Out To Pasture

Memphis may be Home of the Blues, but for Ken Green it was the city of his salvation. In the FedEx St. Jude Classic last week at the Tournament Players Club at Southwind, Green proved his career wasn't headed for the ER by finishing in a tie for second with Jay Delsing, one stroke back of Jim Gallagher, who won for the second time this year. Just two weeks ago Green was 255th on the Sony World Rankings, having earned a mere $19,927 this year; he more than quadrupled that total in Memphis, with a payday of $110,000. "It seems like I haven't totally lost it yet," Green said after Sunday's finish.

Until last week, Green was part of an unholy trinity, along with Ian Baker-Finch and Jodie Mudd, of once-hot players whose games were on life support. Baker-Finch and Mudd also played in Memphis but with less desirable results. Baker-Finch shot his best back-to-back rounds of the year, but his scores of 71-71 were not enough to qualify for weekend competition. In 11 events this year, he has missed eight cuts and withdrawn three times.

Mudd didn't even make it to Friday. He shot 78 on Thursday, withdrew and headed home to his farm outside Louisville. "I tried to get back into it, and it just wasn't happening," said Mudd, who had taken a month off. "My heart just wasn't into it. I don't know if it's burnout or what, but I'm not the type of player that goes through the motions. I just can't put myself through that misery."

When this decade began, all three were considered among the best young players in the game. In 1988 Green had finished fourth on the PGA Tour's money list and made more than $1 million worldwide with tournament victories in the Canadian Open, the Greater Milwaukee Open and the Dunlop Phoenix in Japan. "I was five strokes away from Player of the Year," Green says.

Mudd has been on the decline ever since 1990, when he won both The Players Championship and the Tour Championship and was fifth on the money list with $911,746. Last year he finished 214th, and this year he is 170th. As for Baker-Finch, he once may have looked the most promising of the three. In 1990 he made nearly $1 million in tournaments around the world and followed that up by winning the British Open at Royal Birkdale, England, a year later. He hasn't earned a penny on the Tour this season.

"They didn't just step in a hole, they fell off a cliff," says Steve Elkington. "Unfortunately golf is that way. There are no safety nets. Some of us know the cliff is out there. We know we can step off it, because you see it happen so many times."

You talk to Green, Baker-Finch and Mudd, and they say the same thing: There's not much difference between their game then and their game now. Confidence, as any player on the Tour will tell you, is the difference between success and failure in golf. It's here, it's gone, and if you're lucky—like Bob Tway and Peter Jacobsen have been this year—it comes back again. "I never knew what confidence was until I didn't have any," Tway said after his win at the MCI Heritage Classic in April ended a four-year victory drought.

"There's a line, and sometimes you can't get back once you've crossed it," says Green. "There are guys who have not come back. Then there are guys who have. Tway's come back, and look at Peter [Jacobsen]. Every year it happens. All of a sudden, guys do something to reinforce their confidence. Whether it's personal or physical, everybody has his own problem that he has to cut through."

Green's troubles started out with a bitter divorce from his second wife, Ellen, which was finalized last summer. In the midst of those proceedings, his play declined and his earnings dropped. Earlier this year he found himself three months in arrears in alimony and child-support payments. A warrant for his arrest on assault charges was also issued in Florida after Ellen accused him of injuring her during an argument.

At the time, he was living in an apartment near his hometown of Danbury, Conn. The message on his answering machine began, "This is Ken running-from-the-law Green. I'm out on the lam right now." But he knew it was not a humorous position to be in. Clearly, it was not easy being Green.