the United States. With his teammates watching alongside him -- and feeling the weight of the country on his shoulders -- Wadkins lay two, 80 yards away from a pin placed right behind a bunker.
The sand wedge shot nearly went in the hole, Wadkins birdied, and that was the last time the United States won the Ryder Cup. After the victory, team captain Jack Nicklaus said Wadkins "needs a wheelbarrow" to carry the guts necessary to hit that sand wedge.
"He has left a pretty indelible imprint on people's minds that he will hit the shot he has to hit to win the tournament," said Vinny Giles, his agent who, like Wadkins, is a Virginia native and former U.S. Amateur champion.
"He's going to fight you tooth and toenail," Ben Crenshaw said. "Most of the time, Lanny's playing well. The few times he isn't playing well, he'll get it around somehow. That's the player who's dangerous."
For all his accomplishments, Wadkins has gone unnoticed by the public. The public pays attention to majors. Wadkins has won one, the 1977 PGA, the same number as Wayne Grady, Jeff Sluman, Lou Graham, Jack Fleck and Tony Manero. His record in the majors is a pothole on the road to posterity.
"I've had some opportunities," Wadkins said, as wistfully as the self-confident get. "I've got a lot of seconds and thirds. It's been a little frustrating. My game is set up for those courses."
Wadkins drives straight. He is among the best iron players on the tour. At times, his putter left him. At the Masters, his brain left him -- it took Wadkins 15 years to realize he shouldn't hit at the pins on the hilly, deceptive greens. Once he did, he finished third the last two years.
Wadkins has three runner-up finishes at the PGA, including a sudden-death loss to Larry Nelson in 1987. He finished second to Floyd at the 1986 U.S. Open, capping a streak of four top-seven finishes in five years. He finished fourth in the Seve Ballesteros-Tom Watson duel at the 1984 British Open.
Good record, yes. But winning major championships spells the difference between recognition by peers and by the public -- between respect and history.
Being the most-feared match-play golfer in the nation is as worthwhile as being an excellent wishbone quarterback. There's not a big market out there.
The gunfighter mentality can't even be used on Tuesdays and Wednesdays anymore. Wadkins remembers playing 36 holes on a practice day before the Heritage Classic because Arnold Palmer refused to end the bet a loser.
"When Arnold called an emergency nine, you played," said the former Palmer Scholarship winner said.
The tour players don't play money games anymore. They're too busy with shoot-outs and pro-ams. The only golf applicable for match-play skills is played on Sunday with the tournament on the line.
Since the beginning of the 1982 season, Wadkins has led after 54 holes eight times. He won six of those tournaments, averaging a four-stroke margin of victory.
The young players on the tour grew up watching Wadkins win tournaments. Wadkins won his first event as a rookie in 1972 at Las Vegas. Upon hearing Wadkins say this in a recent shootout, 22-year-old Robert Gamez smarted off, "I'm not sure I was born then."
Wadkins is not so old that he has forgotten the benefits of youthful sarcasm. When paired with the limber-backed, he will go out of his way to forge a bond.
"I try to make them feel comfortable," he said. "I'll ask, 'Where are you from? . . . . Been out here long? . . . . Where did you go to school? . . . . Do your mom and pop know you're out?' "
Wadkins insisted that he didn't smart off when he joined the tour. "I called most of them 'Mr.,' " he said. "[Bob] Goalby, Palmer, Snead. Only one didn't tell me not to," Wadkins said, smiling as he enunciated the title. "Mr. [Julius] Boros."
Yet the story goes that even Snead, no shrinking violet, was taken aback by the young Wadkins.
"He's a cocky little ---, isn't he?" Snead said.
Or that Wadkins, stymied by an oak tree in an amateur tournament, refused to believe he couldn't knock his three-iron through the tree. Three attempts convinced him otherwise.
Or that while at Wake Forest, he didn't know the location of the stately, domed library. Not true, Wadkins said.
"That's where you aim at from the eighth tee at Old Town," he said of the course near the Winston-Salem, N.C., campus.
Wadkins told that story himself. He left Wake Forest after three seasons. He had won the 1970 U.S. Amateur, finished second at the 1970 Heritage Classic and 13th at the 1971 U.S. Open. He turned pro soon afterward, but he didn't turn his back on Wake Forest. Behind that cocky front stood a middle-class kid grateful for a chance. Behind the current million-dollar income, that kid remains.
"My father was a truck driver," Wadkins said. "My mother was a school principal. If I was going to college, I was going on a scholarship. The people at Wake Forest were just great to me."
Wadkins has done more than show up at alumni pro-ams -- although the one in April, which featured Wadkins, Palmer, Strange and 13 others, raised $125,000 for the Demon Deacons golf program. He became only the fourth Wake Forest athlete to serve on the university's board of trustees. His four-year term expired in 1990. Wadkins will be reappointed in 1992, according to university relations director Bill Joyner.
"Lanny has been so loyal," Joyner said. "He's a little recruiter everywhere, even when he's in the corporate mode every Wednesday with the leaders of the country in pro-ams."
Though Wadkins hasn't graduated, the university gave him the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1989. To be honored as a Distinguished Anything is a sign of age. So is a daughter (Dawn) who's going to college next year.
"Virginia or Southern Methodist University," Wadkins said. "I'm pushing SMU. She'll be closer to Daddy's credit cards."
It's a one-of-the-boys remark, made by one of the boys at Preston Trail Golf Club, the all-male preserve in far north Dallas. When home, Wadkins is a fixture there. He revels in its chummy, grown-up fraternity-house atmosphere.
He has won 20 tournaments in 20 seasons. The public doesn't know him, and Wadkins isn't all that upset about that. He has the privacy that Greg Norman -- who also has won one major -- does not. Giles played golf against Wadkins on the Virginia, southern and national amateur circuits more than 20 years ago. He has represented him for many years.
"To really be a crowd favorite, a corporate darling, you got to be a little phony, have a little actor in you," Giles said.
But ever since he won the first tournament he ever played -- when he was 8 years old, four holes at Meadowbrook Country Club in Richmond, Va., -- Wadkins has refused to remain humbled.
"I hit my first tee shot, lost the ball and still won," Wadkins said. "I knew I was better than they were. I expected to win at every level. There wasn't any reason to expect to lose."
Wadkins will lose his last match, of course. But Father Time better have the putter working.