Holding Pattern

During the PGA Tour's Florida swing, when preparations for the Masters break into a run, the coming of spring promises renewal. But Sandy Lyle remembers the four-week stretch of tournaments from Doral to the Players Championship as the beginning of the end. Eight years ago on the Sunshine State's flattened landscape, the supremely talented Scot, who was considered the best player in the world, stepped off the mountaintop and began the most precipitous fall of any elite player in the last 25 years. "I obviously went off the boil," the 39-year-old Lyle says. "I got lost and haven't been able to find my way."

The words are a measure of how fragile even a seemingly ironclad career can be. A prodigy from the time he began playing under the eye of his father, a club pro in northern England, Lyle won the 1985 British Open and the '87 Players. The following year he won the Masters. By the time he closed out his '88 season by defeating, in order, Nick Price, Seve Ballesteros and Nick Faldo to win the World Match Play at Wentworth, England, Lyle was No. 1 in the Sony Ranking. Faldo, his lifelong rival, called Lyle "the greatest natural talent in the game." Said Ballesteros, "If we all played our best, Sandy would win." Yet within six months of his victory at Wentworth, Lyle was a basket case, and he hasn't been the same since. Among golfers who have won at least two major championships by the age Of 30, only Ralph Guldahl (the 1937 and '38 U.S. Opens and the '39 Masters) and Tony Jacklin (the '69 British Open and '70 U.S. Open) disappeared from the top as quickly as Lyle, although John Daly is threatening to join the list. "It was as if someone had flipped a switch," says Lyle. "I wasn't the same player. I'd lost it."

Exactly what happened remains a mystery. Despite his success in '88, when the 1989 season opened, Lyle felt uneasy. He finished tied for second at the Hope, tied for third at Pebble Beach and second at Los Angeles, but he was fatigued from the demands of the previous year and wasn't happy with how he was hitting the ball. When he returned home for two weeks, his wife, Jolande, could sense that something was wrong. "We didn't really know it, but Sandy was golfed out." she says. "During that time at home you could see on his face that he didn't want to go back out there. He should have said, 'I'm chucking my clubs in the corner for four months, and don't anyone talk to me about golf.' Unfortunately, Sandy, unlike the other top players, doesn't know how to say that. If he had done that, maybe he wouldn't have had all the problems."

When he returned to the U.S. for the Florida swing, Lyle made the cut at Doral and the Honda, but remembers being "exhausted" by self-doubt. Finally, at Bay Hill, "something inside snapped," he says, and he went through a horrible stretch of 10 U.S. tournaments during which he made only two cuts, broke 70 just once, and had a pitiful 74.1 stroke average. At his final event of the year, the World Series of Golf. Lyle sat in the locker room at Firestone Country Club in Akron and fought back tears as he admitted that he had asked Jacklin, the European Ryder Cup captain, not to select him for the '89 team, which would retain the cup at the Belfry.

Since then, Lyle's best finish in a major has been a 12th at the 1992 British Open. Before 1989 he had won 22 times worldwide, but he has had only three victories since, all on the European tour, with the most recent coming in 1992. On the PGA Tour he has had just live top-10 finishes in 73 starts, the best being firth at Doral in 1993. The decline was made more painful because it was inevitably compared with the ascent of Faldo, with whom Lyle has always had a distant and complicated relationship. "That didn't make things any easier," Lyle admits.

This year there is a sense of urgency to Lyle's attempt to regain his form because if he doesn't, his playing options will soon be limited. His 10-year Tour exemption for winning the Masters expires next year, so Lyle has decided to play more than 20 events in this country, his most ever, rather than split his schedule between the U.S. and the European tours, as he has since 1985. Instead of commuting from the 18th-century mansion he owns outside Edinburgh, Lyle has moved his family—Jolande, who is his second wife, and their daughter, Lonneke, 3, and son, Quintin, 2—to Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

Lyle feels that after years of wandering through the wilderness of swing theory, he has emerged a better ball striker. That conviction, plus his belief that he has been steeled by the deaths of his father, Alex, in February '96. and his mother, Agnes, five months later, has him convinced that he is on the verge of a breakthrough. "This is the year I want to get the name Lyle back on the leader board," he says. "I want to be recognized as a top player again, not as a has-been."

That will take a lot of doing. In five events this year, his best finish has been an 18th at San Diego. Last week's result at Doral, where he placed 45th, was typical. Lyle was among the early leaders, with an opening 67, but during the third round he whiffed twice on a ball that had come to rest between two roots and ended up shooting 78. In his first official round of the year, at the Hope. Lyle reeled off five birdies and an eagle to go seven under par through 10 holes and admitted later that he had begun to think. This is going to be a wonderful year. But the long putter he has been using since late last year quickly cooled off, and he finished 73rd. In his next two events, he missed the cut by a stroke at Phoenix despite making birdies on three of the last four holes and was 50th at Pebble Beach.

Lyle has come to believe that his difficulties can be traced to a flawed swing. Even in his prime he had patches when his powerful shots turned wild. "I always needed good hands, sheer skill and confidence to get around, and I had that as a young man." he says. "As you get older, your faults start to take over. I'd always had the nagging thought in the back of my mind that something similar to what has happened might just happen." Without a strong understanding of why his swing worked, Lyle couldn't head off his slump, particularly when his confidence left him. "I got to where I had no safe shot," he says. "Instead, I had two evils—a pull hook and a block. You can play with one evil, but you can't play with two."

Lyle's search for a cure took him to more than a dozen instructors, including Jimmy Ballard and David Leadbetter. Throughout, his most trusted teacher was his father. "He was always my best friend and my most supportive fan, but I probably strayed too far from him in terms of my game," says Lyle. "His messages were always simple. He would point to the practice range and say, if you want to be good, there's your ticket.' "