SONOMA

Jim Thorpe said he had choked. He was sitting in the interview room after he'd blown the lead on the 18th hole on the third day of the Charles Schwab Cup. And he said he had choked.

A silence enveloped the room. I asked if he really choked. He looked startled. He said he was joking. He said the writers listening to him were supposed to laugh at his joke. He looked at Denis Watson, the tournament leader who was sitting in the room, and said the guys on the Champions Tour don't choke. Watson, a polite man, agreed with him. No choking allowed.

Probably, Thorpe didn't choke. He is the defending champion in this tournament and he said, in self-defense: "Choke, I don't know what that is. I don't think I choked. We might get a little tense out there basically because we're human, but we've done this thing so much. We've been under the gun before"

He said when "you're rookies playing the regular Tour, there was some choke, there was some butterflies. But we're 50-plus years old. The choking is all behind us."

So, sure, Thorpe didn't choke. It's just that he botched the final hole, messed it up, slaughtered it, was too tentative getting to the green. He had been invincible all day, smoking that cigar, hitting his choppy drives, being cool on his putts, cool as ice. But now the pressure has increased on the Champions Tour.

"The guys are getting tougher and tougher," he said. "There was a time, you thought you could go out and post 15-, 16-under par, it would be good enough. But today, it just doesn't happen today. The younger guys coming out today are much stronger players. They hit the ball farther than the older guys."

It's like Thorpe was taping an ad for the Champions Tour.

He had prepared for the day by cutting a half-inch off his driver. The club head had felt heavy and slow. And it seemed brilliant what he'd done, that's how well he'd hit his drives.

But as he began the 18th hole leading by one stroke, he turned conservative. He didn't blast his driver and then surge to the green as he'd been doing.

"It was the only bad tee shot I hit all day," he said. "We decided to lay it up. If I took another look at that pin, I wouldn't have laid up. I was thinking a bogey wouldn't be all that bad."

His thinking changed quickly. And it all had to do with backspin.

He hit his third shot to the green and put all sorts of backspin on the ball, something professional golfers can do. His thinking was logical. He wanted the ball to roll back toward the cup, which was in the middle of the green. He didn't like the pin placement, and that may have affected his thinking.

But he applied too much backspin, way too much. It was a piece of strategy that went wrong, and it unfolded in painful slow motion.

The ball hit the green hard and gripped, and then it rolled backward. And rolled. And rolled past the cup and it kept rolling. It finally ended up just off the front of the green. And what would have been an acceptable bogey quickly turned into an unacceptable double bogey.

If it wasn't choking, it was a very bad hit, and it meant Thorpe had played beautifully until the very end when he didn't play beautifully at all.

Afterward, he blamed himself for playing it safe.

"If I was going to make a double bogey," he said. "I might as well have made a double bogey trying," he said. As a life philosophy, that's as profound as it gets.

Thorpe almost didn't qualify for this tournament, was, in fact, the last guy to qualify. So he's happy to be here and he said, "I won't be in the line of fire quite as much."

He meant he's not the leader and there's an advantage in that on the final day. That's an example of making a positive out of a negative.

Immediately after his round he didn't seem nearly as cheerful. As he walked off the course he flipped his ball to a fan, a bad flip which hit the ground and bounced. The flip was as bad as his shots on 18. Then he made his way to the media area, a grim look on his face.

In the meantime, his caddy had thrown Thorpe's bag of clubs to the ground with a loud slam. The poor guy sat on a low wall shouting to himself something about "chip shots." He did not look like a happy caddy.

Maybe Thorpe should have cheered him up.

You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@

pressdemocrat.com.