Golf: Langer graduates at course management

IT ISN'T in Bernhard Langer's nature to go for broke. Do not expect him to thrill your heart. In his mind the name of the game is efficiency. Vorsprung durch Technik. 'I have the best preparation,' he said after making an ominous move yesterday.

There are golfers who tell jokes. Some have even been known to burst into song. Langer's preferred party piece is a lecture on course management. 'It is one of my strengths. I have heard a lot of players who play with me say that,' he added.

Lee Janzen, the US Open champion, is the latest. After partnering Langer for two days, he said: 'I had never been out with him in a tournament before, but from practice rounds and watching TV, I knew how good he is at managing the ball around the course. He hits the right club in the right spot, and so far he's missed only two makeable putts.'

This is precisely what the rest of the field does not want to hear. If Langer is up among the leaders, the road gets tougher. When becoming the Masters champion in April he could not be caught after making a decisive move in the second round. There is not much point in waiting for the German to slip up because he rarely does. People think Langer's play to be boring and prefer to watch more liberated spirits, but they have to admire him.

In that respect he is much like Nick Faldo, the leader after thrillingly setting a course record yesterday. They are products of a system that deplores the old golfing philosophy. The idea of hitting it, finding it and hitting it again does not appeal to them. 'Simon Holmes (his coach) has helped a bit this week,' he said. 'I have a better feel for the shots. It was just the take-away. I started my take-away a little differently and completed my back-swing better.'

When Langer does make a serious error it raises a great deal of astonishment. On the 18th tee he was looking at a sun-drenched fairway and flags on the grandstand streaming in a stiffish left-to-right breeze. The course manager in Langer calculated that it would be best to start the ball out left and let the breeze take over. It was the right move but it did not work. Instead of simply starting the ball out left Langer hooked it into knee-high rough.

The result puzzled and irritated the German, who stood there shaking his head. Langer was even more puzzled when he got to his ball. He had found it but could he move it far enough to think about saving par? Thick grass turned the club in his hands and the ball took off low left and hit a woman in the crowd. 'It would have been better for me if I had not hit the woman,' he said. It would also have been better for the woman, although she was not seriously hurt, but Langer was speaking technically. He meant that he would then probably have been playing from well-trampled grass, not the semi-rough.

As that was the only blemish on Langer's card he was understandably peeved. In 1985, again as the Masters champion, he might have won the Open at St George's but for some atrocious luck on the greens during the final round. He found himself needing a birdie at the 18th to force a play-off with Sandy Lyle. For once he had to be daring, it was the only way. He had to get down from off the green. He missed by a whisker and took five. 'The bogey didn't matter,' he would say, 'there was only one way to have a chance of winning.'

Had Langer triumphed he probably would have been voted Sportsman of the Year in West Germany as it then was. Instead he finished runner- up to Boris Becker. The title still eludes him. 'I think it is because golf still isn't very big in our country,' Ulrich Kaiser, a German journalist, said. 'The majority of Germans still think of it as an upper-class game, the way they used to think about tennis. Langer is admired but he is not as big as Becker and some of our footballers.'

Langer's excellent record at Sandwich helps to explain why he believes he can win here. 'I do not have any negative thoughts,' he said. 'We only hit about three or four perfect shots a day. Today there were 10 or 20 that could have been better but even the bad ones were fairly good, and the good ones were very good. A few were brilliant.' The trouble for Langer was that Faldo came along and managed the course better.