Playing for The History Books

By Tom Callahan

Searching for context, a golfer and a basketball team found something better than winning last week. Curtis Strange and the Los Angeles Lakers were each playing for history; their opponents, Nick Faldo and the Detroit Pistons, were seeking only national championships. The results were rather wonderful.

Almost at the moment that Strange was getting up and down out of a sand trap, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was doing much the same thing under a basket, to extend both ordeals an extra day. "I don't object to a longer season," ! Abdul-Jabbar says reasonably. "But I don't think we should be competing with Wimbledon."

Strange's fitful par at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass., forced an 18- hole play-off for the U.S. Open title. Because it involved the British Open champion Faldo, thoughts of Brookline's previous nationals were unavoidable. In 1963 Arnold Palmer held the British title when he lost a play-off to Julius Boros. So did Englishman Ted Ray in 1913, when he bowed to the Boston amateur Francis Ouimet. This was America's historic breakthrough in golf.

At great occasions lately, the rest of the world has broken back. By any objective measurement, Britain's Sandy Lyle, the current Masters champion, is the most accomplished player of the moment. In some order, he is followed by the Australian Greg Norman, the Spaniard Seve Ballesteros and perhaps the Americans Lanny Wadkins and Strange. A winner of $3 million and no major titles, Strange was the signature U.S. golfer of the '80s.

He went to Wake Forest, Palmer's school, though Strange ceased to be a pup out of Palmer when he was snooty one time to a volunteer scorekeeper. Golf's great king slammed the young individualist publicly, along with all his modern kind, for "discourteous and ungentlemanly behavior and thoughtlessness that is despicable to me." Manners aside, Strange indicated odd priorities for such a talented man. He customarily skipped the British Open because of its proximity to his own little tournament for a brewery.

A source of some hilarity over the past few years of dour golfing clones is the fact that Strange actually does have an identical twin brother, who presumably smiles all the time. At the Masters in 1985, Curtis had a near collision with history, blowing his chance by hitting a creek at 13 and a pond at 15. Nobody cried, not even Strange, though he did last week. He beat Faldo in the play-off by four strokes but really by something extra that the Englishman well understood. Recalling his own day of glory at the British Open in Scotland, Faldo said gracefully, "That was my dream as a kid. This must have been Curtis'."

Choked by thoughts of his deceased father, Strange could scarcely say what it meant to win the U.S. Open. Just beating Faldo head to head couldn't be it. He hadn't cried when he won the Houston, the Hartford or the Honda. "It means what every little boy dreams about," he said finally, "when he plays golf all by himself late in the afternoon, and he puts down three or four balls. One is Snead, one is Hogan, one is Nicklaus and maybe one is Strange." And he is entered in the British Open in two weeks.

In Los Angeles even the ultimate title can seem a mere thing. The Lakers won the N.B.A. championship in 1980, 1982, 1985 and last season, but repeating consecutively had become the hobgoblin of the industry. Not even the Boston Celtics had done it in 19 years. For the Lakers, the chance to regard themselves as the Celtics, the Green Bay Packers and the New York Yankees came down to a seventh game, their third of the spring.

Actually, the summer solstice arrived just before Isiah Thomas, both of them limping. After 112 games, the bright-eyed star of the Detroit Pistons still had several working parts, but one ankle was overdue at the shop. Offensively anyway, he tottered admirably through the first half, when Detroit led by five points. But against a turned-up blast of James Worthy, the Pistons fell behind by 15 in the last quarter. They had to make their final run without Thomas, and nearly pulled it off. "At the end of the game," said the Lakers coach Pat Riley, "you were watching a great basketball team hold on. We were just holding on." L.A. won, 108-105.

By 29 months, Abdul-Jabbar at 41 is the league's oldest player, and has already re-enlisted. After he made two free throws at the end of Game 6, the 7-ft. 2-in. center was asked about those familiar butterflies that infest stomachs. His, he explained, had long since expired of old age. When he first arrived at UCLA as Lew Alcindor, Abdul-Jabbar was a sculpture of pipe cleaners, all connected at right angles, that later became high-tension wires. Now he is the most serene mobile in sports.

He remains a stubborn man: since some hairs won't grow on his head, he mows all of them off. But in ignoring recent calls to vacate the stage -- the loudest coming from Wilt Chamberlain in the bleachers -- Abdul-Jabbar has showed both wisdom and a sense of history. Nobody will have any trouble remembering him at the top of his game, because that's where he is.