Up From The Ashes

"We agreed that I would handle the fire," Maria says, "and I think he wanted to do his part to help divert us from the nightmare we were going through. Raymond has a wonderful ability to reach down and do what he has to do." Two weeks ago he reached down again and won the Senior Grand Slam Championship in Japan (where the eligibility rules decree that all birthdays fall on Jan. 1). Raymond Floyd is hot again, hotter than a house afire, and he is heading home to Augusta National .

Floyd grew up 250 miles from Augusta , in Fayetteville , N.C. "I'm always excited about going to the Masters," he says. "It's the greatest tournament in the world, the greatest place in the world. I go there three or four times a year when the tournament isn't on, just to play." He speaks in a voice fragrant with honeysuckle and magnolia blossoms, a remnant of his North Carolina boyhood.

His father, L.B. Floyd, served a 21-year hitch in the Army, much of it as a master sergeant at Fort Bragg , near Fayetteville , where he was the golf professional at the enlisted men's base course. Floyd's mother, Edith, was a local club champion, and his sister, Marlene, has played on the LPGA tour since 1976. "We never really lived the Army life," Raymond says. "My dad always wore civilian clothes." In the Floyd barracks, reveille was just an early tee time.

Raymond has no memory of a day that was not inhabited by golf. "He could always hit it so pure and good," recalls L.B., who's now 69. "I owned a driving range near camp, and I had to stop taking him there because the people would all stop and watch him hit. Nobody was buying any balls. I don't mean to brag on the boy, but Raymond can still turn the club upside down and hit it 250 yards off the tee lefthanded."

At age six, Raymond could play equally well left- or righthanded, which was quite an advantage when he began hustling the noncoms for quarters. "There was a sergeant in the Army I played a lot when I was 13 or 14, and it got to where I couldn't give him enough ups," Floyd says, "so I finally played him, alternating shots between my left hand and my right." Raymond was a scratch golfer by then, and what he scratched for mostly was other people's money.

"When I grew up, golf was a gambling game, that was just the nature of it," Floyd says. "And for me, that was the fascination of it. Had it not been for the gambling, I don't believe I would have enjoyed the games as much or stayed on top the way I did. I started playing for quarters, and for a long time I guess I never ' played a game of golf that I didn't have a bet on. If you're practicing a hole, a six doesn't seem much different from a four. But if you have a quarter on it, then you've got a rooting interest. And the higher the stakes, the more intense your interest becomes."

By the time he finished Fayetteville Senior High, Floyd had attracted the attention of a backer who drove the teenager to a town 50 miles from Fayetteville to play in gambling games almost every week. "We gave him an allowance," L.B. says, "but you know how kids are, always running out. Raymond was like that until he was about 18, and then I noticed for several months he never came back and asked for any extra money. He would go out on weekends and just clean these men for big money. I didn't want to raise a son up to become a degenerate gambler, but....Raymond would just clean those ol' boys out. It was hard to fault him."

Floyd spent one semester at the University of North Carolina in 1960, but he quickly grew restless in Chapel Hill . He had been offered a contract to pitch for the Cleveland Indians organization at 17 but had turned it down. Instead, at 19, he became a golf pro.

"In those days, all the real athletes went into baseball or football," Floyd says. "Golf really wasn't that big then." When Floyd won the St. Petersburg Open and was named the PGA rookie of the year for 1963, Arnold Palmer was the leading money winner, and Jack Nicklaus was still fat. Nicklaus, who had preceded Floyd onto the Tour by a year, lost the weight soon enough, but it has taken Floyd almost three decades to begin to emerge from the vast Nicklaus shadow.

At 6 feet, 200 pounds, Floyd was never physically overmatched by anyone on the Tour, not even Nicklaus. "I could launch it," Floyd says. And yet for the first 11 years of his career, the only time he finished higher than 24th on the earnings list was 1969, the year he won the PGA Championship , his first major title.