Caves Valley Golf Club

BROOKS ROBINSON wishes the golf ball would move. Then he'd stand a fighting chance.

Let it come to him in the form of a Wilbur Wood curveball, floating and dancing like a flag fluttering in the breeze, and yessir, then you'd see some results.

Perhaps it is not difficult at all to explain why Robinson was master at one sport and can't seem to master the other.

For 23 years, Robinson, now 58, played third base as well as anyone before or since. He was never one of the game's most feared batsmen, though he finished with 2,842 carer hits, but he was more than capable at one of the sport's toughest assignments: taking a round bat and hitting a round ball squarely. When he retired in 1977, he moved to the broadcast booth, where he spent 16 years, and now he spends a few days at the ballpark and many more than that on the golf course. Yet his inability to master the sport more than he has is still unsettling. How, he asks himself, could he hit a curveball 400 feet and yet have trouble hitting a stationary golf ball onto a fairway 40 yards wide?

Now, he realizes, much of the answer is rooted in the fundamentals; he got serious about golf too late in life.

Until he retired, Robinson never made golf much of a priority. In fact, early in his career he swore off playing at all during the season. He plays with far greater frequency now that he's president of the Major League Baseball Alumni Association, which conducts more than 60 tournaments annually for various charities.

"I played early in my career on off days," he explains, "and then I got married in 1960 and I just didn't have time to play. I think there was a psychological factor, too, because if I'd play on an off day and go to the ballpark and have a bad day, I'd say, 'Maybe it was the golf swing.' I thought about it a lot and one day said, 'Maybe the best thing is to stop playing.' So I stopped playing entirely about '64 or '65 during the baseball season."

He played during the offseasons, but it wasn't until he retired that he began to take the game a little more earnestly. What he learned soon thereafter was that if he wanted to reach his goal of becoming a single-digit player, hard work -- a great deal of it -- was required.

"I always thought as I played more, I'd get better," he reasoned on a recent rainy afternoon at Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills, Md. "Well, I'm about a 12 right now, but I thought I'd be an 8 or 9. I don't think I'd ever get much better than that, but I thought I'd get a lot better than I am now, and it sure is frustrating."

Robinson makes no bones about being unable to comprehend the intricate details of the golf swing. He's never had a formal lesson, but by the same token he fails to realize why it's as complicated as it appears.

"There's a weight shift in hitting a baseball, just like there's a weight shift in golf," he says in animation, his arms getting into position as though a fastball might be coming from the other end of the grill room any second. "You get into that cocked position in hitting, just the same way you get it back and into the cocked position at the top of the golf swing. I heard that most of the mistakes are made when you bring it back, so I'm thinking, 'Well, why couldn't I just start right here?' After all, I hit from right here."

Just as he experienced hot and cold streaks in baseball, he's experienced similar spells on the course. "When you're really hitting," he explains, "I don't care who's out there pitching -- Sandy Koufax, Walter Johnson -- it doesn't make any difference; you're right on. You hit everything. And then there are days your little boy can toss one up to you and you pop it up.

"The same is true in golf. You get something going, then you butcher three or four shots in a row and you can't help but say, 'This is unbelievable.'"

For as long as he can remember, even back as a kid in Little Rock, Ark., baseball always came naturally to Robinson, who played on four pennant winners and was named MVP of the 1970 World Series. That's logical; in his day, big leaguers didn't play out their free agency and change teams every five years. For 23 seasons he played on the same team, mostly for the same manager, with many of the same teammates, at the same ballpark. Outside of baseball, he'll never attain the same level of comfort.

"There really is a mental part of this game," he admits. "I've played in a lot of pro-ams, but if there are 100 people watching, it'll scare the hell out of me. Talk about being out of your element. You hear people talkin', 'Let's see how he hits it.' And that's all I want to do -- hit it . . . somewhere. I just want to get off and get out of there. My heart starts pounding. I tell people, 'I wish this was the top of the ninth and the bases were loaded and I had 3-and-2 on me.' That I could handle."

"He'll hit some really good shots at times," says Dennis Satyshur, the head professional at Caves Valley, "and he's real competitive. But he's basically self-taught, and because he also has a home in California and spends so much time there, he's in between a lot. He'll come in and do a few Orioles games and come out and play a few times, but he's basically a good ol' boy from Arkansas who doesn't take the game as seriously as a lot of others here."

Robinson wasn't named to 18 All-Star teams and inducted into the Hall of Fame on natural ability alone. How much extra batting and fielding practice does one take over 23 years? "I could always catch the ball, never could run, had an average arm," he says. "The big question was if I could hit major league pitching, and it took me a while to get the hang of that. I had to work hard to improve certain parts of my game, and I kept getting better and better and better."

So would that same work ethic pay off on an improved golf game? "I'm not dedicated to that kind of work," he replies. "This is fun, and I want it to continue to be fun. I'd like to get better, and I'm hoping I can get better, but it's not something I have to do."

So Robinson won't win the club championship. So what? At Caves Valley, that takes some doing. Its national membership includes, among others, former Mid-Amateur champion Jim Holtgrieve, two-time Walker Cupper Marty West III, Ed Gibstein, a semifinalist at last year's Mid-Am and a quarterfinalist in the U.S. Amateur, and Buddy Marucci, a longtime standout from Philadelphia.

Caves Valley, a 5-year-old club located amid the pretty, rolling countryside of Baltimore suburbia, with its horse farms and expansive estates, is a perfect match for Robinson. It is the first club he has ever joined, and he is blissfully content there.

"I just like the camaraderie here," he says. "It's a golf club. No pool. No tennis. I just come out for a game, and I'll play with anyone who happens to be around." Caves Valley prides itself on its service -- where else does the staff remember your birthday and security guards recall the names of first-time visitors? -- and who can blame them if they want to keep the pampered service all to themselves as some sort of hedonistic secret?

As long as he plays golf, Robinson will never experience thrills similar to what he enjoyed on the baseball diamond. He played on two World Series winners, but the final out that won the first one, in 1966, remains the moment in his long career that he recalls with absolute, precise clarity.

"That was the first time for the Orioles, the first time for the city," he recalls. "As a youngster growing up and playing baseball, you say your dream is to sign a professional contract, get to the major leagues, get in the World Series and win. And we did all those things in '66."

Not even golf's ultimate thrill, a hole-in-one, compares. It was several years ago when Robinson made his. He was playing with two former Oriole teammates, Jim Palmer, also a member at Caves Valley, and Dave McNally. "Whenever I see Palmer he still says, 'That's the ugliest hole-in-one I've ever seen,' but I remember every part of the shot. I hit a 7-iron, and it ran all the way across the green and dropped in the hole."

The ace was stunning to Robinson, who may or may not have broken 100 that day without it. "I had 96 that day," he recalls, "and it seemed as though I was double-bogeying every hole. So to get up there and make a hole-in-one was shocking."

Just like a couple of strikeouts followed by a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. Hey, it can happen to anyone.

-- Rich Skyzinski