DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9710050177

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C12  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JIM DUCIBELLA, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG                      LENGTH:   89 lines

LOOKING BACK, MICHELOB AGED JUST FINE THE TOURNAMENT ENTERS ITS 17TH YEAR AT KINGSMILL, WITH EACH BRINGING BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS.

What began as the Kaiser International Open in California and became the Anheuser-Busch Golf Classic, then the Michelob Championship at Kingsmill, pulls into Williamsburg for the 17th year in a row this week.

What a difference turning 17 made in my life. I'd been driving for a year, and I was comfortable behind the wheel. I had more confidence in who I was. I was nearly through high school, I had narrowed my college choices to a few. I even had an idea of the career I wanted to pursue. I liked life.

Seventeen should be a great year for the Michelob Championship. The best field ever, guys golf fans all over the world can identify with just one name. Couples. Kite. O'Meara. Daly. Zinger. And plenty, plenty more. More than half of the top-50 money-winners will be here, far more than ever before.

Seventeen is an awkward anniversary for reflection. But in this case, with such radically different dates and huge galleries expected to relish a superb field and the field on which they compete, there isn't a better time.

There are lots of stories to tell. Vern Peak, who directed the tournament in California and came to Virginia to help with the transition from Silverado to Kingsmill, took his first look at the golf course and told then-administrative assistant Johnnie Bender that ``It was a John Mahaffey course.''

Your first-year winner? John Mahaffey, by two strokes over Andy North.

Mahaffey nearly joined Calvin Peete as a two-time winner at Kingsmill. In 1985, Mahaffey and Mark Wiebe were tied at the end of 72 holes. The playoff began on the par-4 16th, and Mahaffey's tee shot rolled dead on a cart path. He chose to play it from there, mangled his club, but put his approach on the green. Even so, Wiebe won.

At Kingsmill, ``OB'' had nothing to do with being out of bounds and everything to do with Orion Burkhardt. The flamboyant Burkhardt, who loved fine clothes and walking sticks, replaced Peak as the tournament director until his death a few years ago. Burkhardt toodled around Kingsmill in the Rolls Royce golf cart Anheuser-Busch gave him when he left St. Louis. He was lovably combative when he read something about the tournament that peeved him, and he made one of the shrewdest decisions in the event's history in 1982.

That year, Friday's round was halted by heavy thunderstorms that left more than half the field still on the course. They couldn't play a 36-hole final on Sunday because the tournament was televised by NBC and they'd scheduled an early finish.

So Burkhardt became the first tournament director in PGA history to pay the winner - Peete - the full first prize even though he ``worked'' just 54 holes.

Peete's round was interrupted by weather. Bill Kratzert wasn't so lucky. On one of those blast-furnace-hot July days several years ago, Kratzert's caddie decided he wanted to carry as light a bag as possible. So he emptied everything but the absolute essentials, including balls. He took just four, all of which Kratzert had lost by the middle of the back side, resulting in his disqualification.

One year, if you said ``birds'' at Kingmill, you more than likely were referring to the Purple Martins. Some volunteers erected a birdhouse for them at the rear of the practice range. That proved to be much too inviting a target for the PGA players, who rapped shot after shot at the birdhouse trying to determine whose aim was best.

And that created another problem. Because the grass surrounding the birdhouse was deliberately kept high, range workers were having trouble retrieving balls. Finally, the house was removed, costing the players a target and the birds their home.

There's even been a Watergate-type scandal, emphasis on the Water. Happened the first year in Williamsburg. Someone called Anheuser-Busch headquarters in St. Louis with the Oliver Stone-type complaint that folks in Williamsburg were so concerned with making sure everyone drank beer that they had conspired not to put water stations on the course.

``That had absolutely nothing to do with why there wasn't water on the course,'' says Jeff Fleishman, then the golf and marketing director for Kingsmill, now a coveted consultant whose recent work includes City Park and Bide-A-Wee in Portsmouth and the proposed Lamberts Point par-3 in Norfolk.

Fleishman spent the rest of the week with a garden hose in his hand, filling and refilling coolers and jugs with gallon after gallon of water, then driving them onto the course.

Last year, of course, there was too much water on the course, courtesy of that hurricane Kingsmill people called ``the real Big Bertha.'' But, except for a few trees on the adjacent Woods Course, Bertha spared Kingsmill and the golfers.

Maybe that turned out to be a good omen. There have been nothing but positives for the tournament since Bertha blew town. Bigger money. Better players. The best dates.

The only way to increase the excitement would be to offer a Tiger Watch. Rumor has it that's on the agenda next year. ILLUSTRATION: STAFF FILE photo

John Mahaffey won by two strokes in the first year at Kingsmill and

nearly won again in 1985. He lost in a playoff to Mark Wiebe.

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