DATE: Saturday, July 12, 1997               TAG: 9707120631

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Tom Robinson

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:   65 lines

ON GOOD DAYS, THE BIRDIES FALL; ON BAD DAYS, THEY GOBBLE YOU UP

No matter how you try, there are just going to be days on the golf course when the crows will win.

You can be the only Virginian in 28 years to win two consecutive state junior championships, but you'll slice your first tee shot out of bounds and feel like mush the rest of the round.

You can have a partial scholarship to the University of Virginia on tap and real dreams of turning pro in a couple of years, but you and the bogey man will spend four hours of quality time together, bonding.

You can roll an OK approach shot barely off the 10th green - and OK is about the best you hope for on blah days like this - but when you reach your ball, it will be gone. Meanwhile, in one of the tall pines that beautify Elizabeth Manor Golf and Country Club, a ball-thieving crow will cackle, gloating over its heist.

Young Mr. Cameron Yancey, sir: What're you gonna do?

``I couldn't do anything like I wanted,'' says the 18-year-old Yancey, moments after carding a six-over-par 76 Friday in the second round of the Eastern Amateur. ``My drives were awful, my irons were awful. And I didn't putt very good.''

Aside from all that, Yancey's second day at his first Eastern Amateur was just delightful.

``There are a lot of great players out here, and I know I'm just as good as any of them,'' Yancey says, a dark blue Virginia cap covering his close-cropped haircut. ``I couldn't get anything going. But golf is like that. That's what happens.''

In a 168-player field that stretched from 16-year-old Vertti Iso-Ahola of Upper Marlboro, Md. to 67-year-old Bill Harvey, a leather-skinned Greensboro resident who has played in 40 of the 41 Eastern Amateurs, Yancey was one of the fresher faces.

To Yancey's credit, the face even wore a smile at the end of the long day. Raised on the nine-hole Nottoway River golf course in Blackstone, near Petersburg, and largely self-taught, Yancey fits comfortably into the ``fledgling star'' category.

For the guys who live and play there, two middling rounds - he shot 73 on Thursday - hardly dent their confidence.

Now, Yancey isn't Tiger Woods, but if it were 25 years ago, he could be Curtis Strange. Strange won the Virginia State Golf Association junior title as a 15-year-old in 1970, was second the next year and won it again in '72.

Yancey, though, did what only Jimmy Ellis of Virginia Beach has done in the past 30 years: win the junior title in back-to-back years. Ellis did it in '68 and '69.

``I really wanted that,'' Yancey says. ``When you play like this, it makes you look kind of bad. But I'm glad to have (the pressure.)''

Ironically, Yancey finished runner-up the last two years to Staunton's Mike Gooden for the state Group AA high school championship. He says he's been most interested in the VSGA hardware, though, some more of which he nearly snagged last week when he made the semifinals of the Virginia State Amateur.

Next comes a pro-am in Richmond, then qualifying for August's U.S. Amateur, which Yancey gives himself a chance to reach - and which he won't, of course, if he hits only three fairways or seven greens the entire day, as he says he did Friday.

In the end, Yancey's outing was little better than that of Harvey, who shot 79 and told anybody who asked, ``Well, I got in and didn't hurt nobody.''

When the birds and birdies have equal influence on your round - Yancey experienced one of each - that's ageless golf wisdom that the young to the young-at-heart can appreciate.

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