Oregon daily emerald., April 17, 1985, Supplement, Image 9

Is that
all there
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See Page 4B
Wednesday, April 17, 1985
Emerald Sports Supplement
WEINHOLD
walkin’ that fine line
!Paul Weinhold is alone on the practice
green at the Emerald Valley Golf Course
in Creswell, knocking in two-foot putts.
Before him is a throng of white golf balls,
probably 40 of them. On the other side of
the cup is another army of balls, the ones
Weinhold has already put in and taken
back out.
Weinhold, 22, is a member of the
University golf team, but he’s voluntari
ly redshirted this season, having agreed
with coach Scott Krieger's suggestion
that he take a year off from competition
to try and regain his confidence.
*'l was an All-American sophomore
year.” Weinhold says. “Then last year I
was just a dog.”
He says this matter-of-factly with an
amused smile. Weinhold is 6-foot, trim
and tanned, and gracefully handsome.
He doesn’t look like a loser.
“When I first got here {to Oregon),
they loved me,” Weinhold recalls. “I’d
go out and play on rainy days. People
would look at me like I was crazy. Now, I
look at people who do that like they were
crazy.”
Story by Brian Ballou
^^^einhold is talking about a game he
started playing at age 16. "I was
obsessively compulsive about it (golf). I
spent every day practicing. I won a tour
nament later that year.”
That first win was in Roseburg. Later
that year he won another tournament in
Coos Bay. While on the Medford High
School team in 1980, Weinhold made
both the Hogan and the American Cup
squads, and in 1981, he drilled in a bir
die putt that clinched Medford’s state
championship.
Weinhold is a college senior now. Two
years ago, he was a part of the University
golf team’s NCAA squad, took medalist
honors at the Portland State/ Rippling
River Tournament, tied for second place
in the Portland Invitational and earned
an All-American honorable mention.
That same season he played 38 rounds,
averaged exactly 75 strokes per round
and had a low of 67. The season before,
1982, he had a low round of 65.
Then in 1984, Weinhold’s junior year,
his game fell apart. His confidence and
consistency dropped, and his average
climbed to 78; although that was only
three strokes over the previous year, in
collegiate golf that meant Weinhold was
among the ranks of golfers in the Pac-10
who weren’t quite good enough.
But Weinhold speaks as if he’s
describing someone else’s sob story. He
looks you square in the eye, and, speak
ing clearly and unwaveringly, talks not
about yesterday and tomorrow, but about
today — right now.
“I've been told I’ve got the talent,”
Weinhold says, “and all it comes down
to is whether 1 want to do it.” This
became the question he’s endlessly
pondered during his redshirt season.
He's evaluated himself and his relation
ship with golf.
“Golf’s kind of the vessel for competi
tion, and I was just going out there with
the idea of using golf as competition to
try and win. And winning was ‘it,’ and
not playing golf. The golf, it’s like it
wasn’t even in the picture anymore J’. he
says.
“Krieger would tell me last year not to
be so hard on myself.. .when I would
have a bad round,” Weinhold explains.
‘‘But when you think like that, it’s.very,
very difficult not to. And I do if in
everything. If I do poorly in school,
where I would get a ‘B’ in a class that I
expected to get an ‘A,’ I would be very
hard on myself. I’d let it get me down.”
Weinhold agreed to sit out a year. He
needed time to gather up all those loose
ends that had begun unraveling within
himself. Now he is applying himself to
his political science and sociology
classes, considering the possibility of at
tending law school, working as a
bartender for Max’s Tavern and training
for triathalons.
To turn around and enter a couple of
triathalons seems a bit peculiar for a per
son who wanted to get away from com
petitive sports. But Weinhold explains,
“It’s not something that I go out there to
Photos by Robert Hsu
win. That’s the real beauty about it. This
summer I was really wound up about
golf because I was playing so badly, and
it really got me down. As far as com
petitive things, I just wasn’t dealing with
them very well.”
He took part in two long triathalons,
where participants run six miles, bicycle
30 miles and swim one mile. He placed
12th individually in the Mile High
Challenge Cup, held in Lakeview, Ore.
last summer. He even did well in the
swimming portion of the event.
'Tm a survival swimmer,” Weinhold
says, laughing, as he tells about swim
ming across Drew’s Reservoir near
Lakeview. “I’m standing there on this
shore and there’s all these people packed
around getting ready to dive in the
water, and I knew I’m going to get beat
up. And I just look at my brother and he
just looks at me and says I was white as a
ghost.”
Weinhold says he was afraid he would
get part way across and “they’d have a
boat out there trying to fish me out of the
water at about the half mile mark.” But
he made it.
However, behind triathalon training,
bartending and school, there is golf.
“I’ve learned more from golf than from
college,” Weinhold says, flatly. “We
learn how to survive and use our time.
It’s all individual.”
“Hit one in the water and make a ten,
nobody’s sobbing for you.’’
"A'he game of golf has consumed and
directed most of his adult life. “Thirty
days of golf is a lot to miss during a
school year,” Weinhold explains. “You
can’t take calculus and science courses
because of all the (required) labs.” Once,
the golf team players missed six weeks of
one term, including final exam week.
The demands of tournament-level golf
Continued on Page 3B