Golf with Spurrier anything but casual

ELGIN — The jitters are bound to surface, you figure. You just wonder how much, for how long and how they'll affect your ability to hit a little white ball where you want for the next four hours.

It's not exactly Amen Corner, the island green at Sawgrass or St. Andrews' Road Hole, but there are obvious nerves that go along with your first 18 holes with Steven Orr Spurrier as your playing partner.

With South Carolina's football coach occupying the other side of the cart, this 10-handicapper learned as much Monday at Spurrier's annual media golf outing at Woodcreek Farms Golf Club.

The initial fraying of the nerves is only indirectly related to Spurrier.

They unravel as a few TV cameramen scramble around to set up, preparing to record Spurrier's shot. Coming in shifts, someone recorded every swing he made Monday.

Just one lens is enough to take you off your game a touch. It makes you wonder how pros do it with hundreds of eyes on them.

In time, Spurrier has become a ham and a hound for the cameras. On the first tee, he directs one filming cameraman to move from behind him to beside him.

"C'mon around here," he says in that quick Tennessee drawl, "so you can get you a good angle of me swingin'."

The metaphorical spotlight is always on for Spurrier, and he always responds.

"Did you get that putt I made back there?" Spurrier asks a new cameraman as he joins the group. "About a 15-footer. It was a good one. You should've been there."

A hole later he steps to the tee and asks, "Cameras rolling? You got that

camera on? Let's see if I can knock one out there for a camera."

Later, he spots yet another camera and waves at it.

"They kept pointing those cameras in my face," he said, "so I learned to wave. ... OK, now you wave. Right there, wave at the camera."

Awkwardly, the 10-handicapper waves.

The second thing that induces nerves is, predictably, the 62-year-old Spurrier.

It's not the presence of the Heisman Trophy winner and famed coach. That's actually not all that difficult to swallow down.

It's the fact that Spurrier, well, he never shuts up. Only briefly as you hit. And that's not guaranteed every time.

Your wayward golf game is the target of his zingers, jabs you previously thought were reserved for guys like Tommy Bowden and Phillip Fulmer.

He'll kid about your club selection. He tells you that you're throwing the team under the bus after a particularly mediocre approach shot. He tells you you're playing "army golf — left, right, left, right" because of your inconsistency. He asks if you're ever going to make a putt.

Just like you've seen him do when he zaps Clemson or the like, he grins wide or laughs at his own joke every time he offers up a new punch line.

"Geez," one team member exhaled. "If this is what it's like playing with him, I don't want to know what it's like to be against him."

The kidding aside, the conversation is polite. It's friendly small talk. Comparing East Tennessee hometowns. Chatting about sports personalities. Talking about media coverage of him and his teams.

No deep-rooted discussions of religion or politics. Not even much talk about football, besides a story here or there from his own history books.

It's mostly about golf, and whether this foursome can string together enough birdies to top the leaderboard.

The ultimate answer is no — a 7-under-par 65 was two shots out of second — but the team that also included The State newspaper's Joe Person and the Greenville News' Rick Scoppe had enough of an early run to stir hope.

Five birdies on the front, including four solid putts by Spurrier, put the team on pace for a 10-under round.

That was enough to make the ultra-competitive Spurrier change his plans. Instead of switching teams with defensive coordinator Tyrone Nix, as was planned from the beginning, Spurrier stayed put.

Sensing a possible win, he told Nix to keep playing with the radio trio and cruised by the group to the next tee.

A USC official tried to coax Spurrier into trading groups anyway, but there was no telling him what to do. The 10-handicapper shrugged and grabbed his driver.

On the 10th teebox, Spurrier has his group pass Nix and his foursome — something of an unorthodox move for the scramble format. But he doesn't like waiting, and, so, he doesn't wait.

And that's when Spurrier goes to work. It becomes obvious that he genuinely wants to win his own golf outing, for the same pride that makes him want to win anything from checkers to the Florida game.

He's grinding, taking every shot like it's for a green jacket. As he walks up to the ball, he begins to mumble directions to himself.

"All right, 4-iron," he says. "Aim at the pine tree. Knock down this 4-iron. Pine tree. Yup."

Then, he'll make an awkward-looking, fidgety swing that turns out fine more often than not. If the shot doesn't go as planned, he'll chide himself until he gets to the next shot.

And then he'll ride himself about it after the hole, until he hits a shot that makes him celebrate. After each birdie putt, he skips across the green and says to the cameramen, "Y'all get that? Get that one on camera? C'mon now, let's go to the next hole."

After 18 holes, it's easy to see how Spurrier motivates his players, but it's difficult to explain.

For reasons that cannot be put into words, you want to play well for him. You don't want him to be disappointed in you.

When you do hit a bad shot, you can literally see the disappointment in his face. And you don't want to hit that shot again.

And Spurrier's reactions to your good shots are worth the wait. After you nail a 300-yard drive and, later, a 15-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole, Spurrier gives you a fist pound and exclaims, "My Man!"

And, for a second, the jitters subside. A smile creeps across your face.

Then, the moment's gone.

"I'll bet you can't do that again on the next hole," Spurrier says as you pile into the cart.

The 10-handicapper rolls his eyes. He thinks about what it would take to be a 5-handicapper by next year's round.

Reach Travis Haney at thaney@postandcourier.com.