Late in the final round of the Mas ters tournament in Augusta, Ga., last week, spectators following George Archer began shouting, "Charge! Charge!" Recalls Archer: "I said to myself, 'I left my credit card at home. I'll take the cash.' "
Take the cash he did, winning the $20,000 first prize with putting that was better than his punning. He did not charge. He just ambled along, playing the kind of steady, conservative golf that wins few fans — but lots of tournaments. Indeed, though he was the fourth-highest-ranking pro golfer last year, with winnings of $150,972, the 29-year-old Californian is one of the least-known top players on the tour. It's not that people don't notice him; at 6 ft. 6 in. and 185 lbs., he sticks out on the greens like a pin placement. It's just that he is short on glamour. "People tell me to grin more," he says, "smile at the TV cameras, show some emotion, wear flashier clothes. But I can't do it. It's just not my style."
Archer's style is calm verging on coma. He never blows up over a bad shot. He never celebrates a birdie. He does not smoke, drink or swear. Before a match, he is often in bed by 9:30 p.m. "I just try to concentrate on my golf," he says, "and I have enough trouble doing that without worrying about my image." Once, when an onlooker cried "Nice shot, honey!" he muttered, "Thanks, lady," totally unaware that it was his wife Donna. "Maybe," he said, "I should take acting lessons."
He needed all his cool going into the final 18 holes of the Masters. Behind by one stroke, Archer won by playing a cautious par round, while such renowned rivals as Billy Casper, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer were getting lost in the Georgia pines. Archer was in trouble only once—on the 15th hole, when his second shot plopped into a pond for a one-stroke penalty. After coming back with a precision-wedge shot that dropped 13 ft. from the pin, he relied, as he had through the tournament, on his putter. Hunching over the ball, he holed the 13-footer to save his par—and the match.
Basic Squat. Archer, who was voted Putter of the Year last season by the golf writers, describes his form on the greens as "a basic squatting position," a technique he developed as a caddie in San Francisco. It served him so well that for three years in a row, he was lowest-scoring amateur in the city's Lucky International Open and soon had himself a sponsor, Eugene Selvage, a retired brewery president. Archer was installed at Selvage's 5,000-acre Hereford ranch in Gilroy, Calif., where he painted fences and cleaned out the barns in the morning and played golf in the afternoon. The "Golfing Cowboy" turned pro in 1964.
He still lives on the ranch with his wife and two daughters. He does his muscle-toning exercises, thrives on health foods and sleeps on a mattress reinforced with wooden planks. In this atmosphere, the colorful George Archer unfolds. "I love the peace and quiet of the ranch," he says. "The rest of the world is a rat race."