Columnist Dean Juipe: Time passes and Hale is less hearty

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

He won so often it almost became routine. And when Hale Irwin didn't win, it seemed as if Gil Morgan did.

Irwin and Morgan ran 1-2 on the PGA Senior Tour throughout 1997 and '98, collecting a remarkable 28 victories between them.

Irwin won seven times last year and nine times the year before, including the Las Vegas Senior Classic each year. Morgan's six 1998 victories matched his total from the previous year and kept him on Irwin's tail and well ahead of a Senior Tour pack that had only one other occasional star, Larry Nelson.

Many fans found the domination monotonous. Others found it invigorating.

Either way, it appears as if those days have passed.

Or, as Irwin told a TV reporter over the weekend, "this is not last year."

No, obviously it's not.

With the 1999 season well under way and Sunday's major tournament, the PGA Seniors' Championship in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., won by Allen Doyle, it's clear the Irwin-Morgan express has run aground. Neither has an authentic victory this season and both are struggling, at least in comparison to their earlier standards.

"You'd have thought if Hale was going to turn around what's been happening in 1999, he would have done it right here," said NBC golf analyst Johnny Miller, referring to the tournament in Florida that Irwin had set his sights on and badly wanted to win.

Instead, he was a nonfactor and was never on the leader board. Irwin and Morgan finished tied for 11th, nine strokes behind Doyle.

Putting has become Irwin's Achilles' heel. While he led the tour last season with an average of only 1.7 putts per hole, this year he's far down in that statistical category and has taken to changing putters on a regular basis.

In another sign of panic or, perhaps, his willingness to experiment while not playing well, he has changed golf balls several times this year.

With nothing working, he's wearing a pained expression. It's obvious he didn't expect his reign atop the tour to end so abruptly, or at least be curtailed quite so severely in such a short span of time.

Time. That's the real problem here. Irwin will be 54 in June and Morgan is 53. More importantly, there's no debating this Senior Tour axiom: The closer you are to 50, the better your chances of doing well and capitalizing on a 45-event tour that this year offers $49 million in prize money.

Doyle is 50 and has now won twice this year. The only other player with two wins is Bruce Fleisher, and he's 50.

It's no coincidence.

Later this year the Senior Tour will add three prominent players who are turning 50: Tom Watson (in September) and Lanny Wadkins and Tom Kite (both in December). They'll be expected to step in and more or less grab the baton that Doyle and Fleisher -- who Miller calls "the Hale Irwin of 1999" -- currently have a grip on.

Of course it's still a little too early to say Irwin is absolutely in a radical decline, even if he (like Morgan) has only one top-10 finish so far this year. Let's see how he does in three weeks when the tour reaches Las Vegas and Irwin settles in on the TPC layouts that play to his length and touch.

But based on the available evidence, this year's tournament will have a new champion. Someone, in all probability, closer to 50.

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